DMN3 Blog

Chances are your Social Media Strategy involves Facebook. As the top social media brand, its 500 million users are fast becoming the major focus for social media marketing. Here are some specific ways you can market to your audience on Facebook:

While you probably are not interested in marketing to Facebook users worldwide, consider this. Sixty-four percent of U.S. Internet users visited Facebook in April, 2010 and spent an average of 6.75 hours on it.

Facebook is a social networking site. It is all about building relationships. Your efforts should be focused on building relationships with your target market or audience. Your plan or Social Marketing Strategy should have defined your target and fringe market profiles and identified many of the areas where they are congregating on Facebook.

Remember that social media marketing requires a more social and subtle kind of marketing that shies away from outright promotion of your business brand. You must engage your audience in ways that are meaningful to them. That means offering content that is valuable and relevant to them. It also means listening to the conversation and responding in a meaningful way.

You can use Facebook to build brand awareness, distribute information, create a community, provide customer service and increase sales. The specifics on how best to do these things and track results down to ROI is often not quite so clear.

What are your marketing options on Facebook? There are a number of ways that you can implement your social media marketing strategy on Facebook.

1. Facebook Page
2. Community Page
3. Events
4. Advertising

Facebook Page: Most organization’s Facebook marketing is about setting up a Facebook “page”. The focus of these Facebook business pages are the brand, organization or businesses. Certainly this is the appropriate first step. Unfortunately, it is often the only step undertaken by many businesses. The page potential is limited by the social media savvy of the person or persons charged with it.

Your Facebook Page should be focused on getting the word out about your organization in a way that is not offensive to those who might become your “fans”. The term “fans” is used instead of “friends” to describe those who connect with you on your Facebook business page. Facebook “fans” are more valuable to a brand than “non-fans” when it comes to product spending, brand loyalty, propensity to recommend, brand affinity and likelihood of sharing marketing messages with their connections (earned media).

Your organization’s Facebook page should be used to publish information that’s important and interesting to your audience. Your goal is to build a fan following and engage and create interactions with and among your fans.

Community Page: A Facebook community page is a separate page that groups users around a common interest. Users can opt into the page automatically when they list the interest on their profile. Your organization should approach community pages with caution because community members, not necessarily your organization, determine what transpires within the community.

Community Pages can either boost or harm brands.

• They can help a brand by luring more brand followers to its Facebook page.
• It can create more authentic consumer connections by allowing Facebook users to find your brand based on their interests.
• You can glean useful intelligence and insight about your target audience.
• You can keep tabs on what people are saying about your brand.

Events: Facebook allows you to create an event as a separate feature of the site. Hosting events through this feature allows you to announce them through Facebook connections to friends, fans and group members. From within Facebook events, you can also send out additional information about the event to those invited. Such efforts help to increase interest in the event and enthusiasm for it. It also creates the opportunity to increase interest in the brand and can increase the organization’s fan base. All this is contingent on the event being of interest to the various Facebook members invited to it.

Advertising: Social media marketing is all about having social media members “spreading the word” by directly engaging with your marketing message and sharing it with their friends. This viral sharing of your message among social media users is termed “earned media”. “Paid media” is traditional advertising on a site.

The thing that is different with Facebook is the ability to combine both into a hybrid of earned and paid media. An example of such a hybrid is social ads. For example, if a user’s friends are fans of a brand on Facebook, the ad unit itself will contain the names of those friends. Such a combination approach can significantly enhance the ad recall, awareness and purchase intent over the impact of a traditional Ad.

Earned media is the most effective advertising with Facebook users. Getting an ad campaign to go viral and be shared with many connections is what we all want. Recent research by Nielsen and Facebook show that users exposed to both a paid homepage ad and organic impressions (newsfeed stories distributed by friends) are three times more likely to remember the ad than those just exposed to the paid homepage advertising.

This new research demonstrates that paid advertising on Facebook, if done properly, can play a role in increasing brand awareness and purchase intent.

Don’t forget to integrate your Facebook marketing with your other marketing strategies. Use your website, social media and other marketing communications to raise awareness of your Facebook presence to both existing customers and potential customers.

The key to whatever strategy you employ in your Facebook marketing is “engagement” with your intended audience. Engagement is an on-going, two-way discourse. If your efforts are only one way, you should be reexamining your social networking strategy.