Brand Image – Nike Shoes: How A Fanpage Became a Spampage

With 2.2 million Fans, the Nike Fanpage is one of the largest branded Facebook pages out there.  Problem: It’s not the official Fanpage and it’s massively infested with spam. Good example how not to present yourself on Facebook.

With 2.2 million Fans, the Nike Shoes Facebook page is one of the largest branded pages out there. Unfortunately this is not the official Nike page. An intelligent dude was clever enough to page-jack the Nike Facebook page (But Nike has several other Fanpages managed officially and effectively – e.g. the Nike Football Fanpages, which are available for several countries and where Nike is doing a great social media job!). Millions of dollars and a whole community is slipping trough the fingers of Nike.

With 377 comments per week, the Nike Fanpage sees only 10% of the engagement of other Fanpages e.g. Starbucks. With an enormous amount of comments ( 77%) being spam, it is clear why the Nike page receives such bad numbers.

Remember how Syncapse evaluated a fans worth to 136$ per year?  According to that calculation, this would mean that the guy who created the Nike Facebook page is sitting an heap of 300 million $. OK we all agree, that’s overrated but nevertheless, Nike is letting 2,2 million people untouched. 2,2 million people is the size of Slovenia.

Now  a question for you Nike? How much money would you pay to have an instant access to every person in Slovenia. Have every person sign up for your news, videos or new product features, integrated in a community so that they can exchange experiences, thoughts on your product or share new ideas with friends they met online? Again: Every person in Slovenia.

While other companies are struggling to reach 10’000 Fans, Nike is letting these opportunities pass:

• Direct customer care and attendance to your most loyal customers
• Tapping in to customer knowledge and possible product faults
• Creating a community around the product
• Having evangelists stand in for your brand
• No identification of your most loyal customers

Also not interfering with the fanpage can have some threats

• Customers who seek attendance on your page will get disappointed when not receiving direct feedback
• A spam-like community can have negative image spill-overs
• No communications between the followers of the page
• Most loyal customers get scarred off and won’t communicate on your page
• Free access for spammers

Of course taking back the possession of your page is not perceived well by everyone, but having a spam filled page and people not wanting to interact on it might even be worse. So, please look out for you Fanpage and don’t let every dog pee in your garden.