by Mike Stiles
I recently came across a study mentioned on Ad Age, a review of the 300 top brand pages on Facebook, that showed the engagement of leading brands is down 22%. Some brands do better than others of course, but that was the net result. As a reminder, engagement is not about how many fans you have or how many you can collect. It?s about how, and how often, the fans you do have are interacting with the content you?re putting out. It?s basically a measure of how interesting, entertaining, or informative they think you are.
With engagement being down 22%, it appears brands are now running head-on into the same herculean task that we as radio entertainers have always faced?how do you make sure everything you do is fun, funny, useful, rewarding or compelling? Because if you want people to stick around, and certainly if you want people to talk to their friends about you, you?ve got to be one or more of those things.
Music aside (it is what it is, and your listeners can hear the same songs just about anywhere), this task of listener engagement rests squarely in the hands of your on-air talent. For decades, talent did an amazing job of this. The good ones knew instinctively what to talk about it, talked about it with a unique personality that created fiercely loyal fans, captured the local voice and lifestyle, and they could keep all this up 4 hours a day. That?s truly incredible.
So what did radio do? Fired them.
The ones that are left are barely allowed to speak, and take their ?entertainment? instructions from ledger-clutching business managers. Fun, huh? Brands today would KILL to find people with the kind of power of engagement that radio threw away. Because now they?ve got to engage their audience, and they?re finding out it?s not that easy. It?s a very special talent.
Michael Scissons, who wrote the Ad Age piece, says bad content is starting to take its toll on brand Facebook pages. However?local pages have been seen to drive 36% better results. That means the less content that?s pushed into local markets from an all-controlling mothership, and the more loca managers are allowed to craft pages to appeal to their local market, the more success they?ll experience. What did radio do? Push content into local markets from a mothership and limit the autonomy of their local managers & talent. Wow. Brands must learn two things radio unlearned, that content is king and all engagement is local.
Mike Stiles is a writer/producer with the social marketing tech platform, Vitrue, and head of Sketchworks comedy theatre. Check out his monologue blog, The Stiles Files.
Find him on Facebook or on Twitter @mikestiles
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