Chapter 1

Exploring Facebook Marketing

In This Chapter

Discovering Facebook’s marketing potential

Looking at four key Facebook marketing strategies

Mastering the art of Facebook engagement

Examining Facebook’s global market opportunities

Understanding the basics of Facebook marketing

Seeing the benefits of selling from the Facebook platform

Facebook is the most powerful social network on the planet. With more than one billion active users, Facebook presents a unique opportunity to connect with and educate your ideal audience in a way that your website and your blog can’t even come close to matching.

The reach of the Facebook platform has grown exponentially in the past few years and will only continue to get bigger. In fact, the number of Facebook Pages created by brands was over 50 million in February of 2013. Today, almost anyone or any company can find a following on Facebook, from big brands such as Starbucks to small mom-and-pop shops. Facebook’s platform can turn a business into a living, breathing, one-to-one online marketing machine. Facebook has changed the game, and there’s no better time than the present to jump on board.

In this chapter, we cover why Facebook should become a key marketing tool to help you grow your business. Specifically, we look at Facebook’s massive marketing potential, its expansive capability to reach your ideal audience, and the core strategies you can implement today to seamlessly add Facebook to your marketing program.

Seeing the Business Potential of Facebook

We have good news and bad news for you when it comes to Facebook marketing.

• The bad news first: Facebook marketing isn’t free. Sure, it doesn’t cost actual dollars to get set up with a presence on Facebook, but it will cost you time and effort — two hot commodities that most business owners have very little of these days. You have to account for the time and energy it takes to plan your strategy, set it up, train yourself, execute your plan, build your relationships, and take care of your new customers after you start seeing your efforts pay off. And although you don’t need to be tied to Facebook 24/7 to see results, dedicated time and effort are essential when creating a successful Facebook marketing plan, and your time and effort are anything but free.
• And for the good news: This book and our collective experience can help you streamline your Facebook marketing efforts and eliminate the guesswork that often goes into figuring out anything that’s new and somewhat complex.

Remember this very important fact: You are not in the business of Facebook marketing. Your job is not to become an expert or a master of Facebook. As you navigate this book, remember that your job is to be an expert at your business — and Facebook is a tool that you will use to do that. Take the pressure off yourself to master Facebook marketing. This will make all the difference as you master the strategies outlined throughout these pages.

Facebook can help you create exposure and awareness for your business, increase sales, collect market data, enhance your customers’ experience, and increase your position as an authority in your field. However, before you can start to see real results, you must determine why you’re on Facebook.

Asking yourself what you’re after

If you take the time to ponder the following questions, you’ll gradually begin to create a road map to Facebook marketing success:

• Why do you want to use Facebook to market your business? More specifically, what do you hope to gain from your use of Facebook, and how will it help your business?
• Who is your ideal audience? Get specific here. Who are you talking to? What are the demographics, needs, wants, and challenges of the folks who will buy your products, programs, or services?
• What do you want your ideal audience to do via your efforts on Facebook? In other words, what feelings, actions, or behaviors do you want your audience to experience?
• How can you be useful? Finally, remember that Facebook is a friend network where brands are relatively unwelcome. How can you use Facebook to be useful to your customers?

Using Facebook to your advantage

When you’re clear about why you’re on Facebook, you’re better able to design a strategy that best fits your business needs. We explore many potential strategies through the course of this book.

For now, though, in the name of helping you better understand how you can use Facebook to market your business, here’s a list of just a few ideas you can implement when you embrace Facebook marketing:

• Set up special promotions inside Facebook, and offer special deals exclusively to your Facebook community. You could create a coupon that your visitors can print and bring into your store for a special discount, for example.
• Offer Q&A sessions in real time. Your visitors can post questions about your niche, product, or service; then you and your team can offer great advice and information to your Facebook community.
• Highlight your Facebook fans by offering a Member of the Month award. You could choose and highlight one fan who shows exemplary participation in your Facebook community. People love to be acknowledged, and Facebook is a fantastic platform for recognizing your best clients and prospects.
• Highlight your own employees with an Employee of the Month feature on your Facebook Page. Profile someone who’s making a difference at the company. You can include photos and video to make it even more entertaining and interesting to your audience.
• Sell your products and services directly inside Facebook. Include a button that links your fans to an electronic shopping cart to enable them to buy in the moment. You have many opportunities to promote and sell your products and services on Facebook.

