Social Media Brands: The Break-Up

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It’s not you; it’s me. Okay, no, I lied; it is you. I thought we agreed to take things slow, but you came on a little too strong. I’m just not prepared to deal with your neediness right now. I’d like for us to still be friends, but I’m afraid that won’t work either. I just don’t trust that you won’t leave me irritating messages day and night. We’re over. Too bad this letter will never find you.

No, I did not just break up with my boyfriend via blog post, what a twenty-first century cliché that would be! I did, however, draft my best “Dear John Letter” directed toward harassing social media brands, and I am getting dangerously close to ending our relationship.

Anyone with a Facebook, Twitter or e-mail account should know exactly what I’m going through. We friend, follow or subscribe to an organization we support, and before we know it, it’s filling up our newsfeeds, timelines and inboxes with excessive, irrelevant or boring information. And so comes the inevitable break-up. A new study released this week by ExactTarget and CoTweet found that more than 90 percent of consumers have “broken up” with at least one brand. Check out the findings, courtesy of the Daily Dog:

• 91 percent of consumers have unsubscribed from permission-based marketing e-mails.
• 77 percent of consumers report being more cautious about providing their e-mail address to companies.
• 81 percent of consumers have either “unliked” or removed a company’s posts from their Facebook news feed.
• 71 percent of consumers report being more selective about “liking” a company on Facebook versus last year.
• 51 percent of consumers expect that a “like” will result in marketing communications from brands while 40 percent do not believe it should result in marketing communications.
• 41 percent of consumers have “unfollowed” a company on Twitter.

Unlike most real-life break-ups, the organization has no idea why it lost another relationship. The end is quiet and painless, as if the relationship never existed. This lack of notification is ultimately problematic for an organization; it gets no insight to its misuses of communication and, therefore, has no incentive to change its behavior. Furthermore, social media relationships are generally not on-again, off-again; once consumers are gone, they’re probably gone for good. So how can organizations avoid a “block,” the dating equivalent of a restraining order?

• Update sparingly
• Establish newsworthiness
• Convey personality