Fan brands guide to Facebook commerce

1

The Fan Brand’s Guide to Facebook Commerce

ISSUE 1JULY 2011

http://www.moontoast.com

Tim Putnam Vice President of Client Services at Moontoasttwitter: @thetcp

Brad Posey User Interface Designer at Moontoasttwitter: @bradposey

Marcus Whitney CTO and Co-Founder of Moontoasttwitter: @marcuswhitney

Matt Sullivan Client Services Manager at Moontoasttwitter: @matt_sullivan

CONTRIBUTORS

http://www.twitter.com/thetcp

http://www.twitter.com/bradposey

http://www.twitter.com/marcuswhitney

http://www.twitter.com/matt_sullivan

F-Commerce Is the First Frontier of Distributed Social Commerce 4

The Economic Drivers of Facebook Commerce 5

Finding Success With the Facebook Conversion Funnel 6

The Facebook Fan Engagement Spectrum 9

The Anatomy of a Fan (infographic) 14

So What’s This EdgeRank Thing All About? 17

Content Drives Facebook Commerce 19

Social Media Listening on Facebook 20

TABLE OF CONTENTS

4 | The Fan Brand’s Guide to Facebook Commerce Tweet This E-Book

Social Networks, Content Networks and Smartphones are empowering consumers

to find, research and transact with your brand in ways never before possible. And consumers are choosing to use their new found power.

Distributed Social Commerce is how you will meet your consumers where they want to be met, and deliver the offers that they want from you, before your competitors can.

Facebook has enabled people to build and maintain relationships with other people and brands in a way that no online platform before it has. Facebook learns about us through our interactions with other people and brands, and keeps us engaged by never looking the same when we visit it. We, the Facebook members, are rewarded for contributing to the collective intelligence of Facebook with likes, comments and shares, with more relevant content in our news feed and better suggestions for friends we should request and brands we should like. It’s an amazing system.

Imagine now harnessing that collective intelligence, with the goal of finding and serving your most valuable customers. That’s what F-Commerce is all about.

But you can’t be successful without understanding the rules of engagement, and believe me… there are rules. Understanding concepts like EdgeRank, The Fan Engagement Spectrum, Facebook’s Economic Drivers, and what the conversion funnel looks like in Facebook are critical to your success in F-Commerce. So is having the right tools.

There are many brands who have been using F-Commerce with great success in Music, Publishing and Retail. To be successful with F-Commerce, it is imperative that the commerce element is seamlessly integrated with a solid social media strategy. Brands we have seen that are owning F-Commerce have great engagement with their fans and are having real conversations with their communities. Commerce is now being used as a rewards tool.

This is a new era.

Consumers are very much in control and they are dictating where they will engage with a brand. Many brands are now advertising their Facebook Fan Pages instead of their websites. Social Media Marketing was yesterday (if you can believe it), and Distributed Social Commerce on Facebook is Now. Seize the day!

F-COMMERCE IS THE FIRST FRONTIER OF DISTRIBUTED SOCIAL COMMERCE

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We are trying to make this as simple as possible, friends.

No business is easy. There are always factors beyond your control that can impact how well things will go for you in your business. And then there are the drivers. We keep pointing to the drivers, because they give you a simple way to assess your opportunity, and your performance against your opportunity.

In our experience, there have only been four (4) key drivers that we have had to measure, both qualitatively and quantitatively, to determine how successful a social commerce campaign can be, and how well we’ve actually done. Behold:

Audience - Qualitatively, you need to understand how engaged your audience is and what their threshold for buying directly from you is. Quantitatively, you need to understand how many of your total audience you are able to actually reach. Both of these can be determined (approximately) from previous social interactions and marketing conversion metrics. Moontoast helps you get concrete results by monetizing directly, to add another dimension to the data points around your audience. But Moontoast (or anyone for that matter) can’t monetize a disengaged audience, or an audience too small to get meaningful results from.

