Anatomy of Fans

“Likes” is a new way of defining relationship between People and Brand. Open IDs like “Facebook Connect” is giving more detailed information about their customers. Brands keep on exploring new ways to access customer’s information and identifying different ways to engage with them.

I have defined engagement and fans into different subsets, first let’s talk about 3 different level of engagement, how engagement is driven with those interactions and how to increase the quality of fans that you already have (as I always say, acquiring fans is not the art, the real fun and challenge is how to interact with them and keep them engage.)

The 3 levels are bifurcated as under:

1) Light Engagement(Like on Post through Brand Website): Here the potential fan is not coming through any Facebook fan page, possible he doesn’t even know that you exist on the Facebook page unless he sees a social-plugin on the brand website. This is more of content driven, here fan likes the content on the brand website and clicks on “Like” through Social-plugin. The moment Fan clicks on “Like”, there is an update that goes on Fan’s news feed. This activity done by Fan is visible by Fan’s Friend in their news feed.

2) Moderate Engagement (Like on Facebook Fane Page): Here Fan like Fan Page through Facebook. The moment Fan like the “FAN PAGE”, the posts done by Brands or updates happening on Brand’s Page are shown in Fan’s news feed of the Fan. Simultaneously any activity or engagement (whether it’s Like on Brand Page or Like on Post of the brand) done between Fan and The Brand is shown on Fan’s Friend New Feed.

3) Heave Engagement (Facebook connect and Facebook Apps): “Trust” is one major factor that really influences Fans to come in this category. Here user logs in to Brand Website using Facebook Profile and Brand can access basic information of the user (with permission). Now this is something really important to understand that user has shown “Trust” in brand that’s the reason they have shared their basic information with Brand through their Facebook Login Credentials. Once the Login Credentials are used to login, brand updates are shown in Fan’s news feed.

Engagement Spectrum of Fans: To increase interaction or engagement with Fan, you need to make optimum use of the content that can drive conversation with your Fans. There is very strategic approach that needs to be adapted to ensure that your Potential Fans are converted to Super Fan.

This can also be used to identify the life cycle of your Fans

1) Potential Fan: This person is a Friend of your Fan, who is witnessing activities done between brand and his fan through his news feeds. However he doesn’t have any direct interaction with the brand yet.

2) Engaged Fan: This is a Fan who has liked your page. For any reason, but yes liked your page. At this stage it is very difficult to identify the potential of your fan unless Fan reach the next level and that’s “Advocate Fan”

3) Advocate Fan: This Fan has done some good work on word-of-mouth for your brand and helped you to go viral. This could be direct or indirect approach. Direct Approach is when he has spoken or shared your posts with his/her friend/friends. Indirect is approach is when he hasn’t spoken to anyone directly; however his frequency of engagement/engagement rate is so high with your brand that his/her friends keep witnessing his activity with your brand through their news feeds.

4) Purchasing Fan: This Fan has given his/her basic information and made purchase from you.

5) Super Fan: This Fan has given his/her basic information and made purchase from you. And not only this, he/she has led another Fan to your brand to make the purchase from you.

I promise that in my next post i am going to talk about “How to convert “Potential Fan” to “Super Fan“… So Stay Tuned

Love You All

Mohit Lamba