Facebook experts, I need help: is this 'strategy' idea legit or nonsense?

[cos2030]

Hi guys,

I have a friend who works in a large university where each faculty has their own Facebook page. The pages are rarely maintained and experience very poor levels of engagement.

The university's main Facebook page has a very large following (195,000+ likes), but again, the engagement is very poor - on average each post gets about 20 likes, 2 comments and 1-2 shares if that.

Now, my friend works in one of the faculties and doesn't happen to have a Facebook page (his particular faculty is concentrating their efforts on other areas of inbound marketing). However, the social media manager for the university is insisting my friend’s faculty create a page and contribute to a wider ‘campaign’ being undertaken at the uni - however my friend is not convinced (and neither am I) that the logic behind this campaign makes sense. Here's how the campaign has been described:

1. The main university page (with 195k likes) posts a generic image ('whats happening this week at the uni'), which asks people to ‘look in the comments’ to see what's happening among all the different faculties

2. The faculty pages all at once submit comments on the post about 'what's happening' in their area

3. The faculty pages 'like' the main image post, share it, and like the other comments left by faculties

The social media manager says this campaign approach will ensure the main post gets into the feed of the 195k followers (and more) and increase the reach of the other faculties’ pages because of the high level of 'engagement' and 'aggregation' on the post.

My friend and I feel this idea is flawed for a number of reasons:

1. Routinely it’s the same people and faculties engaging with the post - so the vast majority of the 195k won't be reached virally anyway

2. The 195k have demonstrated they aren't engaged, due to the poor prior performance of the page – it’s unlikely the posts even make it to their feeds organically

3. The image is generic (it is literally a picture of a building which says 'what’s on this week') and doesn’t entice people to take an action - you can't see the comments as they're collapsed in the feed, so unless users actually are compelled by the image to click into the comments the post is useless

4. The message isn't targeted - a number of random faculties provide comments to the post, so it's very possible what's offered by the faculties isn't relevant to the wider audience.

Anyway, I'd really hope someone with a deep understanding of Facebook could help provide some clarity on this campaign proposal. It seems like a flawed methodology which advocates manufacturing engagement and an ineffective use of time and resource.

Many thanks

[cos2030]

Hi there Jane,

Thanks a lot for taking the time to read and respond to my question.

Your response confirms my thinking that the premise is flawed, and brings into question why the faculties just don't activate their own audience as and when required.

Thanks again, appreciate it!

[JaneCopland]

I feel the basic marketing principle behind expecting an entire student body to be interested in the happenings throughout the entire university is flawed - the math majors aren't interested in who the visiting poet to the English department is this week (if this is the type of information that is shared). If they are modelling what engagement should look like off the percentage of fans who like / share a post compared to something like the university athletics page, they are going to be disappointed.

The faculties sharing the generic status with everyone's weekly happenings seems similar to having an important page two clicks from the home page instead of one: why would I want to search through 20 faculties' updates to see what's on in the psych department when, as a fan of the psych department, the psych department could have posted their schedule themselves? I understand the idea behind having all the departments contribute, but it seems to misunderstand the audience and how they want to consume information. Facebook posts rely on the browsing attention span of the audience, which isn't long!

Facebook's algorithm will rank poorly-shared content in quite a low location on the newsfeed if people have their newsfeeds sorted by Top Stories, which is the default. It's hard to say exactly how their algos work (although a lot of study has gone into this in a similar way to how people have studied Google), but a page with 195k fans whose posts routinely receive 20 likes will not be assigned great metrics on the back of that.

My alma mater has fairly decent engagement (40k likes; a couple to a few hundred likes on popular posts, but as low as 15 on less popular stuff). Every post gets just a few shares and a little more comments, but keep in mind that a comment or a like will make a public post show up on that person's timeline as well, so it's similar to a share in terms of visibility (I am not 100% sure about how the placement of a post changes on others' newsfeeds depending on whether their friend has liked, commented or shared, however). What my alma mater is doing, however, is posting university-generic stuff, not news about specific departments unless it's catchy or particularly interesting (the PhD. in squirrel psychology did well because it's a) cute and b) odd; interestingly they did not link to the relevant faculty and I can't find a press release or course page, which seems like a big oversight, even for new news!).

I would contend that a federal model (if you like) of marketing with a bit more power given to the faculties would work - things of interest to the faculties are dealt with on their pages whilst the central university page deals with generic interest.