Chapter 2

Building a Following and Running a Facebook Marketing Campaign

IN THIS CHAPTER

Building a loyal following for your business

Connecting with friends and followers

Adding Facebook to marketing campaigns

Implementing and marketing Facebook campaigns

Crowdsourcing to promote your contest

Building your business page for the campaign

Understanding Facebook’s promotion rules

Social media is about connecting with friends and followers. When marketing a business in the Facebook world, people often focus on how many friends and followers they have. The fact is, if you have friends and followers but have no influence over them, you might be wasting your time and marketing dollars.

Success on Facebook is about building an audience that is listening. Better yet, it’s about building a network of influence, in which you influence not just the people in your own audience but their friends and connections as well. In the following sections, we give you practical advice on how to increase engagement with your current customers and how to attract new customers.

Although this chapter focuses on building your business using your business page, much of the advice here is useful for individuals who are just looking to up their game on Facebook and have a more popular personal timeline. Of course, if you’re promoting your business or branding your business on Facebook, you should abide by the Facebook terms of service and create a business page instead of using your personal timeline for your business.

When starting your Facebook marketing, you’ll probably find out how to build your audience, make connections with your audience, and nurture those connections so that they become loyal friends and followers.

After you’ve built a foundation with your business page audience, you likely need to give it a boost to take things to a higher level. A little shaking of the trees is required to let people know that it’s worth connecting with your company on Facebook. Social marketing campaigns are a great way to do this. A social campaign enables you to reach people who you will not likely capture the attention of through daily interaction.

Campaigns tap into crowdsourcing, or using the resources that the public (the crowd) can provide to accomplish more than what you or your team can do with the resources you have. The word is a play on the word outsource, which is to look for a service provider outside your organization to deliver a service.

In this chapter, you find out how to start a social marketing campaign. You also discover how to build your business page to best show off your campaign and draw in fans to enter your promotion.

Understanding the Importance of Engagement

When people Like your business page, they value a connection with your company, at least to some degree. That connection has to have some meaning. The more you can humanize your brand, the more value you will get out of your marketing efforts. This is achieved through engagement.

You can’t build engagement without some human effort behind your Facebook marketing. You can automate a lot, but at the end of the day, people are looking to connect with other people. When customers feel that your company values the personal connection to them, they are more likely to do business with you.

Don’t forget about being top of mind. If customers have several choices when buying a product or service, all things being equal, whoever they remember gets the business. This is one big reason why engagement on your business page is so important. Consumers tend to have a higher level of trust for a brand if they’re more familiar with it by name or experience. This certainly presents a good case for having a presence on Facebook, but all the more for having an active presence where you engage with your consumers. Figure 2-1 shows an example of how Amy’s Kitchen reached out to its customers to meet a need. Customers commented and felt connected to the brand.

image

Source: Facebook

FIGURE 2-1: Creating meaningful connections.

Facebook and other social media sites have fostered a social media–driven world where people expect to be able to interact with their favorite brands. Some of this will happen automatically if you have wide enough name recognition. Some will happen only as you nurture your customer connections. When you nurture those customer connections, they become better customers and recommend you to their friends.

Building friends and followers for your business

You won’t have a successful experience with Facebook for your business if you don’t make the effort to build an audience. Building an audience starts with inviting people to Like your business page. The next steps are to get some interaction from the people that Like your business page and turn them into loyal followers who will tell their friends about you.

Here are a few ways to start building a following for your business:

  • Start in house: When you first launch your business page, one of the most important things to do is get the ball rolling. People like to be where the party is, and having a starting group helps! Look to the people already involved with your company. Start by inviting everyone in your company to Like the business page. From there, each employee or partner can ask their personal friends to Like the business page as well.

  • Ask and invite: No one is going to find your business page if they don’t know to look for it, so it’s a good idea to take every opportunity to share Facebook with your customers. It seems too easy, but a simple “Please Like our business page” really does work. Incorporate a link to your business page in your e-newsletter reminding your customers to Like your business page on Facebook. You’ll get a good number of people who are happy to click the Like button and be the first among your Facebook audience. If you hand customers a receipt, put your Facebook address on the receipt, or hand them a card with your Facebook address. At the very least, remind them verbally to find you on Facebook and be sure to Like the business page.

    tip Keep the ticker in the back of your mind, too. When you have several people Liking your business page at the same time, the ticker shows more Facebook Like activity, increasing the chance that a friend of someone who Likes your page will also Like your business page.

