Category Archives: Marketing

10 Facebook for Business Best Practices: thanks to Hubspot

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I borrowed these top ten from inbound marketing experts Hubspot. Do you have any Facebook business tips you’d like to add?

1. Be interactive, fun and helpful. When people reach your Facebook page, they are looking for some kind of interaction. Don‟t disappoint them. As an example, a hardware company offered their Facebook fans links, applications, and engaging information, and within a short time, they added 26,000 fans! <And the more interaction, the higher you score on the ‘EdgeRank’ algorithm, which means more of your content is featured in your fans’ newsfeeds.

2. Embed videos on your Facebook page. There is no reason why you should send people to YouTube to watch your videos. Keep ’em right on your page with embedded videos! <good idea, and you can create a tab for YouTube videos within your FB Page too.

3. Create a connection between Facebook and the outside world. I recently read a case study about how sales reps worked with local retailers to promote their events through Facebook updates and photos. Consider something similar. <what’s worked for you?

4. Create contests on Facebook. Contests are a fun and engaging way to encourage participation from fans and even generate new fans. For example, in order to enter a contest, one company asked people to comment on a thread announcing a giveaway in Facebook. <See the success with the Shopping.com iPhone giveaway which took place alongside lots of ongoing comps – see Slideshare of the campaign

5. Integrate traditional advertising with Facebook. The Facebook icon/logo is well known. Add it to your print ads to promote your Facebook presence. Another great idea is to use traditional ads to promote contests that encourage people to sign up on your fan page. <and the granular targeting helps to keep costs down and engagement up

6. Use Facebook to grow your email list, and vice versa. Use your email newsletter to boost awareness of your Facebook page. In addition, promote your email newsletter to your existing Facebook fans. The end result will be growth in your email list and your Facebook fan base. <that’s a simple but great way to add ROI from Facebook growth..

7. Introduce new products on Facebook first. People who sign up to be fans of your Facebook page are likely your most loyal evangelists and customers. Reward them by giving them information about a new product/service/feature before everyone else. If you do it right, they will help you promote it to others. <exclusivity rules OK

8. Welcome new page visitors. When thinking about Facebook, a new metric comes to mind: visitor-to-like. As a B2B company, you ultimately want to maximize the percentage of people who visit your Facebook Page and click the “Like” button. One important way to achieve this goal and establish expectations with new fans is to implement a ‘welcome’ landing page that invites new visitors to Like your Page. Technically, there are many ways to execute this. HubSpot customers, for example, can install the free Facebook Welcome Application. <and you can use the Welcome Page to run comps too

9. Integrate social content on your Facebook Page. Facebook is the gateway to the internet for many people. They use it as a home base. In fact, one in eight minutes on the internet is spent on Facebook. Because Facebook has become such an online home for people, it is important to incorporate content from other social channels like YouTube and SlideShare to extend the life and reach of that content. <and not forgetting Twitter!

10. ‘Like’ other businesses’ Facebook Pages. Remember that social media is, well, social. By Liking the Pages of business partners, valued vendors, and customers, Facebook will notify the administrators of those Pages. In return, some of them may also decide to Like your Page, which will also expose it to the individual fans of their Pages. Think of this as leveraging Facebook for co-marketing efforts. <network with other potential partners via Facebook!

 

Are you listening hard enough?

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A while ago I went for an interview at social commerce innovators mydeco, who I really admire. I don’t recall who interviewed me at mydeco I do recall the useful feedback, which was that I listened too much in my interview. Funnily enough at a Shopping.com offsite in late 2010 in sunny Marbella I highlighted “listening” as a key strength during a cross-company workshop.

At a more recent meeting with a social media guru he asked me hypothetically what  I would say to a tea retailer client, armed with market research data which showed their customers drank a lot of tea at midnight. He believed the right answer was to advice the client that they need to produce a low-caffeine tea to meet the late night tea behaviour need.

My answer (OK, polished up a tad in hindsight) would be to make the strategic assumption that the tea customers knew they were drinking normal caffeinated tea at midnight; and start a discussion with the customers on that basis, before talking to the client as to how to develop their offering. How does that sound?

My one-liner taken from the '60 Insights from Experienced Community Managers eBook' published by Blaise Grimes-Viort

The value of listening in building a community isn’t just in terms of you as a CMO listening to what your customers say; it’s also the same mechanism which drives the value of a community in the interactions between members. Take the example of Stocktwits which I blogged about in 2008, and which I heard recently has also invested in UK-based City Index – currently loooking to recruit a social media planner. To quote Roger Ehrenberg, founder and Managing Partner of IA Ventures from that time:

“Stocktwits massively leverages the power of the long tail, but the reason followers are able to rapidly identify value is because of reputation.

“THE STOCKTWITS COMMUNITY IS A MERITOCRACY. Those that hem and haw and say little don’t get followed. Those who are insightful, sharp and decisive command large readership. And this is the way it should be.

“We’ve only just seen the tip of the iceberg of what the Stocktwits community can and will become.  But the power of the platform is clear.”