Offer - What are you offering? Is it compelling? Does it have game dynamics tied to it to motivate your audience to engage (buy, share, give you

their info) with the offer? You’ll have to try lots of offers to find your sweet spot, so don’t get jaded if the first one or twenty don’t work. This is a learning process, and once you nail it, it’s a great revenue stream and low-cost customer acquisition channel.

Placement - How did you integrate the offer into your brand’s social experience? Will fans find it? Is it surrounded with social triggers that can inspire sharing? Did it come across as relevant with the surrounding content? Did it appear at an ideal time to drive the most traffic? All of these things matter big time when it comes to seizing the opportunity of your Social Commerce campaign.

Virality (new word, gotta love the Interwebs) – How easy and compelling is it for the offer to be shared, thus expanding the audience and growing the overall opportunity.

These are the only things that we focus on when working with partners to build great Social Commerce campaigns. Keeping it simple lets you measure and improve towards Social Commerce excellence, which we all want. So let’s keep it simple friends, focus on the drivers.

Have you been measuring your drivers? If so, how do you think you’re doing? Let us know.

THE ECONOMIC DRIVERS OF FACEBOOK COMMERCE



FINDING SUCCESS WITH THE FACEBOOK CONVERSION FUNNEL

Now that we understand the Economic Drivers of Facebook Commerce, let’s talk about the Facebook conversion funnel.



The keys to leading a person from casual user to Liking a page, and through making

a purchase, lie in having a solid social strategy and compelling offers that your community gets excited about. So how can your organization use those, regardless of size, to be successful in your own efforts?

Let’s take a look at the following factors and how they can be applied to marketing on the world’s largest social network:

Liking with LimitedWhy is Black Friday so popular? Because a limited quantity of product is available for a great price. There’s only so much of it to go around, so people freeze their bums off outside of Target at 3:00 in the morning just to get a $20 toy. Scarcity is a powerful tool.

What do you have that’s scarce? Maybe you have an awesome backlog of merchandise that’s been collecting dust in the warehouse for years. The fewer, the better. This is what drives impulse buys in social commerce. If your customers know they can’t get it anywhere else and there’s only a handful left, they are much more likely to buy.

Scarcity will attract new Likes (and customer acquisition) as word of the offer spreads.

Quality Over QuantityPopularity is a tricky thing and a little relative. A brand with 20,000 fans on Facebook is popular compared to one with 100 fans, but pales in comparison to the brand with 20 million fans.

It’s really about what you do with your fans and less about how many you have. Do you think a brand like Timberland is any less effective at accomplishing a social commerce goal than Coca-Cola just because they have only 425,000 Facebook fans compared to Coke’s 32 million?

Engage with your fan base and continue to offer a unique and awesome experience. In

turn, your community will grow. We believe authenticity, consistency, and great content that encourages a reaction are big drivers in developing a community. Posts with photos and videos encourage sharing, and therefore expand a brand’s reach. An authentic brand voice will build trust, leading the casual brand fan to have a deeper sense of personal ownership which makes them pay more attention when your updates crawl down their news feed.

Getting DirectSo you have a community. Your fans are your fans for a reason. They like your products, your customer service, your stores, your marketing, and any number of other things. You are the authority on your brand and your fans want to buy from you.

Why deny them that? Take out the middle man and go where your fans are gathering. That way, you’re in control of the experience. Fans appreciate that experience much more than just buying your wares at a big box retailer.

This is a big factor in the conversion funnel. People buy from the source because the sense of trust is very high. A great social experience that ends with a sale builds affinity and is an opportunity for brands to build repeat business. Note I said “experience”. The experience flows all the way from the initial introduction to the offer through the message a person receives after the transaction. Be solid here and you will see that person again.

Facebook Commerce is not about constantly posting your products or services to your Fan Page. It’s about building a community...



Friends get BenefitsIt’s simple; reward your fans for being loyal to your brand. Think about what you are a fan of. What makes you feel appreciated for being a fan?

