Here’s how you can segment your Facebook database to understand who’s a fan, and who isn’t.
Marketers have started to use ‘contests’ and ‘promotions’ in an increasingly frequent way to build fans for their brands on Facebook.
What they may be doing (and expensively too), is creating a collection of ‘contest enthusiasts’ rather than a database of fans — in the true sense of the word.
Genuine fans have a high level of ’emotion’ and ’empathy’ to a brand and are unswerving in their loyalty to it.
However most contests and promotions are not designed to attract such fans (brand enthusiasts or advocates in essence) but a much more mainstream set of customers — including those who belong to competitors.
The result is that many brands have ended up with ‘so-called’ fans as opposed to ‘genuine’ ones.
What do you do if you’ve built your fan base using contests and promotions?
The first step is to look at how you might segment it to understand who on your database is actually a fan and who is not.
A good way to do this is to use the principle of NPS (Net Promoter Score). NPS was developed by loyalty guru Frederick Reicheld and is now a trademark owned by Bain Consulting and Satmetrix Systems.
What NPS helps you to do is break down your customers into three key segments — Promoters, Detractors and Passives — all by their responses to one key question: “Would you recommend this brand to a family member or friend?”
By breaking down your fan base in this way, NPS helps you to understand the emotional traction of your brand — its pull and strength in relation to your fans on Facebook.
What’s the benefit of undertaking this exercise?
It can help you get a more genuine, down-to-earth picture of the emotional strength of your brand as it relates to your fans on Facebook.
It can help you to figure out who’s a fan and who’s not — and help you start to look at your strategy for Facebook with a much clearer and better defined set of objectives.
Finally, when you segment your fan base this way, and apply the principle of NPS at regular intervals, you start to see whether the initiatives you’re undertaking on Facebook are having the desired impact and shifting the needle when it comes to your fans — or not.
www.warren-knight.com thanks Patrick D’souza the Client Services Director of Euro RSCG 4D Singapore.