The Facebook Marketing Series is supported by the Buddy Media Platform. Seven of the world’s top 10 brands drive their brand on Facebook with the Buddy Media Platform. What’s your plan? Visit buddymedia.com today.
With 500 million members and growing, Facebook offers brands and marketers direct contact to the largest pool of online users on the web. After all, social media is fast becoming more popular than e-mail on mobile devices and more convenient for news consumption than the daily paper.
In recent weeks and months, Facebook has introduced and improved a number of on-site tools that sage brands and businesses can use to better market themselves. Even the simplest of tools such as “Likes” and photos could serve as a catalyst for a viral network effect. Of course, there’s also opportunity to be had with more calculated efforts around Place Pages, Questions and the New Groups.
New as these conveniences may be, they’re still rich with opportunity. What follows is a look at how these tools, mixed with a little ingenuity, can be applied to your marketing purposes.
1. Bright Lights, Big Facebook
Facebook Photos are likely a much overlooked brand utility. In recent weeks, the social network has added a slew of photo enhancements that Page owners should become keen on.
Especially of note is the ability to upload hi-res photos up to 2048 pixels wide or high. In combination with the lightbox interface and the removal of pagination (all album photos appear on a single page), photos now really pop on the world’s largest social network.
For marketers and brands, these upgrades offer huge opportunity; you can now use Facebook’s magnified photo product to better engage brand fans. Take a look at Travelocity’s Facebook photos for a prime example of this strategy done right. The brand employs its iconic Roaming Gnome in photo spreads — that are then posted straight-away to Facebook — every chance it gets.
“Thoughtful and engaging photos are a critical component to our Facebook Page,” says Joel Frey, Travelocity’s senior public relations manager. “When the Roaming Gnome attends an event like the Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque, our social media team definitely wants our fans to chuckle at his antics, but we also want them to imagine themselves taking a balloon ride one day and, hopefully, using Travelocity to help them turn that dream into reality. So we make sure we’re always taking shots that capture the entire scene and not just the Gnome mingling with his fans.”
2. Focused Group Action
Facebook recently introduce a New Groups feature for private, even secret, one-to-many communication channels. New Groups are like mini Facebooks — but with group chat and document uploading — which make them ripe for intelligent brands and marketers to employ to their advantage.
We’re not suggesting you run out and invite random Facebookers to join your group — that’s a terrible idea. But, we do see potential for several practical use cases, especially given that most social networkers call Facebook their online home.
Here’s a few that come to mind:
- Consumer Review Groups: Instead of hosting customer or product feedback sessions via your own tools, invite members to participate in private group sessions via the New Groups. It’s a win-win for both parties because participants will feel more at home in a familiar environment, which may make them more likely to participate and provide higher quality feedback. These groups won’t replace market research efforts (for bigger brands anyway), but they could help you glean insight in a much faster and more intimate fashion.
- Event Groups: If you host networking events, conferences or seminars, consider letting participants know prior to, or following, the event that you’ve created a group for further discussion.
- Live Chats: As noted above, New Groups feature group chat. Brands and marketers that maintain groups should consider inviting company figureheads to participate with customers and fans in live group chats. You could either schedule live chats or have a recognizable personality drop in unannounced.
Any marketers or brands employing these strategies need to remember to respect the online boundaries of Facebook members. As such, we’d recommend not inviting customers to join a group without their express permission.
3. Riddle Me This
Facebook Questions is another new product from the social network that can be molded into the perfect tool for brands and marketers.
The Q&A product lends itself to Page owners, who can respond to questions as their business (versus responding as an individual). Page administrators can also post questions directly to their Pages, with the activity also showing up in the News Feeds of your Facebook fans. Clearly, Questions can be a marketing tool for soliciting organized feedback in a way that also exposes the business to larger audiences, should fans post and share their answers.
Facebook Questions should be used like any other Q&A tool out there — think LinkedIn — meaning we highly recommend a soft sell approach. If you take to Questions to explicitly sell your product, you’ll probably be met with unresponsive Facebookers. If, however, you seek out questions to answer where you can demonstrate expertise, or post questions to your Page that resonate with fans, then you’ll be working to develop better connections with these individuals.
4. “I Was Here”
If your place of business has a physical store, then your job as a marketer is to improve foot traffic. Facebook’s Places is a potential digital tool for creating a tangible connection between your online profile and your offline venue.
Your goal, by in large, should be to inspire in-store customers to share the “I was here” message with a place checkin that gets distributed to their Facebook friends and posted to your Place Page. You’ll want to start by claiming your Place Page — one is automatically created once a Facebook member checks in to a venue. You can then encourage checkins via in-store signage or special checkin-themed events.
Loopt and SCVNGR also offer deep Facebook integration with the potential to loop location activity on those services back to your Place Page, as well as bring Facebook checkins to their apps’ audiences. You’ll certainly want to explore what these apps can do for your venue, but distribution and visibility are key here.
Right now, there is a clear disconnect between Facebook Pages and Place Pages, but we suspect that the two entities will eventually merge into one single page. Once this happens, you’ll have even greater potential to turn fans into venue advocates and vice versa.
5. Just For the Like of It
“Likes” aren’t exactly new to Facebook, but they are becoming increasingly more important buttons to brands and marketers. The more you can encourage fans and would-be fans to “Like” your Page and updates, the more distribution you’ll get. Distribution is nothing to scoff at either, especially given a recent partnership between Bing and Facebook that surfaces Facebook “Likes” in search results.
There are a number of creative ways to solicit “Likes,” one of them being the more passive approach of posting stellar content that inspires action. You can also integrate “Like” buttons into your website, should you wish to complete the circle between Facebook and your business site. This might be a wise move considering “Likes” are proving great at generating referral traffic.
More aggressive “Like” tactics mixed with a little old school marketer know-how have been known to work as well.
Golden State Warriors marketing director Kyle Spencer, for example, employed an ingenious plan to up the “Like” count on the Warriors Facebook Page. Spencer took advantage of the basketball team’s preseason games and its e-mail database to engineer more “Likes.” He started an e-mail marketing campaign giving away free tickets to the team’s first two preseason games, so long as the recipients “Liked” the team’s Page.
The initiative paid off handsomely and fans even took to Twitter and Facebook to voice their disappointment when the first offer sold out. The Warriors then re-upped the campaign for the final preseason campaign. “So in total, we increased our Facebook followers over 20% (73k to 88k) with just two e-mails,” says Spencer.
Series supported by the Buddy Media Platform
The Facebook Marketing Series is supported by the Buddy Media Platform. Seven of the world’s top 10 brands drive their brand on Facebook with the Buddy Media Platform. What’s your plan? Visit buddymedia.com today.
It's always good to have new ways to utilize your Facebook presence. Check out these ideas!
