This week’s Human Rights Campaign movement, with a good portion of my Facebook contacts changing their profile photo to the company’s logo in support of a US Supreme Court decision in favor of marriage equality, made me think about what a move like this means, as far as engagement with a campaign, and how one could measure this factor to determine success in communications strategy. My main concern is not that it showed engagement (which is useful to note when compiling best practices) but rather what kind of engagement it indicates and how can it be used as a platform for future successes in communications.
Yes – a Facebook profile change is a great measure of engagement. Why? and what does social media engagement mean, especially for communications and advocacy campaigns?
When an entity posts on Facebook, the first level of engagement is a “Like”. However, it is not necessarily a cause for celebration; one “Like” is easy to do and there are not many consequences for any user and certainly not any limit for “Likes” for one user across the entire network.
The key to look for is when your “fans” begin sharing your content – this essentially means that your content is so good or original that your fans and friends, not only want to tell their friends about the post, but they’re willing to let it be a part of the kaleidoscope of posts that define who they are in this social media medium.
A friend adopts your logo as their profile picture? Jackpot. This means they wholeheartedly believe in the cause you are promoting that they are willing to let it define their presence on Facebook completely. To HRC’s social media team: “Quick! Before the campaigns ends and SCOTUS makes their decision, keep a file of all of those fans that have changed their picture because they’ll be most likely to sign up for your email newsletter and donate money when you need it!” — Is there a way to record this and measure it within your Facebook Insights? Surprisingly, no.
Just as you would never throw an event (having spent funding to provide food, drink, entertainment, etc. to draw in a crowd) without setting out a sign-in sheet for further contact with the crowd, no social media engagement opportunity should happen without evaluation, most importantly, as well as with long-term goals in mind. Similarly, Facebook Insights could gain strength by providing more diverse and exact ways to analyze a page’s activities. In the end, is sharing content more representative of better engagement than the profile picture move since it can be measured in Facebook Insights? Or should organizations and businesses on Facebook not wait for Insights to catch up and find their own way to measure this move? Is there a way to measure how many people change on this day? And exactly when? And why? Is there a way to tell where they get the photo from – whether it’s from a friend or directly from a campaign’s page or a news article? Does it matter?
It matters depending on the goals of your campaign. Starting this morning, I saw my friends, mainly ones I knew were already against Proposition 8, changing their profile picture. I clicked on their picture hoping to discover more information to find that there was none, just the plain simple statement of the logo …and perhaps an air of mystery can work in HRC’s favor, inspiring people to be curious and go to search for what this image means. I had to Google search the campaign before I could find any information about it on Facebook, so I changed mediums and left Facebook. The best link I found then lead me back to the campaign’s Facebook page for an additional change of medium. By that time, a user could be bored by the extensive search and opt out of participating.
So, would it have been more effective if the photo had had a website address, news article or Facebook event invite integrated into the image? Once again, depends on what HRC’s goals were for this campaign or if it even had an intentional and thorough communications strategy in tow.
Based on the behavior I saw throughout today on Facebook, I will assume HRC’s only goal was to simply publicize and broadcast their efforts as well as show in numbers/visually who supports gay marriage. Therefore, would their target audience be the undecided, but easily-swayed-by-a-social-media-campaign users? But then what is their goal for the steadfast anti-gay-marriage Facebook users? How would they define their target audience? Did they have one for this campaign?
Your guess is as good as mine, but the lesson of the day is: in all communications campaigns, set clear goals or work closely with your client to define them; even if it takes some soul searching and it isn’t necessarily comfortable to admit you don’t have a strategy, the campaign will be all the more successful for it.
