What happened to community engagement?

Like-baiting and fan acquisition fell out of favour a long time ago, any social media manager will tell you that — thanks to recent changes to the algorithms, these have been reduced to vanity metrics with little to no benefit. This has left publishers in a position where if we want to stay relevant and benefit from Facebook’s updated algorithms, we need to ensure that content encourages conversation rather than idle taps — anything to keep us all on Facebook for longer so we’ll get served more ads. In Zuckerberg’s own words, they’re seeking to increase the visibility of pages that provide a platform for these types of meaningful conversations;

“With this update, we will also prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people”

So where did that leave us? In a position where brands are doing their hardest to begin and provoke conversations, spending their marketing budgets blasting out sponsored content into our feeds, waiting for us to take the bait.

But it’s becoming increasingly obvious that this is where involvement stops for a lot of brands, they’re starting the conversations and expecting us consumers to do all the hard work in continuing them. Community engagement doesn’t seem to exist for a lot of brands anymore. It’s the social media equivalent of starting a conversation about yourself at a party, only for you to leave the room and expect everyone to carry on talking about you.

Take Shutterstock for an example, this morning I was served video advert linked to Pride Month, displaying four groups of LGBTQ+ people, accompanied with messaging promoting their range of tailor made content. Directly underneath this advert was a comment calling homosexuals disgusting, and another calling homosexuality detestable. How many hundreds of thousands of other people also saw this advert and now associate the brand with those comments? A brave brand would have clapped back at the comments, a safe one would have hidden them. A lazy one does nothing.

Moderation is a key part of community engagement, without an authority figure to guide and control conversation, things can spiral. It’s not about limiting free speech, it’s about creating a safe space which is beneficial to all involved. Without this, it’s only a matter of time before the name calling starts and someone gets called a Nazi. Hiding comments takes less than a second, and as far as the original poster is aware, their comments are still visible — so Keith in his fedora might be sat smugly looking at his ‘hilarious’ troll comments, but in reality nobody even knows what he wrote.

Just ask Sky News Australia and other Australian media houses how they feel about moderation. Just this week, the news broke that an Australian court had deemed that they were liable for defamation for comments that were made by members of the public. They’d not posted any defaming content themselves, but they’d essentially created a situation which allowed this defamation to take place on content that they’d posted. Whilst our personal opinion is that brands shouldn’t be blamed for comments they did not make, imagine how easy it would have been to spend a few minutes scrolling through comments and hiding anything harmful.

Away from homophobes and defamation suits, similar situations of poor community engagement are happening all over the internet, scroll down a bit further and there’s a carousel advert promoting a range of casual shirts. Whilst the primary objective was surely driving traffic towards the website, a by-product of this meant that they’d amassed over 40 comments from people who had been served the ad — meaning that the brand had literally paid for their attention because they fell within their targeting parameters. Customer service issues, people tagging their friends and general queries about the products — all completely ignored. It doesn’t take long to incorporate community engagement into a marketing plan, after all, the brand will surely already have an agreed tone of voice and persona, it’s just extrapolating this onto another medium. With 62% of millennials admitting that they’d want to get in touch with brands they like online, meeting this willingness to communicate with a wall of silence can only have negative repercussions. 73% of consumers also point to customer service as an important factor when making a purchasing decision so poor service experiences will drive away potential return purchasers.

The benefits of being hyper engaged with your audience are incredible, you get to learn from and understand your audience in a way that no AI ever could, creating deeper levels of engagement and giving your audience a reason to continue coming back. Loyal fans have always been known to be your best marketing tool — and by creating one-to-one channels of communication, you’re in a position to turn passive consumers into passionate ones. We hate to admit it, but Gary Vaynerchuk might be right when he says;

“You have to make them feel special, just like when your great-grandmother walked into Butcher Bob’s shop or bought her new hat, and you need to make people who aren’t your customers wish they were.”

And with an increasing amount of consumers heading to social media for customer service issues (35% in 2017, up from 23% in 2014), brands can’t afford to ignore the spaces where their customers choose to communicate, especially when consumers are willing to spend 17% more with brands that deliver great service.

Not only are you taking the opportunity to drive conversation in a way that suits your business objectives, but you’re further playing directly into Facebook’s algorithms and increasing discoverability;

“Page posts that generate conversation between people will show higher in News Feed”

Facebook are literally giving us a guidebook into how to increase ranking, but brands aren’t taking the quick wins when they can. Provoking conversation is one thing, but who is better to keep it going than the person who started the conversation in the first place? Don’t just start the conversation, be the conversation.

If we’ve piqued your interest and you want to have a chat about content marketing or social media, feel free to get in touch; sam@wearecommit.com