  • Use custom tabs: A custom static HTML iframe tab enables you to have content that is only for people who Like your page. When you create a custom iframe tab, you have the opportunity to create more incentives for becoming a friend or follower. For example, you can create a tab that invites potential fans to Like your business page and then download a coupon, a white paper related to your niche, or even a short e-book. Giving potential friends and followers a reason to Like your business page is easy with a custom tab.

  • Use contests and sweepstakes: By giving something away, or asking a question with the winner receiving a prize, or using games or any other creative way to get engagement, your friends and followers feel more involved with your brand and business. And those who don’t already Like your page may be drawn in when they see the activity of their friends who do Like your business page in their news feed or ticker.

    warning Facebook has strict guidelines for hosting contests and sweepstakes on its platform. You can check out the guidelines at www.facebook.com/page_guidelines.php - promotionsguidelines. Breaking the rules could mean losing your business page!

  • Make a difference: A business was launching a business page for the first time. In an effort to create some buzz and get a burst of new followers, the customer launched a campaign to donate a dollar to a local charity for every Like on its business page within a certain time. The charity was promoting the campaign, and so were all the company’s employees. The customer increased his Facebook audience by giving potential followers a compelling reason to Like his business page.

Connecting with your friends and followers

You need to connect with your friends and followers, but how do you keep up if you have a large audience? You can connect with your Facebook friends and followers in many ways; you’re not just limited to making comments and posts.

The following list provides a few ideas that you can use to connect with your friends and followers:

  • Ask questions. It’s not about you; it’s about your audience. The best thing you can do for your Facebook engagement is to ask questions of your Facebook friends and followers. When you give them a chance to talk, not only do they take a step in engaging with you, but their activity shows up in their friends' ticker. When their friends see that activity, they may be more likely to check out your business page and become a follower.
  • Encourage them to check back later. You want your friends and followers to be repeat visitors. Sometimes it’s just a matter of letting your fans know that more is coming tomorrow. How about posing a riddle of the day, and offering the answer the next day, along with a new riddle? With your business page’s Pin feature, you can pin the daily riddle, question, or discussion to the top of your business page. Or you could create a new cover photo each week with a new question. If your fans come to expect a new cover photo on a certain day each week, you encourage them to visit your business page regularly.

  • Comment on other business pages as your business page. A one-sided conversation isn't much fun, is it? It’s important to remember that if you want people to interact with you, you also need to interact with them. You can even comment as your business page rather than your personal timeline.

    Figure 2-2 shows how someone commented on another business page’s status update as his company Crowdshifter. By commenting as his business page instead of himself, he’s introducing his brand to potential followers.

    remember You can’t comment on personal timelines when you’re using Facebook as your page; you can interact only on another business page.

    The value of commenting as your business page is making mutual connections by connecting with other businesses and building connections with some of their followers. This may lead to some of their followers choosing to check out your business page to find out more about your business.

  • Be a real person. It’s okay to let your personality shine through on your business page. Be funny, be serious, be professional. You know your goals and your audience and know what they can handle. Bring a little of yourself to your business page!

    If you have multiple people in your office who update the business page, have them sign their updates with their name. Your followers will start to recognize your employees (and their personalities) and will feel a stronger connection with your entire company.

    tip If you have a large audience, you can’t always talk one-on-one with them all. Start by focusing on the influencers and those who are most engaging. You'll still project a human brand to your audience, even to those who aren’t commenting directly with you.

image

Source: Facebook

FIGURE 2-2: Commenting as a business page.

Integrating Facebook in Marketing Campaigns

If you own a business, you know that finding and increasing your audience is essential for long-term success because those connections are the ones that lead to repeat business and referrals. As your Facebook audience grows, take advantage of the opportunity to build loyalty with those who connect with your company.

