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Promoting Your Facebook Presence

May 27, 2010

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Pro­mot­ing Your Face­book Pres­ence, 7.5 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
I’ll bet you have some great Face­book Strate­gies you’ve imple­mented like the ideas below. Add a com­ment below and the best sug­ges­tions will be added to this list with a link back to your site.

I know social media mar­ket­ing is a hot topic these days and there are a lot of com­pa­nies attempt­ing to get their foot in the door with social net­works. The appeal of these net­works is incred­i­ble, mainly for the viral and expo­nen­tial nature of the system.

My net­work is a con­nected graph with expo­nen­tial growth pos­si­bil­i­ties. My 400+ friends all have approx­i­mately 350 friends (on aver­age and infor­mally) if any com­pany can get their foot into the door and illicit a response from my friends and their friends then the brand spread and effec­tive­ness of that “shar­ing” can be astounding.

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Social Media Strategies

In addi­tion to that it’s much more than the one way con­ver­sa­tion that Tele­vi­sion, Radio and even a Land­ing Page can pro­vide. I get feed­back, I gain key influ­encers, brand advo­cates and it’s the con­sumers doing the mar­ket­ing for me. This dynamic is much more than a shift, it’s a par­a­digm shift in the way we con­sumer, pro­mote and self mar­ket to each other.

So what does this mean for the aver­age com­pany and inter­net mar­keter?

Well to be quite hon­est it means that you’re not likely doing any­thing with your social media pres­ence. The fact is that the vast major­ity of com­pa­nies out there are not effec­tively uti­liz­ing their Face­book presence.

Hav­ing said that I have infor­mally seen a great deal of excel­lent brand iden­ti­ties on Face­book. I’m also going to ignore some of the more pop­u­lar exam­ples here like Ford, Star­bucks and Heinz.

I’m look­ing at smaller oper­a­tions that have action­able changes you can make that will help you make more of your page, pres­ence and ROI. Some of my per­sonal favorites are:

North­ern Edge Algo­nquin Park
Echo Val­ley Ranch and Spa

Look­ing at these three, and yes all of them come from my casual usage of Face­book rather than any in depth dig­ging. These are quite sim­ply excel­lent pages that keep me inter­ested, return­ing, vis­it­ing and inter­act­ing. This is isn’t a mas­sive empir­i­cal case study, this is me look­ing at things that just “work”.

Let’s break it down what do these peo­ple do that most peo­ple do not do on Facebook?

  1. Men­tion users by name. They thank new mem­bers and ref­er­ence them directly. This is a great way to start a 2 way conversation.
  2. Uti­lize events. I’m always sur­prised at how few brands actu­ally main­tain the events on their page through the events appli­ca­tion. It’s not only a great way to deter­mine par­tic­i­pa­tion, it helps to orga­nize the event as well.
  3. Allow user sub­mit­ted pho­tographs. This is a key for the travel and tourism sec­tor since it’s so applic­a­ble but it’s some­thing that many brands can lever­age. Think about it, lots of room here for inno­v­a­tive ideas.
  4. Respond to com­ment threads with­out sound­ing imper­sonal. By actu­ally nam­ing the com­men­tor and respond­ing like a real live human being rather than a 2 dimen­sional drone then there is a ton of oppor­tu­nity to inter­act directly with your users and build strong relationships.
  5. Ask­ing ques­tions. This doesn’t have to be exactly polling per say. Just update the sta­tus and ask a ques­tion, you might be sur­prised at what comes out of it, like lots of com­ments and even more vis­i­tors and peo­ple inter­act­ing with your page which is the goal here.
  6. Exclu­sive Face­book only Offers. I get alot of grief for ever bring­ing this up but it’s a key way to get new users. I know you have users on your main domain already, maybe they are mem­bers of your face­book pres­ence, maybe not. But do not offer the same thing to both, wel­come them to join you on Face­book to become eli­gi­ble — exclu­siv­ity is impor­tant, plus join­ing you doesn’t cost a thing.
  7. Nifty, groovy, neato Face­book appli­ca­tions. Now obvi­ously if you have the bud­get cre­at­ing an extremely use­ful cus­tom Face­book appli­ca­tion is prefer­able here since it makes you stand out from the crowd in a big way but for those on a shoe­string bud­get con­sider adding even the most sim­ple appli­ca­tions like Social RSS which will auto­mat­i­cally post your con­tent from your blog or news site onto your face­book page with­out human inter­ven­tion. It’s simpe, it’s free and it keep your con­tent flow­ing on Face­book. There is noth­ing worse than a stale page.
  8. Add notes to your Face­book Page. This means unique Face­book only con­tent. Yeah that’s right, only on Face­book. This increases the exclu­siv­ity of being a mem­ber, if you clone your cur­rent efforts then you will severely reduce the attrac­tion and inter­ac­tion on your page. What is the point after all of hav­ing mem­bers who do not inter­act? Nada, zip, zero.
  9. Use videos. Not high pro­duc­tion qual­ity videos. I mean grass roots real live videos, sim­ple, fun and engag­ing. Think about a walk through of your office, hand­held videos from events. This is Face­book and Social Media Mar­ket­ing is not the same as tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing. You don’t need a fancy intro, a bit of cam­era jig­gle is fine and non scripted videos make peo­ple like you more, you’re real. You are after all real, aren’t you?
  10. Incite con­ver­sa­tion. This means being con­tro­ver­sial but not rude. We don’t want to get peo­ple angry (unless your goal is to rile peo­ple up into action) but you do want to get them talk­ing on a con­tro­ver­sial debate. Why not? Play the ref­eree, being on either side of a debate will alien­ate peo­ple to you and we def­i­nitely do not want that.

That a pretty basic action­able break­down of things you can work into your social media mar­ket­ing strat­egy with­out break­ing the bank or hir­ing a team of 10 peo­ple to man­age. This stuff is easy, so get on out there and start opti­miz­ing your own Face­book pres­ence, these actions have a huge ROI and lead to many many good things.

Any­thing else that I’m cer­tain I’ve missed? I’ll bet you have some great Face­book Strate­gies you’ve imple­mented like the above — com­ment below and the best sug­ges­tions will be added to this list with a link back to your site.
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Related posts:

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  2. Using Stum­ble­Upon Effectively
  3. Pepsi Cheer — Social Media Done Wrong

Written by Dan Nedelko · Filed Under Features, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Social Networking 

Comments

One Response to “Promoting Your Facebook Presence”

  1. Jason Acidre on August 11th, 2010 2:00 am

    it’s also cool to share hilar­i­ous images or videos once in a while (may or may not be related to your niche), though you have to choose wisely to avert from offend­ing any­one within your net­work. The real key to a suc­cess­ful social media cam­paign is the rela­tion­ships that you get to build along the process. Inter­ac­tion place a great part, it’s a tedious task, but def­i­nitely worth it.

    Regards,
    Jason

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