This doesn’t have to cost you a fortune. In fact, many of the best rewards are simple and affordable. Wufoo is famous for sending thank you cards to random customers. What does that cost them per card? Less than a buck?

Get creative! The best part about social commerce, and Facebook Commerce specifically, is that it’s completely open to interpretation. There are no rules, but there are things that just work. Find what works for your brand and make it a part of your overall strategy.

Be RegularThe key to success in any endeavor is consistency. As Woody Allen said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” We think that number is even higher.

When it comes to Facebook Commerce, you need to just keep at it. Your fan base is built over time, and the best way to build that base is by staying top-of-mind. This can be in the form of polls, photo caption contests, giveaways, quotes, choosing a fan of the day, anything that gets your fans involved.

Facebook Commerce is not about constantly posting your products or services to your Fan Page. It’s about building a community that, when the time is right, is open to doing business with you. When used well, the Facebook conversion funnel is a loop. By being smart with the offer and providing a great experience along the way, you can train your audience to expect to shop through your Facebook page.

Now go. Be awesome.



THE FACEBOOK FAN ENGAGEMENT SPECTRUM

BRAND



Our numbers match up with other analysts pointing out that community engagement on the whole sits a little over 3%. That means that out of all of a brand’s fans, each post might have 3% of their audience engage with it. And that’s if it’s a GOOD post. Of course there are things you can do to bump up your EdgeRank, which helps your posts to be seen by more people, but we’ll assume you, as a social media marketer, are doing a pretty stellar job talking to your community. 3%. Not necessarily the same 3% with each post, but 3%. It varies by community, but 3%.

There is a fascinating series of blog posts by Michael Wu over at lithosphere.lithium.com about looking into deeper metrics to find superfans within the engagement spectrum on Facebook. He takes a look at things like comment thread depth, repeat interactions within the same post, timing and velocity of those interactions, and Facebook as a community for brands verses a social network…that is, pre-established relationships (social network) vs. opportunity for relationship growth through engagement (community building). Several of his stats stand out:

He points out that, while social, Facebook is not inherently designed to be a relationship building website. Because the news feed falls down the page so quickly, it’s very difficult to create and maintain meaningful conversations. From that view, a 9.6% return rate makes sense (and even sounds a little high).

Likes and comments. That’s the first thing we look at when someone asks about engagement on Facebook, right? Okay, maybe community size, then

Likes and comments. The truth is that measuring community engagement on Facebook is much deeper and more complicated than that. Let’s take a look at what engagement looks like from a numbers perspective, then drop some ideas on how to get better and more repeat interaction with those beautiful people who have publicly told your brand, “Hey brand, I like you.”

Engagement by the Numbers

30% of active fans reengage with fan pages. That means 70% of fans post once to a brand page and never return.

Only 9.6% of fans return to the same conversation on a fan page. 90.4% of active fans post once in a thread and never return to the conversation.


http://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/Building-Community-the-Platform/Quantifying-Facebook-Engagement-More-than-Just-Counting-Fans-and/ba-p/26022


The Case for Facebook Commerce as a Relationship Sustainability Tool.

The Fan Engagement Spectrum

The Path to Superfan Starts with Reach

We talk a lot about rewarding fans for publicly saying they like you. The process of liking a brand is not difficult. A button falls in front of you and you click it. But the emotional high five that comes along with it, we think, is highly underrated by brands.

We get so caught up in the number of fans we have that we forget these are PEOPLE who are very much alive. We have the opportunity to superserve them because by Liking us, they have also admitted they’d like to be entertained by us or learn from us or be treated like VIPs by us. It’s a remarkable opportunity.

We believe communities can beat 3%. First we have to look at a brand’s audience and how fan behavior and engagement travels through various engagement levels. We believe in a Leap 5 social commerce philosophy. What we mean is there are 5 types of fans which are at different levels of engagement.

