As I have had the opportunity to experiment with an increasing number of Facebook ad campaigns, I feel like I’m starting to get a feel for how to use the platform to best effect.  I’m sure that we could get some great input from all of you as well but the approach I’d like to talk about has to do with taking a layered approach that includes fan page enhancements, regular facebook ads and sponsored story ads used in combinations.  I think this layered approach is the best way to address the issues of new fan acquisition, engagement and leveraging a fan base in one concerted effort.1.  Develop a content marketing strategy: This can be as simple or as complex as the project demands but take some time to figure out what you can say and do with your audience(s) that is likely to have value to them while also serving the needs of allowing you to communicate what you need to communicate.

2.  Use fan page enhancements and apps to offer higher levels of engagement to the audience(s): There are wide range of great apps and a variety of price points that can create whole new user experiences for your facebook fan page.  Some of the functionality you can add include contests, coupons, like gates, custom landing pages, sign up forms, galleries, downloads and a whole variety of other experiences.  Don’t just rely on the wall and the like button.  Give people more ways to interact with you.

3.  Use Facebook ads as a fan acquisition tool: Facebook ads suffer from high impressions at low CTRs.  However, they are also not terribly costly so that even at low CTRs you can generate enough impressions to create some activity.  I think this makes them useful for acquiring new fans and building out a base of awareness but read on….

4.  Use Sponsored Stories to leverage fans: Don’t let your facebook advertising stop at fan acquisition.  Sponsored stories based on the actions that the fans take on your newly enhanced fan page is the secret sauce that makes all the rest of this work worthwhile.  In the most basic sense, they offer you the ability to leverage your fans to reach their friends in generally more impactful ways than simple post liking achieves. Here’s a link to a PDF from facebook on the subject.

So how have you been combining these tactics together?  Anyone have any additional thoughts or examples of recent projects that showcase how this all works?

• I have often written that your social media marketing has to focus on the needs of the audience first. However this recent article by Clay MacDaniel cites research by Razorfish and She’sConnected.com are indicating that a primary reason for consumers to fan your company or brand is to receive promotions and discounts.  Let’s take a look at some ways that you can find a balance between social media marketing that attracts the attentions of your audience and social media marketing that pushes sales messages to them.

Nail a need. Make your offers highly targeted.
If you are involved in social media marketing you can use the information that you gain from constantly monitoring and engaging in the online conversation around your brand to generate offers and promotions that are specific to the needs being expressed by your audience. For instance, let’s say you are monitoring the social conversation around your restaurant and you find that the health-conscious portion of your audience often comments favorably about the dietetic options on your brunch menu. You could develop an offer that is specifically designed for them by offering a discount to a local spa or free admission to a local fitness event as part of a package. In fact, if you are monitoring the sites that your health-conscious audience frequents, you can use those sites to help get the word out. The advantages here are many:

• Higher redemption rates of more specific offers with lower overall promotion costs
• Generate fan loyalty in your audiences by speaking directly to their needs
• Generate promotions and discounts that add value to your brand rather than cheapen it.

Test and monitor. Use the channel to refine your offer strategy
The immediate data that you gather from distributing offers online affords a great opportunity to test and tweak different aspects of it. What if you change the value, make it time sensitive, make it referral-based, or make it a contest? You may notice that some promotions generate interest but lower redemption rates whereas others get less click activity but generate better sales.

Keep the balance. Make the largest volume of social media marketing about engagement with your audience’s interests.
This is the tricky part. Your audience wants to be rewarded for their loyalty but they don’t want to be barraged and bored by your endless series of offers. Whats the right balance for you. Is it a deal of the day or of the week? If you have 6 specific audiences that you can monitor online do you make sure you offer at least one promotion to each audience each month? The right fit will become apparent of you continue to track things like your rate of new followers, click-through rates on all your posts, how often your posts get passed along or commented on, and the engagement of your audience off-site. Your primary emphasis should continue to be on creating the force of attraction that draws them into your social media marketing with a generous sprinkling of offers and promotion to keep them active.

Be specific, keep testing and trying, and don;t overdo the promotions and you will find that social media channels can help you get those sales messages out in new, cost-efficient, and effective ways.

