Facebook Marketing Bootcamp: How Your Business Will Be Better In A Connected World

We usually look to different industry experts for their experience and insights on Facebook Marketing, so it’s nice to finally get best practices directly from Facebook.  Since it’s their product, they can validate what practices really do work and what are meant to be used with their system (though, of course, we can’t forget there’s a definite “sales” element involved in them trying to get us to try their Facebook Ads 🙂 ).  The Facebook Marketing Bootcamp is providing free webinars over the next coming weeks.   Register and you get a free $25 coupon for Facebook Ads, so you might want to register here.Today’s webinar was the first in the series and it was titled “How Your Business Will Be Better In A Connected World”.  It gave a general overview on how Facebook can benefit your business and what technology Facebook has to offer.

Here are some summary notes:

Our lives our made of connections to things we care about: people, songs, hobbies, sports, places – this makes us who we are.

Technology (such as Facebook) brings us closer – transforms how we connect and share our lives – on an ongoing basis.

Benefits to businesses?  They can connect to friends’ friends – through word of mouth.

Stats:

• Word of mouth is twice as likely to cause engagement, 4 times as likely to cause purchase.
• 800 Million on Facebook
• 350 use mobile
• 2 billion posts/day
• 500 million log in
• 250 million photos uploaded

Conversations and sharing are happening in a way never done before

It’s up to you to build essential connections – not just count clicks.  Our job to spark conversations, inspire sharing.

How to Grow Your Business

Pages

• Upload photos and info to express your business
• Engage – this is how you let people know and communicate with your audience – ask questions, exclusive offers.
• FB recommends to connecting to at least 10% of your base – statistically, these are your influencers.
• Updates, photos, events, etc – posts go to their newsfeeds

Ads

• Simple to reach your fans and their friends per ads.
• Utilize Facebook Ads, sponsored stories.  Granular targeting – by interests, local reach.

Sponsored Stories – shows your target audience how their friends interact with businesses.

• Take actions already happening with your page and make it visible by friends’ friends.
• Ads manager – you can turn on sponsored stories
• You want them to always be running – you can boost your reach

Social Plug-ins

• Simple line of code and you can integrate your site with Facebook and its social capabilities
• Have to ask yourself though, “Is it good for my kind of site”
• American Eagle added a “like” button so people can share with their friends.

1-800-Flowers – make sure everything they do is social.  Contests, promos, etc.  Starts every campaign with the question “Is it Social?”

It allows you to communicate with customers on a consistent basis.  Facebook page allows you to blast message to fans already interested.

Increase Facebook fan base by “marrying” offline and online together – in store signs, receipts, etc.  Add “Facebook” info to your offline literature.

Success Stories

How consistent should we post?  There’s no exact science, it’s on a page by page basis.    But there are a couple rules of thumb:

• Post at least once a week
• Set up a post calendar – post certain types of content on certain days to keep users engaged.
• Most effective? It will vary between business to business, but mix it up.
• Put questions in your posts to get feedback.
• Utilize photo/video to grab attention.
• Over time, you will see what kinds of posts gets you the most amount of feedback.