I've been waiting for this moment for some time, let me start by saying "Marketing creativity has to be met by Technology Platform". You need the mean to deliver your ideas and how you gauge whether it is working or not.

Marketing is about creating demand that most probably there or not there, or shift market share. By any means necessary, there are lots of way to get there, traditional or modern. The means for this 21st Century has certainly became a bit more fruitful, whereas in the past has been dominated majority by print advertising, public relations and perhaps direct mail/newsletter. Today you have a lot more options (which is helpful and also drives the price to be more competitive or less monopolized), it helps us marketers to re-evaluate our core business objective and what perceived value we want to deliver.

Recently, I had a tiny success in setting up the company's Facebook page (seeing that a year ago they were not confident on this area). I took a different approach and try to avoid generalization of audience, instead I segment it. Instead of one general company Facebook page, we setup four Facebook page (one had already existed, but we revamped and relaunched it). As you can imagine this means the content will need to be drawn up on four approach instead of one and that can take a lot of time, as well as resources to prepare it.

Campaign Asia covers a bit on my work:

There are many approach on building a fan base, I set an objective of integrity and that means no inside employees are encourage to join the page. As we really want to build an organic community and our future customers. And so the conversation begins, we try to  ride on as much as we can through our fan base friends and that was painstaking at the beginning as the number growth can be really slow, our first page took about 3-6 months to grow to where it is today. But once it does, the rest comes through and the growth skyrocketed. But... fan base/numbers are of course nice, but we focus on the engagement quality.

We combine multiple tools such as HootSuite, Facebook Insights and Facebook EdgeRank to determine how we were doing. I think any Facebook marketers would agree that driving Fans engagement can be challenging, there are many factors to consider:

• Time decay - the post could decay over long period of time, hence sometimes its a good idea to recycle your message.
• Volume - your fans are naturally on Facebook everyday and they can't just be fixated on you, so you need to consider where and when the page post should appear.
• Engagement - most people typically just watch and they don't really engage, hence why you need to encourage them like "click like" or "don't forget to share this", etc as a call-to-action as that is what Facebook Insights and Edge Rank measures.
• Is your post interesting - don't be lazy and take off a flier and just post it on Facebook (unless it is really interesting), but try to create something more customized for your fans. Consider picture as number one, video only when you got something really interesting.

Below you can see the average stats of Facebook post that attracts your fans:

Below as a sample, a content that rides on an event would tend to receive a lot of LIKES and SHARES as well, which is really nice.

But even then, the global average of engagement is pretty low, so don't get disappointed, just keep working on it and it'll come:

It's a community, let them speak up. Having said that, I do police my Facebook pages and set a very strong profanity block list as there are many spammers these days that tries to ride on your traffic. You don't want that to happen as it can annoy your fans. Below is a sample:

End, let me close by saying what I believe for social media consists of two things - engagement as king and conversion as queen, if you can't convert in short or long run then it's effort wasted.

One more thing... don't forget to have fun, work wouldn't be interesting without fun.