Versio2’s Top 5 Facebook Social Marketing Tips
Andrew Gough, February 1, 2012 in Facebook Articles, Top Tips, Versio2 News
February 2012 – Here’s our first Top 5 collection of killer marketing tips for Facebook, that giant of a social network.
1. Offer a ‘Like’ incentive of value
We learned from our hugely successful Unique Hotels Facebook campaign in November that users will ‘Like’ a page if you give them something in return. This can be anything, but it must be something of value to your target audience.
With Unique Hotels, ‘Liking’ was necessary to enter a prize draw (the prizes being various hotel services like meals, spa treatments, accommodation etc.), but in other cases it could be something like special content only for fans.
Check out Part 1 of our Unique Hotels case study to see how we used Facebook marketing to get 12,000 fans in just four weeks.
2. Choose a Facebook “vanity” URL for your fan page
You don’t ever want a main Facebook URL that ends in random numbers. If you can’t remember it, neither can your audience. Go to facebook.com/username and choose a memorable address. Think about it in the same way you would when choosing a domain name – you want it to reflect your brand identity, and not be too long.
Choosing a vanity URL also makes linking to your page more reliable, and less prone to errors and changes. Facebook will take care of resolving your custom URL to the correct fan page.
3. Design a great welcome page & make it your default landing tab!
Spend time designing a welcome page for your Facebook marketing campaign. A lot can be achieved both aesthetically and functionally. Embed a game, videos or entice new fans with other premium content.
For Unique Hotels, we designed a landing page (see main image) that incorporated a room booking tool, and space where attention-grabbing images could be placed advertising special offers.
Change the default landing tab to be your new welcome page. Anyone visiting your custom vanity URL (see Tip 2 above) that hasn’t clicked the ‘Like’ button before will land on your shiny new welcome page, and see all the excellent functionality you’ve added in (but not fans, they’ll go straight to your wall). Don’t take this last step and it’s a little like spending money on a new front door but having the garden path lead to the back.
4. Embed a“viral” video on Facebook, but think carefully!
Viral marketing is the practice of creating some kind of content, usually a video or game, that grows in popularity and spreads through the Internet population exponentially. This can work out well as part of a Facebook ‘Like’ campaign, where companies can create great-looking fan pages and apps with embedded viral videos or engaging games to encourage new fans.
If you want to produce a viral video, production values can vary but a clever idea is an absolute necessity. As YouTube demonstrated, the viral video phenomenon was started on zero budgets but priceless ideas. Since then marketers have attempted to recapture that magic, usually by emulating the quirky low budget production (a camera phone will do if the idea is sophisticated enough) but using it as part of a big budget marketing campaign.
This clever video from Samsung demonstrates this point perfectly. Can you figure it out?
5. Inbound Marketer on Facebook, yours is the way forward
A truly comprehensive Inbound Marketing (IM) strategy will always include Facebook or Social Media Marketing (SMM), as well as Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Content Marketing (CM), Google Optimized Marketing (GOM) and other Internet Marketing techniques.
It’s no longer enough to have just a blog, or just a Pay Per Click campaign, you need to include at least one social network to boost your strategy. Facebook is a great way to tap into a huge network of Internet users who habitually spread news and information to their friends. The viral video example above incorporates Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, a Google social network in its own right, into a single campaign.
For our Unique Hotels campaign, we created a custom “app” to allow fans to enter a prize draw and then collect game points by sharing badges or adding their name to a mailing list. We combined this with other Inbound Marketing techniques in perfect harmony to drive increased volumes of qualified traffic to Unique Hotels’ blog and traditional online sales channels.
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Have you got any good tips for Facebook marketers? Or have you any stories of Facebook marketing failures. Share them with us, leave a comment below!
