04 Nov What Are Your Social Media Expectations?

Courtesy of E-Marketer.com

What can you really expect from your branded Facebook Fan Page? It’s a tough question that needs to be addressed in the early stages of your planning. A lack of experience and information about your target market could make a realistic expectation difficult to grasp or maybe even impossible.

Understanding the way consumers as a whole behave on Facebook is a good place to start. Grasping this could help you understand why your interactions and “Likes” aren’t as high as you would like. According to a recent EMarketer.com article, only 25% of U.S. Facebook users visit company and product pages while 54% make comments on the post of others. This 25% rate represents substantial growth and has led experts to believe that 2011 will be a big year for consumer interaction on Facebook branded pages. As Facebook establishes itself as the center for social interaction on the web, marketers will increase their budgets for social media.

The article makes the point that judging success on the number of followers and Likes can be deceiving. True success comes with social interaction and the transactions that occur as result of those interactions. On a large scale, companies are having trouble tracking these conversions. The key metric of your Facebook Fan Page success in the future will be based on interactions. Followers and Likes are important but in the end it’s about the interactions.

I am not saying that you should lower your expectations for social media interactions but we need to understand that brand interaction isn’t a top priority for social media users. This is changing however. How do you plan on creating interactions and measuring success in the coming year?