More complicated than the question of growing a community and developing interaction rates is the big never addressed question of inactive fans. How could we get them out of the page ? Why should we...? If a fan leaves a page without "unliking" it, which means that either he hides the updates in his feed, or he never gets back on the page, never interact in anyway nor read anything about our brand, nevertheless, he remains as an official fan in the global countdown. But do we want to keep him as a fan if, from his own point of view, keeping in touch with us is worthless...? How could we focus only on "active fans" rather than "generic fans" ? And would it bring more value to our community ?
There are several consequences for us in this issue, managers of big international or national pages... Let's take the case of our Ferrero Rocher International 16 millions fans page. Although they all decide alone to join the page and brought it at this amazing level - we did not invest anything in FBK Ads for this page, most of them just left the page as it was not manage initially by the brand, and then because it took us so much time to start really managing it correctly. Having the internal organisation ready to manage these kind of page is not that easy to achieve, but it's another topic for another post. So the situation as it is today, is that these fans have joined the page in the last 3-5 years, and no update has been made since that time in order to identify the active ones versus the inactive ones. This feature does not exist yet. You can join as many pages as you want, no matter if you don't ever visit them again, you're in the numbers of the page. Except if you take the action to "unlike" it. What probably 90% of people never do.
How can we manage correctly a FBK page if we do not know how many people are there ? All the performances ratio are wrong, the engagement rate also (PTY) as so many fans have left since a long time, the reach is dramatically low compared to the global volume of fans, the socio-demographics are wrong, well, there is nothing useful left for us. We don't know who really is in front of us in the community of our brand.
We need Facebook to develop a feature which will allow us to have a precise visibility on the active fans, let's say those who have been connected in the last 3 months with our page at least once no matter how. And we should be able to send inactive fans a message to ask them whether they are still interested by our brands, or whether they want to unlike us, and to force this in case of no answer. Because without this update on the real status of the fans structure, we won't be able to develop an adapted engagement program, we won't be in line with our fans expectations. We simply don't know who we are talking with. And for 16 millions fans pages, this can not last.