Developing a Facebook Marketing Strategy
Ch. 8
Throughout the book, we have spent time discussing specific features of Facebook and how they may be imple
mented into your professional life. Much of what we discussed is beneficial for your personal and professional presence on Facebook. Although the individual features can be beneficial, Facebook becomes extremely successful if you can tie all these features together. Now that you have a clearer understanding of the available feature set, we now have to design a comprehensive strategy for you to follow when you get to the final page of this book. One blanket strategy will not be the answer because you can use Facebook in a variety of different ways. More important, your company’s needs are different than the next company that reads this. Your product or service is different. Your prospect and customers are different. Your goals and success metrics are different. Throughout this chapter, we discuss a couple different strategies along with a set of actionable tips for each strategy. Before we can dive into different strategies, we need to lay out a set of questions for you to answer to help frame the strategies and select which is the best for you to start with. Take a few minutes to answer the following questions:
1. Why do you want to use Facebook for your business?
2. What are the specific goals you want to achieve for your business with Facebook?
3. How can you use Facebook to fill a need, want, or void that your prospects or customers are experiencing with your company or your competitors?
4. Are you currently doing any online advertising? If so, would you like it if you could target those ads more appropriately?
5. How do you plan on measuring success?
Now that you’ve answered those questions, it is easier to know which stack of tips to start conquering. At the end of the day, all strategies mentioned throughout this book will more than likely be helpful to you at some point. So, having a working knowledge, or at least, understanding, of how to use this social network overall is beneficial.
Boiled down, Facebook can be used the most effectively by businesses in three main ways:
1. Community building: You need to deploy a community building strategy if your main goal is to develop a strong overall presence on Facebook. You may already be engaging on other social networks, especially those in which you can interact in real time with your prospects, customers, or fans. Using Facebook for community building enables you to use the most tools available within Facebook. Your overall goal is to generate conversations, drive awareness, increase your fan base, and be an active part in this community. No community is ever successful without a strong community manager. Be prepared to play this role or delegate it to someone within your organization.
2. Marketing and promotion: Although through the building of a community you have the opportunity to market and promote your products, services, or upcoming events, if that is all that you truly care about, you need to start focusing your time and attention on some tools first. Using Facebook as a marketing and promotional tool can be useful in driving traffic to landing pages or event registration or in promoting awareness around a product launch or special offer.
3. Advertising: A straight advertising strategy through Facebook is the most limited strategy of the three; however, some organizations want to use Facebook only as another advertising stream for their company, product, or service. This is okay but you will not be harnessing the true power of Facebook. Tools are in place, as we have previously discussed, that enable you to solely advertise through Facebook. If that’s what you’re looking for, skip forward a few pages and pick up your reading at the start of this strategy.
These strategies and the tools to execute these strategies often cross over, as shown in Figure 8.1.
You could select one of these strategies to begin using or you could integrate all three of them into your digital marketing plan. Additionally, you can probably think of a few other strategies that could be used to fold Facebook into your marketing plan. Either way, the most important thing is that you realize that Facebook can be a beneficial addition to your current marketing plan and that you recognize that the social network can be used in a variety of ways that can help your business.
Let’s start by exploring the more broad but potentially most powerful strategy: using Facebook to build community.
Designing a Community Building Strategy
Okay—so you’ve decided that you want to use Facebook to build community. That’s great! The hard part is over. But, you have managed to choose the strategy that is the hardest to develop and demands that you keep up with it on a constant basis. The cost to implement: hours and hours of sweat equity. However, using Facebook for community building will allow you to apply the many, hopefully helpful, principles that we’ve discussed throughout the course of this book.
Building a community in Facebook will allow you to increase brand awareness, build community, drive conversations, market and promote your brand, products, and services. With Facebook growing at mind blowing rates, it is becoming more and more likely that your prospects and customers will be hanging out in Facebook.
