Tag Archives: pages

Friending Your Fans

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There are some brands that want to sieze control of all Facebook pages when they first enter the Facebook arena. They want all fan pages to be under their control and will often get Facebook administrators involved in this process. This approach to ‘owning’ your Facebook presence is not the best approach. In fact, it’s probably the worst.

So how do you own your Facebook presence? The first step is to identify all the existing brand fan pages and determine how much engagement they are enjoying and what kind of sentiment they promote towards the brand. If a page has very low engagement or has a negative sentiment, then your tactic will be slightly different. For this post, we’ll assume that you’ve found a set of positive pages with high engagement.

Once you have a list of these pages, you can begin engaging with the fans on the wall. The first rule is that you should not use the wall of these pages to directly drive traffic back to your page. In other words, don’t post generic “hey, come check out my page”-style content. It’s spammy and does not add any value. Instead post relevent information around the brand, participate in discussions and if possible, offer incentives to the fans of the page.

Try not to look at Facebook from a single page perspective. Try to see it in the same way you see your personal profile. You go to your friends walls, you write messages, you participate. Managing a brand should work in the same way. Find pages that are promoting your brand and help them. Participate constructively, do not attempt to control, instead, attempt to guide.

Social Media Campaigns

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A seperate Facebook page for every campaign?

Social Media Campaigns. I shudder at the term. So many agencies are taking the campaign-based approach to social media. In other words, we’re launching a new product, let’s create a Facebook page! Three months later when the launch is over, the Facebook fans are left high and dry.

Campaign-based social media is a stupid strategy for one very important reason :

Social litter

Some companies have profiles all over Facebook and Twitter, most of them stagnant. Not only does this make the brands actual page difficult to find, it also leaves fans disenchanted. If your digital agency is suggesting that you create a new fan page for every launch, then maybe it’s time to get a new agency. Social media should always be approached with a long term view. It’s fine to launch with a campaign, but make sure you have budget to keep that page alive for the next campaign (and the one after that too). Make sure you’re creating content that will live beyond your 3 month launch and into the future. Make sure you give your page an appropriate name. Naming it after one of your products is a huge mistake. Using your company name is a little better. Naming it after a common social interest is golden (but I’ll talk about that in another post). My point is, social media, think long-term.

One of the problems that I currently face is that several clients have had their social media strategies run by agencies that don’t know what they’re doing. There are fan pages for every campaign and every product. The fan base is spread thin, there are not enough resources to manage these pages and the client has only one solution : consolidate! Not a bad idea, but most of these clients are running from one extreme to the other. Having too many pages to not having enough. Instead of splitting your pages up by campaign, try splitting them up by target market. If you’re selling toothbrushes, one page is fine. But if you’re selling deodorant for both men and women, then you need two pages. One for men, one for women. Why? Because men and women are different (obviously). To try and consolidate two different tones on to one page is suicide. You’re going to lose both audiences (and make your community manager cry).

To summarize :

1. Social media is a long term investment. Your profile must live beyond your launch campaign.

2. Don’t litter the web with useless profiles, have a strategy, understand your audience.

3. Be intelligent about the number of pages you need. Think about your target market and create pages accordingly.

4. If anyone ever mentions a Facebook page for a single campaign, spit on them.