Engagement via social media is a key component of most marketing activity. But if employees are tweeting professionally using their own accounts, who owns their followers? And does it really matter? Alex Aspinall reports
Web 2.0 has revolutionised the business world, presenting a plethora of new opportunities and challenges for everyone from marketers and journalists, to bakers and candlestick makers.
Many marketing departments will now hopefully either have a social media strategy in place or at the very least have an appreciation of the importance of a loose set of workable guidelines.
Despite this, however, BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg’s recent high profile move last month, to rival broadcaster ITV, saw her 60,000 Twitter followers follow her right out of White City, much to the disgruntlement of her former employers. The incident highlighted something that (even the most savvy) social media strategies may neglect to consider.
Who is following who?
It’s not always easy to know exactly what followers want, according to Victoria Savage, project manager at Big Dot Media. She says, “There is no real way of knowing the answer to this for sure unless we ask the individual. For me, personally, I will follow a brand if I like it, but I would much sooner follow an individual attached to the brand.”
Jon Pollard, director of digital strategy at BrocklebankPenn, agrees, highlighting the differences between someone making a decision to follow brands and people. “Generally, people follow a brand or a business because they’re interested in it or its products, and an individual because of their personality and content. Even where the individual is closely tied to a brand, the expectation from the follower is different. For most people, if an employee left a brand, their Twitter account would be seen as distinct.”
In the online arena, debates were raging in various forums and blog post responses. Opinion was divided on whether a company should be able to retain an employee’s Twitter account and if it was the person or the company a follower was following. There was one very interesting post questioning the merit of the whole debate from the Guardian’s Martin Belam. He highlighted that, although it made for a good headline, the BBC had not actually lost 60,000 followers because many of them followed other BBC accounts. Others suggested it didn’t really matter.
A significant number of people sided with Toby Mason, director of Totally Communications, who reasoned that, “If you are interested in the BBC you will follow one or many of its official accounts. In this case, however, it is definitely the individual and the content of her tweets and style of news reporting. Yes, she was at the BBC but now she’s not; tough. The channel has no right to her account unless they stated to her otherwise when she set it up or clearly stated within her contract.” It’s all just part of the modern media/marketing landscape; perhaps the equivalent of an employee taking their contact book with them when they move jobs.
What’s a follower worth?
Regardless of who owns what online, the conversation does throw a useful light on the statistics bandied about within social media marketing circles. In an environment becoming ever more focused on data, statistical analysis and ROI, just how important a metric are follower numbers? Are they merely an ego boost or do they tell you something meaningful about brand performance? It’s not hard to find marketers with an opinion about this.
Andrew Dalglish, director at Circle Research, says, “It’s a useful metric as it gives an idea of reach and, as the information is publicly available, provides a simple benchmark of success against peers. In making these comparisons though, three things should be remembered:
1. Be realistic: Focus on comparisons within your niche or with comparable sectors.
2. Use a pinch of salt: Follower numbers can be manipulated so make account for a degree of false inflation.
3. Quality over quantity: Followers should only be evaluated in conjunction with a measure of quality, such as Klout.”
Social media top trumps
Dalglish is not alone in this assertion. His assessment is also supported by Chris Gorell Barnes, CEO at video agency Adjust Your Set. He says, “Having a large quantity of Twitter followers is like bragging about the number of shoes someone has in their wardrobe or the number of Top Trump cards a child has collected. The total volume isn’t as significant as the reach and influence of those followers.”
In other words, if half your company followers list is somehow comprised of users with names such as ‘IHeartJustinBieber4Eva,’ bots designed to generate fake online connections, your family and friends and other extraneous entities, the relevance attached to the number of followers you have dwindles pretty quickly.
And this seems to be the general consensus. Katie King, managing director at Zoodikers Consulting, and soon to be author of a book concentrating on social media in B2B marketing, comments, “We believe that although many businesses are most concerned by their number of followers, it is more important to think about how they are engaging with these followers and whether they are following the most appropriate people in the first instance.”
This is clearly where the most value comes from marketing via social media channels; the ability to interact directly with an engaged, interested audience. It is better to have 2000 people actively engaging with your brand than to continually pump out reams of interesting content that is being ignored by the 60,000 people your Twitter profile claims you have. Rather than competing in a digital arms race with their competitors and losing sleep over follower-churn, brands should be focusing on positive interactions with genuine followers.
Who’s the daddy?
So, bearing in mind relevance, authority and interaction, how much will the BBC have felt the loss of the 60,000 followers that supposedly defected to ITV? The answer is ‘probably not that much.’
No one is suggesting that efforts should not be put into building a decent social media following; indeed it should be encouraged if the numbers are truly representative. But let’s face it, focusing primarily on these statistics could just be seen as the digital equivalent of ‘my dad’s bigger than your dad.’ And having a big dad isn’t guaranteed to boost your ROI.