But, now you need to know how you’re going to build that community. You’re eager to get going and instead of listening to a bunch of pontification, you just want to get up and running. Let’s start with five tactical steps that you can do as soon as you’re done reading:
1. Create a personal Facebook account: If you don’t already have a Facebook account or haven’t set one up during the course of reading this book, then stop reading and go to facebook.com. Go back to the beginning of this book and walk through the steps for setting up your personal account. To set up a Facebook Page, you’ll need to have a personal account to hook it to. One thing to consider is that some people feel uncomfortable using their personal account to administer Facebook Pages or Groups that are for work. If you do feel uncomfortable, set up a second account to manage your Facebook Pages or Groups from (see Figure 8.2).
Tip
Setting up a second account to manage corporate Facebook Pages or Groups can make it easier to keep personal and professional lives separated. That way, if you leave your company or someone else takes over the community management of your company’s Facebook presence, it is as easy as giving the new person the credentials to the second account. There are no ties to your personal account.
2. Create a Facebook Page or Group for your business: We’ve gone over the differences between a Facebook Page or Group. You need to decide which is better for your goals, but suffice it to say, if you want to build a public community, go the route of Pages. Head back to Chapter 3, “Establishing a Corporate Presence,” and follow the steps outlined to set up your Facebook Page. When you create your Facebook Page, make sure you add photos, videos, biographical information, your website, and any other relevant information to complete your Facebook Page. If you decide to use a Facebook Group, spend time going through all the features available and tweaking appropriately. Before you start inviting people to your community, make sure that everything is set up. Remember, when your prospects and customers start finding you on Facebook, it will be another point of impression for them. Therefore, put your best foot forward and take the time to set up your Facebook Page or Group properly (see Figures 8.3 and 8.4).
3. Let your current community know: If you’re already active on other social networks, you can use these networks to invite people to join your Facebook Page or Group. Depending on whether you have colleagues who you are friends with under your personal account, you could also post a status update on your personal account inviting and encouraging people to fan your Page or Group, as shown in Figure 8.5.
4. Add your Facebook presence into your marketing creatives: Unless you’re a technology or social media-focused company, you’re probably using many other methods to connect with your prospects and customers outside of social networks. Therefore, you need to inform all of them about your newly created Facebook presence. One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is to start adding it into all your marketing creatives such as your newsletters, brochures, billboards, digital advertising, website, and any other areas where you might provide contact information (see Figure 8.6).
5. Add your Facebook Page to email signatures, business cards,
and other areas in which you provide other forms of contact
information, as shown in Figure 8.7. One of the simplest ways to start
letting others know you’re now active on Facebook is by adding a call-
to-action to connect with your Facebook Page or Group on your email
signatures, business cards, and any other areas in which you encourage
people to contact you. Think about how many emails you send per day.
Many of us send 25 to 50 or even 100 to 200 (if you’re an email addict)
emails per day. That adds up to a lot of opportunities to provide your
contacts with an opportunity to connect with you.
In addition to these options, you can encourage your community to connect with you on Facebook in several other ways. Utilize these as appropriate.
As you develop a stronger presence and build a larger community on Facebook, you need to test, measure, test, measure, repeat, to find out what works best for your community. Some communities engage with shared articles. Others prefer to respond to questions asking for input. While other individuals may want an area, such as a discussion forum, in which they can go to engage. Be sure to test these different engagement methods so that you will know the best way to continually build a stronger and more engaged community (see Figure 8.8).
Designing a Promotions Strategy
One of the more targeted ways that you can successfully use Facebook as part of your overall marketing plan is to use it for promoting events, products, services, or special offers. Utilizing Facebook Pages, Ads, and the Events capabilities, Facebook can be used to promote in multiple different ways. Looking for some ideas of how you can use Facebook in this way? Check out these ideas:
• Promote your upcoming webinar by creating an event and posting it to your personal Wall and your Pages Wall. Send an email to everyone in your personal and corporate network on Facebook encouraging them to attend.
