Last year I wrote a short piece entitled “Why Having People ‘Like’ Your Radio Station Isn’t Enough.”
I’ve also tweeted a warning to radio stations that bribing people to “like” your Facebook fan page can harm their social media presence:
“Having 1000 people ‘like’ AND interact with radio station’s Facebook page is better than 10,000 ‘fans’ who never interact with that page.”
Most radio people still don’t get it.
One consultant compared it to increasing a station’s cume:
“No matter how you get people to ‘like’ your Fan Page, there’s always a chance that some of them will become ‘real’ fans.”
That’s both incorrect and, quite possibly, harmful to the radio station.
If you have a successful “forced listening” campaign designed to get as many people as possible to sample your radio station (e.g., a $10,000 daily birthday prize), that will help your cume.
If your programming is compelling enough, some of those new listeners might become regular, loyal listeners — which will help your quarter hours.
But that does not translate to Facebook pages.
Why not?
Because Arbitron (or Rajar or Nielsen or BBM) doesn’t penalize you for having a large cume but a small quarter hour share.
Facebook, on the other hand, continually calculates an “engagement” score for your Facebook page.
Pages with large numbers of “fans” but virtually no interaction with them (fans don’t post on the page, don’t comment, don’t “Like” or “Share” items) are less likely to show up their fans’ news feeds than other pages.
Even for fans who do really “like” you, guess how many times, on average, they visit your fan page after “liking” it?
Answer: Never again. Most of your fans see you, if at all, in their news feeds.
But if your Facebook engagement score is low enough, most of your postings might never appear in the news feeds of most of your erstwhile “fans.”
I’m just sayin’.
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Your item about indiscriminate “like” campaigns was an eye opener. I’m embarrassed to admit that I never thought about fans never going to our page again. AND our company has a requirement that our individual personalities each have their own fan page and post to our station FB page via their individual pages.
I had long suspected that certain postings were not being seen or reacted to by the majority of our station fans because those fans had only “liked” the station page and not the individual jock pages. Now I know why.
They weren’t showing up in most of our fans news feed.
Never revisiting a station’s FB page makes sense because that’s how I use FB. I follow several other stations around the country, but rarely (if ever) actually go back to their page. I get my updates in my news feed just as you’ve illustrated.
Thanks Dan. This has helped me a ton.
GREAT Article, an eye opener!!