The preceding list is just a glimpse of what you can do inside Facebook’s powerful walls. Many more opportunities await you, as we explain in later minibooks.

Reaping the benefits for business-to-consumer companies

When it comes to business-to-consumer (B2C) companies, one of the greatest advantages of Facebook marketing is the ability to engage one-on-one with your ideal clients. By asking questions, encouraging conversations, and creating personal engagement with your customers and prospects, you can build relationships in a way that wasn’t possible before social networking took the marketing world by storm.

Although we all know that consumer brands with big marketing budgets can attract millions of followers on Facebook, there’s still room for the little guys.

Here’s a thought experiment: Rather than feel frustrated because your company can’t compete with big-brand giants on Facebook, turn the success of those companies into an opportunity for you to model the best and learn from them.

Here are four key strategies that the big B2C companies have adopted in their Facebook marketing strategies to help them stand out from the rest:

• Acknowledge your fans. The B2C giants on Facebook do a fantastic job of spotlighting their fans. When fans feel appreciated, they continue to engage with your Page.

  One great example of this strategy comes from Oreo, which knows a thing or two about standing out. Oreo created a campaign to spotlight what fans think about Oreos. Fans share their videos, photos, and stories via a Facebook app, providing Oreo with limitless content and customer loyalty. Oreo’s Facebook Page has millions of fans, so those folks must be doing something right! See Figure 1-1.

  

• Know your audience. When you’re clear about who you’re communicating with on Facebook, you can create experiences around your audience’s interest and likes. An example of a B2C company that’s in tune with its audience is Red Bull, as evidenced by that Page’s custom apps and unique content.

  The team behind Red Bull’s Facebook Page knows what its audience will respond to best and then delivers. A series of online games and apps for fans, for example, is geared toward sports and high-impact competitions, as shown in Figure 1-2.

• Mix up your media. Facebook strategies that infuse a variety of media, including photos and video, often draw a bigger crowd. One example is JetBlue’s airline terminal live music shows.

  JetBlue knows that many of their customers appreciate culture. Working with local and independent artists, they presented live music concerts at several of their locations, as shown in Figure 1-3. So not only are they using videos, but they’re also providing rich cultural experiences in addition to affordable and enjoyable air travel! Very smart, JetBlue!

• Have fun. Face it, most people log on to Facebook to have fun and connect with friends. Interacting with businesses is a distant consideration. That doesn’t mean, however, that these users aren’t a captive audience! The key is to infuse fun into your Facebook activity when appropriate.

Photos are viewed more than anything else on Facebook. They go viral quickly because when a fan posts a photo, that photo is sent to the News Feeds of all their friends. Hundreds of thousands of potential new fans will see these photos.

When reviewing these four strategies illustrated by some well-known B2C companies, remember that you, too, can create these experiences for little or no cost. Again, model the best that’s out there, and make the strategies work for your own business.

Reaping the benefits for business-to-business companies

We know that Facebook marketing works well for B2C businesses, but if you’re a business-to-business (B2B) company, you may be wondering whether Facebook makes sense. In short, the answer is yes! In fact, according to the 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Research Report from HubSpot, 41 percent of B2B companies have reported acquiring a customer through Facebook.

Not only can B2B companies incorporate the four key strategies mentioned in the preceding section, but B2B companies also have a unique advantage over B2C when it comes to Facebook marketing: Facebook’s platform is designed to support exactly what B2B companies need to be successful in attracting clients and securing sales.

To better explain this idea, here are three factors that make B2B a perfect fit for Facebook marketing:

• B2B has a smaller potential customer base. B2B companies don’t have to constantly focus on growing their numbers of followers to hundreds of thousands; instead, they can put the majority of their focus on nurturing the relationships they already have. Facebook is a platform that thrives on one-to-one relationships.
• Buying decisions in B2B rely heavily on word of mouth and reputation. Businesses that are looking to make a huge buying decision often want to know what their peers are doing and how they feel about a product or service. Facebook’s open network allows people to see who their peers are interacting with and what they’re talking about at any given time, therefore making it easy to find out what others think about a product or service.
• B2B generally has a higher average price point than B2C. When the price of the product or service is considered to be high, the client is likely to seek out information and content to support buying decisions. On Facebook, content is king. The more high-value content a company can generate, the more likely it will be to attract the ideal client base and become a Facebook success story.

