Top Brands are not interacting on social media

Hi class,

I came across an article which I found very interesting. The article discusses top brands who do not interact with their fans/followers on Facebook. It discusses the top-50 brands on social media according to Interbrand. Out of the 50 Top brands on social media, 27 of them do not respond to fans who comment on posts, or allow customers to write messages to the company. That is more than half of the top 50 brands and I found this number very surprising, because the main goal for social media should be to interact with your customer. Among these 27 companies are Disney, McDonald’s and Sony who only allow posts that are created by the companies themselves. Another interesting fact that is in the article is that Apple still does not have a Facebook page. Apple has a fan-created page which attracts almost 8 million fans, but Apple still does not think that they should use Facebook. Many of those top 50 companies are posting sales, coupons and other promotions but these conversations are mostly in a one-way direction. The companies are stuck in the old promotional habit and are not interacting with the customers. Social media is perfect to interact with the customer so i found it weird why these big companies are not interacting with them.
The writer gives two theories why these companies are not willing to interact with customers. The first theory is that more than a third of all the posts that were collected could damage the company. But only 8% of these posts were real complaints, the others were just spam. Companies do not want to lose the control about what’s said about their company and do not allow people to post messages on Facebook to prevent it. The other theory is that companies do not know how to create a good conversation with their customers. The average content of these top-50 brands is 71% promotional and only 5% of the posts were created to start a conversation with the customer. This is only a small percentage of the total posts. So these companies are not actively seeking for interaction with their customers although they belong to the top-50 brands on social media.
Some of these top-50 brands are doing really well and there are three general ways for a company to start interaction with the customer. These ways are:’using nostalgia, product discussion and finding common causes’. The article discusses an example of Coca-Cola who uses nostalgia in their posts about the 130 year history of the company. This encourages fans to comment on the post about how they remember Coca-Cola from when they were young. Fans also want to discuss products that interests them and the articles also says that when a company does something where other people have the same cause for (like giving money to a charity), it will get a lot of interaction (http://socialmediatoday.com/adam-chapman/925366/most-top-brands-facebook-still-don-t-talk-their-fans, 2012).
I found it very odd that these top companies are still not interacting with customers on social media. You can really make a good plan on how to post and how to interact with customers when you look at the theories about how to start a good conversation on social media with customers. I think it is very important for companies to stay in touch with the customers and to keep them interested. Otherwise the amount of fans of a company’s Facebook page will decrease and it will be less of an asset for your company.

I hope you also liked the article and found it just as interesting as me.
Please share your thoughts,

Tim Ellens

Reference:
http://socialmediatoday.com/adam-chapman/925366/most-top-brands-facebook-still-don-t-talk-their-fans, 2012