Using Facebook to grow your business

Facebook: Good business tool or annoying distraction?^

Facebook: Good business tool or annoying distraction?

Facebook was introduced at Harvard University in 2004 and was originally called TheFacebook. Its core idea was to be a network for college students to communicate. Facebook has since grown to be one of the largest social networks on the web, at over 8 million unique users in the United States alone. (Yadav) Many thought that social media would fade away and become a dying fad but the truth is that Social Media, "in less than three years, has become the most popular activity on the web." (Swartz) Facebook has found a way to facilitate engagement and connection between people like never before.

With these facts, it is no wonder many businesses have started exploring the use of Facebook as a business tool. However, there is huge debate going on in the marketing and corporate world as to the benefits and drawbacks of using Facebook as a way of connecting and engaging with customers. Many businesses have not yet embraced social media networking as a major component of their success strategy for a multitude of reasons. Some companies steer clear of Facebook because they feel it is a distraction to their overall goals, too time consuming, results can't be measured, investing more effort than getting qualified buyers in return (poor ROI). When considering whether Facebook is a solid business tool or a distraction for your business, all things must be considered and weighed equally, without preconceived notions or bias for or against the medium. Consider the fact that it wasn't until 1997 that the Internet reached 50 million users in the United States, while Facebook gained over 100 million users in the United States from January 2009 to January 2010, marking a 145 percent growth rate within one year, according to research by digital marketing agency iStrategy Labs.

While some businesses might argue that Facebook is completely for personal and social use, it is clear to those on both sides of the fence that Facebook helps set the stage for building relationships with people who share the same interests, activities, or personal contacts, as opposed to primarily disseminating or digesting information feeds. Therefore, it can't be ignored that this also means social networks enable companies to invite audiences to get to know its brand in a way that traditional forms of marketing or advertising can't. It just makes sense that, if you are "out there" more, more people can find you. But Facebook goes beyond that. Being present in social media gives businesses more time to listen. Companies can keep an eye out for what other people are saying about their brand. It is commonly referred to as "Brand Monitoring".

In today's digital world people care more about what their friends and family think of a restaurant, retail store or service provider than what they may find on Google. This truth demonstrates the necessity for engagement and interaction among customers and peers about business. Facebook is one of the most effective means to engage and interact with customers on a personal and professional level.

Facebook has opened the way for businesses to connect and promote their business through a "Business Page" which allows for brand customization, a section for specials and discounts and also allows for feedback. The introduction of the "like" button has completely changed the way businesses market on Facebook. This feature, when selected by the customer or prospect, "subscribes" them to that particular business page feed. What this means is that when someone "likes" a business's page they have now "subscribed" to receive constant updates of that particular business. This feature is revolutionary and has changed the way businesses can market.

The goal of marketing has always been to produce a high ROI or Return on Investment, providing the advertiser with a positive return on dollars and/or time spent marketing. The beauty of Facebook is that it is free to use and yet has the potential to reach a target audience of almost 9 million users. There are also excellent tools on the Internet for small businesses or divisions of larger businesses that spread social media duties among team members and have a customer-service approach to engagement, such as www.Hootsuite.com, www.CoTweet.com and www.TweetDeck.com that are designed to help businesses streamline, automate and schedule their Facebook interactions to save time as well, also increasing ROI.

Since the inception of Facebook, many tracking and analytics tools such as www.SpredFast.com and www.Radian6.com have been developed to closely monitor a company's ROI in social media with presentation-ready graphs and benchmarking features so companies can compare social media campaigns to other strategies in the industry or to the same type of campaign as it was run in another industry. Businesses that have learned to engage well and track their results are seeing a significant increase in web traffic with only a few hours of time invested per week. They also have a noticeable increase in their search engine rankings and have even been able to track deals that were closed due to their participation on Facebook.

