What Good is a Facebook Follower?
These days, corporate brands and nonprofits alike are diving into Facebook marketing — for a small indicator, look at how many TV commercials now drive potential customers to a Facebook page rather than to a company’s own website (ten years ago, it might have been a AOL page!). And of course pushing a product or cause on Facebook makes intuitive sense, considering how much time we now spend on the site — you want to go where the audience is. But here’s the elephant in the room: what good are those followers if we can’t actually get them to DO anything?
Note that I’m not talking about the Gladwellian “soft ties” argument about the potential of social media to change the world — to me, Egypt and Tunisia are proof enough of social media’s ability to provide people the tools to self-organize for political change. I’m thinking from the point of view of a practical professional marketer, someone who’s trying to get attention for a product or (more relevant for our purposes on Epolitics.com) to build a following for a candidate or a social cause.
7 comments April 6th, 2011 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
