Utilizing Facebook Advertising

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Anyone can start a Facebook page, the question remains on how do you grow them. The most common steps any company would take is to send out their company fan page to the internal team, asking their immediate friends and family to like them. This often followed by a boasting press release of reaching an X amount of fans on the page, but...

Does this help the company at all, getting your friends to like your page or even your content maybe great on the surface, but defeats the purpose of truly reaching out and creating a set of direct conversation with your audience.

After a long time experimenting on Facebook (and still am until today), I've discovered some of the following that might help your fan page:

  • Leverage the power of Facebook advertising, but don't take on an approach of traditional advertising.
  • Running contest and giving away free items maybe great, but how to convert them into your customers.
  • Take your online effort, to an offline effort (e.g. a flashmob to introduce your new Facebook page, a door stopper campaign, etc).
  • I found ShortStack to be the best and affordable tool to create and manage the content via the easily editable CMS. It is also one of the platform that has rich integration with third party systems. They have ready made template, but I recommend setting aside a budget to get it designed properly.

More notes on how to use Facebook advertising (first I think its a different approach on what you call advertising on Facebook):

  • I found conversion for acquiring fans are traditionally low or slow sometimes, but the figures is between 5-10% or could be more depending on what you are offering.
  • Leverage on the power of your existing fans (when I say this, this only works when you have organic fans).
  • It doesn't work like Google Ads, there are no keywords. Instead its interest, gender, age, language, etc (having said this always take into account that no one will ever complete their full interest or what they like on Facebook, the most basic or common targeting you can use are - age, gender and location).
  • Start with a small budget, I normally start with USD50-100 a day.
  • Always conduct A/B testing on your ads, find out which one works best and then roll out with that one on a bigger budget/scale.
  • If you are intending to lead the ad outside of Facebook, make sure you have a well designed landing page with capture form or conversion point (but take note normally it will be a one time visit only and the conversion is even lower once they've left Facebook environment).
  • The best Facebook ads that works are to direct them to your own Facebook page, it can be a post story, promoting an event to capture RSVP, sponsored stories, etc.
  • Before you start the ad however, make sure you have designed a proper landing page. It should be no less than fan gating, introducing who or what you are, what's your product or service and why they should like you. Try to provide fans reward and best not be a cheapskeat, as they are your fans after all.
  • There is a good reason why you need a landing page, imagine your new fans landing on your wall, where the conversation has happened. You can see why they can get confused.
  • The chance of your fans unliking your page after they became a fan is less than 1%, so no worries there.
  • Focus on engaging ads, something that will draw their attention from the wall for a split second. Maximize and design a great image that demands attention.
  • Got a special announcement or story to tell, use Facebook ad to spread the words to the people or audience that matters to you.
  • Rotate your ads as much as possible and localize.
  • "Great artists steal" go to Facebook Ad Board for some inspiration - https://www.facebook.com/ads/adboard/
  • The minimum threshold for your targeting should not drop below 20,000 otherwise it will not go anywhere.
  • Always go for CPC model, even when there is no click your ads will keep on appearing until the end of your campaign.

Final note, keep on experimenting :)

I will try to keep on updating the ads and share how it works out.

 

Update - 30 January 2012: updated an ad sample of sponsored ad by Ritz-Carlton.

Screen_shot_2012-01-31_at_12

Flexamail, Access Social Network from Your Email... for China?

After Egypt incident, Flexamail kicks in as a service provider that allows people to access their favorite social network directly from email. Their API access your Facebook or Twitter and can pull recent updates or tweets. Although you do need to find a way to authorize the accounts first before you can do this, I've tested it and it's pretty handy. Once you've set it, its not necessary for you to logon to Flexamail, the emails are delivered straight to your personal inbox of your choice. Flexamail is just a medium or bridge between your errr... Internet Freedom and your inbox.

You will also get an instruction manual via email on the different email address and function, best to save these into your address book as they are quite long. You can basically do image hosting, retrieve file up to 25 MB, browse website (its done by saving the website in a pdf format, Facebook and Twitter - follow, search, reply to a tweet, send photos, etc. You can learn more here, currently it is free (I suspect they are getting fund through advertising, hey somebody got to pay the bills right).

This can be the answer for China and a way around the Great Firewall, as it is difficult to block email servers... but then again we may never know. Let me know if anyone has been using this constantly from China? I don't use it a lot, as I found it tiring after a while sending those emails and waiting for a reply and then having to send another reply... simply put quite a lot of emails exchange.

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Facebook Just Getting Started

It's March 2nd, 13 more days to the 15th and Facebook is still here, hopefully it'll stay that way.

Earlier this year a news or rather rumors from an unverified website or source almost shook the world of social media.  An unconfirmed press release was sent out in the name of "Facebook" with a statement from Mark himself that he will shut Facebook down in March. Turns out its a hoax to boost the website credentials and traffic.

