In our Facebook Marketing Series, Mashable offers tips, insights and a bevy of tools to enhance your marketing on the 900-million strong social network.
We know that brands typically reach just 16% of the fan base they have worked so hard to build, but our tips for engagement and explanation of Facebook's ad suite should help you broaden your reach and increase engagement. For even more tips, follow our Facebook marketing topic.
1. Expanding Your Facebook Reach
While Facebook has never officially divulged exactly how to increase reach — though it did release an ad product, Reach Generator — there are several tactics known to work.
First, let's review the EdgeRank trifecta. EdgeRank is the algorithm used by Facebook to determine the most screen-worthy content. Three factors, multiplied together, determine your content's value: affinity, weight and time. The affinity score is based on how often a fan has engaged with your brand content in the past, including page visits. Weight, or popularity, is determined by the type and quantity of engagement your post receives (e.g. Likes, comments). Lastly, time and the decay of your post matters; as your content ages and engagement wanes, it becomes less relevant and therefore less likely to appear in a user's News Feed. Understanding the EdgeRank algorithm is the first step for brands to improve their content strategy.
2. Using Facebook's Open Graph
Last year, Facebook launched a new initiative built around, of all things, verbs. The company's Open Graph sought to do something interesting with the way we communicate with each other: Any action expressed on Facebook could become a branding opportunity.
Perhaps the best example of Open Graph at work is Spotify. If you listen to Green Day's "Dookie" on Spotify, then all of your Facebook friends will see that you're enjoying the album, and perhaps they'll even mark their approval with a Like or comment. You don't have to do anything to initiate the action except listen to the album (and don't initiate the app's "private listening mode"). Meanwhile, Spotify gets lots of free exposure simply by having users run its service.
Although the appeal for app-makers like Spotify is obvious, Open Graph represents a challenge of sorts for marketers. If you sell soft drinks, for instance, how are you supposed to get people to do anything but "Like" your brand? But beyond that obstacle is another, perhaps more daunting one: Marketers are wary of handing over their data to Facebook.
Open Graph has now been available for almost nine months and there are just a handful of case studies of brands using it successfully. However, there are a couple of high-profile examples of marketers using it well, including Ford's Customizer app and USA Today's Ad Meter.
3. The 10 Most Common Facebook Marketing Mistakes
At this point, most people know to market their business on Facebook — there are more than 900 million people on the social platform, constantly "liking," sharing, commenting and posting, after all.
It's a great audience, but there are a few mistakes you'll want to avoid. Mashable spoke with the Facebook team as well as Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow to learn about the most common Facebook marketing mistakes.
"There's actually a science behind this — yes, it's an art, but we have found some strong conclusions that there are levers that marketers can pull to be more successful," says Sean Bruich, head of measurement platform and standards at Facebook. His team recently studied 1,200 posts by 23 brands over a month-long period, using quantitative measurements to determine the unique impact of each post. "This is not a black box … there's a lot of opportunity to understand how to make your marketing better."
4. 5 Hot Facebook Marketing Trends
Timeline, the photo-heavy redesign that Facebook herded brands into in March, has changed the way brands market on Facebook. Although there have been conflicting reports about Timeline's effect on brand engagement, marketers are realizing that Timeline may not be more effective — but it definitely is different.
However, Timeline's not the only catalyst for the changing marketing ecosystem on Facebook. Another is Facebook's financial situation: The company is under huge pressure from Wall Street to figure out a winning formula for advertising on the platform. With about 133 million users in the U.S., the social network has a potential audience bigger than the Super Bowl's. Though GM has punctured Facebook's air of inevitability, most advertisers haven't lost faith enough to drop advertising on the platform wholesale.
The combination of these two things has ushered in five new Facebook marketing trends.
5. Why Less Is More on Facebook
What's the best way to market your brand on Facebook? According to Peter Shankman, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist with a background in marketing and consulting, the answer is actually pretty easy: "Sharing for the sake of just hearing yourself talk is pointless."
Yes, the key to doing more is doing it with less. "You want to engage your audience and make sure that they feel like they're apart of something — not just being marketed to," Shankman explains. "Then they will do your PR for you."
Mashable spoke with Shankman about the inner workings of Facebook marketing and what users really want to see on your brand page.
6. How 7 Brands Are Using Facebook Ad Tools
On Leap Day 2012, Facebook gathered all of its marketing executives in New York City for a coming-out party of sorts for a slew of new ad products. To people outside the industry, the promise of new initiatives might appear a bit on the dull side. But for advertisers, anything that Facebook does for advertising is of interest.
Among the products Facebook introduced were Premium on Facebook, Reach Generator, Offers and Logged Out ads. The company also asked brands to embrace a paradigm shift from advertising to "Stories," Facebook's preferred term for brand-related messages. Since that time, a few big brands have experimented with the new tools.
7. Tools to Boost Facebook Engagement
Over the past few years, Facebook marketing has moved from the domain of early adopters to a mainstream focus for nearly all businesses. During that time, a large number of social media marketing tools have emerged to help companies reach and engage with fans, run promotions and contests, and even integrate Facebook Ad programs with the rest of their social marketing.
But while most marketers are currently using the myriad applications that allow them to run their ongoing programs, they may not be as familiar with tools they can use to enhance their day-to-day activities and make their programs more effective.
8. Facebook Strategy for Brands With Multiple Locations
For some companies, one Facebook Brand Page might not be enough. For example, if a restaurant chain prides itself on local ingredients, or a business seeks to cultivate a strong community around each brick-and-mortar outlet, it might make sense to have a Brand Page for each location. But then again, does a brand really want to divvy up its audience and dilute it among several similar pages?
While chunking up an audience among numerous Facebook Brand Pages may seem counterintuitive, it does work to the advantage of some brands, such as Lululemon and Sprinkles. But other small businesses, such as Butter Lane and Sweetgreen, find that one Facebook Brand Page does a proper job of cultivating a strong community behind the brand.
9. Tips for Better Customer Service on Facebook
Customers know that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and web-savvy customers know that Facebook is the ultimate squeak amplifier. According to Forrester Research, 27% of U.S. online consumers sought customer service support on the web in 2011, and currently three out of four expect a reply to a negative comment posted on Facebook.
Unfortunately, many brands still don't incorporate customer service into their social strategy, despite the fact that Facebook is one of the best venues in which to turn your customers' negative comments into brand opportunities.
Here are eight tips to help you improve your Facebook customer support initiative and, in turn, raise your brand's reputation, decrease your inbound service requests, acquire new customers and turn infrequent customers into brand loyalists.
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