Manifesto
How attention flows on the web
Further to my last post I thought it useful to contrast “the 3rd most engaged with UK brand on Facebook” with an issue people care about.
Frack Off’s Facebook Page has been heavily focused on the protests at Balcombe. In early August the number of ‘People Talking About This’ was running at 240% of people who had ‘Liked’ the Page. Presumably many of those people have now Liked the Page as follower numbers are up, yet ‘People Talking About This’ still stands at a high 87% of total followers.
Compare this to Jaguar’s Page. Many more people have ‘Liked’ the Page, over 2.2 million. ‘People Talking About This’ stood at 3% of those total ‘Likes’ on the day I checked. This is woeful but entirely typical of a ‘brand’ effort. Many of those interactions were coming from the Indian contingent that ‘Like’ the Page, whomsoever they may be.
‘Liking’ a ‘brand’ is likely a signifier of something around personal identity that the individual wishes to represent. It does not appear to represent a desire for the elusive ‘engagement’ that marketers keep banging on about with little evidence of any success. People don’t care about brands; they do care about issues. Brands are generally too bland and frequently too close to negative issues to be able to meaningfully interact with people on topics that are important to them.