It did unravel some people to a degree, over 60,000 post in regards to the news was posted on Facebook fan page.
Later on a poll was sent out to everyone checking what is the level of people using Facebook, it goes pretty huge the very least. It got me thinking...
  • Facebook has become not just a website, a business tool or source, but I guess part of our culture it inter-connects us freely.
  • I mean there will be a lot of people loosing their jobs or even for some small businesses, large corporations has thrown in large stack amount of marketing budget on Facebook.
  • Several business have setup their "website" on Facebook, instead of just having a website.
  • Facebook commerce and buying is also on the rise.
  • It sparked a debate on how people's life will be without their Facebook friends.
  • Several blogger started to talk about how to back up your Facebook data, just to be on the safe site, go here if you are interested in backing up (better safe than sorry).
  • Last note, Facebook employs over 2,000 people and just recently opened 2 offices in Asia, just doesn't make sense at all if Mark wanted to shutdown and do that.
  • The result will be catastrophic to say the least.

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Facebook Fan Page 2.0, Socially Friendly

Last Friday - 11 Feb 2011, Facebook announced new fan page upgrades that has started to roll-out, as usual Facebook has been really busy rolling our more new services, from live commenting, photo browser, etc.

Here are just some of the new FB Fan Page 2.0 features on the surface:
  • First thing, the business page now looks more social friendly, instead of looking like a business now it looks like a friend. So you might as well be friend with the product/service/brand you like. When you navigate as a fan page in Facebook world, the notification bar will pull latest posts, messages and new fans.
  • You can navigate the brave Facebook world and see the news feed from a company perspective.
  • Photos uploaded by you or fans will be displayed now on the top head bar, like your personal profile.
  • Profile picture is now reduced to 180×540 pixels.
  • Tab is now gone and moved to the left side, again like personal profile.
  • You can feature the business owner or page admin profile on the left side, so people will know who is representing the business.
  • Static FBML will also be going away, developers are encouraged to move to iFrame module.
  • You can now comment as a person or a company YAY!
On the back end side of things:
  • Stronger spam fighting going on here, see my last post.
  • Notification send via email when people post on your page, kind of the same thing Hyper Alerts was doing. Although I wish there is a setting for frequency.
  • Add feature like pages, so you can show your partner or separate business from your company that is connected.
  • Finally you can now fix your category if you've previously entered the wrong category.
Here are some of the news and blog posts in regards to Facebook page changes:
Now whether you like it or not, Facebook will be upgrading the Fan Page by March, so marketers get ready, stop complaining and get used to it.

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Facebook Combats Wall Spam Posting

Don't you hate it when people litter on your Facebook page's wall?
Luckily Facebook has stepped up in combatting spam, for page admin you'll now notice a grey color on some of your spam post from your fans (see below for several sample of the color highlight, which makes admin life easier in combatting spammer). You can now easily remove post, this is helpful for page with lots of fans to manage and just clean up people that wants to leave their web links or tap into your audience.

With the new Facebook page 2.0 upgrade, if you go into the back of the house for admin you can also now further include the list of keywords you want to highlight as spam and it will automatically highlight future posts. It will not automatically ban the post, but will make admin life easier.

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Schweppes Facebook Profile App

Schweppes taps into the new power of Facebook profile, the apps allow you to have fun with your photos (minus the fuzziness of arranging your photo one-by-one).
Here is an intro of the app on YouTube.

The app is pretty straight forward, you do have to like Schweppes first before getting access to use the app. You the upload and adjust your photo, hit save. Your cropped photos will then be saved under your personal photo albums named Schweppes Profile. You will have to tag it, but here is how a tiny bug kicks in and scramble your photo slightly. You have to tag based on the instruction, just hover over the photos it will be named "tag first, tag second, and so on...". I would recommend you tag and save, then check your profile to see if everything is in order.

After launching the app around end of October last year, Schweppes fan base reached a new height of fan growth, have a look at the graph below. It almost doubled in the last 3-months.

Have fun!

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Facebook Insights Update

I've been noticing minor updates on Facebook Insights that can really benefit marketers or small business owners.
You can now track specific date or week that matters the most to you, perhaps you've launched a promotion or campaign take a look if it carries any impact to your fans.

You can also see the traffic source view from external websites into Facebook, as well as which tabs are getting the most views.

In addition for PR Agency that loves those impressions, you can now tally up all of Facebook posts or specific ones that matters.

Small changes from Facebook, but big step for marketers.

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Wildfire Social Media Growth Tracking Online Tool

Wildfire social media marketing apps just launched their latest social media monitor tool for Facebook and Twitter.

The tool mainly gives you the capability to (for more details you can visit their blog here):
  • Measure your fans base performance and growth.
  • Compare it to your rivals.
  • Also gives you a weekly update if you sign up (it's free).
  • Gives free advice.

I am hoping there will be more features in the future such as comparing the audience interaction and re-engagement rate, etc among others. But all and all its a good tool.

I've decided to give it a try, coming from hospitality I am comparing three of the finest luxury hotels Facebook & Twitter accounts - Four Seasons, Mandarin Oriental and Fairmont (you can also see it for your self by visiting this link).

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