Take your Facebook Strategy to the Next Level (Part II)

 
Last week we discussed the first 4 useful guidelines to Take your Facebook Strategy to the Next Level (Part I). Now let’s continue with the last 4. The purpose of a guideline not to simply “copy and paste,” but to actually read and apply the tips that are outlined to get the most from your Social Media Strategy:

5- Participation in Dialog

Interact and engage with followers in a two-way dialog, reflecting customers’ behavior in this medium and encouraging the spread of information through word-of-mouth .

This dialog, however, is not solely happening within our own channels, so we must enable alerts to monitor our brand and related topics of interest being discussed in other areas online (LinkedIn groups, news, forums, blogs, twitter, etc. …). Our goal is to detect these hotspots and key influencers, prioritize  the frequency with which we should participate in each channel (or maybe not), make sure to adapt the language, voice and tone of the messages to the community, and last but no least, add value to the conversation, careful to not be spamming the conversation.

Example of how to bring these external conversations into Facebook can be seen using our Twitter or RSS Feed applications, to bring these streams onto your Facebook page and utilize the power of blogs and Twitter, or other updatable content, to widen your reach and encourage people to join the conversation surrounding your brand.

 

6- Enable P2P Interactions

Don’t just post content to your fan page. Encourage peer to peer communications between followers who are genuinely interested in your brand. They are the most active users as well as your key influencers. You will lower support costs, identify customer champions, and build stronger customer relationships. This way, your brand/company will scale and increase the return on your investment.

Our Get Satisfaction application for Facebook fan pages is a perfect example of how to give customers a place right on your own page to ask questions, report problems, share ideas, and give praise without ever having to leave the brand’s page.

7- Foster Advocacy

BE PROACTIVE. This is the holy grail of Facebook. Your brand has to encourage and provide easy ways for fans and followers to share content with others who are not already “following” your channels, and therefore encouraging the viral spread of content leading to the growth of your brand’s community. People like sharing stories, not just content.

Do you have a good example of this? Share it with us!

8- Solicit a Call-to-Action

Have a clear and immediate call to action which invite followers to “take the next step.”

According to Mashable, 51% of consumers said they are more likely to buy a product since becoming a fan on Facebook. We can take advantage of our actual fans and integrate an ecommerce platform to sell our products. Moreover, the evolution of Facebook’s open graph is a big opportunity for marketers:

With the opt-in right to contact me, and everyone else for that matter, who bought “the 2011 Nike MAG shoes,” Nike can then alert me to new shoe stock releases, or even other products they think I might like. They might even add other types of information to their Open Graph node like the closest store locations of where a product is available or which of my Facebook friends bought that item.  All this leads to the consumption of this information which encourages me and other consumers to make decisions that will ultimately make money for the brand.

A great example of this is our newly released Social Catalog application:

 

The content we distribute as well as the interactions we have with our customers happens faster than ever before. Instead of creating huge campaign ideas and seeing them through their conclusion with the hope that they are successful, we recommend borrowing from the agile development methodologies of smaller, more fully formed concepts from which to test and iterate.

Hope all of these tips help you to get the most from your Facebook campaigns!