Social Media Marketing

I did not want to get into social media marketing so quickly, this is a tool to use once we have correctly optimised your website, but I have already had several email asking about Social media marketing, in particular facebook.

There seems to be this mass scramble to facebook at the minute. I have attached some info on FB and marketing.

Please remember that FB is a “personal” sharing site – for companies to make this work they need to interact with friends / fans, you cannot place a page up and expect people to come to you.

Large companies that use FB successfully, designate a brand ambassador for the company  , call him “bob”. Bob will add 2 status updates daily (stats dictate that 3 and above is disliked, unless of course something really good). Then Bob will sit there and “interact on a social level” with other people, comment on their posts, engage in conversation, create quizzes, take part in other peoples quizzes etc.

FB is a long term strategy. You will also find that FB users / fans may never ever go to the companies actual website and should be looked at as two different avenues of awareness.

Take Nike

It has 3 million Fans, however, crucially if you look at the target reach if you advertised nike you would only reach 86 000 people this is because the word nike is only mentioned by 86 000 people on their page, messages and posts.

Nikes “Bob” interacts daily he, talks sport, discusses upcoming fights, new coaching appointments. It has taken Nike 4 yrs to build this up.

FB has to be SOCIAL not CORPORATE

Before we start reviewing various Facebook promotion techniques, I'd like to clear things up a little bit. Essentially when someone "Likes" your Facebook page, they will be notified every time you update its status, it's almost the same as following someone on Twitter. To have your message spread on Twitter you need to have your followers retweet your post so that their followers could see it and retweet in turn. On Facebook, the principle is a bit more sophisticated: when someone likes or comments your status update, this fact is being reflected in his profile. And when your status update gets a decent amount of "likes" and comments it is promoted to the Top News section of a user's News Feed, so that more people could see it.

 Now let's refer to a famous "90:9:1 Social Behaviors Rule" to understand what it takes for your message to become visible.

Let's consider that "Heavy Contributors" are those ready to comment on your update, "Intermittent" ones will probably "like" it, and "Lurkers" will read it or just scroll through. Say your page has 100 fans. Knowing the fact that only 12%-20% of all your "Fans" will see your status update in their Live Feed, we can see that:

I hope this delivers a clear understanding that Facebook promotion takes an enormous amount of effort to become successful.

Promoting Your Facebook Page Internally.

1. Using your Brand Ambassador.

• Add to friends any people that may be your potential customers or somehow relate to your business. Recently, Facebook has added Skype integration, which can suggest you some Facebook friends from the list of your Skype contacts. Once you have a decent amount of friends use the "Suggest to friends" and "Share" buttons to promote your Facebook page to them;
• Use Facebook Search to discover relevant pages, groups, events, people and even messages. With Search you can easily track any mentions of your brand and provide feedback - people really love that;
• Once you join pages, groups and events, you are able to participate in the conversation, which is a great way of direct promotion. Moreover you can see the list of the group members and easily add them to friends;
• Communicate. Once someone comments on your new status, a photo, or anything else - answer back. Moreover you need to make people love your brand and become active contributors and then brand ambassadors. 1/4 of search results on each big brand is UGC (User Generated Content).

Power Tip: When composing a message put the @ symbol and start typing the name of your business page to mention it, just like you mention someone on Twitter. This can be used as a signature to your updates.

2. Keep the page fresh and interesting.

People join your page hoping to receive some interesting stuff from you, so do not disappoint them. Facebookers usually prefer pictures, videos and links to plain text updates. Here is a comprehensive list of things that you should keep in mind to avoid losing your fans: don't post too many updates; don't automate your content; don't be a duplicate of your website and don't be boring. Your page wall is your social proof and a signal for people to get involved.