With a successful Facebook marketing strategy, you still use traditional marketing tactics. If Facebook proves to be a strong platform for your company, use outside marketing campaigns as a tool to drive new connections to Facebook. Do this by making Facebook the ultimate call to action. If your primary goal is to build an audience for long-term sales and customer loyalty, a call to action that leads them to Facebook is ideal.

Promoting Facebook via traditional advertising

You can advertise your company or product in many ways. With traditional advertising, your goal is to be seen by potential customers so that they know who you are and will choose to buy your product. Advertising is always more memorable if the person you reach takes some kind of action.

tip In addition to creating a memory, creating a database is important too. Advertising can be expensive. Not only do you want customers to buy your product today, you want them to buy again tomorrow. For example, after a car dealership sells a car to a customer, the next challenge is to get the customer to refer new customers to the dealership. And the next challenge is to get the customer back for service on his or her vehicle. If you can convince this loyal customer to connect with your business page, the person becomes part of your database from which you can ask for repeat business or encourage referrals. This is why promoting your business page within your traditional marketing is so valuable.

The following list gives tips to promote your business page using traditional marketing:

  • Billboard ads: If your marketing campaign is going to reach a broad audience in a concentrated city (or several cities), a billboard may be part of your marketing strategy. Driving people to your business page from a billboard is challenging. Billboards only allow for a simple message, and a long URL might be difficult. If your company name is unique, it might be more effective to invite people to find you by searching your company name. Do this by telling people, “Search for us by name on Facebook.” A more common name may make that difficult though. For example, Blazefly might be fairly unique and therefore easy to find in a search. On the other hand, something like Bob’s Car Care may be the name of several places and it may be difficult to find the correct one in a Facebook search.

    tip Keep in mind that Facebook search is literal. If you search for blaze fly instead of blazefly, you won’t find the business page. The capitalization isn’t important, but the spaces are. As a business page owner, you want to be sure to title your business page in the way that you think people will search for it.

  • Print ads and handouts: Someone who discovers your company in a favorite magazine or receives a handout has a little more time to read your message. Print ads and handouts are perhaps the easiest ways to get a message across because you can provide ample information. Often times, incorporating the Facebook logo and colors helps to make it more clear that your business page can be found on Facebook.

  • Free samples: People love getting free samples before they decide to make a purchase. One really powerful way to build a database is by offering a free sample to anyone who requests it. You can create an iframe tab that hosts a contact form where people submit their contact information to receive a free sample.

    remember Make sure that the actual form is just in the Like-only section, so that people have to Like your business page to access it.

  • The secret password: If you’ve found a website that makes sense for you to advertise on, driving people with a good call to action is critical. You don’t just want them to see the ad; you want them to click and take action. Imagine your company is a credit counseling service, and you’re offering a free initial credit evaluation session. Your advertisement could say, “Click to go to our business page and get the secret password to redeem your free initial session.” With this, you have the opportunity to use a fans-only iframe tab that provides the password. You get people who are interested in your services, and they become Facebook followers at the same time.

Having a memorable URL

When you share your Facebook URL as a call to action, it needs to be memorable. For example, if you’re advertising on a billboard, your audience has a few seconds to read your ad. If the URL is a long destination, you may not get any traffic.

tip Get a custom Facebook username (also called a vanity URL) for your business page. You can read up on how that works at www.facebook.com/notes/equine-calculator/how-to-claim-your-vanity-url-for-your-facebook-page/474147772600069. After you have a vanity URL for your business page, it’s a lot easier to tell people where to find you. If your company name is not conducive to being memorable in the form of a Facebook URL, try a typical web URL and redirect it to your business page. You can even redirect the URL to a specific tab, because Facebook tabs each have a unique URL.

You can buy a URL from NameCheap (www.namecheap.com), among other places. These services always have a simple function to allow you to direct your web address to any other page.

remember When creating your marketing materials, use the proper URL address. Make sure it’s the URL you see when looking at your business page the way your fans view it, not your home screen where you look at your news feed.

Using apps to build influence

Using third-party apps can help strengthen your engagement with your friends and followers because you can customize specific functions and characteristics into your business page. Apps can provide a variety of functions if you have the resources to develop them. For example, if you provide efficient heating and air equipment, you could build a home efficiency calculator app that allows users to find out how they can lower their heating bills. The idea with this is to generate more influence with your fans by providing value.

