With a user base of over 600 million, 10 million of whom are Australians, Facebook is definitely mainstream and is becoming harder for marketers to ignore.
You may have a Facebook profile for your personal life; Facebook Pages are for brands and businesses. In April, Facebook Studio published a guide outlining the best tools and principles for marketers to build a presence and run campaigns on Facebook, called Building Your Business with Facebook Pages. I’m not saying that you can build a Facebook Page and then tick the box that you’ve got social media covered - your social strategy should include more than Facebook, and your Facebook strategy should include more than simply putting up a page. You’ll need to continually manage your presence and give people reasons for liking” your brand, interacting, sharing, and coming back for more.
Facebook’s guide will give you some tips on what that entails. It outlines the three core phases of a marketing program on Facebook: Build, Engage, Amplify.
- Build is the first step, including Facebook Pages and apps enabling you to reach an audience on Facebook; as well as social plugins allowing you to extend connections and conversations to your website.
- Engage is about using the touchpoints established in the Build phase to engage and grow your audience – for example, publishing relevant content on a regular basis, and engaging in conversations with your fans.
- Amplify is about extending your reach through social networks via both earned (via the news feed), and paid (via Facebook ads) audiences.
The Guide covers best practice in terms of tailoring campaigns to your specific business objectives such as innovation and product development, generating awareness, increasing sales, loyalty/relationship building, word of mouth, feedback, generating awareness and so on. There are examples of where these strategies have worked using specific tools and applications.
Facebook supports a multitude of tools and apps, but if it all sounds too hard and time consuming, there are experts who can help you devise your Facebook content strategy and make implementation of apps easy. Loopster Media operates in Australia and provides marketers with tools and services to help them achieve their goals on Facebook without having to spend time and money building custom apps. Many beauty brands have built a Facebook presence using these content management tools. For example, Dove's Facebook Page allows users to select their country and language. Dove makes use of multiple tabs for their ranges such as Skincare, Deodorant, Hair and Men, and included within these product tabs are options for people to submit questions, sign up for newsletters, take quizzes, answer polls, take part in discussions (there were 71 discussion topics when I last checked), and to share where you find real beauty in your life”. Dove has over one million Facebook fans and this Page is a great example of a brand giving users the tools to interact and become part of the community. Stila’s Page is a good example of using a splash page to make it clear to users what you want them to do (Like Us”) in no uncertain terms – with the payoff being that you’ll have access to exclusive offers each week. CoverGirl includes free products giveaways, exclusive videos, badges, polls and quizzes for those who join My Covergirl” on Facebook. Avon asks people to Like” them on Facebook in order to watch a video. They also include functionality for finding or becoming an Avon rep including videos, a Twitter feed, and a photo gallery.
It all starts with what your business is trying to accomplish via social media. Have a look at what others in your category are doing, but don’t lose sight of the fact that you need to build in tools and functionality that drive the specific actions that are important to your brand and its goals.