• Use the Photos section of your Facebook Page to leak out photos of an upcoming product to your fans.
• Throwing a party or meetup at an upcoming conference? Run a Facebook Ad for the targeted positions and demographic. Couple this with an Event listing.
• Promote a new service via a Note on your Facebook Page. If several people were involved with the project, tag everyone who helped out. This can help to spread the message by alerting them and posting the tagged note to their personal Wall depending on their privacy settings.
• Create a Facebook app and run it from your Facebook Page to create an experience for your fans (think: Fight Club, welcometofc.com) by utilizing Facebook Connect and enable social sharing capabilities, thus increasing the visibility of that product and your Facebook Page.
Your ability to successfully use Facebook as a promotions vehicle is limited only to your imagination. The most obvious promotions will be those that require an RSVP because that has a perfect fit with the Events section of Facebook Pages. Those can be easily coupled with a Facebook ad. But, there are several other ways, as previously highlighted, that you can use Facebook to promote an upcoming event, product launch, new service, or other news that you want to increase awareness of (see Figure 8.9).
Designing an Advertising Strategy
Similar to the promotions strategy, using Facebook to augment your advertising strategy can be another targeted method to integrating Facebook into your overall marketing plan. Some ideas for how you can use Facebook Ads are
• Advertise an upcoming webinar.
• Advertise an upcoming offline event such as a conference, party, or meetup.
• Advertise a product launch, new service offering, or other special offer.
• Use Facebook Ads as a recruiting tool to advertise a new position.
• Advertise your Facebook Page or Group to encourage more subscribers.
One of the benefits of Facebook Ads is that you can test with a small spend. If it is successful, you can easily renew the campaign or decide to tweak it and then relaunch it.
Make sure you follow the tips provided in Chapter 5, “Facebook Advertising: How and Why You Should Be Using It,” to ensure that your ad stands out among the other three to four ads that display along with your ad in the right sidebar (see Figure 8.10).
The Importance of Measurement
It doesn’t matter which strategy you decide is appropriate to implement if it is the right strategy for you and your company. What is important is to ensure that you measure your activity. You need ways to figure out if your chosen strategy is successful for your needs. Facebook provides several ways to measure your engagement on the network depending on which strategy you deploy.
Facebook Insights
If you’re going to use a Facebook Page to build community, be sure to use the Insights functionality, as shown in Figure 8.11.
Facebook Insights provides the Page administrators with a number of data points, including
• The number of posts/updates that you’ve had on your Page.
• The number of interactions that your community has had on your Page.
• The number of interactions per post.
• An approximated score on post quality.
• The number of discussion posts.
• The number of reviews.
• The number of mentions.
• How many new fans have come onboard.
• How many new fans have subscribed in the past week.
• How many fans have unsubscribed.
• The breakout between male and female.
• The breakout between age groups.
• A graph of your friends based on country and language.
• The number of page views that your Page has received.
In addition to just raw numbers, Facebook provides the administrators with several different graphs, grids, and other interesting forms of content under the Insights section of a Facebook Page, as shown in Figure 8.12.
Using Facebook Insights is the primary tool to judge what type of content is right for your community. Not only can you monitor how well different types of content perform, but you can also make certain judgments about the types of content you may share based on demographics. You can also use Facebook Insights to ensure that you’re staying consistent with your status updates and sharing. With busy marketers’ and executives’ schedules, it is easy to forget to engage on Facebook.
Facebook Advertising
Besides providing a great platform for targeted advertising, the Facebook Ad platform provides a robust set of analytics (see Figure 8.13).
Facebook Ads allows you to measure the performance of your advertising campaign by providing you with the following data points:
• Current bid
• Type of ad—either cost-per-click or cost-per-impression
• Number of clicks
• Number of impressions
• Click-through rate
• Average cost-per-click or cost-per-impression
• Average CPM
• Your total spend to date on the ad
Tip
Confused about what bids, cost-per-click, cost-per-impression, and everything else previously listed are? Flip back to Chapter 5 for an in-depth overview of these features.
