It takes a whole lot of work to get users to follow your brand on social media and the larger your following, the more users you are able to reach with each post. The last thing you’d want is for those users to leave in droves.
Fractl and Buzzstream surveyed 900 social media users about how frequently they weed out brands they no longer feel kinship with and why. In terms of loyalty, LinkedIn users tend to unfollow brands quite unfrequently, with almost 50 percent of users saying they have never unfollowed a brand there. Facebook sees the highest percentage of brand unfollows, with 25 percent saying they had unfollowed a brand in the past month, but Twitter followers proved fickle, too, as 12 percent unfollowed a brand in the past few days alone.
Content is super-important to users as well as how active the brand is on their channel. Twenty-one percent of users say they unfollow brands whose content is boring, 19 percent said they unfollow if the brand posts are too frequent, and less than 15 percent say they unfollow a brand if they perceive the content is irrelevant to the brand itself.
Users prefer to see images (22 percent), videos (15 percent) and customer reviews (15 percent) as content types from the brand. There are content types that social media users avoid like the plague, too. Twelve percent of respondants said they don’t like brands posting white papers, 11 percent don’t want to read your e-books, and 8 percent aren’t particularly interest in your company news.
While these are good general recommendations, the content that works best for one platform may not perform as good on another. This is why it’s very important to have particular goals in mind and a social strategy that leverages those platforms best.
If you’re posting content that is irrelevant to your brand, you can be sure users are aware of it and will put you to task.
