Digital Marketing Consultant

A new report (shown above) by email marketing firm Constant Contact and researchers Chadwick Martin Bailey has thrown up a bunch of interesting statistics about Twitter and the relationship between brands and customers on the site. Many of those figures, taken from a survey of 1,491 US-based consumers aged over 18, are reason to put a smile on any marketer’s face.

In particular:

• 60% of people are more likely to recommend a brand to a friend after following it.
• 50% of people are more likely to buy from a brand after following it.
• 75% of people who follow brands have never un-followed one.

For businesses that already have long lists of Twitter followers, that’s great news. It means that those lists are rich with both evangelists and customers, and they’re stable — a valuable asset indeed.

But here’s what really stands out from the survey. When it came to the top five reasons that people chose to follow a brand on a site, the breakdown was:

• 64% — “I am a customer of the company”
• 61% — “To be the first to know information about the brand”
• 48% — “To receive discounts and promotions”
• 36% — “To gain access to exclusive content”
• 28% — “To receive content/information to re-tweet and share with others”

Just under half of brand followers then were looking for discounts while the top two reasons had nothing to do with anything as solid as saving money on their next purchase. Instead, the biggest factors driving people to follow a brand on Twitter — with all that says about the prospect’s willingness to provide recommendations, purchase and stay loyal — are a more amorphous sense of belonging.

People follow brands on Twitter because they associate themselves with the company and want to feel that they have a special relationship with it. It’s the same reason that Apple fanboys read sites like MacRumors and CultofMac, even though much of the information the sites contain is wrong and the accurate details filter into the mainstream press eventually anyway. They read because they’re already fanboys and keeping tabs on Apple’s rumors is what fanboys do.

Companies that don’t have Apple’s cult appeal will need to work a little harder. If people are following brand streams because they already feel a sense of loyalty, the hard work is being done before they reach the social media site. It’s being done through image, through the company’s story, through all of the branding techniques that marketers have used for years to build loyalty among customers.

It’s a valuable lesson to remember: social media sites like Twitter are invaluable tools for measuring brand loyalty, harnessing brand loyalty, generating referrals, sparking purchases and keeping customers loyal. But they’re not complete replacements for the traditional marketing methods that create that loyalty in the first place.

If we go back to the statistics above about the top five reasons that people chose to follow a brand on a site, I would suggest that the top two statistics are because of the following three. In other words, use Twitter to offer the discounts/special offers and then you will gain more of those who like to be fans.

Mobile Phone Use with Facebook

• There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
• There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products.

Conclusion

The reality is Facebook is not a phase and is here to stay.  Businesses need to determine how they can monetize this network if they wish to compete and stay in front of their customers.  

Facebook can no longer be seen as the site where college students go to socialize about the latest fashion or party – as statistics show the fastest growing demographics two years ago was those 35 years and older, and today it is woman over 55 (InsiderFacebook.com).  In fact, 45% of Facebook’s US audience is now 26 years and older! Businesses need to consider sites like Facebook as part of their marketing mix; otherwise the risks of not being present can actually open the door for competitive or negative brand exposure.  

So if you have not already, it’s about time to give your online marketing strategy a facelift by joining Facebook!

A Few Tips about Facebook and Business

How do you get your branded name on Facebook?  

It is important that you build your Facebook Fan Page with your branded name as www.facebook.com/yourcompany.  Once your fan page has over 25 fans and you then can reserve a vanity URL for your business.  

How do you maximize your video optimization on Facebook?  

First, name the video file with your keyword phrase.  This is the method to indicate to the search engines what your video is about.  When you upload the video, Facebook will allow you to provide a title and Description of the video.  Make sure that both these fields have your keyword phrase.

How do you maximize your ads on Facebook?

Remember that Facebook is push marketing, more traditional, and different from Google Adwords in which people are actually searching for your products or services.  However, the ability to narrow down your exact audience provides an opportunity for your to connect to the right people.  

Keep in mind...

• Visit www.facebook.com/business to get started and to determine if there is a target audience on Facebook for your product or service based on the demographics of your prospects.
• Visit http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=861 to learn more about writing optimal ads, character limits, image size and resolutions, and terms and conditions.
• Always tag your ads using parameters in the destination URL, so that you can determine through your analytics which ad copy or image is driving the best results.

Get The Word Out!

Now that you have your Facebook Page, how can you let people know about it? Here are some different ways to promote your Facebook Page to your customers and start the interaction.

