This is Part 2 of a series which is set out to help businesses successfully brand themselves via Facebook in order to ensure the optimum levels of Facebook user engagement! Part 1 of this entry established that it’s important that your brand chooses a good username for their page, they should utilise the company logo as their profile picture, offering promotions via their cover photos, they must fill out the about page, providing links to their main sites and other social media outlets. The recommended posting frequency is at noon or 7 pm on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturdays, in which posts should be as interactive as possible. We now move onto Part 2 which discusses the various other ways to utilise Facebook as a valuable marketing tool.

Photos and videos

As Aaron Lee (2012) has aptly alluded to, a picture paints a thousand words and a Facebook photo is worth much more than that. The brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text, meaning there’s little better ways to grab users attention than by sharing photos, or videos on your page. These photos can be anything from promotional photos/videos or photos that are going to spark conversation and interactivity in a fun and creative way. According to TrackMaven, posts with photos receive 37% more interaction, than posts without! So using photos and videos is key!

Humans of New York provide an excellent example of this where they post photos with stories in the description, this has led to each day users sharing their own stories and photos on the page.

Ikea created the perfect combination of promotion, Facebook branding, and photo uploads when they hosted a wedding for an Australian couple on Valentines day, kitted out with one of IKEAs newer ranges. They invited 80 random Facebook fans to the hour long ceremony, which they posted various photos of on Facebook. These photos showed off the wedding as well as showing off IKEA’s new range in a way that text never could.

Obviously you wouldn’t only post irrelevant photos or videos but it’s a great way to add a human feel to your brand, making it more accessible for users and potential customers. Not only this but as 29% of users like a page on Facebook for fun and entertainment, according to Social Media Examiners study, this is a good way to play into these elements without increasing capital expenditure.

For more ways to enhance your experience via Facebook videos, see The Social Media Examiners guide to do so!

Competitions and exclusive experiences

Returning to that same Social Media Examiner study that has been scrutinised so much in this part and the former part of this blog, it was concluded that 36% of Facebook users who are associated with a brand, like the brand on Facebook in order to get a discount, freebie or a coupon; furthermore, 25% users like the brand to get access to exclusive content that the brand will provide; and a further 22% like a page due to recommendations by friends. But how do we utilise these three figures, you may ask. The answer is simple, a brand can utilise such opportunities by offering a contest where a number of shares will be rewarded by a coupon or a free product or something along those lines (Gunelius 2012). This will attract more likes to a page, thus attracting more users to visit the page, creating more interpersonal relationships and also opens a brand up to many more potential users and consumers of the product.

Obviously this is where exclusive content of the actual brand is key though, because if a plethora of potential consumers visit the page, but the page offers nothing of any real value, they’ll be turned off from liking the page and therefore giving the brand a bad reputation or at least limiting potential consumers.

IKEA’s bedroom makeover was a great example of this! In 2011 IKEA launched a competition giving fans a chance to win $10,000 worth of IKEA furniture in order to make over their bedroom. All fans had to do was explain on the IKEA Facebook why they wanted to make over their room, generating great user engagement. To further the engagement IKEA held a public vote to pick ten finalists, who IKEA was cut down to three. The three winners then had 90 seconds to grab as much furniture as possible from the store, really boosting PR and engagement in the mean time!

The only problem with competitions such as IKEA’s is that there would be no real way for a small company, who don’t have a big marketing budget to offer such promotions giving three fans £10,000 (for a British company) because the money just isn’t there.

Sales Pitches?

Now it’s obviously important to inform the users about upcoming products and sales, but there are certain issues and drawbacks that occur when the page is far too focussed on promoting their products (Karasiewicz, 2013). Being a pushy salesman is not going to bode well with users who are simply surfing Facebook in their spare time, it’s their social time, they shouldn’t have to be harassed with constant pitches! So the suggestion here is to ease up on the pushing of products, and be more personal, no more business jargon (Ganguly, 2015).

Lee (2013) maintains that you should put emphasis on your fans, and not your products, more emphasis on fans means that they’re more likely to buy products. But then again how is a fan likely to buy a product that hasn’t been promoted at all. The real goal here is to promote your products, but also to engage with fans, to create relationships.

Humanize the brand

Brands should act human on Facebook, it really makes the user feel as if he’s dealing with an actual person (which he is) as opposed to a faceless corporation. This shouldn’t be too hard to do considering brands are made up of actual human beings, but if you’re still scratching your head over this one, here’s some quick tips!

A way to optimize your brands Facebook liking potential is by signing posts, this is a great way to add a human face to the brand, it makes the user know that real people are posting this stuff as opposed to a faceless corporation as mentioned prior, making the brand ultimately more relatable (Ganguly, 2015). An example of this is Chipotle Mexican Grill, who sign posts with the writers name.

