Leslye Schumacher is a Founding Partner with Vici. Leslye’s background in media spans 25 years and includes working for both large and mid-size television, radio and newspaper companies. She has held positions in sales, management, marketing and NTR. Leslye has extensive experience in training salespeople and coaching managers. She is Google Analytics Advanced Certified, a Certified Radio Marketing Consultant and a Certified Sales Talent Analyst, having assessed over 10,000 media salespeople and managers. Leslye was the Vice President Of Talent Services for The Center For Sales Strategy before going on to start TalentQ Consulting and then Vici Media.
“So few people actually see posts from top brands on Facebook and Twitter that focusing heavily on those networks can be a waste of time, money and resources.” This quote is from vice president and principal analyst Nate Elliott of Forrester Research in a new research report
He goes on to say that their research showed, “It’s clear that Facebook and Twitter don’t offer the relationships that marketing leaders crave, yet most brands still use these sites as the centerpiece of their social efforts — thereby wasting significant financial, technological, and human resources on social networks that don’t deliver value.
Their findings aren’t surprising. Another study by advertising agency Ogilvy found that brands’ Facebook posts only reached 2% of their fans. Given that Facebook has announced that they are further diminishing promotional postsstarting this month, that figure is likely to go even lower
So we now know that organic reach is close to zero – what about engagement? That’s still good, right? Nope. Engagement is even worse. Forrester’s research found only .07% of top brands’ Facebook fans interact with each of their posts on average; for Twitter the average is .03%
What SHOULD a company do? Well digital advertising is one way to get your message heard. But also, the Forrester report says instead of spending a lot of time and resources on building your Facebook and Twitter following, focus on building up your own website’s engagement. Their research showed U.S. adults were three times as likely to visit a business’ site as to engage with its Facebook page
Companies should be looking at their websites and determining how they can better reach and engage interested consumers – that means better Search Engine Optimization, blogs, communities, comments, reviews, offers, instant chats, and so forth. In other words, stop building traffic for Facebook and Twitter, and focus on building your own traffic.
