I 'Like' Facebook: Tips for advertisers

Don't miss: Facebook's brand page changes: Implications for marketers

If there’s a celebrity in social, Facebook is it (at least for now). Moreover, with digital media influencers such as Microsoft's global advertising head Caroline Everson joining Facebook, the social-media giant is signaling to agencies and advertisers that it is keen to talk business. With an IPO in the pipeline, focusing on commercial interests is inevitable.

On the agency side, we are also experiencing a much more involved responsiveness and enthusiasm from the Facebook team. This is a most welcome move, compared to an acquisitive, sales-oriented approach that was often the case about 12 months ago.

Apart from the relationship front, it is also evident that Facebook continues to develop ad products and enhance its platform for added value. For example, Facebook has integrated existing networking features with “sponsored stories”, turning alerts that a user’s friends have “liked” a brand into ads.

Facebook’s recent introduction of Timeline, which mirrored Museum of Me, a Facebook app created by Intel last year that allowed users to archive their social lives on Facebook, is also timely. Having accumulated years of users’ data, this feature organises users’ activities on Facebook in a chronological order, by calendar year, delivering to every users a unique, personalised online multimedia journal, linked to their friends and communities.

It’s a simplistic generalisation, but Facebook seems to “get” consumers. No doubt, the company has also copped its share of bad press in regards to how it has used data in the past, and in matters related to privacy. But still, Facebook is tasting success, with 85 per cent of its revenue derived from advertising last year – valued at about $3.15 billion.

If Facebook’s success is built on understanding consumers, then for advertisers to be successful utilising this platform, we need to think and behave like consumers, focusing on three key areas: Head, heart and hand (action).

Head

Think of your brand as a person. If your brand-persona were to start a presence on Facebook, who are you? What is your personality? Who would you attract as friends and who would you invite as friends? What do you like or dislike and what do you talk about? What would you comment on and what kind of content would you share? In short, what is your brand’s mindset or attitude in this environment?

In parallel, it is also important to appreciate the mindset of users when they first land on your page, when they first connect with you, what their expectations are. These attitudes are often framed by the type of messages they were exposed to prior to landing on your page. This means building a conversation plan, which should comprise awareness messages, promotions messages, and simple friend-to-friend relationship-building chatter. Plan where the triggers for your conversation may originate, make sure these lead to your Facebook page, and have an understanding of where conversations may go from there.

Case study: Huggies recently asked fans in Hong Kong to upload favorite baby snapshots to the Huggies HK Facebook Page. The 60 photos receiving the most fan votes would appear on the city’s buses. Using Facebook Ads to help drive campaign awareness, Huggies received more than 4,000 photos in just three weeks. As a thank-you to fans, Huggies mounted a 30-foot-long billboard featuring the entire photo collection in one of Hong Kong’s busiest subway stations, turning it into one of the city’s most visited attractions. A win-win for both advertiser and fans. Source: Facebook.

Heart

Content is king. Because Facebook is about connections and communities, content with heart resonates best with audiences when communicating via this platform. Know what moves you, and how that moves your like-minded friends. Your content should be sincere, real and open. In short, human.

Case study: An example of such “heartfelt” content is 'The Yellow Ribbon Project', the Yellow Ribbon Prison Run and the Community Art Exhibition. The run aimed to call for participants to collectively encourage all ex-offenders to “pick themselves up and to get back on track”, while the art exhibition allowed Singaporeans to appreciate and adopt art pieces made by inmates during their rehabilitative art therapy.

The aim was to grow this movement from some key flagship events and the Yellow Ribbon month of September to a year-round engagement. By engaging the community through Facebook, the Yellow Ribbon project hoped to offer ex-offenders a second chance in life while inspiring a ripple effect of concerted community action to support them and their families.

In the campaign, a piece of art expressing one inmate’s struggle in rehabilitation was posted online, but some parts were blacked out and not shown. As the community grew, the picture was progressively “unlocked” and revealed, driven by social ads and community members inviting their friends to help. All the experiences were carefully tied to the Yellow Ribbon brand to maintain the high level of integrity associated with the cause. The content and experiences grew the brand’s Facebook users from 1,600 to 26,900 in just seven months, turning what could have been a taboo social topic to one openly discussed and supported in the social environment. Source: UM Singapore.

Hand (Action)

Think of all possible actions that may result from your messages or interaction, such as likes, comments and shares as extensions to actions in the physical environment and create appropriate stimuli to generate such responses. In doing so, measure these responses, linking them back to business objectives. It’s not just about growing the number of Likes or fans; it is what you do with them afterwards.

As the saying goes, if you make friends at a party (as you would in a Facebook page), you would not ignore them afterwards and neglect to speak to them. And when you did speak to them, you wouldn’t limit your conversations to brand messages, or to promises of giveaways.

Case study: Country Crock used Facebook to spread the love for carrots, peas and other tasty vegetables. The campaign was designed to show moms that their families would gobble up veggies prepared with its soft spread. To reach members of its target audience, Country Crock created a special tab on its Facebook page where moms could browse recipes like Easy Mashed Gingered-Carrots and Honey-Orange Mixed Vegetables. As part of the campaign, premium ads drove engagement by asking questions such as "What’s your family’s favourite vegetable?"

Each person’s response created a story in her friends’ news feeds, driving more awareness of the message. People who liked the page also received a coupon toward their next Country Crock purchase. On its page, Country Crock generated more than 1,000 likes and comments per post for many of the campaign-related posts. Source: Facebook.

In this example, the success of this campaign would comprise not only the number of likes and comments, but the browsing of recipes, interaction with the engagement ads, and ultimately the use of the discount vouchers in stores.

Facebook's brand page changes: Implications for marketers Background Historically, Facebook brand pages and user-profile pages have had two distinct designs. Brands have been free to aggregate fans on their pages and, as with any user status update, when brands update their status, only about 16 per cent of fans see that notice in their newsfeeds. The users to whom the updates are shown are determined algorithmically. Status updates that generate high engagement train the algorithm to show those types of updates more frequently. Brands have been free to publish updates as often as they’d like. Generally that is the responsibility of the community manager for that brand. There are additional paid advertising units available to brands to establish a presence beyond status updates in newsfeeds. Changes to brand pages User pages and brand pages will now have a similar look and feel. These will be more graphically rich templates that use the timeline structure previously available on user pages. Brand pages will now surface the actions of other “likers” who are known to the person viewing that brand page at that time.  In addition, Facebook will offer brands the ability to pay to have their status updates reach up to 75 per cent of their fans (versus the current algorithmic 16 per cent), via its new Reach Generator ad product. Brands are still free to acquire fans and publish status updates the old way at no incremental cost. Implications These changes reflect the desire by Facebook to make the brand page a robust CRM vehicle and not just a lightly funded 'nice to have' marketing function, with always-on marketing support. Those responsible for brand pages will need to learn the new enhanced graphical design features in order to leverage the larger image units, and also consider the implications of the brand page activity of a user's friends featuring prominently. There is significant opportunity in leveraging the timeline structure for brands. The new template may impact and break common page management tools like Buddy, Vitrue, or Involver. If brands want to increase the reach of their status updates, they will need to set aside a monthly budget. Value remains in creating programs that 'spark the graph' without incurring paid distribution fees. This places greater emphasis on creating social platforms that have highly engaging content currency in order to maximise organic viral opportunities.