For B2B companies, connection, knowledge sharing, and reputation management are key ingredients of success. Facebook’s unique platform can help optimize these key strategies.

Developing genuine relationships with customers and prospects

No matter whether your business is B2B or B2C, it really comes down to one person talking to another. No one wants to interact with a faceless brand, business, or logo. We all want to buy from a friend — someone we trust and feel comfortable engaging with regularly.

Facebook allows us to move beyond the obstacles of traditional marketing (very one-sided) and instead communicate with our clients and prospects on a one-on-one level by putting a face with a name, making the entire exchange more human.

Creating one-to-one customer engagement

Engagement is crucial in mastering Facebook marketing. If you build rapport and can get your Facebook community talking, your efforts will go a long way.

It’s one thing to broadcast a special promotion on Facebook, but it’s an entirely different experience to ask your fans a question related to your products and services and receive 50 responses from people telling you exactly how they feel about what you’re selling. In many cases, this real-time engagement can be priceless. In Figure 1-4, the popular online shoe and clothing retailer Zappos.com asks its female fans about “girls night” preferences for fingernail polish color preferences.

One very successful Facebook marketing strategy is to ask your followers interesting questions. It’s human nature to enjoy talking about likes and interests; therefore, encourage sharing by asking your fans to express their thoughts about their likes and interests. It’s a great way to increase fan engagement.

Providing prompt customer service

Before the days of social networking, phone calls, e-mails, and handwritten letters were just about your only options when it came to reaching out to your clients. Today, you can send a tweet or make a Facebook post to inform your customers of new features, benefits, or changes to your products or services. Social media allows you to get the word out quickly, making it easier for you to keep your customers informed and satisfied.

If you optimize your Facebook marketing experience, you can provide your customers a superior customer experience — a much richer experience than you’ve ever been able to offer before. Not only can you create a social media experience in which you’re keeping your customers informed, but you can also give them an opportunity to reach out to you.

Imagine this: You sell shoes. A client orders a pair of your shoes online and receives them in the mail. When the shoes arrive, they’re the wrong pair. That client logs on to Facebook and posts this message:

I just received my much anticipated pair of red stilettos in the mail today … too bad the company messed up and sent me sneakers instead! I’m frustrated!

At first glance, you may think that a post like that would hurt your business. On social sites like Facebook and Twitter, however, you can turn a potentially bad post into an opportunity to gain a customer for life.

Imagine that you respond within just five minutes with this post:

Julie, we are so sorry that you received the wrong pair of shoes! We are shipping your red stilettos overnight, and make sure to look for the 50% off coupon we included in your box as well. Two pairs of shoes are always better than one!

Here’s what’s great: The opportunity for real-time problem solving is powerful. You not only just saved a sale and made Julie a happy customer, but you also showed anyone watching on Facebook that you care about your clients and will go above and beyond the call of duty to make them happy. This type of experience wasn’t possible before social media came on the scene.

You can find out more about online tools that will help you monitor who’s talking about you online in Book IX, Chapter 3. These tools will help you stay in the know and in tune with your customers. They will also save you precious time and effort when managing your Facebook activity.

In addition to proactively monitoring Facebook for customer service issues, you can use many robust tools to create a virtual service desk directly inside Facebook. Livescribe, for example, has incorporated a support desk directly into its Facebook Page. As you can see in Figure 1-5, you can ask the folks at Livescribe a question, share an idea, report a problem, or even give praise directly from that Facebook Page.

Customers commonly use social media sites to post questions or complaints. If you provide a designated place for support, you’re likely to keep your customers happy and turn them into repeat buyers!

What’s even more important is that others can see these posts. Then fans and potential buyers can go to this custom app to get answers or see what others are saying about the products. It’s another great way to educate fans about your products and services. In addition, this tool can cut down service calls when it’s executed correctly, saving your company time and money.