Apps should, of course, be relevant to your business and the people you want to attract. For example, if your business is an arcade, how about having a game that fans can play right on your business page? If you aren’t ready to invest in developing (or even repurposing) a customized app, you can use several simpler apps to customize your business page and provide value.

Outsourcing your Facebook management

When running a business (especially as the owner), you have to balance your many tasks and determine the best use of your time. The question comes up frequently, “Is it okay to outsource social media to an expert?” You will always be best at serving your customers, but there are arguments for both sides of this conversation.

Outsourced social media marketing

When you outsource your social media (such as content creation and daily management), your biggest benefit is that you can hire someone who is familiar with the tools and how to effectively use them. Social media consultants usually end up in the business because they enjoy social media and are natural at executing social networking and communications.

The negative is that they are likely serving several clients at the same time and can’t spend all their time on your company. Another negative is that they may not be fully familiar with your company, its culture, and its goals. It may take an outside resource weeks or months to learn the nitty-gritty of your business and your audience the way you do.

Finally, be sure you’re working with a person or agency that truly understands the space. Many agencies say they can handle a social media campaign but either aren’t aware of Facebook’s basic terms of service or ignore them because they’ve seen others ignore them. If you’re building a reputation on Facebook, you want to be sure the people helping you aren’t hurting your brand’s integrity.

In-house social media marketing

In-house people often find that their jobs can call them to many different activities. It’s rare when someone can direct his or her full attention to just social media engagement, especially if the responsible party is the owner of the business. A business owner almost always has more immediate “fires” to put out, so social media management gets put on the back burner. For this reason, in-house Facebook management needs to come with discipline.

The connections and influence you build yield great long-term value. The biggest benefit of managing social media in-house is that you are always your best advocate and the best person to connect with your customers.

Comprehending What Makes Social Marketing Campaigns Work

The goal of a social marketing campaign is to increase your business page engagement, followers, and awareness. The most successful campaigns are interesting enough to your followers that they’re willing to do more than just read your status updates in their news feeds. Both Fanta (www.facebook.com/fanta/posts/285086828227700) and Red Bull (https://apps.facebook.com/red-bull-tt/) used their business pages to create complicated but fun scavenger hunts that rewarded interaction. We want to point out, though, that the rewards weren’t always physical prizes. Often just completing a task — if it’s interesting or challenging enough — is enough. In the case of Fanta, fans worked together to help a cartoon character find her way through the business page time warp. Red Bull followers had to follow intricate clues to win prizes. Both companies were promoting awareness about their brand by enticing friends and followers to explore their business pages, but the tasks kept followers’ attention.

Another type of campaign that businesses often use on Facebook is a promotion (this is what Facebook calls contests and giveaways). Facebook has specific guidelines in place for promotions. You can find them at www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php.

Regardless of the type of campaign you choose to run, here are some of the defining characteristics that make a social marketing campaign work:

  • Interactivity: In many instances, the audience you want to reach isn’t the audience you already have; it’s their friends. To reach that audience, you need to entice your current friends and followers to share your content with their friends. Most Facebook users share only funny, useful, or interesting content. Regardless of the type of campaign you intend to implement, the content associated with it must be worth sharing.

    Another interactive option is to include a voting component in a promotion. For instance, if you host a contest that requires each contestant to get votes to win, they are incentivized to invite people to your business page to help them win. You should note that contests should always be hosted on a third-party application.

  • Incentive: Giving people an incentive to take action is a must. As we said earlier, if your campaign is engaging enough, the act of completing a task or solving a problem may be enough. On the other hand, your friends and followers will likely be motivated if they have the opportunity to win something exciting.

    The nature of the prize can depend on the type of campaign, your goals for the campaign, and your desired reach. For example, invite your followers to submit a video of themselves interacting with your product. You aren’t likely to get people to create their own dramatic video (and edit it) if there is only a chance that they could receive a prize worth $250. However, people would certainly upload a simple picture for such a prize. As with everything, it’s important to know your audience. The value of the prize varies with different types of product industries and people.

