Talking to ghosts (the dark side of social)

As consumers move to Dark Social, Social Local and Private Community Platforms (PCPs) like C2-Unity, will there be anyone left on Facebook?

As you enter the town of Lobo in Texas it’s like a setting from a Western movie, creaking signs, and wind blowing dust down the high street. The gas station and general store boarded up, the neon sign, ‘Welcome to Fabulous Lobo, Texas’ sits in darkness.

Bodie in California boasted a population of over 20,000, 65 saloons, 10 brothels, a music hall and 2 cinemas. The gold rush saw it become a thriving community. Now it lies silent, and the only population is tourists.

Ordos in China, should have a population of 300,000, a purpose built modern city, boasting modern architecture and amazing urban spaces and facilities. But like Lobo and Bodie, it too is a ghost town. Of the original 67,000 that moved in, most have moved out.

Sounds familiar?

The term “talking to ghosts” is a recent phrase I heard at a conference referring to the fact that more and more social media sites, especially Facebook groups, are becoming ghost towns, as consumers move over to the dark side – dark social.

“A study on social sharing habits has highlighted the growing appeal of private messaging apps [dark social], with 63% of people now preferring such channels to share content and recommendations.” [Source: The Drum] [Note: other research puts this now as high as 84%]

Dark Social platforms like WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) and other platforms, including PCPs (private community platforms) like the C2-Unity app is the new social media.

Ad free users have a greater feeling of privacy, away from the intrusive eyes of Facebook and others.

The brand owns and controls the whole platform, so the big media giants like Facebook (or your competitors) have no access.

The three biggest drivers to dark social are privacy, no ads and a smaller more inclusive community.

While Instagram and TikTok are doing well at the shallowest end of the consumer market, the migration of consumers is proving challenging for social media teams, who might be pumping out the comments and content to nothing more than ghosts.

[If you want to know more about PCPs check out the links below this article]

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As management guru Charles Handy says, “Common sense is rarely common,” and you don’t need to be a genius to realise that marketing at people is one of the biggest turn offs for consumers, it’s intrusive, disruptive and often annoying – pre-roll ads are more hated than door drops. As an industry we also ignore the fact that bad advertising (in its many forms) is actually bad for business.

Great, engaging ideas are loved by consumers, they even talk about them, which begs the question, why has creativity plunged to such a low level over the last decade?

“Blame the numbers” was the answer give to me by a recently retired top CMO, “numbers make mediocrity look like success, just look how the politicians use it to tell us we have less crime, better education and a better NHS when we all know we don’t.”

The Guardian christened the term ‘The Numeric Society’ many years ago to describe the obsession politicians had with putting a number on everything – even happiness! This has spread across the business world as well. Now a number is what defines success, even if the sales are going the opposite way. And sadly, as we know with the growing concern over media fraud, we can’t trust them.

The web – from digital ads to social media – offers a mass marketing opportunity, that few marketers can turn down. “Who wants a pistol when you can have machine gun?” Although it can also offer highly targeted opportunities, mass marketing is more profitable for media agencies and looks better on the numbers.

Pushing messages at people can create more negative feeling than sales, sometimes referred to as ‘blunt force marketing’. For that 1% who buy, 5% may never want to do business with you. I wonder how many brands overlay their NPS against their digital marketing?

Alternatively, the idea that embedding your media message in a more organic, native environment is great if you can do it well, and let’s be honest, very few do it well. Most social media is hand fisted, badly written and lacking any good ideas at best.

Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, consumers are seeking to get off the grid and away from Big Brother Facebook. We have finally woken up to the fact we are being watched.

Facebook communities are often not communities at all, more a collective because most didn’t join the brand’s Facebook group because they love the brand but probably because they got some promotional goodie for doing so. And never came back.

While Instagram may have given social a new lease of life, like Ordos, people come but quickly move on. Retention is a challenge.

If social media platforms cleaned their sites one a year and only kept those that had been active at least once, what percentage of the followers do you think would vanish? 50%, 75% or 95%?

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Three areas you should be looking at to keep ahead.

PCPs

By contrast, new players to the market, Private Community Platforms (PCPs), like CONNECT2’s C2-Unity app, allows brands to build real communities, with the benefit that only the client can see the data. As they are designed to be real community ecosystems – built around commonalities that unite (which is what defines a community) - they are predicted to be a commercial alternative to Facebook. It’s a new area yet to reach high adoption but tipped to be the next big thing.

It also allows brands to migrate databases and customers collectives over and develop real communities, increasing loyalty and advocacy.

With real communities you get more emotional bonding and greater retention. It’s easy to abandon a collective but not so easy to abandon a community.

Social Local

Social Local, especially local Facebook and Twitter groups, is far more popular than brand Facebook sites and remains out of reach to most brands because it’s set up and run by locals. And they’ll block brands if they do try to infiltrate.

Go to any area of a city, a town, a village and you’ll find a thriving local community on Facebook. Berkhampsted’s local Facebook group, ‘Everything Berko’ has almost 36,600 locals interacting, and making recommendations to each other. Groups like these can have a powerful influence upon local buying power – making or breaking a restaurant or retailer for example.

A recent analysis of one retailer in a N London area suggested that less than 4% of their followers on Facebook lived in that area, yet 95% of their customer came from the local community – in short, they were not engaging the local customer base. However, over 46% of the local population used some form of Social Local (mainly Facebook) which was out of bounds to the brand’s social media team.

Which begs the question, why aren’t brands, especially retailers, engaging local consumer communities? Back to Handy’s quote.

Dark Social

The key to infiltrating dark social is not trying to break in (as one media agency suggested to a client of mine) as that is both socially immoral and will just piss consumers off. The key is advocacy, winning hearts and minds and encouraging local promoters (influencers/connectors) to spread the word and do the job of your marketing department, and probably saving a fortune of wasted budget spent talking to ghosts.

Like the gold rush, social engagement with consumer communities has reaped some great rewards but to keep finding gold you need to keep prospecting.

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Dr Chris Arnold is author of ‘Ethical Marketing & The New Consumer,’ the Brand Republic Ethical Marketing Blog and is co-founder of CONNECT2, UK’s leading specialist in community engagement (B2C2). 

https://www.connect-b2c2.co.uk

To find out more about building a brand loyal community and PCPs, message me or email [email protected], or call me 07778 056686.

Founder of the ethical marketing agency Creative Orchestra, The Garage Innovation Lab and author of ‘FLIP - unthink everything you know’.

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