Now that our Social Media “3M” Services are gaining traction, I’m surprised how many companies have Facebook “Like” pages but haven’t a strategy in place to benefit from the marketing exposure.
With over half a billion users, a Facebook business page has understandably become a must-have strategy for any size company. But many business pages are nothing more than a “virtual wall”, covered with “graffiti. Others are a redundant duplication of the company’s website, like a “digital brochure” to tell potential customers about the company’s offerings. In a recent blog post, I likened some of these efforts to “no more than ‘digital pamphlets’ that “are gathering dust, stacked at the virtual receptionist’s desk but aren’t being “distributed”.
Both of these strategies are wasteful underachievement and failure to harness the interactive power of the Social Media platform.
In another article I noted how a company’s Facebook page “should be more of a ‘hangout’ for the portion of the half-billion Facebook users that has an interest in your company, product or services.” See the article here.
THIS IS HOW WE DO IT
Here’s how we help companies launch their Facebook initiatives.
1. If necessary, we create the new page, with the best apps (tabs) required for the client’s marketing strategy. We recommend custom FBML (Facebook Markup Language) landing tabs, with an incentive (see #2, below) to “Like” the page, not just view it. We’re not big fans of “Reveal” tabs, but grasp the concept.
2. We work with the client on an interactive digital strategy for growing their “Likerbase” (I like to think we coined that word). Most of our retail customers already have an email or direct-mail list.
3. We produce and distribute attention-grabbing, link-laden HTML emails to introduce customers to the new and/or improved FB page. We urge the clients to “incentivize” the opt-ins with offers for new Facebook Likers. These incentives include dollars-off, percent-off, BOGOs, sweepstakes, weekly giveaways and other offers exclusively for “Likers”. We add an opt-in tab to the Facebook page and encourage the client to do the same for their website.
4. We make sure there is engaging content on the page for the inaugural “Likers. The idea is to keep browsing-happy “Likers” on your page as long as possible, with your brand’s mark (logo) in that upper left corner, burning into their conscious and subconscious. This content includes videos, photos, games, trivia, polls, personal features of officers/employees, discussions and more. We include links to other sites and pages, but try not to make them as prominent. That lessens the likelihood of “Likers” quickly navigating away from the client’s page.
5. Next we again engage the “Likers” with interesting “Wall” posts. Best practices include addressing posters by name, customer appreciation, soliciting feedback, apologizing for less-than-satisfactory customer experiences and initiating discussions (we feel these are most effective on the “Wall” and not at the “Discussions” tab). This is where our “3M” service come into play. We Monitor the page every four hours, six days a week for posts that need addressing or brand-damaging spam. We “Mediate” any negative posts and we Maintain the page by removing old and/or irrelevant posts and updating events and applications.
6. We look for or create linkbacks to the client’s page for optimization.
Times are tough and we’ve observed a tendency for companies to take a “Do-It-Yourself” approach to building and managing a Facebook page. As a matter of fact, at least one of our potential clients has tried to pick clean our collective brains about our process in order to get around paying us and doing it themselves. But many small-to-medium size companies are discovering that doing it right is a full-time job. The employee (who has a personal profile and “knows Facebook”) that handles the page “on the side” may not have the time or even know how to effectively produce engaging advertising.
I saw a great little company on Facebook that can economically handle that for you!
[...] (much of the stuff that was covered in my “Don’t tell your “Likers…Anything” and “Your Company is On Facebook….” [...]