Note- – an edited version of this post was originally published on Econsultancy

There seems to be a lot of confusion over engagement rates. in the simplest possible terms, an engagement rate is a measure of how many people are engaging vs the number of people who actually could be engaging. Due to the nature of the different platforms there are likely to be different rates for Facebook vs Twitter etc, but a good rule of thumb is to divide the number of interactions with your base. It isn’t rocket science. However, looking across the barren landscape of brand social media pages, achieving and maintaining high engagement levels does seem to be. So what’s going wrong? Broadly speaking there are six reasons why your engagement rate is low…

Your content is crap

Let’s face it; creating content that is funny, likable, shareable is actually quite hard for most brands. Historically all they’ve had to worry about is a few big campaigns a year that they get months to prepare for. Now they’re expected to churn out post after post of high quality, engaging content

You’re not segmenting

Your audience is made up of lots of different types of people. Sure they will have certain things in common, but they will also have wildly varying passions and interests. What one may love reading about, another might hate. You need to do work to do work to understand what is most engaging to the different groups in your audience, and work out a way to get it to them. Whether that means posting at different times, or putting different content on different platforms. A good example is location dependent content. Do your fans care about the event you are hosting in a city miles away from where they live? Where appropriate and possible you should geolocate content like this. If you can’t target these groups independently you need to work out whether your niche content is going to get poor levels of engagement from your broad audience, or worse, alienate them.

Your timing is wrong

Agencies and brands are businesses. Businesses tend to think between 9 and 5. This leads to a very limited view of when to post content, people use of social networking isn’t constrained by working hours, so neither should a brand’s. I remember once being told that the best time to post for a particular brand I was working on was just after 9am. Turns out that we only ever posted at around 9am, around noon, and just before 5, and 9am was the best performing time of the three. We’d never considered posting before 9am, or after 5pm, so we had no idea if they’d be good times. The minute we started exploring different times our engagement rates started to improve. That said, I’m not going to tell you that the best of day to post is Thursday at 6pm, because that’s nonsense. Ignore the plethora of studies that come out and tell you the best times to post based on averages from a number of brands. Find out for yourself when the best time to post your content. Test, learn, fail and adapt.

You’re asking too much (or offering too little)

A lot of brands are still in the big campaign mind-set, believing they have to do big, expensive, media driven campaigns. Share your brand experience in 500 words or more. Upload your video to our Facebook page. Download our latest app. Asking people to do anything is always going to be tricky. Most people are lazy, especially if there’s nothing in it for them. You want them to put in time and effort? You’d best be offering them an incentive.

You’re attracting the wrong kind of fans

In the mad rush to acquire fans, many brands, often led by their media agencies, have run like ads, run promotions, offered freebies. And it’s works. The problem is, the people that have now liked the page have done so not because they like your brand, but because they want a prize or a discount. They don’t want you to deliver on brand messaging; they want your free stuff. And if there’s nothing in it for them, they won’t be liking any content, or adding their comments, they’ll just be ignoring you

You’ve got too much reach

Generally speaking the more people that see a piece of content, the less likely any one of them is to engage with that piece of content. Imagine you have a core group of fans that always interact with your content, a group of 10,000. If your total fan reach is 100,000 then your engagement rate is 10%. But say you want to get more reach and choose to spend money on paid media to push your content further. Your core group will see the content, but the likelihood that the people who don’t belong to this core group are going to be as engaged is much lower, and the more reach you have, the less likely they are to be engaged.

Your brand / product isn’t ‘engaging’

It’s a hard thing to come to terms with, but not all brands are actually that engaging, certainly not from a social point of view. In fact, most aren’t. Does anyone really want to have a conversation with bleach on Facebook? But, at the end of the day, does it really matter. Long before Facebook and Twitter came along we had advertising, advertising that people couldn’t interact with, couldn’t go online to comment on. But it was still ‘engaging’ – even if it didn’t have a call to action to follow on Facebook. And you know what, it sold a lot of product. It worked because it raised awareness and got the brand front of mind. And for a lot of brands that’s all you need. You don’t need the likes, the comments, the web 2.0 definition of engagement. You need a message that reaches engages people, whether they click a button to tell you they were engaged or not. Because that’s what sells product. That’s advertising.

Now that’s not to say that engagement rates aren’t important. In fact, from a platform perspective they are very important, especially with the likes of Facebook where how engaging you are has a massive impact on your reach. Interactions with the page is a strong component in edge rank, the algorithm that determines who and how many people will see your brand’s content.

That said, chasing engagement rates alone is a very dangerous idea. Especially when you consider that most social media is (or really should be) supported with paid media spend. By nature of the calculation, having a low engagement rate could simply mean you’re reaching an awful lot of people with your message…

Social media works as a platform because it taps into a human need, a need to share, to communicate. Successful brands have been ones that try to add to this rather than merely disrupt. Either by being part of the conversation whilst being timely, relevant and entertaining or by being useful, in some case literally just by being there so customers can contact them in the channels they chose.

Mobile has been exploded in popularity for consumers because it allows them to do a whole host of things wherever they are. From playing games to searching for things on the internet, the very nature of the device is its biggest feature. And that combined with social is incredibly powerful. Users can talk to whoever they want, be it their friends, their favourite celebrities or even their preferred brands wherever and whenever.

It’s social on steroids.

A customer wants to complain about customer service? Now they can do it right from the shop, and if any savvy competitors are listening in they can get in touch with the disgruntled customer and direct them to their nearest outlet. Want to give your biggest fans a discount to reward their loyalty? Deliver it straight to their phone when you know they’re near your store. Or, even better, when they’re near a competitor’s.

However, whilst most brands are at least attempting to tackle social, at least dipping their toe in – very few are taking advantage of mobile marketing – only 14% of CMOs are happy with their mobile strategy. So with that in mind, I’ve put together 10 commandments of mobile marketing. it’s very mobile focussed (obviously), but if you get mobile right, it will turbocharge your efforts in social.

The important thing to remember is that as with social, mobile is more than a channel, it’s a layer. It can add to almost every experience and when combined with social it is one of the most powerful tools a marketer has.

How are  you using mobile and social together? Let me know in the comments.

Sitting in a room full of social media marketers talking about how to best use a social network for marketing isn’t among my favourite tenses to do. However, Facebook graph search is intriguing – I honestly can’t work out if it is an interesting experiment or actually something that could change the way we search.

Which was why I enjoyed the fact that the panel opened by asking the attendees to raise their hands if they had used the tool. About half had. Half of a room of people who had come explicitly to hear people talk about graph search. The second question was even more telling – how many of those that have used it actually found it useful. Less than half again. Not particularly promising.

If you have somehow missed the hubbub about Facebook Graph Search, it’s essentially a tool that allows you to see things you and your friends have shared on Facebook and find things such as restaurants or shops that your friends have liked.

Most people have been on Facebook for almost half a decade. That means Facebook have been storing data about you for five years. That’s an awful lot of data. They probably know more and you and your friends than you do.

Graph search is an attempt to start putting that data to use, for users. But the problem is, it’s probably more useful for brands than for users at the moment. And that does not bode well for its adoption.

Currently the results are based on the number of interactions such as checkins and likes. But over the years the value of a like has been eroded to the point where it’s a lowest common denominator, often given out as a platitude rather than an expression of truly liking something. And just because I check into a place, or my friends do it for me, doesn’t mean that I necessarily like the place, or am endorsing it. I wouldn’t check out of a restaurant if I had a bad meal, so from Facebook’s point of view, I must have enjoyed my time there. To make it meaningful Facebook need to introduce a quality score (as google have for years with page rank), more than just likes. Aside from anything it is just too easy to game likes, purchasing thousands of likes has never been cheaper. But short of adding an unlike button, I am unsure of how this would work.

Arguably Graph search is a massive experiment at the moment. It sounds amazing in theory, but it’s not there yet. And we don’t know if that promise will ever be delivered.

But is there a need for this product anyway? A lot of of our Facebook friends aren’t even our friends anyway. They are acquaintances picked up through life, the people you meet in bars, friends of friends, people who probably don’t know you that well. They aren’t necessarily people whose recommendation you want. And even if they are real friends, as much as I love whole foods I don’t need to know that five of my friends also love whole foods.

We aleady have access to huge amounts of data that we aren’t doing anything with. We’ve had api access to the graph for a ages and no brands seem to be doing anything with it. Search graph isn’t actually anything new for marketeers, it’s more for users. Shouldn’t we be finding ways to use the data we already have rather than getting excited by the theoretical uses of new data?

Note- – this was originally published on Econsultancy

With a recent study showing that only a tiny 14% of CMOs are happy with their mobile strategy we thought it was about time people start asking questions about their brand in mobile.

1) Where are we?

Consumers online are now being heavily influenced by new digital device form factors and the hyper-connectivity that comes with them. The contexts, locations and objectives of online behaviour have increased and become more widespread, yet more diffuse and hard to define.

However, in the face of these very rapid changes, only one in three businesses have a dedicated person responsible for mobile. Whether it is in-house or through an agency partner companies need to ensure that they are fit for an increasingly connected world and that means having someone (or a group of people) responsible for mobile and connected devices.

It is vital that marketers understand how the “connected consumer” will impact their company in at the very least, the short to medium term.

2) Is our existing activity optimised for mobile?

With UK smartphone penetration now over 64% and with more than 80% of those users going online on their devices your online properties are getting mobile views whether you like it or not .

The question is… do those mobile viewers like what they see? Is your bounce rate high (for bad reasons)? Do you have a flash website? Are your designs responsive? What’s the page load? Does your Facebook application work properly on mobile devices?

If you are spending significant amounts of money on digital activity you need to at least ensure that it works on mobile devices.

3) Are our social efforts mobile optimised?

More time is spent on Facebook via a mobile device than through the desktop (20% of mobile users never visit the desktop site), and that is even more the case for the likes of Twitter and Instagram.

Mobile as a platform is inherently social, mobiles are the communications device of our age, be it through SMS, email, social networking or the good old phone call – they are social by design.

Any social media efforts need to be built around the fact that for a large amount of any given audience, mobile will the default device they engage through. Social needs to be mobile.

4) How do our emails look on mobiles?

Personal email is opened on mobile by 49% of UK phone owners, and that rises to 70% of smartphone owners. So, how do your emails look on a variety of devices?

Chances are that you are still seeing the top left hand 25% of the email. The fonts are too small. It’s trying to load huge images (at least on iPhones) and is in grave danger of being discarded before your beautifully crafted copy has been read.

There is some argument about whether or not responsive emails are worth the effort. It’s pretty clear that from a user point of view they should at least be readable without pinching and zooming around.

If we see emails as the starting point for a variety of customer journeys, it’s also clear that making emails that work well on mobile will be yet another way to get people where you want them to be.

5) Is our offline marketing working with our online properties?

Spending millions of pounds of above the line advertising has been the norm for many brands for years, but as the world increasingly goes mobile CMOs need to start asking how this fits into a mobile world.

With up to 85% of TV viewers using a second device whilst watching TV, and up to 44% of those are looking for products they’ve seen in a TV show or ad it’s clear that traditional media can no longer work in a vacuum.

Marketing campaigns need to recognise that even if their advertising isn’t viewed through a mobile, the chances are customers have one in their hands as they come across adverts and if they are going to act based on that advertising, it’s likely to be through a mobile or connected device.

TV adverts can drive an 80% increase in branded search, but Google will push you down the rankings if it feels that your site isn’t providing a good mobile experience.

6) Are we thinking mobile first?

Thinking “mobile first” doesn’t mean mobile is the most important channel. The focus on what’s relevant and important for mobile users introduces a level of rigour into content selection that usually means that loads of “stuff” doesn’t get included.

Strangely enough, this is usually the stuff that is only on other channels “because there is room”. In development terms (ask the dev teams!) it’s just the best way to start producing any type of online property that needs to be available across multiple platforms.

Yes, that means everything.

7) Do we have a channel agnostic content strategy?

In a world where consumers are likely to be accessing everything, from anywhere and using any device, content needs to be built to go anywhere too.

If you are creating content “for the web site” or “for the Facebook page” you have to ask “What does it look like on an HTC Wildfire?” That beautiful long shot video of the sports car driving down a winding alpine road? It probably looks like an ant in a pinball machine. It’s not easy to get right, but content creation needs to happen with a “mobile first” mind-set too.

All too often there are huge infrastructure problems as marketers realise that the whole content management infrastructure is tied to individual digital properties. Bite the bullet and set that content free.

8) Are you helping consumers at “point of purchase”?

“Connected Consumers” don’t chat to the sales staff to find information in-store. They have already searched the product, compared prices and, if what they see about your product isn’t optimum, then there will be plenty of your competition appearing on that screen.

Test the user journeys as they are. After that, ask them to build new planned, engaging users’ journeys with your product and POS as the “call to action”.

9) What will we need to do after we have fixed all that?

Once you have made it “work on mobile”, the next thing to do is to track usage and metrics. Once a platform or device group projects to a certain level of engagement, it is time to enhance for those device types.

In tactical terms that may mean revamping the properties to produce designs and interactions for touch screen  consumer that are very different from what has been the norm when designing for “office equipment”.

In strategic terms, it means focusing on the changes these devices make to traditional digital thinking on “sales funnels” and when, where and how your customers will want to purchasing your products

For years social experts have been declaring that the power of social is to engage people. To have conversations with them, all that jazz.

It’s even hinted that because engagement is so important that even measuring is a waste of effort. That we should focus 100% on engagement rates as this is the only true measure of success in social media. That it’s about quality not quantity.

Nonsense.

Marketing is about sales. And for all brands, to varying degrees, sales are about numbers. As marketers we shouldn’t be debating quality or quantity. We should always aim for both.

Sure, we often need to sacrifice a little scale to get quality. Media targeting is based on this principle. But quantity is always important.

If you’ve set up your social team at incredible expense, with community managers, some social managers and a few senior people for good measure, then you need to be showing significant return. And a few likes won’t cut it. A handful of highly engaged fans is almost certainly a poor use of budget. Unless of course you work in the super luxury market, where you only ever aim for a handful of customers. In the world of FMCG it’s a failure.

This isn’t a debate in other media. We all know that banner ads can have impressions in the millions, but if it’s not engaging, if people ignore it, if it has a poor click through rate, we generally consider them ineffective.

Consider a TV advert – I just can’t imagine there is ever a debate between whether a TV ad should aim for numbers or compelling creative. We know they can reach huge swathes of our audience, but unless the ad itself is engaging, is funny, emotive, entertaining and makes people want the product then someone somewhere hasn’t done their job

Reach and engagement go hand in hand in any good marketing plan. You need both. So can we just stop trying to debate a non-issue?

Note- – this was originally published on the Marketing Magazine blog

We live in a world that is constantly updating. It is always on. We are surrounded by new content; hundreds of TV channels, with most of the content available on demand. Thousands of apps for our phones, millions of hours of content available on the web, updated every second with new tweets, blogs and videos of cats.

And in amongst that sea of content, are brands struggling to be heard. They are producing content themselves in huge amounts. Content is king, they’ve been told, and so they’re doing their part. They are churning out blog posts, “virals” and all the while updating Twitter and Facebook with banal salutations of “good morning, how was YOUR weekend?” supported with an unhealthy amount of exclamation marks.

They’ve made a simple, almost forgivable mistake. They’ve assumed that because there is so much content around, so many brands on Facebook and Twitter and producing content online that they need to shout louder, post more regularly, just to be seen. Content is king, and any content will do.

They have become ‘those people’ on Facebook. The ones who feel the need to post about every little thing going on in their lives. The one whose posts you don’t read, whose phone calls you probably ignore the first few times it rings.

What they have failed to realise is that unlike in advertising, volume doesn’t work for social. It’s an easy trap to fall into, and is now so clichéd it has almost lost meaning – they’re broadcasting, and treating social like an advertising channel. In world of mediocre content, only great content will shine through.

Working with brands this year I will be telling them to do fewer things but do them bigger and better. All marketers have limited budgets, especially given the current economic climate. The best advice to deal with this is to focus your efforts. Don’t spread them too thinly. A handful of fantastic pieces of content are of much more value to your audience, and by extension your brand, than hundreds of mindless Facebook updates. A few great videos that are truly compelling over dozens of pointless blog posts. One great application rather than endless puzzle and quiz apps. “Which one of our brands are YOU?” No one cares.

Say NO to filler content. If you find yourself thinking that you have to post something just because you haven’t in a while, stop. Make sure it’s worth sharing. Make sure it’s something other people will want to share and talk about. Because if it’s not, it’s a waste of time, a waste of money, and worse a bad mark against you in your target audience’s mind. If you become the brand that constantly talks about boring stuff, that never does anything new, interesting, useful or cool then they’ll start to ignore you. And once their attention is lost, it’s really difficult to get it back.

Good brands, like good friends, know when to shut up. Does yours?

For more banal updates you can follow Mike on Twitter.

Google+ launched brand pages yesterday to some fanfare and it seems that once more people are hailing it as the next big thing, the Facebook killer. Even people who were but yesterday decrying the death of the social networking site, scoffing at the 50 million users as inactive and essentially calling Google plus dead in the water, another failed Google project. Funny how fickle the social media expert crowd is when shiny new features are involved.

Brands can now create brand pages for their brands. Great. Whilst marketers are now having crisis meetings with clients who demanding to know whether they should create a Google plus page and how it fits into their social media strategy (surely they’re not just creating accounts for the sake of it?), most people are probably thinking, awesome, more companies in my stream.

So what should your brand be doing on Google plus?

If you are struggling to answer that question then perhaps the answer us nothing. And that’s a perfectly acceptable answer.

If you still want to something, like a child with a shiny new toy, then stop and think. Answer some questions:

• Do you have a Facebook and Twitter page?
• Do they have a large fan base?
• Is my audience on Google+? Will they be?
• Do you have enough budget for another channel?
• If you start maintaining a Google plus page, what resources will you have to take away from Facebook, Twitter etc? Time, money, content? How will that affect the users on those channels?
• What can you do on Google plus that you can’t do elsewhere?
• What are you going to use Google plus for long term?

Gimmicks make for quick growth, but once the novelty wears off, if there isn’t a sustainable approach to content you’ll be left with a dead page, and no one likes that.

That’s not to say no one should be creating brand pages on Google, the different feature set should allow some innovative new marketing opportunities for the early adopting brands. Hangouts for example allow for countless opportunities for brand with celebrity endorsements. Pop up gigs for fans, crowd sourced interview etc. And there is certainly some value in the idea that people can over think the strategy, spending weeks and months making a decision. If you can do something awesome and are confident you can follow it up with continued awesome, then a certain line of thinking says do it. Fortune does favour the bold. But make sure it really is awesome. And recognise that you’re not just doing a one off launch stunt. You’re creating a page. A page you’ll have to maintain for the foreseeable future. A Google plus page isn’t just for launch day.

The last question you need to ask is Do you really want a Google plus page for your brand?

Let me know what you think, show off your Google+ brand pages in the comments. And follow me on Google+ here

Automatic posting, or frictionless sharing as Facebook is calling, essentially means Facebook automatically sharing updates of what a person is doing. Whether that activity is listening to a music track or trading an article on a website.

There are two problems with this new approach to sharing. The first is that this essentially equates social networking with life streaming. Facebook goes as far as to rename profiles as timelines. It assumes we want people to know everything about us, that we want our lives to be public, our lives to be lived in the public domain. But not everyone wants their activity broadcast across the web, certainly not all of their activity. Not everyone wants to be a celebrity, sacrificing privacy for slightly more attention. The functionality is, for now at least, opt in. Meaning the user has to allow Facebook permission to auto share, and in the instance of reading updates, the site must also have the functionality enabled.

However it is default behaviour that if a user does opt in, all of their friends will see these updates. And this is the second problem. It assumes that this information is interesting or relevant to other users. It equates activity with tacit approval or even recommendation. Pre-timeline behaviour was that people had to choose what and when to share. A particularly interesting article, funny video or great music track. People picked good things, acting essentially as curators of content. But now just reading an article for 30 seconds counts as a share worthy event, at least in Facebook’s eyes. Every song you listen to, even the slightly embarrassing playlists, are shared automatically. No selection, no picking and choosing, just a constant stream of unfiltered updates.

People connect on Facebook because they are (hopefully) friends. They want keep in touch and up to date with what is going on in their lives. The big events. The birthdays, the engagements, hell, sometimes even the photos from their holiday. But being a friend with someone does not mean you want to know every little update about their lives. There’s no call for Facebook connectivity in everything we do. I for one don’t wish to know when my friend reads just any article, I want to know when they read an article they find interesting, one they find worth sharing. Automatically sharing creates a stream of largely uninteresting sharing precisely because it is frictionless.

The idea that one day everything we do or interact with will have Facebook connectivity is terrifying. It conjures up images of a dystopian future where we are all reduced to our streams, updating whenever you make a purchase or go to the toilet. And nobody really wants that do they?

Google’s latest effort to enter the world of social, Google+ launched today. Possibly the most interesting thing about the launch is the number of people who have passed comment without even trying the service. ”Google doesn’t get social – this will fail” they cry. (Invites certainly are scarce, I haven’t yet had a chance to have a play, hence why I shan’t be going into specific features.)

 
It’s not that Google doesn’t “get” social. It’s that it’s just not social. Not in the same way as Facebook and Twitter. Google make great products that solve specific problems. Maps, Docs, Search. They solve specific problems really well. Social isn’t a specific problem, at least not one that hasn’t already been in large solved by Facebook, Twitter, Skype et al.
For Google to crack social, they need to find a specific problem to solve. And on the surface, it looks like they’ve still yet to find their specific problem. Circles is an interesting step forward, it’s a nice feature. But it’s not a Facebook Killer. No single aspect of Google+ is. As Jeremiah Owyang points out, Google+ offers no reason to leave Facebook.

And sadly, because many people agree with the “Google doesn’t get social” camp, Google+ may never get off the ground, even if the individual features are good with room for improvement. Social networks need people to be interesting, otherwise it’s just like staring at a mirror in the middle of a large room. Wave failed to take off because they didn’t get enough uptake, then they got sued for forcing gmail users to be a part of buzz. If they get the right number, they may be able to do okay. But there’s a very real chance they won’t.

This post was originally a comment, written by me, as a response to [untitled]‘s blog

In the rush the “engage” fans, and grow fan numbers, hundreds of brands are being very quick to give away fantastic prizes in competitions on their Facebook pages. The problem is very few of them actually think any more beyond this point. They get a prize, create a tab with the competition (those have read the guidelines and know not to use the wall etc for promotions) and think their job is done. In the race for fans very little thought is put into how people will find it and why people will actually want to enter this competition if they find it.

Unsurprisingly this results in hundreds of competitions a week being started by brands that only get a handful of entries. I’ve seen competitions giving away cars with less than 1,000 entries, and holidays to New York with less than 50 entries. With a one in fifty chance of winning a trip to New York you’d be silly not to enter.

This glut of competitions is resulting in a new breed of Facebook user, the semi professional competition entrant. They scour Facebook brand pages, hunting down competitions, prizing the lacklustre ones. And they’re doing it methodically, liking the pages where they have to, and promptly unliking once the competition is over. I’ve seen the same names popping up in competitions for a range of different brands. With the sheer number of competitions launched every week, giving away anything from iPads and TVs to holidays and cars these people must be doing quite well for themselves.

There is of course nothing wrong with these individuals (unless they are breaking the rules to try and win), who wouldn’t try and win a TV if only four other people had entered? But they are symptomatic of a broader problem, an obsession of quick wins in social. Want to get some fans? Throw up a competition behind a ‘like gate’. Sure you may get a few more people liking your page, but are they really fans of your page? Until brands start taking social seriously they will continue to put out these kneejerk competitions.

Now if you excuse me, I’m going to try and win an iPad.

UPDATE: Today I actually did win a car on a Facebook competition. Well, the use of one for 6 months. I think at last count I had 11 votes for my entry. I don’t even want the car.