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Managing Your Presence On Facebook: Business Edition

ByAndrea Rickett

Lesson 1: Unlocking The Power Of Facebook For Your Business

Everyone is telling you your business needs a Facebook presence. It’s true, it sure does, but why?

In this course you will learn exactly why you need a Facebook presence for your business and how it will make your business better by driving traffic, building brand and community, and increasing sales. You will take with you the knowledge and tools you need succeed and build a thriving, successful, and passionate community around your business. An excellent Facebook presence starts with a great Facebook page. Maximizing the effectiveness of that page is one of the least expensive marketing tools available today and perhaps the most powerful. Social media connects people to your business in ways traditional marketing never approached, make sure you’re ready for it!

This lesson in particular, will demonstrate the power of success with Facebook as well as the consequences of going in without all the right knowledge. From here, we’ll move on to making sure you become one of the Facebook success stories! We’ll cover Facebook vocabulary, etiquette, strategies, tools, apps, best practices, and also give you a firmer grasp of what works in the world of social media and what exactly it’s all really about.

Let’s start with the bad news: you can mess up. This course will make it easy not to, but it doesn’t hurt to look at and learn from a couple notable mistakes. Facebook has the power to become one of the central places for building your brand, but on the flip side, the high-octane environment of such an active social network makes mistakes more costly as some of these name brands found out the hard way.

Facebook Flubs:

  1. Nestle: The famously rude Nestle Facebook page. When Nestle was under scrutiny for their use of palm oil from Indonesian rainforests, Greenpeace and other protesters flocked to Nestle’s Facebook page to complain. Now, negative reactions to your business are going to occur once in a while, it’s just a part of doing business. Let Facebook be your opportunity to fix it and turn angry people into raving fans…unlike Nestle. The made a bad situation worse by using poor Facebook etiquette and not understanding the right way to interact with people in their online community. The representative was rude to people commenting on the page, demanded things of them, and snubbed them with an attitude of superiority. The negative sentiment continues on Nestle’s fan page until this day. Read more here.
  2. Honda: Ah, Honda’s biggest fan turned out to be…Honda. A while back Honda debuted the Crosstour to much skepticism. Instead of running a social media campaign to generate buzz or change opinions, one of Honda’s own got the bright idea to pose as an excited fan of the new Crosstour on the company’s Facebook page. You can imagine what happened when everyone discovered that the raving fan was actually the Manager of Product Planning at Honda. The problem here was a lack of authenticity, an idea at the core of good social media and one we’ll cover extensively in the rest of this course.
  3. If you want to read some more on failed fan pages and why they went down, check out this piece on CNN.
And now for the good stuff!
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Facebook Success Stories: 
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Callan Green of Mashable puts it well in her piece examining successful fan pages, “The fan pages that are doing it right are the ones that are actively engaging with their fans. These pages have creative content, two-way communication, active discussion boards, videos and images, and a fun and casual tone to match the medium.”
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  1. Pringles: Pringles has found their voice and uses it to interact with fans in a fun way on their Facebook page. The page is authentic and attracts lovers of Pringles who get the same feel from the fan page. This is essential to a good fan page. If people are comfortable interacting there, you have a win. If people feel the same way about your page as they do your products, you’re reinforcing your branding and have a great start toward building a strong community that  can be a key factor in word of mouth marketing and driving sales.
  2. Red Bull: Red Bull has done some interesting things with their page to appeal to a wide range of their fans. Incorporating Twitter feeds of athletes, videos, and apps are just some of the things they have done to build opportunities for engagement right into their page. Check out their page as well as some of the others to get ideas  you might want to incorporate into your own page
  3. Check out Mashable’s post on the Top 5 Facebook Fan Pages.
[B2B] Facebook Success Stories, Business to Business:
  1. BlendTec: The famous ‘Will It Blend’ series is one of the most successful social media campaigns everywhere. Who would have thought that a commercial blender company would take YouTube by storm with viral video after viral video? And…oh yeah, they have seen a 700 percent increase in sales since the campaign launched back in 2006.
  2. Kinaxis: These guys had the audacity to shoot for doubling their sales leads and website traffic. Could Facebook help them get there? NO. Their social efforts instead blew away their original goals resulting in an impressive 2.7x increase in web traffic and a 3.2x increase in sales leads.
  3. Further Reading: Check out these other great examples and chase away your doubt! And more!
As you progress through the lessons you will start to get a grasp on what works on Facebook and social media and why. Concepts like authenticity, engagement, and community will be at the center of what we talk about going forward. From here on out, don’t think of your Facebook fan page as just a tool for sales, marketing, or advertising. Think of it as a place online to build and host your brand’s unique personality and connect with those that care about you and who you care about. From that will come the better conversion, increased sales, and happier customers you’re looking for.
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These lessons will teach and preach authenticity and community, but it’s not fluff, here are some facts that show how important Facebook and a good social media strategy are, as well as a look at just how valuable a fan is in real dollars.
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Facebook Facts For Businesses To Consider:
  1. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
  2. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
  3. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
  4. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.
  5. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
  6. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
  7. Only 14% trust advertisements
  8. 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
  9. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
  10. We will no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
  11. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
  12. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years
(Courtesy of socialnomics)
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Join the Social Media Revolution! [This video is a must watch]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzZyUaQvpdc[/youtube]
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I’m still not convinced, can Facebook really help my business? As in, make me more money?
Study, courtesy of Chompon.com, click for more.
Excellent Syncapse study on fans, just click to view the .pdf

 

Homework: 

  • If you don’t have one already, set up your Facebook fan page. You can follow this guide and watch the video below for the mechanics of it. Don’t stress on getting everything just right at the moment, we’ll cover some of the latest and greatest trends in making your profile look and be the best in coming lessons, just get your page up and reserve your Facebook url.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOD8_0hh9bc[/youtube]