A case study: Jasdev Dhaliwal of AVG explains their approach to Facebook marketing
[Editor's note: As long-standing Twitter connections, when we noticed that AVG passed the one million "Like" mark last week, we asked Jasdev Dhaliwal, the AVG Head of Communities "how?" to see what everyone can learn from their approach. Thanks Jas!]
As AVG’s Head of Communities, for the past two years I’ve seen our Facebook community grow from a few hundred fans to over one million.
Our page is now larger than many UK Brands including Marks and Spencer, British Airways and Vodafone UK. Globally, we now have more fans than Zappos, Diet Pepsi and Sony Music which is truly remarkable considering our community has grown organically with very limited advertising. Our established history in the security industry coupled with strong brand loyalty has helped us build a strong…
Early studies reveal a mixed message
Value: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Simply Measured Timeline engagement data
Dave has recently covered 9 recommendations for the new Facebook Timeline pages for brands. These switched over on the 30 March 2012.
The question is, has this new platform helped or hindered marketers? Some light is shed on this by this initial data from social analytics software provider Simply Measured, that suggests the change is having a very significant upside for brands.
Average of 46% improvement in engagement across 15 brands
Simply Measured looked at 15 early adopting brand page and found that average engagement on brand posts (comments and Likes) rose 46% in the three weeks after the switch compared to the three weeks before. Prior to the Timeline introduction, the 15 brand pages saw an average of 1,672 points of engagement per post, rising to 2,441 after switching to Timeline.
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A checklist and examples of good practice for 9 new features
It’s now around a month since Facebook business timelines were introduced. We explained the main marketing features here.
We’ve been checking out some of the best uses of the new features for marketing, plus we’re seeing some of the new features aren’t being implemented. It’s rare to see a Facebook page that combines all the features in the most effective way. That’s natural, there’s quite a lot for page owners to “get their heads around”, plus the usual time, budget, technical limitations.
In this post I hope to give some guidance to help you review your site and to combine looking at some examples to learn from, plus showing what some are missing. So from top to bottom, I’ll mark what are potentially the most important.
Well, most…
10 tactics for effective Facebook pages you can implement by 30th March
Value/Importance: [rating=10]
Recommended link: Facebook’s Pages intro
With just one month before switchover to a completely new page layout for companies on Facebook, we’ve rated the impact as 10 out of 5, although that depends on how important Facebook is for your business...
If you’re short on time, I recommend you go straight for the new Facebook pages FAQ for a succinct summary. What Facebook won’t tell you are the marketing tactics that you lose and gain through the new update, that’s what we’ll summarise here, using examples to illustrate the new features.
With an update to a web service, you usually start by looking at what’s new, but with Facebook’s new business pages, what’s most striking is what’s missing since…
New European Facebook marketing pages launched
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Facebook UK Marketing page
We’ve found the global / US Facebook Marketing Page useful for ideas on Facebook Marketing - it seems others do too - there are nearly 900,000 Likes for this page - that's a LOT of people following Facebook marketing.
Until recently, most posts and examples referenced, the US market, but similar sites have now been created in some European countries which we thought we’d alert you to - it could be worth putting them in your Feeds.
In the UK version, it’s good to see Facebook practicing Permission Marketing with a gated page to get access to their resources.
These are the other countries which now have a special marketing page - you can access them from the bottom of the UK page:
…
How to use Facebook for a friendly B2C 'webinar' alternatives
Facebook is 'the' social media platform for communicating with consumers in 2012 and looks set to continue well into the future. Many brands have moved away from microsites and instead have invested heavily in a page presence on Facebook.
There are so many options available - Facebook's opengraph technology offering has not yet fully hit the mainstream.
Facebook webinars
One technology option I've seen in recent months and adopted for my own businesses is the use of Facebook events as a form of webinar- it impressed me so I thought I'd share it.
Here are two examples of the Facebook webinar; one for my own business, Musicademy, and the other for Vets Now, which I described in a previous post showing the awesome ways they encourage interaction on their pages.
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Putting Facebook at the centre of communications strategy including 8 techniques to engage Facebook fans
The brand we're featuring in this case has created the third most engaged Facebook Page in the UK. Although Vets Now is the UK's leading provider of Out Of Hours emergency veterinary care, its not a "megabrand", so it really shows what you can achieve if you get the communications strategy right. In this post I'll review what Vets Now set out to achieve and the lessons they have learnt in their online journey.
Whilst many organisations use social media to prop up, or drive traffic to an existing website, Vets Now took the opposite approach. To build a stand alone community of pet owners (quite literally a MumsNet for pet owners), they and their social media agency Fresh Networks decided to…
You will have 7 days to update within the next few weeks
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Facebook blog update from 24/01/2012
About this update
You’ll remember the introduction of the Facebook Timeline feature on personal accounts back in September last year?
Well this alert is just a note to say that it will be mandatory for everyone using Facebook within the next week or two. Watch out for the message at the top of your page alerting you that you have seven days to preview and update. I'll need to give it some thought - of course my daughters have had it setup for ages - embarrassing being a late adopter...
Marketing implications of Timeline feature
This is mainly a personal alert to the pending update to your page. The Timeline won’t directly affect company pages since this feature isn’t being made available to these. It will affect placements of ads and…
What are the implications for posting updates to brand Facebook pages?
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Edge Rank Checker
And the answer is…
“The average Post Lifetime for a Facebook Brand Page Update is 3 hours and 7 minutes"
This nugget is baed on considering that each individual Post has a “lifetime”. A Post is considered dead when the growth in engagement is less than 10% of the largest growth of engagement between hourly snapshots.
This data was sampled for EdgeRankChecker customers for the month of December, 2011 across 500+ Pages and over 30,000 individual Posts. The average Page size was approximately 140,000. Page size was not found to effect this.
Of course averages, are just well, averages. So the study also looked at individual pages, Average Post Lifetimes for individual Pages were also examined: some Pages averaged a Post Lifetime of approximately 10…
New Global survey reveals variation in Facebook ad clickthrough rates and cost per click
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: TBG Digital UK
TBG Digital are one of the largest agencies managing Facebook advertising campaigns worldwide, so it’s interesting to see their summary of trends in effectiveness in Facebook advertising across different sectors. This new research, released today, is based on 326 billion impressions for 266 clients across 205 countries.
Facebook advertising clickthrough rates
Although we only have an index rather than absolute clickthrough rates, it’s interesting to see that clickthrough varies dramatically across sector:
As would be expected lifestyle-related sectors are highest, but transactional sectors like Retail, Travel and Computer and Electronics aren’t significantly lower. As might be expected Finance is at the base of the league table.
Facebook advertising cost-per-click (CPC) rates
Again it would be good to have…
