MAD Week: Getting Engaged Better Than Being Liked

Facebook likes are not a recipe for success in social media.

David Higgins, Foxtel’s social media marketing manager, told the audience of MAD Week’s social and mobile pop-up breakfast that likes are the same as page impressions were for publishers in the naughties, “which didn’t add up to financial health for them”.

He postulated that “we’ve all got good at likes, but what does that mean?” He said that he told his boss that Foxtel had received 750,000 likes on Facebook, but his boss’ response was: yes but who are they? Higgins admitted that he had no idea who was a customer and who wasn’t.

Despite this obvious shortcoming, likes are still the top metric for companies generating more than US$1 billion.

Today, Higgins said that customer advocacy is the ultimate goal for social media managers. He added, however, that customer advocacy could be hard to obtain “when you’re trying to do a hard sell”.

Using a recent Game of Thrones campaign that he had run, Higgins said that there was massive negative sentiment around Foxtel’s exclusive broadcast of series four.

However Foxtel ran a sit on the iron throne activation in Sydney and Melbourne, which turned around the sentiment to almost complete positive sentiment. In effect, the broadcaster had to go offline to get online support.

He did admit, however that the sweet #GOTFOXTEL hashtag for the campaign “fell in our lap”.
However the win in sentiment thanks to the hashtag competition gave Foxtel much bigger reach, but it didn’t give them the data that they want. They still didn’t know who they had as fans and advocates, they just knew they had lots.

However a second campaign for the Walking Dead, which asked fans of the show whether they were the biggest fan of the show, which was essentially a question-based competition, was able to harvest much better data from fewer entrants.

In its first week the quiz attracted 1200 entrants. Over the 16 week series that number only grew to 1700 entrants. However a large amount of these people came back multiple times, some every week the competition ran.

“In the end we found 182 people who were the biggest fans of walking dead, which doesn’t seem like a very big number, but 5% of a social base gives you 95% of the social referrals. Identify the hard core is the critical point,” he said.

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