Changes to Facebook mean brands need to be more compelling

With the recent changes to Facebook, brands need to much more conversational, produce content that people will talk about and give people a compelling reason to interact with the brand. Otherwise, brands will fall off people's social graphs. If no one interacts with a brand's content on Facebook, brands will disappear from people's newsfeeds.

It is probably stating the obvious but, when you are a brand or organization embarking on a social media strategy, it’s good to remember that you don’t own social media, they do i.e. people are the ones who control social media, not brands. It’s a slightly glib statement, but it's good to bear in mind when thinking about your engagement strategy.

More than ever, brands have to behave in a very human way i.e enter into conversation with people: listen and have a two way dialogue. Rather than behaving in a corporate way – broadcasting the brand’s messages to loads of people, just posting a video, or running and sweepstake [although people are going to Facebook more and more for deals and free stuff].

What I find works quite well to plan engaging social strategies that enables brands to have convserations, is going through a short 7 step process:

Listen

There are shedload of free and paid for tools to monitor conversations in social media, from things like social mention and technorati on the free side, to sophisticated tracking software like Radian 6 and SM2.

People

Work out how your audience behaves in social media. Forrester’s social technographics ladder is a good tool.

Aims

Define what you want to achieve and how you are going to measure it.

Rules

Make sure you know the external rules e.g. industry regulations, and internal rules, e.g corporate policy on sharing information.

Strategy

How you will change the current relationship with the audience.

Content

What content do you have or easily create with which to engage the audience in conversation?

Technology

What channels are best suited to your audience behavior, strategy and content?

Operations

How will you respond, who will respond and what are the response protocols.

I've found it’s worth spending time to thinking these things through before joining the conversations.