  • Followers-only content: When you offer followers-only content, you require that the visitors Like your business page before they can access the content, for example, a video or a white paper. For example, Figure 2-3 is a Welcome page you see if you haven't Liked the Microsoft business page. After you click Like, an animation plays.
  • Datacapture: One of the most important goals from a business perspective is to capture data. That data may simply be Likes or more specific information such as a name, an email address, or demographics. The purpose of acquiring this information is to understand your current audience and build a larger audience with whom you can continue to connect. When you know your audience and can cater to their needs and interests, you can build the relationship.
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Source: Facebook

FIGURE 2-3: Invite friends and followers to Like your business page.

Identifying Types of Facebook Campaigns

When you decide that you want to conduct a Facebook campaign, the next step is to determine the campaign's structure. If your sole goal is to earn space in the mind of current and potential customers, just about any form of campaign might work. A more specific goal requires a particular campaign concept.

tip Consider lead ads to collect leads and connect with the people who want to hear about your business without leaving Facebook. Check out www.facebook.com/business/news/lead-ads-launch.

Here are some of the most common features of Facebook campaigns:

  • Voting contests: A voting contest is based on people entering a contest — usually by producing something — and getting votes for their entry. Photo contests are a common, time-tested concept for voting contests. Facebook requires that you use a third-party app to conduct this contest.

    Facebook’s terms of service state that you can’t require anyone to take a specific Facebook action to participate in the contest. For example, you can’t define Liking a post as a form of voting.

  • Sweepstakes: In a sweepstakes, participants enter the sweepstakes and a winner is determined by a random drawing. The downside is that the sharing component is not as strong in this format. With other sorts of contests (especially voting contests), you often rule out some participants simply because they aren’t confident that they have a chance to win. In a sweepstakes, each contestant has an equal chance of winning in most cases. For this reason, you could attract more entries, even if you don’t get as much voting traffic to your business page.
  • Fundraisers: A fundraising campaign is not necessarily a competition. Fundraisers promote the opportunity to do good by giving to a charity and inviting others to do the same. For example, you might offer to donate $1 for every Like your business page receives in a certain period of time. Fundraising through Facebook campaigns helps you spread the word in a lot of the same ways that contests do. Sometimes charities will form teams to encourage a little friendly competition in raising funds.

  • Facebook as a landing page: Almost any marketing campaign benefits from having a landing page. A landing page is where you direct people with your call to action. For instance, you could direct visitors to a page where they can request free samples or sign up for your email newsletter. Because the web is such a critical part of marketing, a landing page should be part of any campaign. Email marketing messages often have a corresponding landing page (or several, depending on the content of the message).

    Using Facebook as a landing page simply puts the leads or customers you attract with your advertising in the path of your business page. This technique could be a simple way to increase your Facebook audience while targeting another goal. The best way to execute this is by directing a customized web address directly to your Facebook page tab. Create a unique URL that you place in your advertising message (something like “Find out more at www.ourlandingpage.com”), and then direct that URL to your page tab. Each page tab has its own web address (something like www.facebook.com/mypagename?sk=app_7146470129).

Implementing Sharing Contests

Facebook contests have many variations, but one thing they all have in common is an ask, or a call to action. The call to action might be to complete a form, upload a picture, or nominate a charity. If your ask is only to complete an entry form for the contest, implementation of the campaign might be easy. If participants must create a video, complete the form as they upload, and promote the contest to their friends and ask them to vote, your ask is clearly more complicated. If the latter is the case, you face the potential of abandonment, when people begin to enter your contest but then abandon the process, presumably because the effort to enter outweighed the potential reward.

Photo and video contests are popular forms of contests. People often love to share their photos and videos, especially when they might win something. Here are some of the things you need to know about photo and video contests:

  • Get a third-party app to host the contest. Facebook has strict rules about not using any Facebook features (such as clicking Like or commenting) as a means of entry. Third-party apps allow you to manage the entry and hosting of the contest. A well-known third-party app that follows the Facebook rules is Offerpop (www.offerpop.com), which allows you to implement a video or photo contest for your business page.

    remember Because Facebook requires that promotions be run within third-party applications, promotions can be run only on business pages and not on personal timelines. All third-party applications are installed on a page tab (also called an application page). Page tabs display content through iframes, which means that the content itself (like the contest app and images) is hosted on a separate site, and your page tab displays that content.