Creating a shopping portal

Facebook’s expansion into the e-commerce sector might forever change the way we shop. In the past, creating an e-commerce website took a lot of money and even more time. Today, Facebook’s platform — interwoven with third-party apps — has allowed millions of businesses to showcase their products and services and to sell them online. (To find out more about how third-party apps can be part of your Facebook marketing strategy, check out Book V.)

When it comes to the kinds of shopping interfaces you can create on Facebook, you have two options:

• A storefront: Here’s where potential buyers come to browse products. When users want to buy, they click the Buy button and are then taken to a separate, e-commerce website to finalize the purchase. Currently, this type of shopping interface is the most popular, but we’ll likely see the second interface option (see next bullet) catch up soon.
• A fully functioning store: Your second interface option involves creating a full-blown store where shoppers can browse and purchase without leaving the Facebook environment. You can find one example of such a fully functioning store on the Facebook Page for the Grandma Mary Show. Here, you’ll find a buying experience within Facebook where you can buy an e-book directly from that Facebook Page, as shown in Figure 1-6.

When Facebook users post about products they love, the users’ friends naturally want to know more. This curiosity creates viral exposure for your products and services.

Facebook offers an extremely valuable opportunity to showcase your products and services and to create a new portal where you can sell your goods.

Using Facebook with the Global Market

Few people would deny that the social media phenomenon — and Facebook, specifically — is growing at a staggering pace. Online users in Australia, Japan, and Italy all show even stronger adoption of social media than Americans do, and those in China, Denmark, and Sweden are said to be adopting social media at the same rates as Americans.

With more than 80 percent of Facebook users located outside the United States, it’s essential to understand Facebook’s place in the global market.

Facebook breaks down barriers and makes introducing your products and services to international audiences easier. Here are some opportunities you can explore to extend your brand’s footprint in the global market:

• Use Facebook advertising to reach international audiences. You can target 25 countries with one Facebook Ad, or you can target one country at a time and drill down into specific cities within the country. You can also create multiple ads and target numerous cities in the countries you want to target with your ads. The more localized you make your ads, the better chance you have of reaching your ideal audience.
• Translate your content. With the rise of international markets on Facebook today, consider translating your content on Facebook. In fact, English accounts for only 31 percent of language use online. Facebook has its own crowdsourced translation product: Facebook Translation app.

  In many countries, the majority of people do not have access to computers with Internet access. Mobile devices are making it possible for Facebook to reach more people, however.

Understanding Facebook Marketing Basics

Facebook can supercharge your existing marketing efforts by giving you a platform to grow your audience, create deeper connections, and create new experiences to foster loyal client relationships. Facebook’s unique platforms that let you market and promote your brand online are your Profile and your Facebook Page.

The Subscribe button, which is optional, allows Facebook users who aren’t your Friends on Facebook to subscribe to your updates, meaning that they can see your public posts in their News Feeds.

Subscribing to someone’s personal account is a lot like following someone on Twitter. In other words, you don’t have to be Friends with someone on Facebook to see their Public posts. If you’re marketing a personal brand, the Profile with a Subscribe button may be perfect for your marketing outcomes. There are some strategic marketing reasons to have a personal account with the Subscribe button. We cover the complete marketing strategy for activating your Subscribe button in Book II, Chapter 1.

The other way to market on Facebook is via a Facebook Page. Pages are like digital storefronts, or places where your prospects can take a digital walk around your business to learn more about your brand and what you have to offer. Here you can highlight your best programs, products, and services to interact with an interested audience.

A large portion of this book is dedicated to creating and optimizing your Facebook Page. Before we get into the how-to’s and strategies, though, we point out a few of the most important details you need to know to get off on the right foot.

Marketing on your Page and your Profile

Although you’ll soon find out all you’ll ever need to know about the differences between a Profile and a Page, for the purposes of starting things off, here’s a quick rundown:

• When you sign up for Facebook, you create a Facebook Profile.

  A Profile is meant to be all about you. It has been referred to as a living scrapbook of your life. It highlights who you are and gives details about your life experiences over time. With the addition of the Subscribe button, you now have the option to make some of your posts public and other posts private. The opportunity to select who sees your posts gives you a unique advantage by allowing you to be selective and use your Profile to connect with family members and friends, as well as to post information about your business.

• Promoting your business or brand for monetary gain via a Profile goes against Facebook’s terms of service.