• Superfans• Purchasing fan• Advocate fan• Engaged fan• Potential fan

1. Reach (Potential Fan Opportunity) – A key to growing your base in any medium is reach. Quality of channel is also critical, but the Social Graph creates an efficient, high quality, word of mouth channel. So the key here is measuring and growing your reach constantly. Key metrics include:

• Monthly Active Users• Total Fans• Total Fan Network Size• Count of Shares, Likes and Comments per post



2. Interaction (Potential Fan -> Engaged Fan) – Once a fan has chose to “like” the brand, they must be driven to engage. Key metrics include:

• Plays• Page Loads per fan• Count of Shares, Likes and Comments per fan

3. Conversion (Engaged Fan -> Purchasing Fan) – After engagement, ROI becomes critical. Driving sales from impressions and cart building are key metrics to watch:

• Conversion from Impression• Conversion in cart

4. Revenue & Referrals (Purchasing Fan -> Super Fan) - The power of Social Commerce is empowering fans to promote the brand to their networks, as well as making it effortless to have great buying opportunities over and over. Super Fan metrics to watch are:

• Average Cart Size by fan• Frequency of purchase by fan• Total sales by fan• Referred members by fan• Referred buyers by fan

We believe the tools are there – Facebook has built-in engagement and what they don’t have, they let you link to. Tools + Caring + Consistency = Relationship Building. Here are the ways we engage fans on Facebook:

• Surveys – ask your community questions – do you like this or this? Don’t be afraid to go off-topic and speak to current events. The conversation does not have to be exclusive to your brand.

• Photos – share photos of live events, behind the scenes at the office, photos that prompt comments (what do you think of this?), and photos of new products. Ask questions in the title or description of the photo and participate in the comment thread – answer questions or comment back multiple times as your community comments.

• Videos – Use a similar strategy to photos…or take a queue from the Old Spice Guy and make custom videos for specific users in your community based on a question they ask.

We get so caught up in the number of fans we have that we forget these are PEOPLE who are very much alive.



• Comments – Comments are what started social. Each piece of content created can have comments. Use them. Jump in to your community’s posts and comment on them. Then react and interact with comments on your own wall. We’re aiming for conversation that takes the relationship to a deeper level.

• Free Downloads – offer communities something for free. Free is the first step toward commerce, you know. Some of our most viral campaigns have been free offers that let people discover new offers from their friends. Friend-to-friend marketing is the essence of social.

• Commerce – You signed up for Rue La La or Gilt Groupe, didn’t you? You want that discount. You crave the well-fashioned sales opportunity and limited quantity. You want to receive notices every day of what the next sale is shaping up to be. Learn from the wave of discount retail sites and implement similar strategies to your Facebook page.

The case for Facebook commerce sneaks in there when you empower your Facebook page to reward those fans with great offers. That could be deep discounts, items only sold to Facebook fans, limited edition or autographed items, etc. Teach a community to show up every Tuesday at 10a.m. for a deal, and you’ll reach an entirely new level. Commerce is a great way for a Facebook fan to get a payoff. Suddenly, it’s worth it. That emotional high-five got them in the door. That’s when you push the pedal to the floor and build affinity.

To Sum Up

At the highest level, fan count (Liking a page) is not a good metric for engagement. Community engagement (likes and comments) on average sits around 3%. To increase interaction with the fan, utilize different types of content to drive conversations that deepen the relationship with the community and drive potential fans to superfans. Introducing commerce as part of your overall social media strategy is a fantastic way to reward fans and create buzz about your Facebook page. This all requires an understanding that the world we live in today makes it easier than ever to have real relationships with global customers and to increase brand affinity. Treat customers well and word will spread.



Marcus was on a social media panel with the top execs in the industry discussing social

commerce and the conversion of Likes in to dollars. One topic he brought up was Facebook EdgeRank. It’s not exactly water cooler talk, so we’ll explain the basics here.