  • Include clear instructions for how to participate. Demonstrating visually always helps, so use some visual aids. You could even make a video describing how easy it is to enter.

  • Market to the right crowd. Video contests are more complicated than photo contests, because putting together a video is more work than taking a photo. Be sure that the people to whom you market are likely to have a video camera and are comfortable producing a video. Many can shoot some video with a smartphone; however, some people are still intimidated by the idea of shooting a video. Video contests also work best when you clearly describe what you want in a video. You don’t want people to be overwhelmed with the challenge of scripting.

    Photo contests, although simpler by nature, require the same clear concept as video contests. A cutest puppy contest is a simple concept. Make sure that your concept is something that people can easily understand.

  • Compare voting versus judges to select the winner. Gathering votes is a great way to incentivize friends and followers to invite people to see the entries and select their favorite. This method is a great way to attract new followers; however, in some cases, it may not be the ideal method. Do you want people to vote by clicking a button or by entering information? If you ask for information (such as a nomination or an email address), you’re likely to get less traffic but more engaged traffic. Make your decision based on the goals of your contest.

Both Wildfire and Offerpop support all the preceding features.

Getting a good response

One of the biggest fears you may have at the beginning of a Facebook contest is whether you will get a good response. When you’ve invested a lot of time and effort (and sometimes money) in a Facebook campaign, it would be a big letdown if it falls flat. You never know what is going to be a bang-up success and what isn’t, but if you follow some best practices, you can certainly start with confidence.

warning Consider the balance of effort versus reward. More appropriately, consider the perceived effort versus perceived reward. It doesn’t matter how easy it is to enter your contest or how exciting you believe it is; if entering appears too difficult, you won’t have a successful response. If the incentive or reward doesn’t interest the people that you reach, you may not have the success you desire.

tip The following tips will help you find the right balance so you can be sure to get a great response for your contest:

  • Private information: People are often willing to give their home address, phone number, email address, and so on if there is context for doing so. For example, if you ask people to enter your promotion to have their profile pictures featured as the face of your company, and you also ask for a home address, you may have a lower response because people feel that the information you’re asking for isn’t necessary. If capturing home addresses is important, offer a prize that must be sent in the mail.

  • Relevant messaging: When determining your contest concept, be sure that your contest message and your business message align. For example, if your company prides itself on providing the highest quality to discriminating buyers, any message that enforces discounts or free products is inconsistent with your business message.

    Contests can be a great way to reinforce a brand message. The components of that message are often embedded throughout the entire contest and its marketing materials. Use contests to enforce a message you want to get across to your customers. For example, if you make paper products and want to position yourself as a company committed to green products, consider a contest that asks people to show how they too are green. In a photo contest, for example, you may ask participants to “upload a picture of you wearing all green” or “show us your best tips on being green.”

  • Easy entry: Instructions for entering the contest should be clear. Use a simple call to action and limit what activities you ask participants to perform. Every barrier you put in place has a potential of eliminating entries. For example, if you host your contest through a third-party Facebook contest application that requires users to allow the app access to their Facebook accounts, and then they have to complete an entry form, you will have fewer participants than you would if you eliminate one of those steps.

    As a general rule, the best first action (other than clicking to your contest landing tab) should be filling out a basic information form. On this form, include fields for only the minimum amount of information that you need.

    tip If additional steps are necessary, make the steps something participants can do after they’ve submitted the form. If you give participants a percentage of completion, they are more likely to complete the steps because it feels unfinished.

  • Simple messaging: Share a clear message that leaves nothing to conjecture. The longer your contest description, the fewer people will bother to read it. Be aware that some of your audience is going to find out about the contest through someone sharing it on a Facebook status update or other channel (such as Twitter). Make sure that your concept is something that can be summed up in as few words as possible.

