Use Facebook (Without Wasting Your Time)

Of late, I’ve been asked to explain Facebook by more than a few people (a refreshing break from being asked to explain Twitter); from the business perspective, everybody’s being told that they need to have a page, but the Facebook unsavvy or even the casual FB user isn’t quite sure how to implement it.  I don’t pretend to have this figured out more than anybody else does, but I think the key is realizing how the Facebook community behaves and catering to it.

A lot of marketing/promotional channels on the web - search engines (paid and unpaid), social news/bookmarking sites, Twitter, even blogs - are navigational, giving you access to other places.  Linking out is part of the culture around these things.

Facebook is a destination, though.  People in Facebook tend to stay in Facebook, because they are there for a specific purpose, whether it be responding to a friend request or chatting with an old classmate or studiously untagging themselves from photos.  A hard sell on Facebook is probably going to be less effective than it is on other platforms as a result.  Updating your page’s status with “Shop at our store! [Link]” every few hours isn’t going to bring the referring traffic to you in droves.

If you’re going to leverage Facebook, go after fans, not clickthrough.  Clickthrough to the store happens once, but an engaged fan is going to see all of your updates, act on some of those updates and that action will be shared with their entire network, some of whom are going to be influenced to become fans themselves.

How do you do that?  Be interactive.  Have fun.  Provide value, not just in terms of Facebook-only promotions and coupons, but with viral content - quizzes, gifts and, if you have the talent and vision to really pull it off, maybe even your own proprietary application (that does something useful - something like 95% of FB apps fail because they don’t follow that principle.  The era of “If you build it, they will come” in marketing is over).  Viral content is the currency of FB - make it funny and smart and promote the fact that it exists.

If you’re trying Facebook’s paid advertising, try directing some of your ad spend toward cultivating fans and compare the performance between the two campaigns.  Fans don’t instantly equal revenue in most cases, but they’ll be more likely to buy in the future and more likely to buy again once they do.