When you view your wall in Facebook, the default view shows you “Top News”. This is not necessarily a live stream of updates from your friends. Since the average Facebook user has 130 friends, plus any pages they’ve liked, all of those “content creators” are competing for a spot on your wall (how do you like that ego boost?).

What “Top News” displays is the result of the EdgeRank algorithm which selects what Facebook thinks you will find the most engaging, and then delivers that edited news stream to your wall in the Top News display. (Note: To view a live feed you can simply click “Most Recent” at the top of the wall next to “Top News.”)

So the question for anyone who wants to appear in as many Top News feeds as possible is, “How do I get my posts placed in the top news feed?” And that, friends, is where EdgeRank comes in.

EdgeRank looks at several factors to determine what posts will show on your Top News feed.

The first is affinity. Basically, if you spend more time talking with certain friends on Facebook by posting to their wall, your affinity with those friends will be stronger.

The second factor is what Facebook calls weight. Weight is essentially the level of interaction a piece of content gets…for example likes and comments. The third factor is the age of the post. Over time a post’s relevance decays.

For brands, being seen on Facebook is obviously incredibly important. What Facebook has done with EdgeRank encourages all content creators (Friends and Pages/Brands) to be engaging. Based on the criteria EdgeRank considers, some suggestions to increase your edge are:

1. Be engaging. Don’t oversell, but become part of the daily conversation within the Facebook community. Ask questions that encourage responses (comments).

2. Be a media mogul. Adding photos and videos to your posts require people to click to view. These clicks increase your weight.

3. Be consistent. Since a post’s relevance declines over time, posting regular content will keep the conversation fresh.

SO WHAT’S THIS EDGERANK THING ALL ABOUT?



ue we de

AFFINITY (ue )

If you spend more time talking with certain friends on Facebook by posting to their wall, your affinity with those

friends will be stronger.

WEIGHT (we )

Weight is essentially the level of interaction a piece of content

gets. (for example likes and comments).

TIME DECAY (de )

Over time a post’s relevance decays, thus making it less

important and pushing it down the feed.



We hear you. “We sell merchandise. We aren’t in the content business!”

These days, though, everyone is in the content business. If you have a presence on the web, you are creating content. Your website copy, your blog posts, and your Facebook Fan Page updates are all forms of content.

As a brand, what’s your ultimate goal in creating this content? To drive sales, of course. But we all know that you can’t just create blog posts or status updates hawking only your products and expect quality leads. Your content needs to be interesting, engaging, and keep your audience wanting more.

Even then, the content you create on Facebook is a little different from the copy on your website or those long blog posts. How can you use content on Facebook to your advantage when it comes to driving sales?

Be RegularAs you know, when it comes to your Facebook Fan Page, your content needs to live in the News Feed. The Facebook News Feed moves fast and, like a new car driving off the lot, your update begins losing its value almost immediately. We have found that posts are relevant for up to 60 minutes. After that, it’s pretty much run its course.

This means you have to post consistently without being the annoying brand fans hide from their streams. Post enough to stay top-of-mind with your fans, don’t let them forget you’re there, but remember that you are only a small part of why your fans are on Facebook.

Be AuthenticEach brand has its own voice. If you’ve found yours, congratulations! Use that voice to guide your content strategy on Facebook and beyond. Before posting, think about why your fans follow you. What are you trying to accomplish with this update? What update would resonate with your fans? Allow the answers to these questions, your fans, and your brand voice to guide you.

Be FunSeriously, don’t over think this one. There are too many other things to worry about when it comes to your brand. Just have fun with it. Updates can be in the form of photo caption contests, polls, behind-the-scenes videos of your operations, anything that gets your fans involved and lets them see what you’re all about.

Follow these three “rules” and your fans will be engaged with your content. When the time is right, this will allow you to sprinkle in targeted offers to your loyal fan base. And since they are actively following your consistent, authentic updates, they will be ready to jump at the opportunity.