Another way to humanize the brand is to use humour in your brands posts, as long as it’s non offensive, this is a great way to entertain the users and therefore promote a healthier brand image (Ganguly, 2015). Although this can presumably be difficult to balance the humour that a poster would want to portray without conflicting with any social aims that a brand is trying to achieve. Also by playing humour too safe it may come off as not humorous at all, which really won’t do a brand any favours! But still it is worth keeping in mind that humour can lead to a more humanized brand.

One further way to do so would be to post some behind the scenes pictures according to Lee (2013). By doing this, you simply break all the corporate facade down of your brand and make it much more relatable. Here is a great example by Zappos. They shared a photo of one of their employees making pizza.

Recap:

• Post 3-4 times per week, ideally at either noon or 7 pm on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
• Be interactive, stimulate conversations, tag, ask questions.
• Be positive, but handle complaints swiftly and effectively.
• Share photos and videos with users.
• Engage in competitions, offer exclusive content.
• Don’t over promote.
• Humanize the brand with comedy or add personal touches.

Monitoring this success

The first thing what any brand would need to do to measure the success of their given campaign is to set goals, this could be for interactions, or likes, or shares, or direct messages, or whatever you feel is the best indicator of what your brand wants to achieve via Facebook.

Then what you can do is then reflect on this goal by using Facebook insights. Facebook insights provides metrics on how many followers you get in a specified period of time, breaking them down by demographic.

You could then consider what likes, comments and shares you get to measure the engagement!

A word of warning

Interactions can really fluctuate day to day, so it’s unadvisable that a brand would get too caught up on looking at the smaller picture. However, a more apt approach would be to look at the weekly progress, noting what works, what doesn’t work, thinking about how you can improve. By doing this you can really assess what your target market like to see if you notice how many interactions you get per post and on what topic, so not only do you get a more successful Facebook strategy it saves you a valuable insight into the minds of your target market, which allows you to focus your campaign more specifically on them. However, you’ll need to keep in mind that by recreating the same posts day in day out because they were successful once, will ultimately become stale, which will lose attention of your users. So keep it fresh but monitor progress!

When considering the success of your page, make sure you don’t get too caught up on likes and focus more so on the actual interaction a post receives. This allows you to look at the levels of feedback, making success easier to monitor, having happier consumers/likers is key, besides what’s better having someone raving about how good your brand or product is or just autonomously like it and never buy nor mention anything about it again.

Final thoughts

The strategies suggested in this series should help your brand increase its levels of interactivity, obviously there are many variables in the process, like with any marketing element, so success cannot be ensured. However, this guide should at least encourage brands to consider these points and craft them into their own strategy, which should ultimately prove beneficial. So remember:

• Post 3-4 times per week, ideally at either noon or 7 pm on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
• Be interactive, stimulate conversations, tag, ask questions.
• Be positive, but handle complaints swiftly and effectively.
• Share photos and videos with users.
• Engage in competitions, offer exclusive content.
• Don’t over promote.
• Humanize the brand with comedy or add personal touches.
• Monitor interaction once a week and keep reassessing the strategy.

 

References:

DeChernatony, L. and McDonald, M.: Creating Powerful Brands, 2nd edn (Oxford, Butterworth Heinemann, 1998).

Ganguly. (2015). 9 ways to Humanize Your Brand with Social Media.Available: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/humanize-your-brand-with-social-media/. Last accessed 15th April 2015.

Gunelius. (2013). 10 Steps to Creating a Facebook Page that Gets Likes. Available: http://www.forbes.com/sites/work-in-progress/2013/01/18/10-steps-to-create-a-facebook-page-that-gets-likes/. Last accessed 15th April 2015.

Karasiewicz. (2013). 12 Do’s and Don’ts of Facebook for Business.Available: http://www.christiankonline.com/facebook-for-business-ebook/. Last accessed 15th April 2015.

Lee. (2013). 7 Tips to Humanize a Brand on Facebook. Available: http://askaaronlee.com/humanize-brand-facebook/#disqus_thread. Last accessed 21st April 2015.

Lee. (2012). 8 Surefire Ways to Increase Engagement on Facebook.Available: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/increase-engagement-on-facebook/. Last accessed 15th April 2015.Vahl. (2010). 10 Successful Facebook Marketing Examples. Available: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/10-successful-facebook-marketing-examples/. Last accessed 15th April 2015.

Romaniuk, Jenni and Gaillard, Elise: ‘The relationship between unique brand associations, brand usage and brand performance: analysis across eight categories’, Journal of Marketing Management, 23 (3/4) (2007), pp. 267–84.