Mark Zuckerberg and his blushing bride might be busy gallivanting all over Italy, but at home trouble is brewing for Facebook (News - Alert) in the wake of the Facebook IPO as the biggest move in the company’s history yet has spelled disaster for the social networking company – not just financially, but in terms of customer engagement as well.
Just a few weeks following the IPO, brand and customer engagement consultancy BrandKeys reports that the networking site has dropped from No. 1 to No. 5 in the Social Networking Category in the Customer Loyalty Engagement index. While the networking giant was previously at the top of the list, since the IPO, Facebook has fallen down the ranks and is now taking a backset to sites like YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn (News - Alert). The index polls over 49,000 consumers, 83 categories and 600 brands.
In fact, after the IPO, there was an 11 percent drop on self-image and a 20 percent drop on trust and security. While factors like ease of connection and brand value/content remained steady, overall Facebook finds itself in the red when it comes to customer engagement and loyalty. BrandKeys identifies this as “the ultimate leading indicator of profitability,” which showed a seven percent loss in overall brand equity.
“It’s completely consumer-driven,” BrandKey’s President Rober Passikoff said of the Facebook customer engagement decline. “First you need be resonant enough with consumers to make the list. Then we are able to determine how well a brand meets or exceeds expectations consumer hold for the drivers of engagement and loyalty in the category. Five months ago Facebook was doing just fine.”
Facebook has more to worry about than just its customer engagement index as the company’s shares lost about 20 percent of their value three days after the IPO, shareholders have been filing lawsuits and questions are being shot at rapid fire about mobile platforms.
But putting aside its financial woes, Facebook has to figure something out about its Customer Loyalty Engagement index especially as sites like Twitter (News - Alert), Pinterest and LinkedIn looks for any loopholes to pull ahead of the networking giant. One company that understands just how important customer engagement and customer loyalty are is ACCENT Marketing Services, a performance marketing company for brands that are passionate about keeping and growing customers. ACCENT touts its Continuous Engagement Improvement Process, which couples ACCENT’s resources with a data-driven approach to help brands get the most out of their customer relationships.
According to company officials, companies ought to go through five steps when trying to reach their customers: listen, learn, connect, influence and optimize. Each stage is centered upon making each customer interaction more intelligent and engaging than the last, regardless of the interaction channel.
“We try to follow Forrester’s (News - Alert) definition because we think it levels the playing field,” Tim Searcy, chief executive officer at ACCENT Marketing Services, told TMCnet in a recent podcast. “We see engagement as the level of involvement, interaction, intimacy and influence an individual has with a brand over time.”
“That’s what it is, but what we are about and how you go about doing it are a little bit different,” he added. “We have to be seeking an ideal outcome in which that engagement, that intimacy, that involvement, that interaction is positive for the customer and that it doesn’t vary by touch point or by channel.”
Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli