As an active social media user and freelance marketer with more than 3 years of experience I have been always interested in different motivations of people liking or following brands on social media. It’s an interesting and important question to ask, especially if you are about to start a social media marketing campaign or already have one.
Many people like brands on Facebook or follow them on Twitter not because of referrals, news updates and even for interesting content. The most popular reason, however, is special offers and deals that attract many followers to follow brands on social media! According to an Infographic recently posted by getsatisfaction.com guys, the second reason is that they're already current customers, and third- the brand's interesting content. The customer experience is essential for people to feel and have a connection with a product or brand. This is the case in general, and I guess it’s logical it also is in a social media context.
About brand’s interesting content I want to speak a little bit more in this post. Brands today must take into consideration issues that they may previously have wanted to distance themselves from. People are a lot smarter than they are sometimes given credit for by marketers, and especially so when watching the purse strings, and they will make up their own mind if they want to buy a product or not. Recently I have found also many business pages rewarding people, with the chance to win an iPad, in exchange for hitting the Like button on their Facebook page As a matter of fact this is not social proof of your awesomeness: it’s social proof of the awesomeness of the iPad! Think of some creative ways and share always quality content that will answer your followers’ specific needs and create interactions!
Keep in mind also that measuring your core fans of your business fan pages is also important. To calculate the core fan count, the average number of posts-per-contributing fan is calculated. Ask any aspiring entrepreneur how many Facebook fans they want and you're liable to hear numbers upwards of ten thousand, or even one million, but few people ever consider about their interaction or ‘’wrong’’ interaction that can quickly bring Facebook page to its virtual knees.