5 Examples of Facebook Brand Pages to learn from
As marketers constantly look for better ways to use social media to engage with customers and generate positive word-of-mouth and sentiment, a well-designed, thought-out Facebook page is a key platform to target consumers. Facebook brand pages can offer businesses, both large and small, an excellent opportunity to create a presence and a brand experience, but only if this experience is well planned and executed.
In this post I'll look at some examples of companies that I think have created a great experience on Facebook that fits their brand well. I hope these "best practices" give some ideas of improvements that could work for your Facebook presence. These examples all show these key ingredients of a great Facebook brand page including:
A clear objective and raison d'être for the page
A good, professional design which is consistent with all other marketing communications
An impactful welcome page with a clear…
A B2B case study (with learnings for B2C too)
Here's an interesting case study about how Eloqua ran a project on Facebook company page optimisation.
We've summarised some tips based on this project run by BrandGlue, which grew the Eloqua Fan page by 2,500 percent, increased Facebook-referred traffic by 150% and increased Fan engagement to about 3x industry averages. The creative was executed by JESS3 and PageLever supplied the data. These are main learnings we took from the case:
1. Know Facebook's "Golden ratio"
The overall Facebook ratio for status updates is:
27% have a comment
73% have a like
The study show the breakdown for B2B and B2C; they're similar:
2. Start by stopping.
If you fall behind this target avoid:
Declarative status updates
Text-only status updates
Inconsistent posts
Repetitive topics
Back-to-back frequency
Don't forget referral sources - 92% of referrals within Facebook…
Facebook accounts for 52% of sharing on the web
New AddThis report for social sharing during 2011
AddThis, the social share bar tool used by more than 11m websites and 1.2Bn users, with their owners Clearspring, have followed the popularity of their 2010 report with a new 2011 update - see the info-graphic based report below.
The story is once again Facebook led, no surprise, comparing to the 2010 report you can see that Facebook is growing in its place as the default way people are sharing information.
2011 - 52% of AddThis shares are via Facebook
2010 - 44% of AddThis shares are via Facebook
2009 - 33% of AddThis shares are via Facebook
Twitter too is up 577% this year and accounts for 13.5% of sharing, based upon the AddThis Analytics. It was up 105% in 2010 over 2009, so the acceleration there is pretty big to say the least.
The mobile increase is what I…
Improving the accuracy of web analytics for social media tracking
There is a big elephant in the web analytics room... We are less likely to accurately track visits referred from social networks than we are visits from more traditional sources. ‘Less’ likely because the rise of those sources of traffic has coincided with (or helped cause) the rise in use of mobile apps or desktop clients at the expense of traditional web browsers.
So the visits you see as being reported as referred from one of the social networks are only the tip of the iceberg.
You’re almost certainly getting a better return on your social marketing that you think. It’s just not showing up where you’re looking for it. As we near the end of 2011 many are asking:
“If social is so ‘big’ why can’t I see those visits in my site’s analytics?”
If your calculations of the return on your efforts in…
Leaked Email from Twitter reveal costs per follower
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Original post on the Drum
These are the costs revealed in the leaked email from Twitter’s ad sales department:
Cost of $2.50 and $4 per follower
$0.75 to $2.50 for each click, favourite, retweet or reply.
Commitment to a minimum campaign spend of 3 months and $15,000
Since Twitter introduced it’s advertising through it’s Promoted Tweets we’ve had questions from marketers about costs and whether the service would become available to advertisers with smaller budgets as is possible through Adwords, Facebook and LinkedIn.
This leak gives an idea of the costs and suggests the programme isn’t likely to become available to small and medium businesses any time soon.
While most marketers will continue to use Twitter as a…
And what to do about it
Social media is not a standalone skill-set, nor is it even a vocation in its own right. It's a mindset, a set of specific tools and most importantly, it's a process weaved into content and social media marketing. Our post showing the scope of Social CRM shows how social media marketing activities occur across the whole business - this Altimeter image clear shows how wide the scope of social media is.
Beyond that even - social media has to be increasingly integrated into an organisation, not owned by marketing or PR types. Social media doesn't (or shouldn't) belong to someone or just to one team unless they're the only people who care about the customer. Why? Social media starts with your customer, or worst case your fans and brand advocates (who are usually happy customers, right?). And, because…
User features get serious enhancement
Value/Importance: [rating=5]
Recommended link: Twitter video
Twitter has unveiled a major redesign today which will be rolling out slowly. There are four key elements to the changes:
New homepage timeline
Better way to see anything related to you
Interface for easily finding context for hashtags
New user profile
Is this all in Twitter's attempt at trying to become more mainstream and accessible? A move away from the niche knowledge sharing tag it's gained? It looks good at first glance, this official video is useful to demonstrate the changes: http://fly.twitter.com/
Brands also get Brand Pages
There's a really big change for brands too, new brand pages, as Twitter looks to strengthen its relationship with marketers. Twitter's brand pages have been low key compared with the excitement around Google+ brand pages, which…
How NOT to use social media to communicate
It's confession time. At some stage or other I have probably committed most of these crimes while posting to social media. Some I still do on a nearly daily basis, although am trying to unlearn them. How do you score?
1. Using social media as a one-way broadcast communication medium. Not listening, engaging or responding.
2. Endlessly discussing what you had for breakfast and other minutiae. It gives social media a bad name.
3. Not having a profile pic. Signals newbie, spammer or Grandad.
4. Not thinking twice before you post/tweet. It's there forever. Ditto posting when drunk.
5. Jumping into conversations where you're unknown rather than listening first. Especially if your first contribution is to recommend your own product.
6. Blatant selling.
7. Emoticons. How old are you?
8. Posting a link with no explanatory text. Do you really want people to click on it or are you a spammer?
9.…
Understanding who shares what and why?
In 2011, we've heard a lot about the power of social media for "amplification" of messages, i.e. social sharing. Amplification will happen naturally if you can create the right type of content that is valueable and shareable for your audience - whether that's infographics, video or a whitepaper. I think many companies use their blog, Facebook or Twitter to test which types of content and formats are most shareable and then refine their approach based on what's shared and what's not.
Here's a different approach based on understanding the psychology of sharing within your audience. It's about understanding the motivations for sharing amongst different groups and then developing the right content and seeding that works for this group. Next Fifteen has a useful whitepaper that expands on this, but I found this chart most useful as a summary of the motivations; prompting ideas on how…
Facebook releases new marketing advice for businesses
Value: [rating=4]
Recommended link: http://www.facebook.com/business
Our commentary: In the first week of August, Facebook announced "Facebook for Business". While this sounds like an attempt to compete with LinkedIn or Google+, in fact it’s just an update to their guidance notes which had been lacking for quite a while.
The most useful guide is this practical download that works for small and large business.
Download "Building your Business with Facebook Pages"
24/11/2011 update - New Facebook Insights features and learning course
Facebook have announced a microsite, www.learnpageinsights.com which steps you through how to use the new features. If you're short on time and who isn't I recommend the "Quick Reference" feature, where you can hover over and see what's what:
Alternatively, Hubspot has a step-by-step guide that's worth a scan if you're a Facebook Admin.
10/10/2011…