CONTENT DRIVES FACEBOOK COMMERCE



SOCIAL MEDIA LISTENING ON FACEBOOK



It’s easy to get caught up in your social media strategy and focus on

executing killer content, dreaming up engagement plans that would make Nine Inch Nails swoon, and debating about the perfect time to send out a Facebook post. In fact, these days it’s too easy. Let’s face it, social networks move at the speed of now. It’s no wonder that at 6pm on a Friday you feel like you’re running to stand still.

So take a breath for a minute. Relax. Do you hear that? That’s the sound of hundreds of millions of people buzzing away about a vast array of subjects on one of the neatest technology platforms of our time. And it presents brands with an unequaled opportunity to listen.

By this point, many brands get this…and many don’t. Facebook (and other social networks) has personalized what was, for the past 20 years or so, a commerce landscape dominated by companies who didn’t have to be personable. Online commerce started out the same way. Then through comments, and especially now through social networks like Facebook and Twitter, a bad buying experience or a customer support issue gone bad can spread like wildfire through social media. So can great experiences. Perhaps no one articulates this better than our friend Gary Vaynerchuck in his book The Thank You Economy (highly recommended).

Now that word-of-mouth can spread virally, brands have a fantastic opportunity to engage with people on a scale that we’ve never seen before. Why does this matter to eCommerce? Because if you don’t have a dialog with your

community and you just start dropping in stores trying to game them for transactions, you’re brand is kind of a jerk.

Listening is Step OneAt Moontoast, we empower brands to extend their e-Commerce reach into the social stream. Transactions are very important. We understand the bottom line. But we also have the obligation to advise our clients how best to weave commerce into the social stream. We want brands to win at social. We want brand authenticity to trickle down from the top. And so we want brands to listen to what their communities are saying, good and bad, and then show the community that you hear them.

Listening means you have a chance to give people what they want from your brand, be it a product or an experience. You have an opportunity to ask questions and receive real (free) feedback by people who have publicly told the world they like you. Listening also means you have a chance to very quickly correct or make right on an issue that your community might be complaining about.

Until you open this relationship as a two-way street, your community probably isn’t ready for commerce.

Perfect is BoringIt’s tempting to want things to be perfect before letting the world see it. The painter Paul Gardner said, “A painting is never finished, it just stops at an interesting place.” Social campaigns are similar. As soon as a social media campaign is live, you have already lost control. Your fans will mold a campaign into the most interesting shapes you can imagine. Social media managers can do their best to lead the campaign to its


http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_args

http://www.amazon.com/Thank-You-Economy-Gary-Vaynerchuk/dp/0061914185/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314064497&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Thank-You-Economy-Gary-Vaynerchuk/dp/0061914185/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314064497&sr=8-1


destination, and when you get to that destination, odds are that the people in your community have surprised you. People are smart. They love to be a part of something big.

A great social media campaign starts with understanding a community…their wants…their complaints…their triggers…those are things that help shape the most effective social media campaigns. And that starts with listening.

Listening also carries through the entire campaign. Once you throw a campaign out into the world, someone might find a flaw or it might not go the way you hoped. That’s okay. Perfect is boring. Unexpected turns give you an opportunity to show the community you’re listening.

Commerce with EarsWe learn with each campaign. We get ideas for the next one. We respond to issues. We grow.

When commerce is introduced to a trusting community, it can be a win-win. People come to expect great or exclusive offers as rewards for showing their affinity to a brand. Brands deepen their relationship with people, increase customer acquisition, and add to the bottom line, to boot.

Listen to what your community likes (or doesn’t like) from your commerce offerings. Use the built-in tools on Facebook such as comments, likes, and surveys. Can you offer better products or greater discounts? Can you improve the message in the notification a customer receives? All throughout the engagement and checkout process there is opportunity. So listen. People are smart. Learn what your community wants. Teach them you can be trusted because you are listening.


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http://www.moontoast.com

Fan brands guide to Facebook commerce

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Transcript of Fan brands guide to Facebook commerce