Growing a successful Facebook presence

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 and vibrant community. Each day, I come to work with a single mission, how we build a great user experience across all our social media properties. It’s a very humbling feeling, that AVG’s Facebook’s presence has become the largest in the security industry.

We're often asked about the reasons behind our our success. There’s no real secret recipe to our success, but it can be distilled into the Four C’s – Content, Community, Customer Service and Collaboration.

Content

We produce content that our community loves to engage with. Whether it is a blog post, a video or picture, we work hard on producing content that resonates with our users. We often experiment to see what the audience engages with and listen to their feedback. As well as publishing our own content, we also curate relevant third party content with our audience. Measuring content on the success of its engagement value gives us a really refined idea as to what content works and doesn’t work with our audience

Community

We put the AVG Community at the heart of everything we do. It’s the voice of the customer and we take their feedback very seriously. We are always listening and we use their responses to build better products and provide a better service. We reward our biggest advocates with recognition.

Customer Service

Our Facebook page attracts its fair share of people looking for help. As such, we offer a dedicated customer support channel on Facebook and encourage fans with problems to log a ticket with our customer support team. As well as this, we have in incredibly diligent and active group of our community volunteers who actively help other users. Both channels are incredibly important to us and add tangible value to our community.

Collaboration

The social media team at AVG is global, we are a passionate and dedicated team that strive on putting the user first. We work hard on building an environment where people enjoy visiting and keep on coming back because they are presented with real value, whether it is through content, conversation, or a chance to connect with like-minded others. Having the right blend of people in your team is very important and our successes are due to the continuous hard work and expertise of everyone involved.

Summary

The Social media landscape is changing rapidly. It is becoming very clear that there is indeed a ‘half-life’ of a Facebook update, or posted video and it is incredibly short.

Having compelling content is very important, but making sure it is timely and for the intended audience is equally important too.

Today’s brands are battling each other and individuals for user attention. So, with so this in mind, you have to work harder to keep people interested in your content and conversation.

Thanks to Jas Dhaliwal for sharing his advice and opinions in this post. Jas is the Head of Communities for AVG Technologies and blogs as Geek Marketer.You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.