Chapter 22

Facebook Is Your Home Page for the Social Web

Facebook is, at the moment, the most important social network in the world. Over 600 million people connect to one another in what would be the third-largest country in the world if it were a country. And, with the introduction of the Open Graph, we are interacting with our Facebook connections on our favorite websites where our social graph and the corresponding activity of likes, interaction, and commentary become the centerpiece for social curation and more importantly, our focused attention. We are putting our social network to work and we are learning how to share, discover, and collaborate in public.

Brands, regardless of size and focus, are converging on Facebook, where the idea of connecting with customers and prospects represents a potential boon for both earning relevance in a new domain as well as expanding overall reach. Facebook is a spark plug for word of mouth, and when engaged, contributes to the end of business as usual and the beginning of social commerce. In fact, the top 10 brands on Facebook today host more than 100 million likes there.

THE TOP 10 BRANDS BY POPULATION (ROUNDED OUT)

Facebook and Twitter are unique in their design and their culture and each offer distinguishing opportunities for businesses. As such, they demand a dedicated focus, strategy, and approach.

Twitter is important and essential to learning, engaging, and cultivating customer communities. I believe that Twitter is your window to relevance, both understanding how to identify and to earn it.

Facebook, as both a network and a platform, is unlocking new and important connections between people, brands, content, and data. The technical and creative aspects of what Facebook is capable of facilitating on behalf of your business and the people who define your markets, requires indoctrination. And once we explore the culture and technical advantages of Facebook Connect, likes, and the scope and possibilities of the open graph, we get an idea of the deepening emphasis required to transform Facebook from a fan page to a bona fide brand page, creating nothing less than a social epicenter for business.

If Twitter is your window to relevance, Facebook is your focal point for the Social Web.

THE STATE OF THE FACEBOOK

With over 500 million active users, Facebook is by far one of the most important networks in the world. Fifty percent of those active users log on to Facebook in any given day. And in total, people spend more than 700 billion minutes per month posting, sharing, liking, commenting, poking, playing games, and interacting with one another as well as the content and applications that define the pervasive social ecosystem.

The average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups, and events and creates 90 pieces of content (social objects) each month. If you follow Zuckerberg's Law, then we will double the amount of content we share every year. When combined, the numbers are staggering. More than 30 billion social objects (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, and so forth) are shared each month. Facebook is a vortex for content.

Everyday individuals on Facebook maintain a social graph of 130 people, which is in line with Robin Dunbar's theory (Dunbar's number) of the maximum number of relationships we can effectively manage. However, with suggested friends, I believe that number will push us to expand our networks from relationships (strong ties) to relations (focused, weak, and temporary ties). I call this Social Graph Theory. And much like Zuckerberg's Law, social graph theory suggests that the size of our network will grow, but more importantly, become much more complex, yet focused. We will maintain relationships, but also expand into a thinner form of relations that include interest graphs, nicheworks (contextual networks) and temporary connections. What's important for businesses to realize is that individuals now maintain peer networks that resemble engaged audiences in which interests are the axis of conversational rotation.

Brands are increasingly globalizing and Facebook scales with the reach that they need. More than 70 translations are currently available and more than 70 percent of all Facebook denizens reside outside of the United States. And more than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries support Facebook as a platform with more than one million websites integrating Facebook sharing, liking, and visualized social graph features into content discovery and consumption. So what does that mean? Integrate Facebook functionality into your online properties (in addition to other relevant social presences, of course). Two-thirds of comScore's U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore's Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook.

And what of mobile?

Smart phones are the new subtablet, so to speak. There are as many active users accessing Facebook on their mobile device as there are active users of Twitter. And that's a powerful statement. Today 150 million people access Facebook actively and they're twice as active on Facebook than nonmobile users.

