With over 1 billion Facebook users it is the largest and most popular social media website. Marketers often see social media as an easy medium to use as you can make mistakes and be reckless, but you get instant feedback on what works well and what doesn’t (Wyman, 2012). Although this is true, it is a large audience to make a mistake to. Therefore it is crucial marketers get their Facebook social media page correct which is why this blog has chosen Facebook as the basis of it’s discussion.

Number of Active Monthly Facebook Users (Source: Statista, 2016)

 

Engagement

Social media is peoples first choice for 1 in 5 people when they are in a complicated situation and want an answer (Simpson, 2016a). People want to gain something from following a brand. They want to be engaged with, therefore it is crucial if they have a complaint –you must be quick to respond to any query (Moth, 2015). This is corroborated by Hansson, Wrangmo, Solberg & Søilen’s findings (2013) that the optimal profile should be active, each activity must have a clear purpose & be useful to members, send out new & timely information which will not be seen as spam or bombarding their connections & if they choose to run competitions, it is only good if there is a useful prize. And finally, companies should take any critical comments seriously. However, their findings are from 3 years ago, which in technology is quite a while and Facebook has changed some of it’s features in that time. Nonetheless it does corroborate with current findings, indicating that these conclusions still hold.

 

Best Practice

Facebook allows businesses to be specific with who your ad reaches. It allows companies to filter by age, location, gender, likes and interests, you can also choose a headline and text, alongside an image or video to be displayed as the advert. They also utilize audience targeting. People who click on ads on Facebook tend to have a high bounceback rate, however when people do view a page they spend a large time looking through it. This can be useful for marketers when deciding on the content they want to market. Such as if marketers want their customer to explore their website, people are seemingly willing to explore it, and engage with any content. Additionally people already tend to be on Facebook as they are bored so are willing to read any articles – they want to discover new things, if you want to teach people about something new or give them a story, Facebook is the place to do so. Furthermore, because people are on Facebook for fun, content should be light hearted and something people would be really interested in (Chowdrey, 2016). Forouzandeh, Soltanpanah, & Sheikhahmadi (2014). also agreed that people should be provided with information that they will consider useful to them, and that it must not come across as commercial.

 

Perhaps best practice of a Facebook page for marketing is to create immersive content involving a mixture of text, image and video. With the rise of oculus rift this shift will change further however this is not yet known exactly how without it’s release (Simpson, 2016b). Users want convenience, therefore brands must make things easy for them, so when publishing a product, give them the link to the original product page. Additionally make it clear on this page the price, as price is the top priority for people when making a purchase.

 

Future

Managing how people see your content across related platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, or perhaps one day Google and Twitter through their integrations, starts to give you real control of your marketing – allowing you to stop wasting money by reaching someone in too many places (frequency capping) or even to tell a continual story across channels. The social platforms themselves have even started using real people to curate content instead of just algorithms such as Twitter’s Moments and Snapchat’s Live Stories.

 

Facebook allows you to learn more about your client than any other platform, therefore marketers should tap into this content to create unique experiences. This will become particularly important in the near future as personalisation becomes ever-more crucial, adverts will become increasingly personalised and relevant to improve efficiency of social media ad spend to reap the greatest rewards (Moth, 2015). Already companies such as Coca-Cola and Cadbury have segmented their campaigns, when clicking their Facebook you can see different adverts for different segments on their Facebook page, but it will have gone to different audiences. However, here marketers must be careful not to be too intrusive (Daykin, 2015).

 

How to Measure the Success of Your Facebook Campaign

A struggle with social media is how to measure it, with many profiles on private how can you measure how your campaign has affected them? Price (2011) suggested a number of ways.

• Survey your advocate fans – how would they like to improve your product.
• React to comments, initiate conversations with your clients, this has an additional upside of potentially attracting more fans on an advocate basis, allow you to build a measurable advocate network.
• Create unique content, support channels and special relationship-based offers to fans which can be measured, in building a relationship with them, customers are more likely to place the product in their lives, in turn increasing brand equity.
• Integrate Facebook into shopping experience. Create space for fan content, or expert voices which help customers find what they want, which can also then be used to measure the reactions of customers be it positive or negative and then act on this.

