We’ve all heard the riddle – if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, did it make a sound? This same principle applies to Facebook marketing. If nobody reads your post, did your post actually happen?
Marketers are spending countless hours designing, implementing and refining their Facebook strategy. And for good reason. Engaging the 500+ million members of Facebook is complicated and multi-faceted. Those who delay executing their Facebook strategy do so at their own peril. Facebook is now the largest Internet ecosystem and is getting bigger by the day. So where to begin?
Two pillars of any Facebook strategy are 1) creating an addressable audience that you can reach with targeted content, and 2) delivering your content to this audience. Sounds simple enough. Email marketers have mastered these techniques so the roadmap is clear. Right? Wrong. Lots of nuances that make the Facebook platform different - very different - than anything we’ve seen in the past. One major difference is how content is pushed and consumed by Facebook members.
It all starts with building a base of fans who “like” your brand – or encouraging likes of whatever you’re selling…whether a category of products or services, a compelling offer or individual items in your catalog. Once this linkage is made between you and the Facebook member, the next step is pushing relevant content in a timely manner to the members News Feed.
But here’s the tricky part. There’s no guarantee that your content will appear in the members News Feed or, if it does appear, that the member will even notice the post before being pushed off the screen by newer posts. With 90% of Facebook activity converging on the News Feed section, understanding how to get your post to appear is the priority for marketers.
As you would expect given the massive demands in the marketplace, a new area of specialty along with a set of tools is emerging that helps marketers manage their posts, analyze post engagements and optimize posts to become more prominent. Some call this News Feed Optimization – NFO - the next generation of SEO. At the core of NFO is a little known algorithm Facebook uses to determine the relevance of posts called Edge Rank.
Edge Rank considers engagement with posts such as comments, likes and shares to determine relevance. The more relevant your post, the greater the likelihood of this post appearing on your fans’ News Feed. And as Facebook members share and comment, they push your post to their social graph and increase brand exposure. The promise of social marketing is within your grasp.
But the Edge Rank secret sauce is not clearly understood and, more importantly, is hard for a marketer to manage. Great posts with compelling content simply do not guarantee success.
But marketers now have a new tool from Facebook. A product that gives marketers a more straightforward way to control whether their posts appear. Paid placement through Promoted Stories. Here’s how it works.
Post content that you believe is compelling and motivates action from your fan base – whether that is a call to action to visit your site, subscribe to email campaigns, conduct a transaction, complete a survey or simply ask for feedback. If the post is a Promoted Story, the post appears on the right rail of the news feed, effectively taking up a more permanent presence on the news feed of your fans.
Another flavor of Promoted Stories is promoting individual Likes – or in Facebook parlance, Like Stories. Here again, being able to highlight a like will generate more awareness, resulting in far more impressions and a greater likelihood of being noticed by friends of the person who originally took the Like action. Now, instead of solely relying on the merits of the content to generate engagement, marketers can revert to good old fashioned media spend.
So while products like Promoted Stories will help, marketers should not lose sight of the bigger picture…a large audience of fans who like whatever you’re selling must be created. Without this audience, your posts will struggle to make much of a difference.
This post has explored a very narrow path to becoming a more effective marketer on Facebook. Many more issues are in the mix – integrating Twitter into a Facebook-centric social strategy (see article here about our early efforts at Nextag Twitter Advertisers Lead Gen), a differentiated social shopping experience, monetizing Facebook advertising, properly implementing Connect APIs and integrating Mobile and Local are just a few of the challenges digital marketers face.
But make no mistake, developing deep Facebook expertise is crucial – probably the single most important marketing development since Google introduced AdWords. Testing various approaches, analyzing results and quickly adapting to new and unexpected events should be the centerpiece of your strategy.
At the very least, you should avoid being the brand whose posts are compared to trees falling in an empty forest.
