The Facebook and Twitter bandwagon has gathered such momentum and has picked up so many passengers that it is easy to forget about the large groups of people ignoring the trend, watching the bandwagon roll by and getting on with discussing their own special topics with their online friends in the old village halls and community centres of the web, the forums.
It is easy to be taken in by the phenomenal numbers, the media hype and the group psychology of being involved or being left behind. Few tend to pause and reflect on exactly what Facebook and Twitter can actually do for your business let alone measure the results of a social campaign and if you are spending any money or time with Facebook and Twitter it is a campaign!
It’s generally true that the more things change, the more they stay the same and I’m reminded of one of the sales lines used by Yell.com when it first started. An enthusiastic salesperson would point out just how many visitors they were getting to their site every day (insert big number here) implying, with the same logic that dooms many start up businesses, that if even a small percentage of this big number were to contact you then you would have more business than you could ever cope with. What they never pointed out of course was the number of interest categories that should have been divided into this big number and the relative proportions of visitors between the categories. You may well get a decent proportion of people using Yell.com to find an accountant, plumber or photographer but how many would really use it for (insert your business here).
This is very much where the wheel has turned back to with Facebook and Twitter, massive numbers but just how many are interested in you and your products? They are there, sure enough, but they’re not there for you, your business or anything close.
The irony is that while large chunks of budget are being invested in Facebook and Twitter with the hope of targeting demographics extracted surreptitiously from user behavior (see our blog entry on the Cookie Law which frowns on this) there are ready made social groups neatly organised according to interest... the interest demographic, a technical marvel with Facebook and Twitter, pretty much the way it has to be with forums.
Let’s take a case in point with a forum we have been involved with since 2001. CaravanTalk has, at the time of writing, over 26,000 members with around 13,000 visitors per day and over 600,000 entries. These figures are just a spot on Facebook and Twitter’s young face but every single member and visitor is there because they have elected to discuss caravans, caravanning and anything associated with the subject. Not only this but the general topic is, of necessity, broken down into sections and subcategories. If your business is Caravan related you have a close to 100% relevant audience who are not only appropriate but also actively engaging with their field of interest.
Forum software has become very powerful over the years, is relatively inexpensive, even free and is remarkably easy to use. As a result forums on just about anything you can think of have sprung up and if your business is not represented by a forum or section of a forum then you are one of the few and have a rare opportunity to get things going yourself.
Coming back to a previous point though, the reality is always in the numbers. In a recent consultancy report we analysed the efficacy of an active Facebook and Twitter social campaign and as a direct comparator used the unprompted public commentary from a single forum regarding that company. The social interaction ratio between the two was over 700:1 in favour of the unprompted, unfunded forum.
If you are not currently engaging with forums whether by hosting one, content contribution, sponsorship, advertising or just monitoring then you are missing out on one of the most resilient and powerful social media phenomena that no-one tends to talk about.
Coming soon... on a more techie note, how to develop a long tail search keyword strategy with a forum.