Potential customers are using Facebook every day to talk about local businesses, restaurants, retailers and service providers. Therefore, the potential for that user base to notice and talk about a particular business that is visible on Facebook is huge. When coupled together with good products and services the power of Facebook is almost limitless. Eric Qualman, in his book Socialnomics, said it best, "It's Word of Mouth on steroids. A subset of this in the future is that we will no longer search for products and services, rather they find us via social media." (Qualman) So it seems to me that the deliberating about Facebook should not be whether or not to embrace it as a business tool, but rather about developing an individual business strategy for social media. Once companies learn how to get involved, while making the most of their time and money, aligning with their overall marketing plan, and properly track their return on investment (ROI), the argument will be no more.

By: A 1 Admin Support

What is Facebook’s EdgeRank? ^

Facebook has an algorithm called EdgeRank that determines what actually gets shown to whom. The basic way of looking at that is every single post that you put out on your wall gets a post quality score. If you have a low post quality score, it doesn’t make it to very many people. The fundamental things that influence your post quality scores has to do with the number of interactions you’re getting on your post, so how many likes, how many comments, how many shares, and then, of course, the element of time, so how many of those are occurring really close to each other, is the number of interactions continuing on a post, thereby making it relevant to keep in the newsfeed, and all of those elements.

The key things that people do not interact with are related to self-promotion. If you have a large fan base, you can sometimes even be lured into thinking you’re doing a good job if you’re getting 500 comments on something. But if you’ve got over 2 million fans, that’s actually a really poor interaction rate. So what we tell people is that the Wall is really a place for you to build a sense of community with your fans. And it’s really a place for your fans to be able to interact with you and for you to be able to interact back with them in non-promotional sort of ways. Then what you want to do in order to reach your fans in any sort of a scalable way is use advertising. You can take out ads that target only your existing fans–the number one reason people become fans is to take advantage of promotional offers.

There was a great study done by DDB where they surveyed thousands of fans across six different countries. The majority of participants said they joined your Page because they are looking to get offers from you. So make sure that your fans see targeted ads—take them to a landing tab where there’s an opportunity for them to be able to share this out with their friends, and that’s the best way to get into the news feed. Thus, you are using their news feed to get yourself promotional posts to have a high-enough post quality score.

IN OTHER WORDS…

You may not realize it, but News Feed only displays a subset of the stories generated by your friends — if it displayed everything, there’s a good chance you’d be overwhelmed. Developers are always trying to make sure their sites and apps are publishing stories that make the cut, which has led to the concept of “News Feed Optimization”, and their success is dictated by EdgeRank.

At a high level, the EdgeRank formula is fairly straightforward. But first, some definitions: every item that shows up in your News Feed is considered an Object. If you have an Object in the News Feed (say, a status update), whenever another user interacts with that Object they’re creating what Facebook calls an Edge, which includes actions like tags and comments.

Each Edge has three components important to Facebook’s algorithm:

1. First, there’s an affinity score between the viewing user and the item’s creator — if you send your friend a lot of Facebook messages and check their profile often, then you’ll have a higher affinity score for that user than you would, say, an old acquaintance you haven’t spoken to in years. 2. Second, there’s a weight given to each type of Edge. A comment probably has more importance than a Like, for example. 3. And finally there’s the most obvious factor — time. The older an Edge is, the less important it becomes.

Multiply these factors for each Edge then add the Edge scores up and you have an Object’s EdgeRank. And the higher that is, the more likely your Object is to appear in the user’s feed. It’s worth pointing out that the act of creating an Object is also considered an Edge, which is what allows Objects to show up in your friends’ feeds before anyone has interacted with them.

In other, hopefully less confusing words, an Object is more likely to show up in your News Feed if people you know have been interacting with it recently. That really isn’t particularly surprising. Neither is the resulting message to developers: if you want your posts to show up in News Feed, make sure people will actually want to interact with them.

If you want to watch the video for yourself, click here, navigate to the Techniques sessions, and click on ‘Focus on Feed’. The talk about Facebook’s algorithms begins around 22 minutes in.

By: Jason Keath & Jason Kincaid 02/2011

The NEW Facebook “Send” Button^

Just over one year ago, Facebook introduced the Like button to help people share worthwhile things with all their friends. But there are many times when people want to share something with just certain people. So now Facebook introduces the Send button, the easiest way to privately share things with groups and individuals.

How It Works

The Send button is a social plugin that websites can use to let people send a link to a friend through Facebook Messages, post it to a Group, or email it to an individual. For example, if you see a Mother's Day gift idea on 1-800-Flowers.com, you can now send a message or email to your family members to discuss. Or say you're training for a marathon and you come across a great article about running shoes on The Huffington Post. Now you can share it with your entire running group in just one click.

The Send button drives traffic by letting users send a link and a short message to the people that would be most interested. They don't need to leave the web page they're on or fill out a long, annoying form.

Facebook designed the Send button to be used alongside the Like button. By including both on your website, people will have ability to broadcast the things they like and also send it to specific people.

How to Add the Send Button

The Send button can be easily added to existing Like buttons or as a standalone feature. Developers currently using the XFBML Like button can include the send="true" attribute in their Like button code to generate a combined button, and those using an iFrame version of the Like button will need to upgrade to XFBML to display a Send button. The following code will generate a combined Like and Send button:

Developers can add a standalone Send button with the following code:

Convert 47% More Visitors To "Likes" With a Custom Facebok Landing Page^

According to All Facebook rep Jeff Widman of BrandGlue did some A/B testing. He discovered…

"We ran an A/B test just four weeks ago to guesstimate the efficacy of a landing tab. We drove visitors to the fan page of a major brand using ads. Those ad-driven visitors converted to fans at a rate of approximately 47% WITH a landing tab. When we turned off the landing tab, those same ad-driven visitors converted to fans at approximately 23%. A VERY noticeable loss in conversions over the course of the campaign."

That type of conversion coupled with the fact that Facebook continues to push the limits, innovate and grow at a staggering rate (they’re over 550 million now) should convince you to at least explore creating a custom Facebook landing tab for your non-profit organization.

As you explore, start looking at ways to make the tool work for you and check out how others (non-profits and for-profits) are getting creative with the capabilities Facebook gives them. I’ve been doing just that.

We implemented a custom landing page with "reveal" feature to a local client in the restaurant industry with tremendous success:

Landing Page (page recognizes whether visitor has "liked" the page or not and if not they are presented with this landing page):

Reveal Page (once visitor clicks "like" above they are then "revealed" this page with a special offer):

The landing page and reveal feature create a much more interactive and funneled experience with the user allowing for a higher "like" conversion. As noted above the conversion rate is greatly increased when a landing and reveal page feature are implemented. For more info check out our social media packages page or contact us directly. Happy Facebooking!!

Top 3 Tips to drive traffic from Facebook to your website^

#1: Use teaser content

When you post an article, you provide your fans with a clear picture of the content being shared. The post will contain a headline, photo and intro text. But in this case, I am suggesting you provide only a teaser to pique the user’s interest. Some might find this a bit sneaky, and it’s not something you want to do all the time, but it can be an effective way to entice a click.

Chili's does a good job of this on their page. As you can see in the example below, they have posed a question that is likely to generate interest and they have included a short URL so it’s not immediately clear where the link will take you.

#2: Share articles or blog posts

If your company produces content that is hosted on your own website, be sure to post it to your wall. This is great to get someone to click "read more" and go to your website.

Even if there is a high level of overlap between visitors to your website and your Facebook page, don’t assume that people are seeing every new piece of content on your website. Promoting articles and blog posts is an effective strategy because the content will be consumed on your site but can gain additional visibility through sharing, commenting and Liking on Facebook.

Media companies are major practitioners of this because they have produced a wealth of content, but you don’t have to be The New York Times to take advantage of this strategy.

#3 Use Facebook tabs

There are many different ways to use tabs for the dual purposes of engaging fans in the Facebook channel and providing relevant links back to your website. A good example of this is Toyota. When users first land on their page, they’re encouraged to Like the brand but can also easily click to the Honda site for more information about any of their vehicles.

As you create tabs for your page, think about how you can offer users utility on Facebook but without hosting all of your content on your Facebook page, especially when the content already exists on your website. Where appropriate, include links that drive users back to your site

Remember that you can set any tab as the default landing tab for people who have not previously Liked your page. This way you can shape their initial interaction on your page to support your objectives both on and off of Facebook

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