Facebook professionals need to learn from email marketers’ mistakes
Posted: June 18th, 2011 | Author: Sam Bueno de Mesquita | Filed under: Content, email-marketing, Facebook, strategy | 1 Comment »Social has been the glamorous end of digital marketing for the last 5 years, while email is a bit of an ugly stepchild – always there, but everyone would rather avoid talking about it.
Social networking hanging out with crowdsourcing and location - email (right) trying to be friends
To some extent, this is because email marketing involves such an intense, single-minded and boring focus on deliverability. Unless social moves in the same direction soon, its practitioners are going to find themselves in all kinds of trouble.
Email marketing circa 2002, Facebook marketing circa 2011
Every email marketer above a certain age will, early on in their career, have ruined someone’s business. We were flying blind: we didn’t know about spam filters; we didn’t understand whitelisting; we ended up getting our employers’ email addresses blacklisted so severely that even internal emails were disappearing into Junk Mail folders.
Now the legion of self-proclaimed ‘social media experts’ are making the same mistake.
Your Edgerank decides whether your updates appear in someone’s Facebook Top News feed. It’s calculated on how often that friend (or one of their friends), interacts with you. Every time they, or their friends, looks at your page, clicks your links, likes or comments on your status, your Edgerank will rise. This means it’s self-sustaining. Maintain a good relationship with someone, and your updates will stay in their feed – making it easier for you to strengthen that relationship further, as well as improving your Edgerank with their friends.
But if you slip out of someone’s Top News feed, then you’re gone for good, unless one of their friends remains keen. Slip all the way out of a network’s feeds, and there’s no way for you to get back in. You can have a million friends, but unless they happen to switch their news feed from ‘Top News’ to ‘Most Recent’ (and no-one ever does) none of them will see your updates. Ever.
Just like incompetent emailers, inept Facebookers don’t just fail to provide value-for-money: they do irrevocable harm.