  It isn’t against the rules, however, to mention your business and keep your relatives, friends, and those subscribed to your Profile informed about new happenings with your business.

• A Facebook Page is designed specifically to highlight your business, and its purpose is to allow businesses to communicate with their customers and fans.

  Those who follow your Facebook Page expect to see promotions and conversations about your programs and services, so it’s perfectly acceptable to promote your business on a Facebook Page.

For a more comprehensive understanding of Profiles and Pages, check out Book II, Chapter 1.

Developing your Page to be a hub of activity

Your Facebook Page can serve as a meeting place for people who have similar interests and values. Involve your customers in your conversations by asking them questions and encouraging them to share their thoughts.

One way you can create a hub of activity is to encourage your fans to use your Facebook community as a platform where they can connect with other like-minded individuals.

You can become the go-to source in your industry, for example, making your Page the hub of your industry’s latest news and happenings. By delivering valuable content via your Facebook Page, you’re setting up your company as the authority — a trusted advisor.

One great example of a company using Facebook to position itself as the go-to source for an industry is HubSpot, a major player in the marketing automation software space (see Figure 1-7).

During the course of this book, you’ll have the opportunity to familiarize yourself with many strategies that can help you create a unique hub of activity, including a bunch of strategies we show you in Book VII.

Understanding privacy options

After you set up your Facebook Profile, you have several privacy options to choose among to determine just how much or how little of your Facebook self you want to share. These options become even more important if you decide to activate the Subscribe button, making your Profile more accessible.

First, Facebook has what it calls an “inline audience selector,” which is a drop-down menu that lets you decide which group of people sees your post (see Figure 1-8).

With the inline audience selector, you can choose to display your post to five groups:

• Public: All your Facebook Friends and anyone who has subscribed to your Profile Timeline can see your post.
• Friends: All your Facebook Friends can see your post.
• Friends Except Acquaintances: All your Facebook Friends whom you manually selected as Close Friends can see your post. This group is pulled from a custom list that you set up manually. We discuss the strategy behind custom lists in Book VII, Chapter 1.
• Only Me: You can post something that only you will see on Facebook, but we realize that this seems a bit silly to do! This is a good option if, for example, you don’t want people to see old photos you have uploaded but you don’t want to outright delete them.
• Custom: You can manually choose the individual Friends who see your post.

You can not only select an audience when you post, but also change your selection at any time. To do this, hover on your posts’ globe icon, as shown in Figure 1-9, and then choose your audience preference from the drop-down menu.

Here’s how to access your privacy settings:

1. Point your browser to www.facebook.com, and log in to your account.
2. In the top-right corner of your screen, click the lock icon.

   A drop-down menu opens with privacy options.

3. Click See more Settings from the drop-down menu.

   On the Privacy Settings and Tools page, you can see all your options for setting your privacy controls on Facebook, as shown in Figure 1-10.

Facebook’s privacy settings allow you to control exactly who sees what within your Facebook Profile. The challenge is that the privacy settings are extremely detailed, and Facebook changes or upgrades them often. But don’t worry: When Facebook does make changes, it always notifies users, thereby keeping everyone informed.

Also included on the privacy options dashboard is the option to set your default privacy setting to Public, Friends, or Custom. You can also dive deeper into the settings and customize specific sections of your Profile Timeline, and we suggest that you do just that.

Although you do need to have a Profile in place before you can create a business Page, there’s no way for others to see the connection between your new Page and your existing Profile — unless you tell them, of course. Only you know the connection, and you can keep it that way for eternity, if you like. People who choose to connect with you on your Page won’t be able to access any information from your Facebook Profile.

Keeping things professional but personal

Facebook gives you the opportunity to give a face and personality to your company. Sure, many of us use Facebook in our day-to-day business (as we mention earlier in this chapter), but the vast majority of Facebookers are there to engage with their friends and have fun. And no matter how serious your product or service may be, you always have room for a little levity.

People want to know you, not your brand. Be careful about using jargon in your posts and coming across as too “corporate” because this is often seen as inauthentic on social networking sites. Talk to your Facebook community as though the people in it are your friends, not potential clients. The more real you are on Facebook, the more your fans will want to engage with you and your business.