Avoiding a flopped contest

Sometimes, no matter what you do, you just don’t get people to participate as quickly as you would like. One of the best ways to avoid this situation is to make sure that you don’t launch a contest without a strong network to invite to participate. Sometimes personally asking your customers to enter is a great way to get the ball rolling. For example, an HVAC service company asked every one of their technicians to invite their customers to enter their Facebook contest after each appointment. Putting a little extra attention on promoting your contest at the beginning makes a big difference.

warning Some people feel that it’s okay to ask a few customers or friends that you know personally to enter a contest to get things started. Others feel that this gives people an unfair advantage or otherwise less genuine entries. Regardless of your feelings on the matter, be sure that you never seed a contest with falsified entries to make it seem like there’s lots of interest.

Marketing a Facebook Contest

Initially, you might think that posting status updates telling people about your Facebook contest is enough. It isn’t. The primary reason to conduct a Facebook contest is to increase the interaction that you get from your friends and followers, as well as increase your audience by attracting new followers. A Facebook marketing campaign in most cases involves more than just Facebook to make it happen.

Facebook works well with other forms of digital marketing. Sure, sometimes if you have a strongly engaged and interested audience, you might be able to post one status update and see it turn into a major success. Most times, however, you have to use other resources as well.

The following list provides advice on how to market your campaign and make it a success:

  • Announce your campaign to your email list. Suppose that you send out a monthly newsletter. The content of that newsletter should highlight your Facebook contest and drive people directly to it. The cross-promotion of email to Facebook and Facebook to email makes your connection to your audience much stronger and more effective.

    Some best practices include putting a graphic right at the top of the email and linking it to the desired landing page. Note that you can link directly to the page with its unique URL. Find this in your browser address bar when you view the tab on which your contest is hosted. You may have made it your default landing page, but that applies only for followers.

  • Pass out cards at the counter. If your business is in retail or any other business in which you see customers’ faces, give them a small card that promotes the contest. Include a hook that gets them interested in checking out the contest. They have to be interested enough to remember to check out the contest later.

    Alternatively, you can place a QR code by the register so customers can scan it with their smartphones.

  • Post your campaign on your website. Make sure an invitation to join the contest obviously stands out on the home page of your site, and remember to link directly to the contest page on Facebook. When people visit your website, the first thing they see should be a contest announcement. This way, you can convert some of your web traffic into engaged Facebook followers.
  • Find a partner. Finding a partner (also called comarketing) is perhaps the most powerful method in promoting a Facebook contest. If you sell custom wheels and another company sells customized car parts, you can be pretty certain that you have nearly the same type of people in your target audience — people who take pride in their cars and may want to make their cars ready for show. You’re lucky, because this audience is already interested in sharing with friends. The winner of the contest might get his or her car fully outfitted with the two companies’ products. By doing this, you promote the contest on both business pages, both email lists, and so on. You'll likely expand each company’s following just by cross-promoting.

Eyeing the Power of Crowdsourcing

One of the greatest reasons to conduct social media campaigns is because of the power of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing can yield great ideas and help to expand your reach.

Using crowdsourcing to create a new product

Suppose a company that sells T-shirts with clever puns wants to introduce a new design. However, the company doesn't have a new design to announce. So they put together a Facebook contest with the following two stages:

  1. Invite Facebook friends and followers to help determine the new slogan for the T-shirt.
  2. Invite Facebook friends and followers to help create a concept for the new shirt’s graphic.

The new T-shirt is released in a few weeks at a big event that many customers attend. The contest was a grand success for a number of reasons:

  • The company uncovered many new ideas for the new T-shirt design. Ultimately, the company was able to simultaneously test the design's popularity before printing the T-shirts.
  • The company increased its Facebook following because it gave people a compelling reason to visit the business page.
  • The new T-shirt design sold better because Facebook fans already had a vested interest in the shirt. The new product raised specific awareness and attracted new buyers.
  • The crowd was part of the creation of a new product, which sent the message that the company values its customers.

Using crowdsourcing to determine your Facebook content

One of the greatest challenges is keeping your Facebook followers interested and engaged in the content that you provide on a daily basis. Discussion keeps people interested. Let your Facebook followers tell you what they’re interested in, and allow them to lead the conversation. This is where crowdsourcing comes in. A contest or campaign can help you attract the interaction that will launch that sort of activity with your Facebook followers.

People like to be valued, and people tend to like the idea of being featured or recognized. One way to do this is to ask your Facebook fans to start a conversation about your company on your business page. Maybe you could ask your fans for a new slogan for your company or what they like best about your business. This invitation to engage in conversation might prompt participation from your audience without requiring that you award a prize.