Facebook also allows you to run three different types of reports:
1. Advertising Performance
2. Responder Demographics
3. Responder Profiles
All these reports can be summarized by account, campaign, or ad and can be run based on daily, weekly, monthly, or custom time frames, as shown in Figure 8.14.
Facebook Ads has an option to tell you the size of your potential target demographic. Although this feature isn’t expressly called out as a feature by Facebook, you can find the data by selecting the option to create a new ad. After you get into the first screen, you can select the options for your target demographic. Facebook then tells you how many users fit that demographic. You can then cancel the option to create an ad or continue moving forward with the customization of your ad.
This can be a great way to see if your target demographic is even on Facebook and if it is, then what its approximate size is.
Web Analytics
As you spend more time engaging in Facebook and pushing prospects, customers, and fans from Facebook to different websites or landing pages, you need to ensure that you measure your referrer traffic to see where Facebook ranks. This provides you with a pulse on whether people are actually doing anything with the information you provide in Facebook. Although you may have a lot of interaction taking place within Facebook, if your goal is to push that traffic to an external website or landing page, you need to give attention to your web analytics package, such as Google Analytics. Depending on your other digital marketing efforts, it is not surprising to usually see Facebook in the Top 5 for referring traffic especially if you’re active. If you notice that Facebook is not ranking in the Top 5, you should take a closer look at how well you convert folks from Facebook to that external website or landing page, as shown in Figure 8.15.
Tip
You can measure Facebook Page performance with Google Analytics, but it will take a few extra steps to make them talk to each other nicely. For the detailed list, visit:
http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2010/goog ... fan-pages/.
Marketing Software
If you use a marketing software such as HubSpot, an inbound marketing software that allows you to track your online marketing and lead generation efforts, you can take your external traffic one step further. With software packages such as HubSpot, you can actually measure the traffic originating in Facebook, leaving and headed to your external website or landing page and then converting on a lead generation form for a webinar that you may be running. If this is integrated with your CRM system, something such as Salesforce.com, you can follow that lead now through the sales pipeline to a closed deal. Apply estimated hours and salary spent on this entire process, and you quickly have your return on investment (ROI) on your hard and soft expenses on Facebook (see Figure 8.16).
Other Measuring Methods
If you’re still not finding the data that you need, you can always export the relevant statistics and dump them into a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel, Google Docs, or Apple Numbers, as shown in Figure 8.17. That way you can develop more complex graphs, track trends, and apply other numbers such as manpower investment to help you determine the ROI of your spend in Facebook. Remember that, unless you use Facebook Ads, your engagement in Facebook doesn’t have hard costs associated with it; however, a lot of sweat equity will go into keeping your Pages, Groups, and Ads running properly. This is a cost that you need to measure.
Summary
As we discussed throughout this book, you can use Facebook in many ways to enhance your marketing programs. The tools are, in general, the same. It’s dependent on how you decide to use the tools provided that determine the impact you may see as a result of your efforts. For this reason you need to determine your strategy using the questions provided at the beginning of this chapter to help guide your engagement on Facebook.
Facebook is a powerful platform for a marketer that continues to grow and add new features. Therefore you must understand the ways that Facebook can be used, what strategies align with those plans, how they can be executed, and how you can measure your investment, both hard costs and sweat equity.
Tip
Looking for additional Facebook strategies, lists of tactical approaches, case studies, and information on measurement? Check out these blogs, all of which provide massive amounts of information about Facebook:
• AllFacebook.com
• InsideFacebook.com
• Mashable.com
Even if a particular strategy fits your needs now, such as the advertising strategy, be sure to check back and see if developing a community or using Facebook to help you promote or market your product or service may be helpful to your organization. New and innovative case studies continue to come out all the time about how to use Facebook in new and creative ways to market, promote, advertise, and build community.
