Secrets of Successful Marketing on Facebook Company Pages

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Millions of people connect to Facebook Company Pages daily, and if you’re a digital marketing agency, your goal is to ensure your client has one of those pages.

La Coste markets through a Facebook Page, a Facebook Application, and Facebook advertising.  Before their entrée on the social network, about 600,000 Facebook users said they liked the brand in their profiles.  Today, La Coste has more than 3.8 million fans with more than 112 million friends, giving the sportswear company the chance to generate demand through an army of trusted advisors with staggering reach.  That’s where Facebook marketing gets interesting when looking at friends of friends.

So enticing is the opportunity that this year, Ford Motor Company launched their new Explorer exclusively on Facebook.  We’re dealing with a social network with greater reach and frequency than the mainstream news media, which is both an opportunity for marketers and a threat to democracy.

Working off the principle that friends are more trusted than advertisers — or Google’s algorithm, for that matter — Facebook gave La Coste a way to market through friends, the most trusted and influential source of information.  Given the sheer size of Facebook, people talk about brands and services, whether companies participate or not. Facebook Pages give companies the chance to anchor those discussions to their own status updates, links, photos, and videos, and in so doing, position their brands the way they’d like to be featured and make it easy for people to advocate on their behalf.

Facebook Pages are free tools that a company, brand, product, or service can set up. Once a Facebook Page has been set up, organizations can communicate through status updates that appear on the Facebook Wall of that page.  If a Facebook user clicks the “Like” button, she subscribes to that page’s wall, and all new status updates posted to that page will automatically appear in their newsfeed.  When a Facebook user “Likes” a Page, they are subscribing to the Page’s status updates.

There are some options for customizing Facebook Pages, the most common of which is creating custom tabs where company-specific information can be featured, such as a bio page for the community manager, an explanation of what friends can expect to receive from the Page if they subscribe or a landing page designed to drive transactions.  Facebook will be moving away from static FBML next year for <iframe>, so marketers will need to be able to host content themselves. But Facebook does expect third-party developers to offer static iframe solutions as well.

Because Facebook users set up their profiles when they sign up, companies can see the demographics of the people they’re connected with.  Facebook says this information is very accurate, and their terms of service — which restricts a user from maintaining more than one profile — are intended to discourage anonymity, the root of most online vandalism and spammy behavior, Slideshare CEO Rashmi Sinha said in a podcast about B2B lead generation.  But research tells a different story, with nearly half of all US-based social networking users masking their true identities online.

Respect the Trust of Your Users: Best Practices for Managing Facebook Pages
If people like a company’s Facebook Page, they’re making a social connection with that company. They’re not there to be marketed to. They’re there to participate in a dialogue. They’re there to share their opinions and ideas. And they’re there to tell what they like and don’t like about your brand.

Focus on Publishing – Every time a status update is published to the wall of a Facebook Page. It is syndicated to all the fans of that page, who can like the update, comment on it, or simply publish it to their Facebook friends. If they like or comment on the post, that activity will also be shared with their Facebook friends. So, focus on publishing status updates.

Keep it Simple – Facebook newsfeeds move quickly, and people tend to scan updates rather than hang on each word for their meaning. Share a single thought, product, or offer. Compound status updates, or updates with clever puns or wordplays, are less likely to be read.

Be Consistent – Use the Facebook Page to reinforce the brand’s core attributes. Brand your page appropriately. Develop a social media policy and provide training so Facebook Page managers have the social media literacy to do their jobs effectively.

Pace Yourself – If you update too frequently, you’ll be seen as a conversation hog and likely lose subscribers. Use a social media engagement dashboard to schedule daily or week updates. The more connections you get on Facebook, the more careful you need to be because you’re talking to a disparate audience, and publishing content that interests everyone becomes difficult.

Be Timely and Relevant – Post a special offer when it is most likely to apply to your followers, like during your company’s business hours. Make a calendar and publish updates when they’re most likely to generate transactions. People are in a different state of mind on Monday than on Thursday.

Social networks are changing the marketing game, and Facebook has the advantage of the most users. Creating a social graph and building connections with friends is very expensive. It’s difficult to change social networks. Unless the new social network provides significantly greater value, Facebook is unlikely to be undone. But with 1,500 employees and 500 million users, Facebook currently provides almost no customer service to smaller organizations. If you’re La Coste or Ford, you get help. But if you’re a small to medium-sized company, you own your own. But Facebook is considering launching a premium page service that would include support.

Still, Facebook Pages allow companies to bring their brands into the social fray to drive website traffic, engage in stronger relationships with their customers, and get better insights into the products and services their customers want most.

The source material for this article was a special Facebook Pages and Facebook Advertising session by Facebook Account Executive Xavier Leclerc on Dec. 9, 2010, an audio recording of which is available at the preceding link.

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