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MCELENY ON SOCIAL

Brands shouldn't limit their fans to any one social network

Tue, 25 May 2010 | By Charlotte McEleny

More brands are dropping campaign sites in favour of social media. While this makes sense, the potential closure of Bebo has highlighted some risks.

Brands are smart to ditch campaign sites: data from UKOM last week showed social media sites account for the lion’s share of time spent online. So it makes less sense for brands to spend on advertising to get consumers to visit their campaign sites when they can more easily utilise the engaged audiences already on social networks.

When Bebo announced it was looking to be bought or would close this month, many brands and agencies admitted they’ll lose thousands of fans, who had in some cases been acquired over three years (nma 15 April 2010). This shows how not owning your community and building it up on a third-party network instead can be risky. The majority of brands are now opting to run campaigns on Facebook or Twitter, and although neither site looks set to close in the foreseeable future, the possible closure of Bebo has highlighted just how fragile online communities can be.

Creating your own branded community, as brands like ASOS and Mercedes have done, ensures you’re in total control of your online fans and their information. The problem is the more that major social networks become part of people’s everyday lives, the less likely they are to then sign up to other communities.

So brands need to ensure they’re on more than one social site, maximising their reach among their target audience but also ensuring that, should it lose members from one community, it has fans and engagement already happening elsewhere. Another way to minimise risk is to encourage fans on social networks to sign up to receive information from a brand on other channels, such as email or mobile.

Although social media isn’t the emerging channel it once was, brands should still be wary of putting all their eggs in one basket.

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Readers' comments (2)

  • Marc Campman, Webjam | Tue, 25 May 2010 4:22 pm

    I totally agree with Charlotte's opinion – brands shouldn't limit their fans to any one social network. We encourage our clients and brands to embrace social media, as it's the way to move forward for both internal and external engagement. However, there is always a risk involved when they have no control over the social networks or their existence. It is therefore essential to bring together all the brands’ activities on the different social networks in one branded social media environment within a single website. This allows their fans to have conversations through multiple major social networks, should it be Twitter, Facebook or other Web 2.0 sites like YouTube. It's the best solution for brands who do not wish to put all their eggs in one basket. A good example of this approach is NME Breakthrough

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  • Graeme Harvey, HuzuTech | Wed, 26 May 2010 10:48 am

    The trouble with relying on building a community on any third party network like Facebook is that the network will ultimately control what happens to your community. The risk isn’t just of the network going under (although you’re quite right to point out the problem with Bebo). You may have no say over what’s advertised on your community, or who joins it, or – in Facebook’s case – its privacy policies. What happens if the network suddenly decides to hold you hostage and charge you for access that you’ve always taken for granted is free?

    It’s true that if you create your own community, you need a really compelling reason for consumers to join it. But if you get that reason right, a ‘home grown’ branded community lets you create exactly what you want (a sales option, for example, or a customer service function); and keep you in charge of how you manage the relationship with your customers.

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