Brands Are Wasting Money on Facebook and Twitter, Forrester Says

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• JACK MARSHALL
 
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Marketers are increasingly turning to social networks Facebook and Twitter in an attempt to start “conversations” and “relationships” with consumers. According to research firm Forrester, they might be wasting their time and money doing so.

“You don’t really have a social relationship with your customers,” analyst Nate Elliott wrote in a new report titled “Social relationship Strategies That Work.”

According to Mr. Elliott, top brands’ Facebook and Twitter posts only reach around 2% of their fans and followers, and less than 0.1% of fans and followers actually interact with each post on average. What’s more, Facebook announced last week that another tweak to its news feed algorithm will soon make it even less likely brands’ unpaid posts will actually be seen by users.

As a result, marketers hoping to interact with consumers online  might be better off investing in social features that exist on their own websites, or in smaller, more niche social networks, Mr. Elliott said.

“It’s clear that Facebook and Twitter don’t offer the relationships that marketing leaders crave. Yet most brands still use these sites as the centerpiece of their social efforts — thereby wasting significant financial, technological, and human resources on social networks that don’t deliver value,” Mr Elliott wrote. “It’s time for marketers to start building social relationship strategies around sites that can deliver value.”

Based on Forrester’s research, Mr. Elliott urged marketers to think carefully about the ways they’re spending their money on social efforts, and to recognize that Facebook and Twitter are not what they used to be from a brand perspective.”While they’ll continue to collect billions in display ad revenues, they’re just not the most important sites for social marketers anymore,” he wrote.

In fact, some brands are already shifting resources away from Facebook and seeing success, according to Mr. Elliot. In the next 18 months more marketers will follow suit, and Facebook “will become nothing but a repository for display ads”, he predicted.