Growing Active Facebook Communities

Presented by:

@AliSABKAR

Facebook Marketing Masters Workshop 2012 @AliSABKAR

Small businesses can support their online marketing activities by creating a Facebook business page. Once you create your page and begin to build a following, you can use it to promote your business on a daily basis. But, growing your page can be challenging, especially as more and more business pages are being created and the competition for "likes" is increasing.

Facebook platform is where information can be shared, conversation exchanged and feedback given. Suffice to say, this is more than a little scary to some big brands that aren’t used to open communication and public opinion.

Questions you need to consider to prepare you to use Facebook for business success: 1) Who is your brand? 2) Who is your audience? 3) What are your communication goals? 4) How can they be revised for this particular medium? 5) What types of content work for this audience? 6) In which tone will you communicate with your audience to represent your brand? 7) Who will manage the community?

Community Manager is the most important because he or she is on the front lines of communication. A community manager usually manages a blog/community, a Twitter account and various third-party social media channels like a Facebook fan page or a YouTube account. A community manager may also be responsible for managing a social listening platform like Radian6 and filtering/assigning conversations to others in the business unit for a proper response. He or she may even organize in-person events to get feedback from the community. The community manager is the face of the brand. Conversations are at the core of the job responsibility.

Definition by SocialMediaExaminer.com

3 Tips for Managing a Social Media Community #1: Embed within your community. Community managers must embed themselves within the community they serve and become integrated with the community. The result is the collecting valuable data and insights from the community members and reporting back to management. The reporting is usually feedback on how to improve the company’s products, services or business processes. You have to earn the trust of the community. Invest hour a day just getting to know others in the community and engaging in really simple and personal conversations.

3 Tips for Managing a Social Media Community #2: Don’t just focus on monetizing. The biggest mistake a community manager can make is to start screaming “one-way” marketing messages at the rest of the community. The members will do one of two things: they will either leave the community or call you out on it publicly. Both are bad for business and should be avoided at all costs. Remember the old saying, “It takes more to acquire a new customer than to sell to an existing one.”

The most effective strategy to drive revenue for a business is to build the community, earn members’ trust and delicately ask for their permission to market your services, a wise proverb from Seth Godin.

3 Tips for Managing a Social Media Community #3: Don’t just listen, get the community involved. The hot topic today is “listening” and the tools are just about commoditized with new applications launching every month. Building strong customer loyalty is not just listening but also acting—embedding yourself within the community and becoming a trusted voice there. However, the challenge for every business in social media is to eventually “become believable.” And that means winning consumer trust.

Not all Facebook fans are created equal. It’s not how many Facebook fans you have – it’s about how many engaged Facebook advocates you have. Juli Peterson, Social Media Strategy. identitypr.com

Mosaic illustration of the "LIKE" button for Fortune magazine. Made out of Facebook interface icons.

Are you more of a sharer, joiner or advocate?

Joiners – 83% – Although they make up a majority of your fan base, they do not help get new fans or spread your messages – they simply participate and that is the end of their interaction. Sharers – 15% – The more active group that participates in your campaigns and takes the time to spread the word about it, reaching out to that “friends of friends” metric. Advocates – 1.5% – Your Facebook “gold mine.” Not only do they participate and share your campaign, they have the ability to influence their community to participate in and share your campaign, as well. This is the community you want to develop.

Latest's case study (examined 10,000 FB campaigns /9months) How to expand their active FB audiences and found that the 3 key audiences that make up Facebook communities are:

So, how important are the advocates, and how do you grow that community? The top 10% of the study group, the “Superbrands,” doubled their sharers from 15% to 30% and tripled their advocates from 1.5% to 4.7% through six best practices. These Superbrands were three times as engaging, resulting in 13 times more growth than the average Facebook page.

1- Consistently provide multiple ways for your fans to engage. If it’s within your budget to run one or more giveaways or contests at once, go for it. You will see the types of campaigns your fans and advocates like to participate and talk about. In addition to paid-for campaigns, other opportunities for engagement through Facebook tabs include: • Email subscription or quote application forms • Relevant, custom regional data for your product or industry • Career tab for your organization • Pinterest or YouTube video integration • Tools like calculators or quizzes • Interactive product guides

2- Provide clear calls-to-action. With each post, tell your fans how to interact with the post. Have them answer a question or instruct them to do something like visit a link, watch a video or click “like” or “share.” Note: Adhere to Facebook Pages Terms regarding contests, promotions and giveaways. Although it is still quite common, giving away products through commenting, sharing or liking posts is against Facebook’s Terms.

3- People like pictures. A picture is worth a thousand likes. Anyone who knows anything about engaging Facebook audiences will tell you that images get your fans going, me included. Integrate images wherever you can – posts, bit.ly links to blog posts in captions, photo albums and your organization’s Timeline. Keep images bright, unique, original, relatable, positive, and most of all, shareable.

4- Keep interactions relevant. Don’t post about winter when it’s summer, and don’t post about events that happened two months ago. Use upcoming holidays, major sporting events (p.s. the Olympics are over now), major film releases and current events to keep your conversation relevant. Also, determine if political or religion-based conversations on your social channels align with your organization’s values and goals, or if you want to avoid them. It’s very risky, and if you aren’t armed with a response strategy, you may seriously offend your advocates and the general public.

5- Mix up your campaigns and new offers. Wildfire found that campaigns that are entered the most, like sweepstakes, coupons or promotions, are not the most shared. Other campaigns like personality-based activities and quizzes are shared more, but not necessarily participated in. Formulate a comprehensive strategy that will engage users from all levels.

6- Encourage social interactions on several social channels. Social media isn’t just about Facebook. There are hundreds of platforms out there, but the Superbrands expanded across several networks, notably Twitter, YouTube and a blog, as well as visual accounts like Tumblr, Pinterest or Instagram. While it is more feasible for brands with more manpower and experience to spread their communities to different platforms, be sure that you understand the platforms and can provide consistent, quality content to maintain additional channels.

Making It Happen

1. Conversation - is designed to stimulate conversation with the fan base by asking thought provoking questions that encourages short succinct answers from fans 2. Pictures – upload images that the client wanted to expose consumers to for SUPRE professionally taken images of models wrong clients clothing

Making It Happen

3. Link – Deep linked updates that that drives traffic away from Facebook to the clients other online properties such as website, online store, blog or YouTube channel 4. Product – spotlight a new product that the client is releasing or will release. You can test new designs and get feedback on possible new items. Update System for the week: Map out what products are going out that week then implement those updates into the system that were designed to drive and a lot of engagement.

Facebook Plugins to Drive More Traffic to Your Content • Do you want more of your content shared on

Facebook?

• Are you wondering how to make it easy for people to share your site or blog content on Facebook?

• Which Facebook widgets are best?

Facebook Plugins to Drive More Traffic to Your Content When people see that one of their Facebook friends has also read and liked the article, they may be more interested in reading the article. The ability to keep people on your website reading your content and getting to know you better will help you convert readers to customers.

Recommendation Box

Like Box

Monitor, Measure & Report • Report weekly or daily depending on activity and

client requirements including: • Monitoring demographic analysis provided by

Facebook Insights • Measure growth rate (this can be done through

third party applications) and you can view both daily and weekly rates.

The World’s Most Popular Company Facebook Pages

1. Starbucks

2. Coca-Cola

3. Oreo

4. Skittles

5. Red Bull

6. Disney: 9,227,053

7. Converse: 6,473,795 Fans

8. Pringles

9. ZARA

http://pagedata.appdata.com/

Thank you If you get it, share it

@AliSABKAR

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