InformationWeek.com Reviews Tips for Business Facebook Pages During the Holidays: 51% of Consumers Are More Likely to Buy From a Company After Becoming Their Fan on Facebook
Posted by: Micah Pratt, director of social networking R&D
The holidays are just around the corner, and businesses are finalizing their marketing campaigns to optimize the shopping rush. Here is an article from InformationWeek.com, written by Kevin Casey, about how companies can prepare their social networking sites in time for the holidays.
4 Tips: Prep Your Facebook Page For Holidays
Will your company’s Facebook page help you take advantage of the holiday shopping rush? Consider these tips for SMBs and fine-tune your strategy.
Small and midsize businesses (SMBs), like Santa Claus, should be making a list and checking it twice. But rather than sorting out who’s naughty or nice, consumer-focused concerns should fine-tune their Facebook presence in advance of the holiday shopping rush.
Among the reasons: The bevy of market research showing shoppers increasingly turning to social sites before they make purchase decisions. Consider this recent study, which found 51% of consumers are more likely to buy something from a company after becoming their fan on Facebook. With the annual flurry of capitalism known as holiday shopping looming large, it’s time for retailers and other consumer-focused SMBs to make sure they’re ready to reap the rewards.
That means doing a bit more than putting up a page and hoping it connects with customers, according to Laura O’Shaughnessy, CEO of SocialCode, a social agency that emphasizes a quantitative approach to performance advertising, with a particular focus on Facebook. The firm recently added LinkedIn to its mix, and is considering the likes of Twitter and Google+.
Socialcode itself has an interesting SMB story. The 50-person agency was born as an internal department of The Washington Post Company, which owns–in addition to the flagship newspaper of the same name–a number of media, education, and other businesses. O’Shaughnessy said that the results of Facebook programs for the company’s various brands were so strong that it began shifting money away from its Google adverting and spending more on social. Later, Socialcode was spun out as an independent subsidiary and began signing on external customers.
In an interview, O’Shaughnessy shared these four tips for optimizing your Facebook activities in the coming weeks.
1. Set goals. The businesses that get the most out of their Facebook presence are the ones that have goals behind it. “Step one is deciding: Is my goal to drive people into my restaurant, is it to drive people into my store, is it to introduce a new product, is it to get people to buy my product?” O’Shaughnessy said. Without a clear sense of what they want to accomplish, SMBs, can’t make efficient use of their resources.
2. Design a campaign with a “viral accelerant.” O’Shaughnessy said the most powerful, effective Facebook campaigns place heavy emphasis on sharing. That often means developing an application, game, or a related microsite to encourage people to spread the word–no matter what the word is. “You want to make sure you’re taking advantage of the sharing activities that are going on,” O’Shaughnessy said.
While a development-intensive application might require a bigger budget, O’Shaughnessy noted that there are sharing-oriented things marketers can do on a smaller scale. She gave as an example a nonprofit client that found strong results simply using a light application aimed at sharing badges on Facebook walls.
“The most important thing about Facebook is really perpetuating that social sharing–getting one friend to spread, in this case, a badge to another friend,” O’Shaughnessy said. “Then all of that person’s friends see that action, so you get this immediate lift.”
Social Networking “Friends” Politics: How to Make Facebook Ads Work to Political Candidates’ Favor
Posted by: Micah Pratt, Director of Social Networking R&D
The 2012 presidential election will be like one never experienced before. Social networking sites are playing a role in these elections that wasn’t imaginable four years ago by hosting debates, facilitating the political conversation and connecting candidates with voters in the digital world. Here is an article from CMO.com, written by Kim Soth, senior vice president of business development & marketing at Jennings Social Media Marketing, on how to get Facebook ads to work in your favor.
Five Ways to Make Facebook Ads Work For You
There is much talk in social-media circles about how to build your audience organically and that, for the most part, it is the best way to build an audience. It is certainly a good way, but it shouldn’t be your only strategy. We suggest that if you are a new company or are launching a product, you can do a great job of building fans with Facebook ads, which offer a great alternative to your marketing strategy. What’s more, Facebook ads are not nearly as complex as Google AdWords—but don’t let the simplicity fool you. For our campaigns we’ve found that Facebook ads, on average, deliver a higher click-through rate than Google AdWords.
For example, we were brought in to help promote a senatorial race. After a month of struggling to gain fans on Facebook, we eventually doubled the candidate’s fans in a week by running ads: We picked up 1,500 fans for a total cost of around $1,000.
So if you think this strategy might be for you, here are five tips that will help you make Facebook ads work for your campaigns.
1. It’s about testing. Always run multiple ads targeting the same “Likes and Interests,” and keep your Likes and Interests the same while testing different ad copy, headlines, or images. What needs to remain the same as your control for a general test is your Likes and Interests keywords. You can test many controls, but the simplest is Likes and Interests. Facebook targets audiences off of two variables: Users and Likes and Interests: If you change these in two different ads, then you don’t have an apples-to-apples test.
2. Likes and Interests matter. Likes and Interests are essentially keywords you are targeting for your campaign based on what shows up for a user. You don’t want to use random Likes and Interests keywords. To make Likes and Interests work for you, it’s important to target based on what is associated with that individual in some way—associations they belong to, things they like, where they work, what they are fans of, or what they’ve written on their walls.
It’s is important not to get carried away and add a hundred Likes and Interests keywords just because it’s cool to see the numbers of possible audience continue to rise. It would seem that big numbers of audience is a good idea, but it’s actually counterintuitive. You want to choose highly targeted Likes and Interests keywords that are tightly associated with your ad copy. Don’t choose a keyword just because of its audience reach. You want to make sure it matches everything you know about the ad copy. Just because someone rides a motorcycle doesn’t mean he is interested in a Harley. One person might buy sports bikes, another might buy BMW motorcycles, while another might be really into Harleys. So it does no good to blast all of them with a message about Harley gear.
Mark Zuckerberg Reveals Major Facebook Updates at F8
Posted by: Micah Pratt, social networking research & development
Over the years, Facebook has been known to make small changes to how users operate on the social networking site. With Google+ becoming a threatening competitor, Mark Zuckerberg made serious changes to Facebook. On September 22, Mark Zuckerberg explained exactly what the 800 million users could expect from the new and improved Facebook at its annual developer conference including:
•Timeline: a stream of information about you
•Facebook Gestures: turning any verb into a button, similar to the “like” button. Example: Reading a book.
•Open Graph: third-party companies can connect their apps and services to Facebook using a one-time permission from the user to share stuff on Facebook
•Subscribe: subscribing to strangers or celebrities to receive posts from them without being Facebook friends
•Ticker: a real-time list of what your friends are posting
•Media: watching TV and movies, listening to music and reading news all within Facebook
Valerie Jennings 
Cassie Stubs
Katie Stumpf
