I was having a conversation this week about the future of Facebook for brands, and how their new ‘Facebook is a reach platform’ strategy will affect brands’ objectives. Aside from the wider question of whether Facebook is losing relevance in the youth market (it is, and becoming more business-focused and less user-focused can only accelerate that) it made me think about how we use the various platforms as consumers.

This got me thinking about second screening, and something a Twitter exec said recently, that “Twitter is the second screen”. I think this is somewhat underplaying the importance of Twitter in traditional media consumption – I don’t know anyone (apart from my dad, maybe) who doesn’t have Twitter open for at least some of, for instance, I’m a Celebrity. It’s become so prevalent and holds such attention among younger demographics that I think we can argue that TV is really the second screen to Twitter. The same isn’t true of Facebook – if anyone does update during the programme, it tends to be during ad breaks and as a broadcast, “weeing myself laughing at I’m a Celeb” etc. But what interests me is the way Twitter and Facebook, as two key social destinations, embrace their roles alongside mass media.

Twitter has always been a tool for joining conversations, and Facebook in its early days was angling for a similar role. Until very recently Facebook execs were telling brands that engagement is key; build a core fan base of engaged users to get the most out of Facebook and to use it in the way it was intended. Realistically, this has never been the best use of the platform. More recently, these same execs have switched track, and are now pushing brands to see Facebook as a reach platform – almost as a rival to ITV. This makes the platform more about marketing, certainly, but it doesn’t bode well for those end users who still use Facebook frequently (presumably someone still does) – this shift away from engagement and into pure reach can only damage the relevance of the platform in the long run, moving it further from the conversations that we have on, for instance, Twitter. To me, this sounds like Facebook attempting to go head to head with TV, competing for mass media attention and trying to change current end user behaviour which, as we know, is extremely difficult.

In contrast, Twitter has fully embraced its role as an addition to TV – it isn’t a competitor, it’s an enhancer. The show Gogglebox was popular in part because of that couple who were always pissed and gave us a good laugh but in part because we like talking about the things we’re watching, and seeing what everyone thinks of the minor celebrity squealing when they’re hit in the face with a bucket of cockroaches. Twitter has made moves recently to increase its relevance to TV, turning on TV targeting for its paid products and introducing keyword targeting earlier in the year to allow brands (and individuals) to promote their content during a TV show, based on Twitter users who are actually watching.

The platforms have inherently different uses and in reality Facebook has never been the destination of choice for real time conversation, but with the recent switch to focus on reach over engagement, it looks like they may have given up on it altogether.

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I’ve been working in social for a few years now, and the last 2 years I’ve spent a lot of time with brands on Facebook. A lot of the brands we work with are active on Twitter, posting on average twice a day. Volume hasn’t ever had a negative impact on what we have done – we’ve adapted and learnt from everything we’ve created and strived to improve what we do to keep our audience entertained and informed.

Using the platform everyday gives us a lot of insight and experience with what does and doesn’t work. Not just on a tactical level but quite an in-depth personal level. What has become interesting (or difficult) is when Facebook’s behaviour changes. When something unexpected happened you’ll start by wondering what it was you did wrong. Did you post at the wrong time? Use the wrong media targeting? Or was the creative just not right? And then you start to notice, no, it’s not me – there’s something different about it, something has changed.

When you try to talk to Facebook you’re often met with denial and mentions of ‘a bug’. You’ll listen to them – they know best. But then you hear of similar experiences and explanations from other teams around you, and other teams in other agencies. We all work with this platform intimately. We know when it’s had a haircut.

Recently Facebook have expressed thoughts on pivoting their proposition, comparing themselves to mainstream media channels they are positioning themselves as a broadcast channel. Part of the reasoning is that there’s now more competition in the newsfeeds for brands to cut through – people have more friends and follow more brands than they did a year or two ago, so it’s harder to stand out and convert organic or low reach. Shifting back to the classic broadcast model of mass reach you’ll pay to be seen by the masses and by being seen by more you’ll obviously sell more. All you have to do is spend more. With Facebook.

It’s another new haircut, but you can’t help but notice this one – they’re coming to you and asking if you like it. The truth is, I’m not sure I do. For a long time they were always about engagement and deep and meaningful connections. But now it’s feeling like an uncomfortable shift, less about the user and being meaningful but more about the advertiser, and that’s just not social.

Which is irrelevant.

Snapchat is almost exclusively a messaging tool (we’ll ignore Snapchat Stories for the moment); a user’s objective is almost always to create a quick, simple message to share with friends. Facebook, and even more so Instagram, are sophisticated tools for carefully crafting a public-facing, aspirational online persona. These are completely different objectives and uses, deserving of a completely separate frame of reference. So why do we, as marketers, feel the need to compare them? As an industry we’ve said for years that numbers mean nothing without context (or if we haven’t, we should have) so I can’t understand why we’re now back to simply stating numbers with a touch of added hyperbole.

Don’t get me wrong, 400 million Snaps is a huge number and the implications for, e.g. data usage etc are potentially far-reaching, but WhatsApp for instance recently handled 27 billion messages in just 24 hours, and this seems a far more sensible frame of reference – at least users view this platform in the same way.

As marketers, we need to live what we preach and put the consumer first, whether we’re trying to sell to them or trying to make sense of the way they use platforms like Snapchat. Otherwise we’re in danger of succumbing to our own bullshit.

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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?

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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

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.

However, this new opportunity also brings with it challenges. What if fans of your brand speak more than one language and live in more than one country? Obviously you can’t communicate with people in a language they don’t speak, and also, it’s difficult to be relevant to users when you are trying to talk to users of multiple territories at once.

More and more it seems the default response is to completely separate the communications approach. Many brands choose to create completely separate accounts and pages for different territories and languages. On the face of it this solves the problem; different accounts solve any language barriers and ensure the content is relevant to each of the different territories.

There is an issue with ensuring that every communication is on brand and on message, but there is a bigger issue. As a fan of Product X people don’t want to communicate with Product X UK, they want to communicate directly with Product X. This can be seen from the fact that brands with one single page will have more fans than competitor brands with different pages for each territory, even when you combine the totals for the territories. Customers want to know they are talking to THE official brand page, and territory specific pages get in the way of this.

As Facebook has evolved, the need for separate accounts has diminished. In particular, targeted wall geoposting and location specific tab content allows the end user to get the tailored content the brand wants them to see, in a language they can understand, but with a brand identity they want to connect with. Using these features you can do away with the need for separate pages for the territories and have a single destination for your global brand on Facebook.

A note on other platforms
Of course other social media platforms are a way off this, with the notable example of Twitter, which does not allow this kind of targeted communication.

Having a Facebook page or a Twitter profile isn’t a means to an end. And simply stating that you want to “engage with your community” doesn’t count as a strategy. Engagement isn’t a strategy. It’s barely even an objective.

You wouldn’t just create a website for your brand. You wouldn’t start an advertising campaign without knowing first why you are advertising, who you are advertising to and what effect you want your adverts to cause. And you certainly shouldn’t start an advertising campaign as a silo; it needs to belong to a wider strategy that considers brand, tone of voice and long term goal. The same needs to be true of your ventures into social media, you need to plan for success.

Facebook and Twitter are channels, tactics, and you need to understand their role and place these tactics in your broader communications strategy. Until you are ready to do this, you probably should not set up a Facebook page or a Twitter profile

As such, the industry tends to suffer from buzzword mentality, jumping from one buzzword theory to the next. One term in particular that has stuck is community marketing, upon which many other loosely developed theories have been built. In fact, the term has become fundamental to how many in the social media industry think about their work and sells it in to clients. “You need to engage your community!” self pronounced social media experts (read social media douchebags) decry, probably because someone writing for Mashable has told them so.

The problem is most brands don’t have communities. Some brands have amassed large numbers of fans on Facebook, but the mere act of becoming a fan of a brand on Facebook does not mean that the user wishes to participate in any community or join in with any conversation about that brand. A Sausage Roll fan page with 10,000 fans does not mean there is a Sausage Roll community; it simply means that 10,000 people are saying they like Sausage Rolls.

Regardless of how many fans it has, a simple Facebook page is not a community; a community is made by its members and the sense of belonging they create for themselves. The real problem, of course, lies with marketers. They have taken the term, raped and abused it so much that they have stripped it of the connotations that first attracted us in the first place: a group of likeminded individuals brought together by their shared interests connecting with each other, and, hopefully, with the brand.

Marketers are using this watered down term and using it to raise the hopes of their clients, telling them that community engagement is the key to success. Clients need to have their reality checked. The problem with clients is they are their brands’ own biggest fans. They think their brand of toilet cleaner is the best, and are willing to shout it from the rooftops. And that’s great; they need to be that enthusiastic in order to sell the product. But as marketers we have to manage their expectations, make them realise that no one else is going to give a crap about their toilet cleaner, even less want to join an online StainBeGone community. They but the product because they want their stains gone, not because they want a relationship with the brand. Sure, they may become a fan on Facebook, (probably more for novelty value than anything else) but don’t misinterpret the signals like a socially awkward teenage male thinking that’s there’s a relationship just because the girl you’re into acknowledged your existence.

This is not to say that online communities don’t exist, or that a Facebook fan page cannot be home to a community, just that as marketers we need to more realistically manage the expectations of our client. Community marketing is not a one size fits all, saviour for brands. There are some great examples of organically grown communities being improved by the brand carefully entering into and becoming a part of the community, such as the Harley Davidson fan club. In these cases the communities already existed before the brand joined them, and so the leg work was already done for the brand.

There are also great examples of brands developing their own communities by facilitating the communication between fans, and with the brand itself, such as the work done with the Guitar Hero community.

The moral of the story is not that it is impossible to create, or join an engaged brand community, but rather that when the social media come knocking at the door telling brands you that “you need to engage with your communities” take it with a pinch of salt.