1. Send out an email blast to your list letting them know your organization is now on Facebook
2. Place a logo on your website that lets your current visitors know that they can follow you on Facebook
3. Run a contest or promotion as an incentive to get people to join
4. Run a Facebook Ad Campaign targeting your demographics and invite them to join your fan page.  Again incentives are great here!

 Facebook Events

Take the same scenario and imagine if you had used Facebook to post your event.  Remember Facebook was designed to allow information to be passed through easily amongst friends.  So this means if a user decides to attend the event on Facebook, a notification will be posted on their wall (page) letting their entire network know they are attending.

So in scenario #1 where you post the event on your website the user gets an email.  In scenario #2 the users confirms their attendance but at the same time their entire network now can see this – which might persuade them to attend as well.

From an admin standpoint, the Facebook Events feature allows you to send a direct message to all the guests you had invited, including those who have confirmed their attendance, declined or have not yet decided/responded.

Facebook Pages

A Facebook Page will allow you to build a business page for your organization, in which you can promote your products and services, connect with your customers and build your brand.  One of the main reasons businesses are afraid to build a page on Facebook is because they do not want to mix their personal lives with their business network.  

So for example, pictures of me at a New Year’s party holding 3 beers in my hand might not sit too well or best represent my organization to my business contacts.  However, there is a way to completely separate your business page with your personal account.  You do need to have a personal account in order to first develop the page, but the privacy setting will then allow you to have control of what information you want users to see and separate your personal and business account.

Once your Facebook Page is created, you can then start to populate it with pictures, images, information, videos that reflect your brand.  If you are already on other social networks such as Twitter, YouTube or blogs, there are methods in which you can customize your Facebook Fan Page to automatically pull information from those mediums into the Facebook Page.

Below is a sample of how a blog post is configured to go directly into a Facebook Page.

Not only does configuring your social sites (website, blog, articles, press releases, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) to work with each other save time, it will allow you to get your information out to your valued subscribers no matter which network they are engaged on.  Also from a search engine perspective, the more your content gets syndicated, the higher the probability of it appearing directly in the search engine results page.

The image below is from the Budweiser Canada Facebook Page, which shows you can really customize the look and feel of your Facebook Page to reflect your website, landing page, email template or offer.

How Can Businesses Promote Themselves On Facebook?

The number one reason why businesses do not adopt a social media strategy is lack of knowledge, according to a survey conducted by MarketingSherpa to small and medium sized businesses in 2009.  This is why when it comes to sites like Facebook most businesses do not know where to begin.  Depending on the goal of your campaign, below are some of the different strategies on how organizations can make Facebook work for them.

Facebook Advertising

Facebook Ads allow businesses to reach their exact audience and connect with real customers to your business.  For instance, if a business were to run an advertisement campaign on a search engine such as Google, they basically can target their audience by telling Google the following:

• If someone searches for this specific phrase (exact, broad, phrase)

• If someone searches for it in this region, radius

However, what if you wanted to narrow your exact audience even further and target those people who are male or female? Married? Divorced? Over a certain age? This is where social networking sites like Facebook shine as they are able to provide marketers the ability to target these demographics whereas search engines such as Google do not have the data of who is actually conducting the search.  As an example, if your target reach is men living in the United States that are married and over the age of 50, there are currently 2,260,940 users on Facebook that fit this demographic.

CM Photographic, a full service photography studio providing engagement, family, children and pet portraits leveraged Facebook Ads, which allowed them to target their exact demographic — 24-30 year old women whose relationship status on Facebook indicated that they were engaged.  Over 12 months, CM Photographics generated nearly $40,000 in revenue directly from a $600 advertising investment on Facebook.  

Of the Facebook users who were directed to CM Photographics' website from the ads, 60% became qualified leads and actively expressed interest for more information.

For Optimization Purposes

If Search Engine Optimization (being found on page one for your key phrases) is important to your business, then there is a way to leverage Facebook as well.  Apart from having your personal brand name listed on page one of Google using Facebook as previously outlined, you can use the video section inside Facebook to build exposure the same way.

Facebook video is not as popular as YouTube video, but statistics show there are about 260,000 videos uploaded to Facebook each day (Techcrunch).  Chuck Bankoff, a WSI Consultant located in Los Angeles, had optimized a video about his services and syndicated the video to various channels such as YouTube, AOL Video, Google Video, Daily Motion and also Facebook.

