Facebook marketing for dummies
What should you do when someone tells you that the organic Facebook reach is going down and you now need to pay to be visible?
First of all, realize that most people, be it marketing managers or agency specialists, still largely operate in a paradigm that Facebook has helped kill; one where there were clear lines between “bought”, “owned” and “earned” channels. But let’s use that old paradigm to look at Facebook.
There are three* potential Facebook uses for organizations:
1. To get people to talk about you
In old school terms: “Facebook as an earned channel”
2. To maintain the relationship with your customers
In old school terms: “Facebook as an owned channel”
3. To pay to broadcast your message to a defined target group
In old school terms: “Facebook as a paid channel”
When we’re talking about Facebook, we rarely define which aspect we mean. Oftentimes we are talking about all three. The lines between these three uses are blurry both for us and everyone else involved, whether it’s internal roles like marketing, PR, product development or customer service, or external roles like ad agency, media agency or production agency (If you’re a small business, all these roles are distributed on one or just a few individuals. But even if you’re self-employed there’s a CMO and that’s you.)
Let’s look at what you as a Chief Marketing Officer have to to consider, and which demands you should put on each role
Aspect 1: To get people to talk about you
There’s a fine irony that for this, your own Facebook presence is not required. Instead, your focus should be to make the whole customer experience so good, delightful and free of friction that people talk about it. You need to work together with all the other C-level colleagues and identify all the occasions when the customer experience and communication doesn’t live up to standard, and fix them. At each hurdle or point of friction, ask the responsible “why do we do this?”. If they can’t justify it with than “the law demands it” it must be changed. Every person in the organization must understand that their job isn’t to make their own job easier. It’s to make the customer experience easier, smoother, better, richer. If these two can be reached simultaneously, you’ve killed two birds with one stone. If not, the customer always wins. This is a step towards a cycle where the customers do the marketing for you.
Your ad agency’s responsibility is to make sure your communication concepts are engaging and relevant for the target group. People share things that are funny, urgent, engaging, interesting and helpful.
Your production agency has to make sure that all material is tailored to fit and use the strengths of each channel. If you see Facebook and Youtube as repositories for your TV commercials, you’re missing out on all the opportunity of interactive media. The content, be it text, image, sound or video must be easy to consume and share regardless of whether it’s from a smartphone or a desktop. Great content has to be tailored and packaged to maximize shareability.
Your media agency has to make sure the material is discovered to begin with. They know if the concept needs activation on Facebook, or if an influential Twitter profile is the way to go. Or perhaps it’s blogger outreach that’s the solution?
Aspect 2: To build and maintain the relationship with your customers
This means that you have a Facebook Page and that you understand why it’s called social media (hint: you talk with, not at, people). Here, I would focus on those that already are your customers or users. The potential ones can be reached using the third aspect. This is where you get your message out by publishing it on your Facebook Page, but your Likes consume the material when — and if- it shows up in their Facebook feed. Facebook takes more than 100,000 signals into account when choosing whether your material should be shown in someone’s Facebook feed, here are the five most important:
This is where you maintain and nurture the relationship with your Super Fans. It’s a small audience, in relation to your customer or user base. Today your audience has an audience of their own, who in turn have their audience and so on. When your message is conveyed by your audience, there’s often an implicit endorsement that strengthens the message.
For this aspect to work, you have to really appreciate your Super Fans and that you’re prepared to spend resources on the relation with them. Your job is to create content that bolsters you as the primary supplier of whatever you supply, or your position as the leading authority within your field. It’s tricky to give hard numbers, but to give you a hint: if you can not dedicate three-four hours a week for Facebook content, you should re-think your Facebook strategy.
Your ad agency’s responsibility here is to make sure your concept creates a good framework for daily communication with the Super Fans.
Your production agency must provide you with content that fits within the above framework and that is tailored for Facebook. To take a full page print ad or the product catalog in PDF format and publish it on Facebook is a cardinal sin. The content has to be useful directly in the user’s Facebook feed. If linking is necessary, the link must be pitched so well that the user chooses it over all the potentially important, funny, urgent, useful and helpful content posted by their network further down in the Facebook feed.
Your media agency must make sure that the budget you have for boosting posts that work is spent wisely. Should this particular piece be boosted towards “People who like your page” or “People who like your page and their friends”? How should the boost budget be spent, as a single big bang or as three or four smaller boosts? How many posts per week should you boost?
(This aspect could also include giving support, but that would make this post too long. See the asterisk at the end.)
Aspect 3: To pay to broadcast your message to a defined target group
This requires sometimes, but not always, that you have a Facebook Page. Here, you’re using Facebook as a pure advertising channel. Depending on format, it doesn’t really matter if your content is engaging; you’re paying and therefore buying a slot in the Facebook feed of users you want to reach. Your responsibility here is to know your target group. Demography (like age, gender and location) belongs to the basics. You also want to know what their interests are and what they like besides what you provide for them. The more you know about the target group, the more specific you can make the ads and the bigger the chance that the message is so relevant it is rewarded with the users attention and a click.
Your ad agency must provide a clear concept for the communication. The concept should be a clear framework, but also have enough room so that messages can be tailored based on context. For example: If it’s raining in Madrid, but it’s sunny in Barcelona, the ads can have different messages for each city that day.
Your production agency’s responsibility is to make sure that you have the right material, or that the process to create the right material is fast. If it’s raining in Madrid and you want to reach people not in a relationship, you’ll have much better chances if the images used aren’t of parents in a sunny London. Perhaps your video has to be edited into several different versions for different purposes. Also remember that ads are very much an A/B test: using two different images for the same ad gives you direct feedback about which is more effective.
Your media agency must understand how to get the full potential of Facebook’s advertising system, know every in and out of it. It’s less effective, and more expensive, to just put out one ad and let it run for a week than it is to work with several versions and quick iterations. Improve and build on ads that perform well and discard those that don’t. Maybe your second video ad should only be served to the people that saw your first (custom audience)? Maybe the message to people in a certain city should hook into an local event?
Are you working with aspect 1, 2 or 3?
It’s when you’re working with all three that you unlock Facebook’s true potential. The ads you run as part of aspect 3 will be much more effective if you have a Facebook Page with a high engagement rate from your Super Fans (aspect 2).
If your customers and employees don’t understand your products (if the person responsible can’t answer “why do we do this?”) you will not win the customer even if you answer on Facebook at 11pm on a Thursday night.
If your PR- and legal departments understand that when your owners sue a competitor, they should both give you a heads up and look into the competitor’s fan base on Facebook. This will help you create strategies to minimize the backlash when the competitor’s Super Fans hi-jack your page.
Damon Razazi, strategist at media agency Mindshare, wrote the other week that “the organic traffic is dead on Facebook”. He claims that you can go to a random brand page on Facebook with Likes in the hundreds of thousands, and see zero engagement, even though the content is good. His conclusion is that nobody will see your content unless you support it with bought media. He clearly doesn’t understand the difference between these aspects of Facebook, and is talking about achieving aspect 1, using aspect 2 but charging for aspect 3. It’s like saying the toolbox is worthless because it’s hard to drive in a nail using the screwdriver.
This doesn’t mean you don’t need a budget to maximize the effect of Facebook. You need a budget to create the right type of content, to improve the customer experience and keep your staff happy, educated and proud of their work place.
If you want to read a great in-depth look at how the organic reach for Facebook Pages has changed, and why, Thomas Baekdal has a very good post about it. I highly recommend reading it if you made it this far.
(This post is also available in Swedish)
*There are lots of potential uses, but covering all the nuances and gray areas would require an essay. To keep it short, I hope you allow me this simplification.