Although these are beneficial measures, he did not specify that you can measure popularity and effectiveness of a campaign by likes of a post and fans of the brands personal webpage which can also be useful measure, though must not be taken alone. Finally, Price’s findings were from 5 years ago, which again in technology years is a long time, which means there will probably be many more technological advancements such as algorithms which could be used. However, due to the amount of private profiles on Facebook, many firms cannot access peoples personal information due to privacy laws – only Facebook can, therefore making Price’s arguments more relevant today than they otherwise may be.

 

Effect of Social Influence

Social media marketers should also factor in that social influence only impacts those who have a low level of involvement with the product. Social influence on social networks had significant impact on both perception of quality and buying intention. They also need to remember that consumers create content, so a brand must be able to generate positive comments to maximize effectiveness using social network sites influencing consumers’ purchase behaviour (Seng & Keat, 2014). However, these findings are limited as it was only about sports product, they only surveyed young people, and the effects of positive social effects of a fictitious new brand. Therefore it may be different for a non-sports brand, additionally it may also be different for an existing brand or product.

 

 

References

 

Chowdrey, N. (2016) Facebook, Outbrand & GDN Which content promotion platform should you choose? [Online] < https://econsultancy.com/blog/67381-facebook-outbrain-gdn-which-content-promotion-platform-should-i-choose/?utm_source=Econsultancy&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6633195_2090-daily-pulse-uk-2016-01-07&dm_i=LQI,3Y67F,LRRZKK,E8W8F,1> [Accessed 25^th January 2016]

 

Daykin, J (2015) Personalised marketing at scale is the next big thing in digital [Onliine] < http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2015/mar/19/personalised-marketing-digital-future> [Accessed 1^st February 2016]

 

Daykin, J (2016) Five things great brands will do differently on social media in 2016 [Online] <http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2016/jan/05/brands-social-media-marketing-2016> [Accessed 13^th January 2016]

 

Forouzandeh, S., Soltanpanah, H. & Sheikhahmadi, A. (2014). “Content marketing through data mining on Facebook social network”, Webology, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 1.

 

 

Hansson, L., Wrangmo, A., Solberg Søilen, K. (2013) “Optimal ways for companies to use Facebook as a marketing channel”, Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 112-126.

 

Moth, D (2015) 11 Pivotal Social Media Trends for 2016 [Online] < https://econsultancy.com/blog/67325-11-pivotal-social-media-trends-for-2016> [Accessed 23^rd January 2016]

 

Price, M. 2011, “Using facebook to measure marketing: is your facebook page generating results? Here are ways to both monitor and measure your social media efforts”, ABA Bank Marketing, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 26.

 

Simpson, J (2016a) Nine glorious digital marketing stats from the past week < https://econsultancy.com/blog/67388-nine-brilliant-digital-marketing-stats-from-the-past-week/?utm_source=Econsultancy&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6643806_2092-daily-pulse-uk-2016-01-11&dm_i=LQI,3YEE6,LRRZKK,E9T81,1> [Accessed 23^rd January 2016]

 

Simpson, J (2016b) How to succeed with visual content, according to Instagram’s top creative [Online] < https://econsultancy.com/blog/67295-how-to-succeed-with-visual-content-according-to-instagram-s-top-creative/?utm_source=Econsultancy&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6539202_2048-daily-pulse-uk-2015-12-08&dm_i=LQI,3W5OI,LRRZKK,E18VE,1> [Accessed 25^th January 2016]

Seng, C.S. & Keat, L.H. (2014) Marketing Sports Products on Facebook: The Effect of Social Influence, Physical Culture and Sport. Studies and Research, vol. 61, no. 1, pp. 65-73.

Statista (2016) Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as of 4th quarter 2015 (in millions) [Online] < http://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/> [Accessed February 1^st 2016]

 

Wyman, L (2012) ‘Facebook may prove important marketing vehicle’, 2012, Furniture/Today, vol. 36, no. 23, p. 12.