Some interesting research coming from ExactTarget, including this, picked up via SeventySeven.

It’s an interesting summary of the reasons people have unfollowed Facebook Pages, with ‘The Company Posted Too Frequently’ at 44% of unfollows, and ‘My Wall was becoming too crowded with marketing posts and I needed to get rid of some of them’ at 43%. There’s some mixed messages in there, as acknowledged by ExactTarget’s full report (Available in exchange for an email address and worth the download), as 24% didn’t get enough deals, whilst a different 24% thought posts were too promotional.

So what’s a brand to do?

The need for a clear content strategy:

The thing I’d have love to have seen in the report would be examples of pages cited for each reason. For instance, the 17% who found content too chatty – was it a brand that was being uncharacteristically chatty? Or one you’d have expected to be more informal?

And were people Liking pages which they presumed would be offering constant deals only to find out that it was a publicity broadcasting tool, or a conversational approach? Were they mistaken or being misled by something? Is it wise to try and aim for a middle ground and attempt to please everyone all the time?

It’s something that becomes less of an issue on Twitter – multiple profiles can each target different areas, with plenty of examples of accounts which purely publicise deals, and profiles from the same brand focused on customer support (e.g. Dell).

And importantly, the same report also indicates that ‘unliking’ a page doesn’t mean that people won’t buy from the company – ’63% of consumers said they were as likely or more likely to purchase something from a company after ending their Facebook relationship.’

Some conclusions:

Often said, but still rarely accepted is the fact that ‘Likes’ really aren’t that important as a metric. Obviously it’s nice if the figure is going up, but the engagement on the page, engagement with individual messages, and important off-site metrics such as referrals are far more relevant.

And secondly, when you’re setting up, using, or revising your Facebook page it’s important to set a clear role for it within an overall content/marketing strategy for your brand. Do you want to encourage sales? Customer service? Conversation? You’ll always get a mixture of responses, but if you can provide some clear messaging and singposts to show what the purpose is, and keep it consistent, you’re more likely to be found by people that want that aspect of your business above the others.

Thirdly – I haven’t spotted anything in the Facebook Pages Terms that actually limits the amount of pages a company could operate. Perhaps the profile rules and a hangover from websites has meant that we’re artificially limiting ourselves to one aggregated Facebook Page for a brand or company, when we could potentially be using distinct pages for different purposes?