November 2012

OK, so let’s imagine that you or your client have a Facebook brand page with a healthy 50,000 likes. 

You’re posting an entertaining mix of links back to your site, photos and the occasional piece of video.

So the question is, what kind of interaction levels should you expect to be getting?

To get to an answer, I’m mashing together a couple of recent pieces of research.  The first, from an article by Robin Grant in Techcrunch looks at EdgeRank – which is the algorithm Facebook uses to work out which updates make it into your news feed. It’s pretty clear that distribution of content by brands has dropped by some 40% in just three months – and that the drop is fairly uniform across even the most popular Facebook pages. 

Many brands continue to treat their Facebook strategy as if marketing has moved no further as an art since the days of glamour models on car bonnets. I’m struck dumb by the lack of meaningful engagement so many moderators offer in their schedule of posts. Whether it be the ubiquitous “win this if you press like” or the “it’s funny because it’s true” sharing of the everyday-odd, I wonder if there is a goal behind the effort.

Of course, in the run up to Christmas, every other brand will be launching a competition in order to extend their fan-base. There’s nothing wrong with that, everyone likes a chance at winning something for themselves in the season of spending. Come January however, when the big bucks have been spent, I think it unlikely that the new fans will represent an increase in engagement in line with the inflated fan figures. I’ve written about the complexity of competition positioning before on this blog, however it’s the lack of ‘engagement strategy’ that worries me more today.

It’s no surprise that tech startups are fast approaching a level of popularity previously ascribed to Katy Perry. The Social Network - a look at the meteoric rise of the now-ubiquitous Facebook - has helped fuel this growth and encourage university students to consider a path through the startup world.

Eschewing banks and briefcases for mockups and moleskins, many university students are keen on the idea of joining a startup, but are largely unaware of just how to go about doing such a thing (though some, like the university-aged founders of GoSquared - a real-time web analytics service - are a few steps ahead).

It's an issue, a challenge, an opportunity that's been highlighted during today's Enterprising Fashion conference - just how are people finding, trying and buying? What is the future of the bricks'n'mortar store and where's the innovation coming from?

One of today's speakers, Paul Bay, founder of citizenbay has produced a mindmap of thinking around the topic. And you know how we like an infographic, especially when there's some smarts involved.