Instead, brands quickly entered a popularity contest for the most Likes. It seemed companies were simply content with growing audience numbers. Until lately, they’ve been comfortable measuring return on investment by the number of fans alone. Now they’re beginning to question the value of such a one-dimensional strategy.

Starbucks, one of the most popular brands on Facebook, has startlingly low engagement numbers, despite its 26 million fans. A recent post from Starbucks mentioned the company’s popular red holiday cups. Yet, its engagement rate (the number of gestures on the post divided by the total number fans at the time of this writing) only calculated to 0.28% Likes and 0.02% comments.

The challenge for brands is to evolve from simply being a company with a product to becoming a valuable source for interesting, entertaining and useful content. The real measurement of a brand’s Facebook success is relevance.

Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm is the first step for measuring a brand’s relevance across its community. Following F8, people began to optimize social media performance against Edgerank’s key metrics, namely, by developing strategies to measure affinity, edge weighting and recency. Unfortunately, numbers don’t mean anything if the brand can’t reach into fans’ News Feeds and achieve basic levels of engagement.

Brands would do best to approach the problem differently or, more specifically, to start acting like those hyper-connected Facebook friends we all have. These individuals not only broadcast their status updates, connect with apps like Spotify, and Like frequently; they also frequently engage friends in one-to-one discussions or curate social events, thereby building broader community circles.

Lees verder op Mashable.