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| A snapshot of the National Resistance Movement official Facebook page. |
In the race for 2016, president Museveni by far has the most
resourced and organized PR (public relations) and marketing both offline and
online but when it comes to social media
engagement the big man takes a back seat.
The problem with digital marketing is that it is so dynamic
and changes so often. Studies carried out in one market and or social media
platform might sometimes not help when you change the platform or location of the
audience.
Twitter for example which is dominated by educated people
that tend to drive media debates has way less users compared to Facebook which
is used by every Tom, Dick and Harriet and an even smaller rate of engagement
than the latter.
Being what they are well known for, ‘tweeps’ might spend all
their time trying to reason out things out and not spare a few minutes to
decide or go cast a vote, leaving Facebook as a safer bet for an online
campaign.
Among the three main contenders in the 2016 current race for
the Uganda’s presidency, the incumbent by far has the most consistent Facebook
pages with several updates on similar subjects coming in several times every
few hours. However, when it comes to engagement with followers, the veteran
president’s pages trail both Mbabazi’s and Besigye’s who have pretty less facilitated
and resourced digital teams.
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| A Snapshot of Amama Mbabazi's Official Facebook Page |
So what is wrong?
It’s all about time. What managers of Mr. Museveni’s pages
are doing is well, good except that they are out of touch with their ‘likes’
(or their ‘likes’ are out of touch with them). The meager number of likes,
comments and shares on posts put up on these pages which include National
Resistance Movement – NRM are a clear indication that something is not right
about the relationship between the parties more so the administrator.
Below are
three.
1. Not
establishing a connection first
The National Resistance Movement – NRM official Facebook
page with 32,385 followers gets an average of 100 organic likes and 30 comments
and 7 shares. Some posts even have 10 likes and six comments. So where are the
other 32,000 ‘likes’ looking?
It goes back to the background. Using an algorithm
called EdgeRank, Facebook is able to determine which articles or posts a user may
want to see on their timeline. This is determined by the posts a user normally
clicks on and the pages they visit or interact with often. The result of
EdgeRank is a default Facebook newsfeed setting called ‘TopNews’
According to Social Bakers, social media analytics and
publishing company that provides social media
management services and deep data
analytics for of brands that market on Facebook, Twitter and other social media
platforms 95% of Facebook users view their newsfeed in the default ‘top news’. This means even if you post and your followers
are online, only those that have interacted with you recently will be able to
see your posts unless you pay Facebook to advertise the post for you. Again,
even with advertising inclusive, latest findings have it that only 24% of all
content that appears on a user’s newsfeed is from pages, the rest being from
friends.
To get things done right, managers of Mr. Museveni’s and
other online pages should first focus on building a relationship between
themselves and their likes and not assume that once a person has ‘liked’ a page
they will be automatically interested in, let alone be able to see whatever
they post.
On Facebook in particular people don’t just like good stuff
they like what ‘good people’ have brought forth. Unless they really like you,
they won’t care enough to make you happy by engaging with you in a positive way.
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| A snapshot of the Forum for Democratic Change Official Facebook page |
2. They
Advertise all the time
To say that you over-advertise on social media does not
necessarily mean that you are throwing sponsored posts all over the place, it
actually means you talk nice stuff about yourself all the time without caring
to know whether someone is interested in it or not.
It is campaign time and we all understand that you need to
ask for a vote but unless you are our friend, telling us about your
achievements since 1986 and future plans looks only and only like advertising:
it is not appealing to our hearts, it is trickery.
It is like a stranger who comes cruising in a Toyota Mark X,
finds a girl at the road side and goes straight away to tell her “hi, this is
my car I have two more back home, an X6 and S class Mercedes!” Whereas this
kind of detail is vital for people who want to know each other, starting with
it is simply advertising, more like spiting on someone.
If you want interaction, stop talking at your followers,
talk with them; introduce yourself, engage in simpler discussions and connect
before starting to give content, to advertise yourself.
Joke; why do many rich young people have relationship problems?
I didn’t mean to ask this because you might not be one anyway.
3. Repeating
the advert and advert
What is worse about the above is their consistency. It is
high time you pause, check your opponents and ask yourself why you don’t I have
as much likes, comments and shares.
Before you ignore this, beware that more than 10.8 million
out of the 15 million voters Uganda currently has use the internet.
Stephen Obeli Someday
Twitter @StephenObeli
This article was first published by Chimpreports 3 Mistakes Museveni's Facebook Team Is
Making Right Now
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