4. Facebook is a tactic,
not a strategy.
@annabelleblue - #DSum13 - @intrapromote
5. 40% of the time people spend on
Facebook is in the News Feed.
65% of the “likes” earned take place in
the News Feed.
35% of the comments are made in the
News Feed (that increases to 45% on mobile)
@annabelleblue - #DSum13 - @intrapromote
I loathe this word. "Engage" is the new "Synergy" - it's the darling of the marketing world - for now. It’s a spot on your Buzzword Bingo card when you’re in a meeting. Does this sound familiar to anyone?“Well, Todd, we’re hoping to leverage the low hanging fruit of our Facebook community to cause a paradigm shift that will result in more engagement. Because at the end of the day, what we really want are brand ambassadors with a 360 holistic point of view that can really contribute to the increased ROI we’re seeing in social.” Yeah, my eyes roll, too.The concept of engagement has no value to your organization unless it’s tied to a goal – new product feedback, brand awareness, customer acquisition, recruiting – any of these things and many more are goals you can tie to engagement, but you have to tie it to something. Looking for engagement alone will not advance your business.
The other key consideration here is that “engagement” is not a one-size-fits-all term with a singular definition. Engagement is SOOOOO loosely defined by Facebook itself, not to mention re-defined by every social media software company, that it’s almost pointless at this time to even render a singular definition. So when you’re tying the concept of engagement to one of your strategic goals, give it a definition. If you’re tying it to brand awareness, consider measuring “engagement” by reach and audience size, for example. Figure out what works for you and your organization.
Let’s dive in shall we? I think one of the most important things we can remember is that Facebook is a tactic. It’s a part of the bigger plan. In and of itself, Facebook is not a strategy. Everyone in this room has a different reason for playing in the Facebook space. The first step to supercharging your Facebook presence is understanding where it fits, IF it fits, into your broader strategy and your organizational goals.It’s a part of the bigger plan. Before you post anything on Facebook, you need to answer the question, “How does this update, this little part of the tactic, support the big picture strategy?” If you can’t answer that question, re-evaluate the reason for the post.
Let’s take a look at how people behave in Facebook. Are you hoping to just build apps and they will come? Think again.
If you’re Pepsi, you may think that Coca-Cola would be one of your top competitors. But Edgerank changes the competitive landscape. Facebook, being a place where people mostly interact with people of varying degrees of importance in their lives, isn’t just serving up marketing content all day, as much as we’d like to think it is.The new look of the news feed, just announced a few days ago, will keep everything primarily the same. However, fans who want to see 100% of your posts will have to subscribe to your page and then go to their subscriptions area to see them. The posts that make it through Edgerank will still appear, as well.
Facebook Insights provides you with an insane amount of value. Use it. Love it. You don’t need a Radian 6 or a Sprout Social or an enormous analytics package to start finding the patterns that will tell you how your audience thinks and acts. Better yet? Hire a community manager. A good community manager will be able to rattle off most of the analytics that you need to know because he or she lives and breathes your behavior.
When you go into your Facebook Insights you’ll see a lot of great data, but one of the most overlooked tabs is the negative feedback tab. Negative feedback not only hurts your Edgerank, it means you are losing fans, even if your “like” numbers stay the same or grow. Once a fan has chosen to “hide all” of your posts, it means they will never see another post from your business unless they remember they like you and go back to your page and opt-in all over again. And that’s just too many clicks. They’re gone. I’ve spoken with some companies who were excited to see that they were gaining 1000 fans a month, but shocked to find out that 400 of those fans were “hiding all” of their posts.
How are you measuring dark social? Sure if someone clicks from Facebook, it will show up in your analytics platforms as a referral from Facebook. The platform adds the UTM – or Urchen Module Tracking – for you. But what happens when someone goes to your page from a social link, and then clicks around and then sees something their dad would like and emails it to him? Well, it’s logged as a direct visit. Or maybe a colleague sends you a link on IM. All of those are marked in analytics as bookemarked/direct/typed and they’re really coming in as the result of social sharing.
The companies that find the most value in their social media efforts are the ones who approach it with a holistic and inclusive philosophy. When I worked as a community manager with Estee Lauder companies, I sought out ideas from marketing, from the PR group, from the product development people, from the supply chain team, and so on. But one of the BEST sources of information and ideas I could always count on was the customer service call center.