For a short while this past week, there was an accidentally revealed document floating around the web that shows some potential upcoming developments in Facebook marketing…and they are definitely ideas that will make business page owners very happy.  The document itself is no longer anywhere where I can link to it but there is this useful article about it on the Inside Facebook site.  Here’s the high points:

1. For page owners, Facebook will track impressions and interactions relative to each post. Right there in Facebook you will be able to see how users are interacting with the content you post which will greatly enhance your understanding of what to post that best suits your audiences preferences.

2. Facebook seems to be planning to offer ad targeting based on a function they call “Real Time”. It’s not completely explained yet but the supposition is that you will be able to target based on the content of the audiences posting activity. So if I post an update about a concert I went to I may be served ads that relate to the artist, venue, genre or anyone else that finds that subject to be defining of their audience. This could be very interesting.

Both of these changes indicate that Facebook is taking a harder look at the needs of marketers on their service. If they continue to make wise choices like the ones listed above I think they will allow marketers to better use the platform while not intruding on the basic experience of their users. In fact, in both of these cases the net result could be a higher quality experience for the Facebook users. Hope to see more about these in the near future.

I am generally in favor of Facebook business pages as long as the business has a reasonably interesting content strategy, the willingness to committ sustained time and energy to it, and the willingness to cross-promote it in througout their marketing efforts.  However, there is one thing thaty bugs me about Facebook relative to some of the other popular social sites such as Twitter and YouTube.  On Facebook there is no way to search for and engage potential new fans without using Facebook advertising to get to them.  I know Facebook does not want to commit the same sins as MySpace and create a platform for spammers but I have to believe that there can be a way to implement fan site invitations that would not be intrusive.

For instance, on Twitter and YouTube there are some interesting ways that you can build out your networks.  On Twitter you can:

• search for posts containing certain criteria and follow, @reply,  or message the Tweeter
• retweet relevant posts from others and they may follow you in return
• search the followers of those who you already follow or who follow you

On YouTube you can:

• search for videos contains certain criteria and message the poster or post a video reply in the comments
• check to see where related videos are being embedded and introduce your content to them
• subscribe to relevant videos and submit friend requests to develop a relationship with the poster

Facebook unfortunately does not allow the business page owner to engage in outreach like this.  Granted you can create useful content for the Facebook community like an app or game, you can advertise, and you can create content that takes advantage of the viral networking of facebook to find new audiences.  This is why we like business pages.  But, I still think the platform could be improved by giving the business user some social networking outreach tools.  In fact, I can imagine some businesses or organizations who should focus first on the other sites I mentioned before investing time and energy in Facebook.  If your goal is to build a network adn your brand does not have much magnetism on its own, Facebook may be much slower going for you than Twitter or YouTube.  I look forward to hearing other people’s thoughts on this.

There is a commitment involved in operating a business page on Facebook. Companies who are not prepared to support the effort with content and conversation should think twice before launching it. However, for those who are prepared to invest the energy, Facebook can be a great platform with useful tools for building out a fan base and optimizing your approach. Carnet Williams wrote this great article with 10 tips for Facebook fan pages. Here are some of the highlights:

1.  Use the fan page admin tool to customize the entry page to your fan site so that users do not just land on the Wall.  This give you an opportunity to set the user’s expectations about what the fan page experience will be like and it gives you the opportunity to pose a clear call-to-action that will increase the number of people who choose to hit that fan button.

2.  Be prepared to keep the content fresh and make use of RSS feeds from your blog(s), YouTube channel, Twitter feeds, or website to automate the process of updating the content.

3.  Be interesting and engaging to your users as opposed to being purely promotional.  Your fan page is a place to put your users interests first and foremost.

4. Encourage fans to post photos and tag them because this take advantage of the way Facebook spreads this content to the fans’ own walls where you have a chance to find more fans among their friends.

5.  Respond to the posts on your fan page.  This may sound like a simple idea but some businesses approach their page like a platform to make announcements rather than a place to interact and engage.

6.  Use the fan page admin tools to optimize you strategy by seeing what content and posts get the most positive attention.

With committment, a fan page can become a great communication tool.  Does anyone else have additional thoughts on how to best use a fan page?

Facebook’s Social Ads Platform publishes statistics on the demographics of its audience for the sake of people looking to use their ad platform. I’ve embedded the full spreadsheet of data below but the surprising thing that jumps out is that the young users are declining at a rate of almost 20%. Some theories as to why this is so include:

• Parental monitoring of Facebook accounts makes the service less appealing to their kids
• The younger demographics hit their saturation point long ago and their is less possible growth in that area
• The platform has lost its cool by becoming more mainstream
• Advertising and marketing clutter tends to drive the younger audiences away because of their BS radar

What are your theories?  What will they flock to next?  Or will Facebook reverse this trend as it moves beyond the functionality on its site and embeds itself into the experience of other sites via Facebook Connect and their API?