IT'S NOT A FAN PAGE; IT'S A BRAND PAGE

Many brands underestimate Facebook and what's truly required to attract and captivate the social consumer. In my research, I find that a significant number of brands focus their efforts primarily on Twitter, treating Facebook as an afterthought. Rather than engage in each community with purpose and dedication, examples are abundant where companies are simply syndicating tweets to Facebook rather than updating each network individually. When people reply on Facebook, representatives are usually unaware, as they're mostly monitoring Twitter responses rather than Facebook. In these cases, Facebook becomes a graveyard for tweets instead of a community where likes are earned and conversations are fostered. After all, how do we expect to trigger the social effect without investing time and attention in the people who define the very social graphs we're hoping to engage and activate?

Facebook success is defined by our investment of time, resources, energy, and creativity. In other words, we get out of it what we put into it. In Facebook, it's not just about who we're connected to, it's about who we're not. What started as fans has evolved to likes and in that simple shift in phraseology comes something quite profound. Fans imply hierarchical relationships in which brands publish at will to a community that feels a bit more like a traditional audience. Likes beget a linear form of relationships through which we earn the endorsement of a social consumer, but to foster a community, we have to continue to do so. This introduces a peer-to-peer (P2P) dynamic in which rather than program our Facebook activity from a top-down perspective, we now have to consider an active participatory role in earning likes, attention, and hopefully advocacy much more frequently than we may have initially anticipated.

Success begins with a plan, which serves as a road map to reach customers and those who influence them. On the road to success, it is wise to refer to the map routinely to ensure that we stay on course. Doing so reminds us why we're here in the first place.

The roles of the social consumer are distinct and the reasons for connecting with a brand are equally diversified. It's our job to cater to each segment to earn their likes and attention now and over time.

Facebook is changing the way we think about business, customers and community and as such, there's much to learn. Everything begins at the beginning, and together, we will earn relevance and expand business opportunities in a new social marketplace one like at a time.

FROM E-COMMERCE TO F-COMMERCE

Mark Zuckerberg describes Facebook as a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, families, and co-workers. Indeed, Facebook is so much more than a social network. As a social utility, it changes the dynamics of relationships, how we communicate with one another, and how we discover, share, and learn. Facebook and social media are redesigning the information superhighway, forever altering how information travels and how people connect. The world is literally becoming a much smaller place and as a result, businesses are forced to compete for attention where it's focused. Otherwise, the concepts of digital darwinism and the need to engage or die most certainly become reality—out of sight, out of mind.

If Facebook is a social utility, then we can use it to engage, to foster a thriving community in which its denizens expect information to find them. The future of business is social and it's giving rise to a new genre of connected consumers, who are becoming influential in their own right.

As a platform, Facebook invites businesses to build a presence and design an engagement architecture that introduces a new opportunity to also grow in prominence and connections, thus defining, and socializing, the next chapter in business. A chapter in which commonplace terms such as share, like, comment, and add become the pillars for triggering a social tsunami of meaningful business touchpoints and outcomes.

It's not about simply having a presence, it's about fostering relationships with people and the varying contingents of consumerism they represent.

As such, Facebook brings to the life the need to integrate a fifth P into the marketing mix, People. And, with the rise of the social consumer, Facebook and social media in general, also introduce a new C into the Four Cs of community: Commerce.

While it may appear that we're progressing through the alphabet here, from E to F, Facebook represents an important platform to engage and activate the social consumer. F-commerce is the ability to execute transactions in Facebook without leaving the network or leveraging the open graph by integrating Facebook into traditional site-based e-commerce platforms. And more importantly, it ties each transaction to the social graph. With each exchange, an update is broadcast to the news feed of their contacts. This potentially sparks a social effect and may ultimately influence impressions and decisions over time.

Levi's, for example, introduced a Friends Store on its website that showcases the jeans that your friends have liked and also allows you to share the jeans you like. This introduces a peer-to-peer influence model through which we influence and are influenced by those we trust. Levi's is betting the denim that the more we interact within its Friends Store, the more people we will be introduced to it simply through our interaction. Doing so creates a bridge between the Web and Social Web, content and relationships, thus socializing the objects that move us.

