Ekalavya Bhattacharya

When it comes to Digital Marketing, India of all countries is the most obsessed about ROI!

The single most important thing which is fucking up the state of Social Media Marketing in India is the - FAN Count - on Facebook.

Unfortunately this all that Brand Managers care about now.

Here are some reasons why?

- Brand Managers are not entrepreneurs. They are employees of the brand. With the emergence of social platforms and explosive growth that twitter and facebook has seen in India, 10-20% of the KRA’s of most of brand managers is now Social Media Marketing.

- When it comes to measurabality - unfortunately the easiest thing for a BM to explain to his boss is the ‘Number of Fans’ the brand has on Facebook. As one goes higher in a company - the more illiterate and ignorant are the people about Social Media.

- When having a drink with your peers - Having more fans for your brand than the other is almost equivalent to having a bigger dick.

So what’s wrong in having more fans?
Well there is nothing wrong in having more fans…but the methodology of getting these.

2 conversations I’ve had with clients over the past few weeks are:

‘We have an offer from an agency which is ready to give us fans at Rs 2/fan. We know he must be having a BPO where all people do is sit and make fake iDs - but it does get us the numbers and that’s exactly what we want.’

‘We know the method we are taking will get us a lot of fake fans, but how does it matter? It will increase the number of fans and that’s what we want. We will still get 10-15% organic growth and those are the users who can get engaged in posts.’

Now the problem is that the good agencies are going to suffer. A lot of houses will sprout up which will get you fans by the dozens using their special methods. The entire medium is going to get fucked and be proven worthless…
Because at the end of the day Social Media is about influential marketing. It’s about engaging with real people who are having real conversations. It is consumer driven marketing.

How can Facebook prevent this from happening?

The Fan count should be removed from public display. It should become a more integrated part of Facebook Insights and the number of active fans should be the parameter which should be looked at. So brands can advertise their pages and get users to their page - but the art of Social Media should lie in engaging the user to eventually lead to a sale.

The likes/comments counter should remain for every post and that should be a good indicator for genuine engagement.

Fan counts are pretty much like Web Visit Counters we had on sites hosted on Geocities back in 98/99. No one uses those anymore and hardly anyone publicly displays the number of visits/visitors they get on a daily basis.

Should also read - Why is Mobile Gaming Fucked in India?