Facebook Demographics Statistics 2009

With more and more of our devices able to take good quality pictures and send them to various places online, it is interesting to note that Facebook has created the capability to email photos directly to your account.  Here are some simple steps to follow to take advantage of this:

1. First, go to Facebook Mobile and get your personal upload email address. You won’t want to give this out, because it’s used for posting content just to your profile. Once you get this address, add it to your address book on whichever mail clients you use, especially your mobile phone.
2. To upload photos or videos to Facebook, just send them as email attachments to this address. Facebook will use the subject line of the email you sent as the caption for the photos and videos you upload (the same caption will be used for all of them if you send in more than one). You can of course edit these later by logging into Facebook.
   

   Facebook photo upload

If you are a an iPhone 3G user you should also be able to upload videos through similar means.  Enjoy!  If any of you learn anything helpful about this please post it here.

It came as a surprise to me and I would think it would be a surprise to many of us that Facebook defaults to allowing your photo to appear dynamically in ads that run on their site. That’s right, you might be appearing in an ad right now and you would not know it.  Who thought that would be a good idea and why did the person arguing the point with them not win?  I’ll tell you how to opt-out but I have to share a funny story first.

Facebook ad fail

A fellow named Peter was surprised to see the ad above when he was in his facebook account.  His surprise was due to the fact that the cheerful lady in the photo suggesting that hot singles were waiting is his wife!  The phote is being dynamically pulled from facebook’s user photos and inserted into the ad without her knowledge.  Peter has since heard from facebook and they apologized while explaining that the creator of the ad did this and not facebook.  However, if you don’t specifically opt-out it could be happening to you too.  Here’s what you do:

• Go to facebook/settings/privacy settings
• Select News Feed and Wall
• Click on the Facebook Ads tab
• In the drop-down menu next to “Appearance in Facebook Ads” select “Noone”.

According to a study by Borrell Associates, Facebook will receive over $500 million this year in advertising revenue with over 74% of that revenue derived from local businesses using Facebook to target users geographically.  Click here for more information but Borrell is quick to note that despite the striking focus on local advertising on Facebook that the overall numbers still represent only a a tiny fraction of the overall dollars spent on local advertising.  However what interests me is not the overall percentage of local advertising budgets that is going to social networks but rather the speed with which any percentage at all has gone to them and the fact the Facebook is the preferred choice.

Facebook’s CPC ad network presents businesses with a relatively precise form of geo-targeting, a large enough audience to suggest a good opportunity scope, and an engaged audience.  For instance other forms of local online advertising might include:

• PPC search which is less precise in how it geo-targets and forces the advertiser to understand the complex arena of search keywords to play it right
• Local news sites which pull the local audience but in a less engaged way and often without the benefit of CPC models
• Other social networking sites like MySpace that may not generate a large enough or suitably engaged audience to make a difference

Granted Facebook’s click-through rates are  often lower than search because the ads are interruption ads as opposed to finding users when they are actively engageed in looking  for your service.  However, it is interesting to see how local advertisers have been willing to leap into this site whereas they typically would be much slower movers into other new areas of online marketing. Stay tuned.  Please share your facebook advertising stories, positive or otherwise.  It’s a new world and inquiring minds want to know.

If you have a business facebook account and you are looking for the best ways to leverage it you should look into Facebook fan boxes. They are a simple to install and configure widget that you can place in your own website to create a dynamically updating version of the fan activity on your facebook page. OK that sounds geeky and intimidating but here is a picture of what it does.

Basically you are bringing the activity on your fan page into a little widget on your own site and saying to your site visitors, “Check this out! People perhaps like you are hooking up with us on Facebook and here is what they are saying.” Take a look at the following image to see how it works:

By using this tool you can:

• increase your fan base
• leverage the content they are creating for you beyond Facebook
• increase the credibility of your own site
• increase trust and, accordingly, conversion rates

One further note,  in a post to its developer blog, Facebook notes that the Fan Box has already been implemented by Coca-Cola, Newsweek, and Threadless.