If you participate in any part of the marketing process (and all real estate professionals do), you know it’s a badge of honor to have many people “like” your brand on Facebook.
For many business owners, it’s a bit of a competition. If I’m more “liked” on Facebook than my competitors, I must be more successful. Right?
If the ultimate measurement of success is revenue and profitability, this premise isn’t necessarily true.
In fact, new data compiled by the Journal of Marketing Research suggests you may want to place your focus elsewhere to get a prospect to do something to help your cause.
Choosing the Right Metric
This research was recently conducted at Harvard Business School and focused on the question: How effective is a Facebook “like” at producing profitable behavior?
For recruiting, the profitable behavior is a hire. The things leading to a hire are tangible events such as a phone conversation about career options, attending an interview or taking a licensing class.
For traditional marketers, the profitable behaviors are actions such as getting a prospect to buy something, or recommending a product to a friend.
The Value of a Facebook Like
After five separate experiments involving thousands of subjects and prominent brands, researchers concluded:
“The act of liking a brand on Facebook—requiring mere seconds of attention and, by design, one click of a button—may simply induce too weak a signal of preference for consumers to infer [actionable] increased liking of the brand.”
This doesn’t mean social media marketing is useless. It can be helpful, but it must be followed-up by additional, actionable steps. Otherwise, researchers noted, it is not effective at producing profitable behaviors.
The actionable steps for a hiring manager can initially be small things like getting permission to follow-up later via email, or agreeing to a scheduled call-back in a few weeks. Eventually, live conversations (via phone or email) and face-to-face meetings need to ensue to convert the liking into actions leading to a hire.
Social media is just one way to get to these actionable steps. For marketers and hiring managers alike, it’s often a strategy that produces lower than expected return on investment.
Liking and reciprocal liking has been documented to produce attraction, and it’s also an important part of persuading someone to take a certain action. But, the tangible actions are necessary to get to the final goal.
Research Source Note: The research cited in this blog was only available in print at the time of publishing. When an online reference becomes available, we’ll update this posting.
Questions or Comments? Reply to your WorkPuzzle subscription email.
Didn’t get the WorkPuzzle email? Subscribe below. We promise not to share your email with others or use it for any other purpose but delivering WorkPuzzle notices.
