This week Brooke Oberwetter, Associate Manager, Policy Communications, Facebook gave a great talk at the Vancouver Board of Trade’s seminar and networking session: Facebook for Small Business: Be discoverable, find customers and build relationships.
The Board of Trade gets it, they started a social media event with networking in-person. Great canapes and wine (one drink ticket though?) and ample time to meet everyone attending. I have been a member of the Vancouver Board of Trade for 19 years but have been rather absent for the last 18 months so it was great to reconnect with staff like Lesley Niven (events) and meet new people like Greg Hoekstra (communications). I made a few notes (and missed a few things but here are a few tips I picked up:
Brooke Oberwetter covered four fundamental steps to laying a foundation for your Facebook success:
#1) Build Your Facebook Page
This seems like a given, but a quick survey of attendees at the event showed that approximately 20% didn’t have a Facebook page for their business. Brooke walked us through some great examples of businesses (not just big ones) that were able to drive real store traffic after launching their Facebook page.
Key steps to building your Facebook page:
- Use your existing client base and contacts to create your initial audience.
- Upload your client contact base in .CSV format and invite the
- Encourage staff to invite connections to the page
- Promote membership on-site (printed materials, cards, Facebook stickers)
- Get your custom Facebook Url. (Hint… it’s right here: http://facebook.com/username)
- Brand and communicate what you do visually with images in the Facebook
- Here was a big tip! and I haven’t seen this one put quite this way: Your Facebook timeline feature is important. If your company is 100 years old and your Facebook page is 2 years old; go back in your timeline and add key milestones, photos, events and news items over the past 100 years to the page. One company (my memory is failing me on which one) ran a timeline scavenger contest on their company history. They hid hints and clues over many years in their timeline and awarded prizes to those people that coule find them.
#2) Connect with people using Facebook Ads
A big focus here was on testing. Instead of creating one ad, commit to at least four types of copy and even dig deeper experimenting with different demographics. A question from the audience later on and how Brooke answered it was a testament to how targeted and relevant Facebook advertising can be. It was focused on B2B marketing. Brooke’s answer was simple – target people who “like” the type of pages and topics that your B2B decisions makers in your region would like. Here’s my own personal example:
We do “Social Selling” seminars. I can run ads targeting people who live in Vancouver and like the Salesforce.com and Nimble.com pages on Facebook – only showing ads to a very narrow but important niche for us.
#3) Engage Your Audience
Quality content. Know your audience, know their dreams, goals, pains and interests and then share great content on your Facebook page. At Socialized Communications we have managed over 20 different brands on Facebook in the past 24 months and an equal number of campaigns. For this reason I need to disagree with Brooke – she suggested you post 2-3 meaningful pieces of content per week. I know that you need to post 2-3 a day if you want any real “engagement” from the majority of your audience. I also really have to personally push this point: Your content has to be relevant, engaging and frequent. It can’t be your latest sale promoted at nauseam.
#4) Influence Your Fans using promoted posts
Not all of your fans see all of your content. (Brooke didn’t share this but I will tell you) If you have 1000 fans and run a great page only about 160 will see your recent update on Facebook. Less will see it if your engagement and content are weak and infrequent. By using the promoted posts function (paying for views) you can ensure that 100% of your fans plus many of their friends see your updates. The more fans/likes you have the more people you can reach with promote posts.
Here’s an screencap of how you sponsor a post:
I would say overal the event was awesome – my only hope is that at future events more focus is put on the Guerrilla Social Media Marketing aspect of Facebook that doesn’t require the purchase of ads. I buy a lot of Facebook ads but it’s only a small part of the equation.
So don’t take my word for it… here are some top Tweets about the event from the audience: