Does a Like equal loyalty or ‘give me free stuff’?

So you have a Facebook page and you have spent a great deal of time crafting the landing area on your page. You have had it specially designed and made it — well, you have made it beautiful. Users begin engaging with your page and because it is so beautifully done, they start liking it and before you know it, you have gone from 0 likes to 1 000 likes. Excellent! Or is it? How loyal are those “likers” (lurkers) that have professed this love for your page and brand by extension?

Are users liking brands on Facebook?
The simple answer to that is yes. In a study conducted by eVoc Insights, 59% of Facebook users are reported to have liked a company brand or company profile page in the last 6 months. What the study doesn’t cover though is how this relates to loyalty. This area of reporting is still a rather vague one that a lot of brands, and digital agencies for that matter, are trying to wrap their heads around.

In another eVoc Insights survey, they tried to tackle this very question. How does liking a page affect loyalty?

Of the Facebook users surveyed who have liked a company page; 54% said that they were either “much more” or “somewhat more” likely to purchase something from the brand that they liked. The remaining 47% of respondents said that liking the page had no influence on their buying decision whatsoever.

What made for even more interesting reading in the survey was the types of brands that were liked.
The top 4 were : food brands; tv shows; music and movies – and then lastly clothing brands. There are no B2B brands in that top four list. They are all B2C brands — which is what you would expect as a B2B brand is targeting a far smaller and hopefully more niche audience demographic.

Do the survey trends mirror real life?
By the looks of things, the answer to that is a resounding no. The Ehren-Bass Institute — an Australian-based think tank — found that the fans of Facebook’s 200 biggest brands were engaging with those brands online a lot less than the previous survey indicates. In fact, only around one percent of them were engaging with these brands online.

Their findings could not definitively say that there was an increased level of loyalty to these brands.

What appears to be happening is there is a large disconnect between users and brands as to why they are actually liking the pages in the first place.

The CMO Council asked Facebook users what they expected after liking a page and the results were quite staggering.

67% of those who liked a page were expecting to be eligible for exclusive offers or special promotions. That’s not loyalty, that’s hedonism.

Even more surprising was when the CMO Council asked marketers why they thought their clients liked a page, they answered “because they are loyal clients”.

At the moment there is still a very vague link between likes and loyalty. Brands and users have not managed to reach a point where there is a clear understanding between why they are engaging with each other online.

There is a massive gap here that needs to be quickly filled otherwise users are going to feel alienated and their expectations are not going to be met; while brands are not going to be seeing the types of returns that they are expecting from “loyal” fans.

The value of a like has long been a debate and it seems it will continue to be one for some time to come. Brands need to be sure that they do the following to better utilise their social presence and maximise what they are hoping to achieve from it :

1. Don’t measure likes as the Holy Grail metric
2. Make sure you are talking to your likers to understand what made them like your page
3. Don’t assume that you have loyalty in your likers — test it and get them engaged!