Preparing Your Business Page for the Campaign

Make sure your business page is ready for any contest or campaign that you implement. Campaigns can be simple or structured. Regardless, the most important aspect is making sure that people know that you have a campaign. The following sections describe how you can prepare for your campaign.

Your cover photo

If possible, the theme of your business page should match your branding. When you conduct a campaign, you may want to tweak the cover photo design to highlight a theme, but you’ll still want to keep your branding. For example, a Christmas photo of the week contest might feature holiday colors or other images to give the campaign a holiday theme, but keep your brand’s logo or other defining characteristic on the photo as well.

The cover photo is a great way to highlight your campaign while still branding the look of your business page. For example, you might include bells and holiday colors for a holiday campaign, or pictures of dogs and cats for a cutest pet photo contest. Remember that your cover photo is 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels tall. (Facebook prohibits calls to action on the cover photo, such as “Enter Now,” so be sure to use the photo only for branding and design aspects.)

A custom tab

You host your contest on an page tab. It’s best to have a custom page for the contest that shows only a preview to nonfollowers and the full version to followers (refer to Figure 2-3). When visitors click Like, they see another view of the tab. You can utilize this setting when you create a custom Facebook tab.

By setting up separate tabs for followers and nonfollowers, you save some content for followers, thereby giving nonfollowers one more reason to become a follower. More importantly, when your campaign attracts tons of traffic, you can gain more of those visitors as followers. It’s important to note again that you can’t have the entry come by way of visitors Liking your business page; the entry must happen in the third-party app.

Contact forms

Using a contact form extends your lead capture beyond only people Liking your page. Facebook contests are a great way to increase your email list as well.

You embed a contact form in your Facebook tab in the same way you embed HTML on most websites. Using the Static HTML app, you can simply place your code in the fields. You don’t have to know how to create a form — several services offer easily built forms. We recommend Formstack (www.formstack.com) because its service has many functions that enable you to create lead capture forms, including database storage for the data, and connect it to your favorite email marketing services.

Canvas apps

Canvas apps are different than the common page tabs that are part of your business page. A canvas app enables the owner of the page to occupy the entire screen in the context of the application. This screen includes the ticker, which updates with activity from the application, as well as other similar applications.

Canvas apps are 760 pixels wide, which allows for a reasonable amount of content; however, it’s just shy of the 810-pixel width of the page tabs in your business page.

Setting up a canvas app can enable an interactive experience between users. This feature is most useful when your contest involves a game or something that can display real-time activity in the app. One distinct disadvantage is that canvas apps redirect your fans to an alternative URL, such as http://apps.facebook.com/wordswithfriends instead of www.facebook.com/wordswithfriends. This means your visitors may have a few seconds of wait time as the canvas app loads.

Canvas apps are great when more page space is necessary (or when you need to enhance the quality of your campaign). Offerpop (http://offerpop.com) is a great third-party tool for setting up a canvas app–based campaign. Figure 2-4 shows the Scrabble canvas app. (Most games are hosted on a canvas app.)

image

Source: Facebook

FIGURE 2-4: A canvas app.

The ticker

One big benefit of a Facebook campaign is the additional visibility created through the activity feed. Specifically, the Facebook ticker, shown in Figure 2-5, displays your friends’ activity on the top-right side of your home screen.

image

Source: Facebook

FIGURE 2-5: The ticker.

Expect the following activity in the ticker:

  • Status updates: If your contest encourages people to post a status update, people will see it in their news feed, but it appears also in the ticker.
  • New business page Likes: Often, contests result in new Likes for your business page. These appear in the ticker as well.
  • Likes and comments: When people Like or comment on a post in your contest, the ticker displays it.
  • Real-time data: All the data you see in the ticker can be seen elsewhere on Facebook. The ticker just displays the data as it happens in real time. This factor might encourage you to carefully time your campaign launch. When you launch a Facebook campaign and everything (your Facebook tab and profile picture) goes live at the same time as your email announcement and Facebook status posts, you may attract more activity through the action showing up in people’s news feeds.
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