The natural step for Levi's is to also recreate that experience within Facebook. With Facebook Tabs, the opportunity to create a Friends Store within Facebook exists now, as does the means to introduce a sophisticated, engaging, and fully functional storefront. There is debate as to why brands would willfully sacrifice traffic to its dotcom. In my experience, this comes down to the unique touchpoints that connect brands to traditional consumers and social consumers respectively. With the social consumer, attention comes at a premium and there are great advantages in capturing attention where and when it's focused.

1–800-Flowers.com hosts a shoplet within Facebook through which consumers can browse through arrangements and order without leaving Facebook.

Early in 2010, Procter & Gamble experimented with a storefront for Pantene, through which consumers could purchase products before they were introduced in stores. Not only did this approach integrate F-commerce into the social equation, it satisfied two of the top reasons consumers consistently report why they follow and like brands in social media: access to exclusive products and rewards or discounts as a benefit of the connection.

FACEBOOK TABS ARE THE NEW WEB PAGES

As in computing, hitting the keys ALT and TAB allows us to switch the windows we have open on the desktop. In Facebook, Tabs unlock Facebook's customization features. Whereas storefronts can take residence as a designated destination within the Facebook brand page, additional tabs can offer discrete engagement opportunities to appeal to the diverse roles of social consumers. Like traditional websites, tabs are the Social Web pages for dedicated experiences. And, not everything has to be related to marketing or promotions.

While we see many companies using tabs to increase likes through contests and promotions, the effect of tabs are limited only by vision, creativity, and execution. Most notably, each tab can assume the position of a landing page, which is intended to visualize the most current initiatives for each brand whether it's aimed at existing or new likes or both. This means tabs are assignable as landing pages, rather than sending people directly to The Wall, where specific content, stories, or programs are presented upon visiting the brand page.

The Facebook presence architected by Dunkin’ Donuts is designed to serve a variety of business objectives. The current landing page is promoting the “Ultimate DD Coffee Fan Contest.”

Just to the right of this tab, Dunkin’ Donuts presents Marice, a creative application that brings an espresso bean to life and encourages you to customize messages to send to friends.

To encourage customer advocacy and loyalty, Dunkin’ Donuts includes a landing page for its DDPerks program. Again, the experience is maintained within Facebook. This program can scale, should Dunkin’ Donuts desire, to include an all-inclusive database that allows customers to access their Dunkin’ Donuts’ account in Facebook.

I should also note, that Dunkin’ Donuts also uses the left side of the page to recognize its fan of the week. Spotlighting customers is among the most appreciated and effective social sparks that ignite beneficial sharing and conversations.

This is merely a small taste of what's possible with the structured customization Facebook supports. Perhaps one of the most understated aspects of tabs is that Facebook Markup Language supports website analytics code from major publishers. In my work, we often use Google Analytics to measure the activity of each page and how visitors interact and travel to and from the brand page.

MADISON AVE. IS MOVING TO CALIFORNIA AVE.

Contrary to popular opinion, Facebook ads do indeed work. In fact, when designed with relevance to specific social graphs and actively managed, Facebook ads perform extremely well. As in anything, there are best practices that one can follow, but in the end, it takes an intrinsic understanding of the people you're trying to reach and what compels them to click, understanding that in a network in which people are at the center of their own egosystem, personalization and incentives serve as pivotal social hooks. Remember, it's not about who likes you today, it's about reaching those individuals who represent tomorrow's likes. And, it's perpetual.

I'm currently running a diverse ad campaign for a client in which each of the pages on the brand page benefits from a series of ads designed to spark interest in designated content and experience inherent within each. For this program, we created a rotating campaign of 29 pieces of engaging creative that changes weekly or every other week—depending on performance. I might add that we are on a tight budget, so conversions are key to ensuring the longevity of the program. Thus, I monitor conversions not only from clicks to likes (C2L), but also conversions of likes to actions (L2A). Each page is intended to spur a unique action and is embedded in the experience. Using conversion science, we can change or enhance ads and each tab to improve performance.