Connecting With Your Customers

Since we know the average user on Facebook spends more than 55 minutes on the site per day, businesses really have no option but to use this medium as another channel to connect with their customers.  Instead of waiting for your clients to come to your website to find out what is new, why not push the information directly to them on channels where they hang out? You can collect feedback, get your products reviewed, receive testimonials, push out promotions, get users to participate in contests, print out coupons; the possibilities are endless.

Take for example Nisim International, a company which is dedicated to solving hair worries, whether you have too much (hair removal products) or have too little (hair growth products).  Using Facebook, they were able to grow their fan base to over 1000 fans and start pushing out promo codes in which they can track and measure to see what medium, message, and offer was bringing in the most value.  One of their latest promotions was to use the promo code “Haiti” in which users received a 25% discount off their order, and Nisim in turn would have also matched the discount with a donation to the Direct Relief International for Haiti.

On a bigger scale, Burger King launched a Facebook campaign called the Whopper Sacrifice.  They had developed an application and asked Facebook Users to sacrifice or “de-friend” (delete) 10 of their friends on Facebook and in turn they would receive a free Whopper.  The campaign, which had taglines such as “Friendship is strong, but the Whopper is stronger,” went viral quickly as each time someone would delete their friend, the application was built to send out a notification to their entire network that they had done so.  However, Facebook stated this was against their terms and asked Burger King to remove the application, which they did - but not before 233,906 friendships had already been sacrificed for a Whopper.

Protecting Your Brand on Google

Have you ever searched for a company name, brand name or product in a search engine before you made a purchase or decided to do business with that organization? Your online brand is extremely important to monitor and manage.  Having one negative listing in the top 10 results of a search engine could be enough to have prospects steer away, leave your existing customers in a state of panic, and damage your brand to the point where business starts to go south.

Did You Know Facebook Has...

• More than 500 million active users
• 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• More than 35 million users update their status each day
• More than 60 million status updates posted each day
• More than 3 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 5 billion pieces of content (weblinks, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
• More than 3.5 million events
• More than 3 million active pages on Facebook
• More than 1.5 million local businesses have active pages on Facebook

This is where almost any business online regardless of their product, service or target audience can leverage Facebook.  Businesses can use Facebook simply as another landing page to tell visitors about their company.  The fact that Facebook is a creditable source, has a high page rank, is updated frequently and has millions of pages and links are all reasons for Google to rank a Facebook Business Page on page one of Google.  This is very similar to having your business listing on a site like Wikipedia, which also comes up high in the search results.

Every time you obtain a page one ranking in Google, you push down any of your competitors and negative listings that may be impacting your brand.  Combining this strategy with other social sites will allow an organization to dominate page one of Google for your branded term.  For example, if a user was to search for the phrase MSNBC, which is a cable news channel in the United States, you can see the areas in yellow to the left that outline social media channels such as Wikipedia, Twitter and Blogs that MSNBC is leveraging as well as their Facebook Page in green.

Why Businesses Should Promote Themselves On Facebook

With the launch of social sites such as YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006, there was no doubt that these sites were changing the way users interacted online.  Businesses began to realize that in order to remain competitive and reach out to their customers, they must start engaging in the tools and networks where their audiences are spending a lot of their time.  To date there are more than 1.5 million local businesses that have active pages on Facebook.

What would it mean to an organization if they had customers talking about their products and services to their friends?  What would be the value of reaching out to customers to tell them about your new services or promotions?  What would be the ROI on having your brand exposed and built on social sites like Facebook?  These are the questions that businesses began to ask themselves – the challenge was exactly how can an organization start to monetize Facebook for business purposes.

Facebook is not for every business, and most organizations will use Facebook in different ways.  First you need to determine if your target audience, your customers, your clients or prospects are even on Facebook.  Whether you are B2B or B2C, Facebook can be a platform, which your organization can leverage.  Here are some of the different reasons why most businesses should start to engage themselves on Facebook if they have not already.

Protecting Your Brand on Facebook

One of the biggest fears that organizations have about connecting on Facebook is if people start to talk negatively about them.  Why open up a can of worms where people all over the world can have an open conversation, right? The reality is, anyone can create a Facebook Page about your company, or start a blog, or upload a video to YouTube etc.  If businesses do not start the conversation, they leave the control up to their customers who might be frustrated, or even competitors that simply want to damage the company’s brand.  Have a look below at some of the Facebook Fan Pages dedicated to companies in a negative way.