Facebook has already proven its worth in terms of business and promotion related activities . Year 2010- 2011 has witnessed a lot of business centric activities, algo- changes and integration of some good options for Facebook business page marketing purposes. Marketing your products, services or any thing on Facebook will require an extreme honest and focused effort to get the desired results. You can or rather must not catch and pray to your suspected potential customers to like your page or buy your products. It is completely non-sense and any FB marketing strategy based on these super-aggressive type will eventually results in degradation in fan followings, zero user engagement and thus automatically putting an end to your Facebook business endeavors. One more important point that every body must learn that Facebook is not a place from where you can expect a daily number fixed conversions (sales) for your business. Many people or even companies forgot to consider this. Facebook, in other words, can be described as a market place (in business context) where people came and like basically to spend time with their circles (friends), activities, looking for a new connection and searching for information. Any marketing approaches should concentrate on the last to point to get the max out of this vast social networking platform. Social Behaviors and 90-9-1 rule
Social Behaviors and 90-9-1 rule
This is one of the most important rule to follow when it comes about engaging your users. In 2006, Jakob Neilsen wrote in Alertbox about this splendid 90-9-1 rule. This rule explains the general behavior of social users on FB and how they contribute to your productivity. Let us assume that a business page on FB got a 100 likes. Now, out of that 100 fans 90 fans are just observers or mere readers who will only read your post or updates and will not do anything above that. The next 9 fans will read your updates and like it and the last 1 will not only read and like your updates but also willingly put his/her comment on it. These 1% is the active or loyal fan. You need to strategies your Facebook marketing strategies in such a way that these 1 % can be made more effective. Sounds hard right ? But its not.
Let us discuss the key five points considering which can make your Facebook marketing strategy a successful one irrespective of any types and form of business you may have.
1. User- Spell: Proper utilization of the profile picture customization option. This is the main part at which a visitor looks first after visiting the page. Profile picture is one of the few things that we can actually customize. It should be attractive and unique enough to charm an unique visitor. Usage of an extremely innovative profile pic with a 200 x 600 resolution, change accordingly if you are currently using its less than that.
2. Fan-Infiltration: This is a strategy that is all about getting the right and targeted fans from the relevant groups, pages, events, people, messages etc. in one word from every corner of the FB that’s relevant to your business.
3. The Blog effect: Setting up a blog with a complete different approach. The current blog integrated with your domain may contains only product related info and that’s fine. What I’m talking about is setting up a third party blog with a more user-friendly name. We can set up this blog that will focus entirely on the age (age groups)/ class (income groups)/ priority (industry based like food, service, any industries who uses your category of products, services on a daily
basis) based targeted users. For example, setting up such a blog for a home ware or cook ware related industry should focus on creating a single blog serving the needs of a modern housewife, working mother, youth and a cooking or fitness enthusiast. Motto: JUST GIVING THEM WHAT THEY WANT AND THEY WILL COME BACK AGAIN.
You might like to look at:
http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/apex/ideaHome
http://www.wegmans.com/blog/
http://www.fiskateers.com/blog/
They are all looking for the same thing that you are i.e, customer engagement, branding etc. Just look at the approaches and try to learn the way they operates.
4. The Post Factor: We need to keep the page fresh, interesting and happening. For that a daily dosage of similar types of post is not enough (as seen in many cases on FB business pages). Apart from sharing latest industry news, fun-facts and other stuffs you can also engage users to actively participate right inside the page by letting them to share their experiences (lets say in the cook-ware context ‘my first cooking’), their memories with such products, ‘My art’ (handicrafts, glass work, glass paintings) etc. This will convey a sense of friendliness and the user will feel empowered to showcase their stuffs thus resulting in organic sharing of your words.
5. User Engaging Activities: Activities like polls, quiz, discussions can results in excellent user engagements. You may also, depending on your budget, can develop an app or game relevant to your business with a small link back to your FB page. Users also willingly participate in an event where there is chance to win some good freebies, that can even be a discount code.
Hope this points help you in your Facebook marketing quest and please do not hesitate to show up with a great point that you might have in your mind if I ‘ve missed them.
Always remember that ‘sharing is caring’
Cheers 🙂
Aritra Ganguly's Blog 