Tag 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!

 

Online marketing organization structure question?

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As a more crowdsourced way of answering this question on the G Plus community on the best team structure to launch an online community I got few replies from community managers on this question – I hope that’s useful. Certainly (2) looks worth a glance;-)

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That’s an interesting question which one rarely gets chance to reflect upon, as usually that set up is already in place. Taking advantage of the ability to plan the team structure I would cross-check your strategy by looking at how you meet your aggressive targets by looking at it from the end customer point of view. For example take an example like Zappos where the customer care people have a dual role of dealing with direct customer issues by phone but also reflecting on activity through their social media activity as a way of reaching out to existing and potential customers. If I was a customer of your new community therefore I wouldn’t care if I spoke to the engagement person or the acquisition person I just want to know that I am valued and for that to be evidence in my online relationships within the community – for example when I feedback a suggestion about a possible improvement to the community that it is publicly reflected upon by the community staff and acted upon if it meets your cost/benefit objectives.

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Some years ago I managed the department handling community and customer facing roles for a company with a rapidly expanding website and customer / reader base and few budget constraints.
We adopted a strategy of aiming to avoid having conflicting demands on each member of the department. We divided the department into teams based on the source of pressure. So we had:
– a team who responded to customer email their targets included real-time response to customer email where possible
– a team dealing with discussion moderation who responded to reports and requests from discussion board users, their targets included real-time response to discussion board problems
– a team who seeded content between discussion boards and editorial content, their targets incorporated rolling editorial deadlines through-out the day

It worked very well.

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Community first. Commerce second. Good conversations create transactions.
Oh. And re-read www.cluetrain.com

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Hmmm – The terms being used sound very process/tech focused rather than community member-focused.
I’d suggest having a team with a “infrastructure” component (that focuses on platform, channels, process mgt) and a “segment/subcommunity” component (that focuses on serving particular groups of members).

But there are many ways of doing things.

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Also – goals. I’d like to submit that you can’t really move forward on any online community campaign without recognizing the goals and reasons behind
your campaign. Is it to drive sales? Drive traffic? Raise awareness?
Knowing your goals helps to put the right people in place.