There aren’t many marketing opportunities that can target 800 million people in one — so it’s no surprise that 96 of the top 100 US advertisers are marketing on Facebook. But there’s a problem: Many of those companies tell us they’re not finding Facebook nearly as useful a marketing tool as they’d hoped. In large part, that’s the result of the disorganized approach many companies have to Facebook marketing. Too many raced to launch a Facebook page without ever setting clear objectives, and are now left with a handful of fans but no clear idea of how to engage those fans. Likewise, too many marketers neither understand all the tools at their disposal nor put sufficient resources into their Facebook programs.
To make matters worse, most companies aren’t getting anywhere near the support needed to use Facebook well — either from their agencies or from Facebook itself. In fact, for a company that relies almost exclusively on advertising revenue, Facebook doesn’t do much to help advertisers succeed. Its content management tools are still primitive compared to what third-party vendors offer; Facebook doesn’t give marketers the data needed to optimize and measure their efforts; and it’s constantly changing the rules for how companies can use the site.
The result? An increasing number of marketers who understand that Facebook is important, but can’t quite work out exactly what it’s useful for.
To avoid this fate, and to make Facebook work for them, marketers will need to follow four steps.
Step 1: Set clear objectives. Marketers need to rethink what Facebook can accomplish for their business. Will they use it to drive awareness and purchases? To generate word of mouth? To increase the loyalty of existing customers? Or do marketers need to help other parts of the organization, like the customer-service team or the product-development team, get the best out of Facebook? The site’s versatility lets you choose from objectives that span almost every part of the marketing mix — but to get the most out of Facebook, you need to have a clear idea of what you’re trying to get from it.
Step 2: Build a page that provides value for your fans. Most brand pages are littered with a random mix of company news, promotions, advertising, and other content focused on what marketers want, rather than what their fans want. Carolyn Everson, VP of global marketing solutions at Facebook, says.
"The brands that succeed on Facebook are the ones that give people a reason to be fans.”
Of course, you can’t provide value to your fans if you don’t know anything about those fans. But how can you learn about your audience if Facebook doesn’t provide you with much detail? One option is to get fans to offer up additional information once they hit the ‘like’ button. For instance, EMI worked with campaign-management platform Neolane to develop a Facebook app that collected opt-in customer information and then tied that data back into EMI’s customer database.
Building a valuable page for fans can also mean creating a richer experience. While a “like” allows fans to read and comment on posts, deeper engagement comes from options like games and contests that are often only feasible with an application. Target took this approach for Valentine’s Day last year; its “Super Love Sender” contest let fans vote on which charity would receive a $1 million donation from the brand. The Target Facebook app also allowed fans to send friends personalized valentines and also provided real-time updates on which charity was in the lead.
Step 3: Use the full Facebook toolkit to increase reach and engagement. Facebook offers marketers much more than just branded pages – it also supplies a wide range of earned, owned, and paid media. For instance, consider using Facebook Ads to increase reach and sharing. Expedia used ads to increase participation in its “The Friend Trips Game” – and ultimately drove more than 1 million fans for the page. Events, location-based tools, and apps can also help you get the most out of your Facebook program.
Step 4: Integrate Facebook into your marketing mix. Most marketers treat Facebook as an isolated asset, rather than building it into the marketing mix. But there are lots of good ways to integrate Facebook into your overall marketing plan. For instance, you can make Facebook promotions the foundation for broader campaigns. Corona’s “most liked beer in America” campaign featured the faces of its Facebook fans on a billboard in Times Square – combining the reach of traditional media (signs in Times Square typically get 1.5 million impressions per day) with the value of driving 200,000 new “likes” for the brand’s Facebook page.
Ultimately, though, the most important piece of advice is the first one: You must define clear objectives for your Facebook programs. Once you do this, you’ll see more clearly how you can build value for your customers, use the entire Facebook toolkit, and integrate Facebook into your marketing mix — all of which will increase the chances that Facebook actually works as part of your marketing program.
Checkout this list of Facebook Marketing Strategies:
COMMENTARY: In the past several years, businesses large and small have come to realize the positive impact of engaging their brand-loyal public and — more importantly — potential customers, via Facebook Pages. While fan pages are typically seen as a destination for users to remain privy to brand news, a recent comScore report shows that a Page is really just the place where content resides, as fans are 40 to 150 times more likely to consume branded material in their news feeds than on the actual fan page itself. This discovery led to Facebook’s expansion of “Page Insights,” including new metrics and analytics designed to constantly remind business owners of what truly matters: engaging content.
Facebook utilizes an algorithm that ensures the most relevant content for each user finds its way onto that particular user’s news feed. The relevancy of this content is determined by a number of factors including how many times it is liked, shared, commented on, etc. When fans of a company interact with branded content, it can then be passed on to their friends and their friends’ friends. With fan acquisition as the main motive behind the Facebook strategy of most businesses, it is helpful to learn that friends of fans are more likely to visit a brand’s store, website and even purchase a product than the average, uninfluenced consumer. In addition, the average friends-of-fans group for the top 100 brand pages on Facebook is 34 times larger than the fan group. This means that a business can often have greater influence amongst its second degree connections, and the virality of a page’s content can be directly related to the success of a business. So, ultimately there’s a need for better insights into Facebook content consumption.
Facebook’s Advertising Communications Manager Elisabeth Diana states that the “one of the purposes behind Facebook Page Insights is to provide all page admins with ways to understand how to reach and acquire new customers.” New metrics have been created in order to provide businesses with not only information about how people are interacting with a brand Page, but also a glimpse into how people are connecting with the Page’s content in other parts of Facebook.
One of the metrics added to Facebook’s Page Insights is “People are talking about this.” This set of data counts stories that are eligible to appear in a user’s Newsfeed, such as any likes, wall posts, comments, shares, questions answered, RSVPs to events, Page mentions, photo tagging and location checkins. The metric allows the page administrator to know what posts have proven the most compelling and interactive.
Another metric added to the equation is the metric of virality, which allows for insight into how viral a particular post is. Virality is determined by dividing the number of “people talking about this” by the reach (the number of people who actually saw the content). Diana notes that because virality is a percentage, whether a business is large or small, the metric “can be used to compare across all Page posts.” The virality metric allows page admins to analyze the success of individual posts and will hopefully lead to an improved page strategy through a better understanding of the audience.
Along with these new metrics comes aesthetic changes as well. “Whether you want to get into the deep end or wade in slowly,” Diana says, Facebook wants to make their Page Insights “digestible for everyone, easy to sort and actionable.” She says most of the heavy numbers have been removed from Page Insights, but “for those needing something a little more data-intense, there is always the option to export to a spreadsheet.” Either way, Diana and Facebook promise that “this is just the first step in enhancing Page Insights for small businesses and brands; there is more to come.” In the meantime, however, Facebook will continue to prompt business owners to provide their audiences with the most engaging content possible to guarantee the greater reach and better sales.
You might want to checkout the Top 10 Facebook Fan Pages for 2011 to get an idea whose pulling fans.
Courtesy of an article dated November 28, 2011 appearing in Forbes and an article dated November 26, 2011 appearing in Mashable
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