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Oct 12
30

Facebook Ads – Building An Owned Audience

Posted by Ed Gazarian
Published in Advice and Tips, Social Media Marketing, Social Networks

Because the PR & Marketing departments are typically where social media campaigns tend to be managed, I’ll use the familiar terms of paid, owned and earned to contextualize how you should go about running a successful fan acquisition campaign on Facebook. If your brand places social media in the hands of the Sales team, you might replace these with terms like “calls”, “qualified leads” or “pipe-line”.

Start thinking about your Facebook Fans as your owned audience. Sure, you might pay for them; but rather than rent them (as you do with traditional advertising), once they opt in, you can consider that audience owned. Your messages can reach them in perpetuity, as long as you’re creative, non-obtrusive and provide them with value.

Begin with geography. Where are your target customers? If you’re DIRECTV, the list is long. If you’re “Joe’s Boston Bar & Grille”, it’s not. List out 10 places to start. Facebook Ads can target down to postal codes, or the radius around a major metropolitan area. They can also be as broad as states/provinces, or whole countries. Remember that many Facebook users list the big city they are closest to as their location (the field that Facebook polls when serving ads). Targeting to a granular level like postal code might not be the right move. Consider targeting the major metropolitan area closest to your target audience (e.g. Madison, Wisconsin) and then checking the option to serve ads to Facebook users within a certain radius of that location.

Next, consider affinities. What are your target Facebook Fans already connected to on Facebook? In the first installment in this series, you were asked to list 10 of these things. If you’re DIRECTV, this list might include things like XFinity, Breaking Bad, or The Suite Life On Deck. If you’re “Joe’s Boston Bar & Grille”, it might be the Red Sox, Northeastern University, or Nantucket. It’s crucial that you explore what’s already on Facebook for your target audience to Like. List out topics/places/brands that are relevant to them; you want those people to make up your owned audience.

Once your fan acquisition ads are up and running, there’s no better way to acquire more Fans than by running fan acquisition ads that target Friends of Fans. Set up a separate Facebook Ad that targets Friends of Fans by geography only. That is, if I see an ad for DIRECTV because I’m in Boston and Like Breaking Bad on Facebook, my friends that don’t Like Breaking Bad – but live in Boston – might still be interested in DIRECTV. These people are a mix of paid and earned audience members. Once they Like you on Facebook, they’ve moved into the owned category.

Keep in mind that these tactics address only fan acquisition. In the next installment of this series, I’ll focus on what you can do with Facebook Ads to engage your owned audience, once you’ve got them.

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Oct 12
24

Rules of Engagement – Defining The Problem

Posted by Ed Gazarian
Published in Industry Commentary, Social Media Marketing

Let’s get something out of the way: there is no static measure or definition of engagement. The word is amorphous, and inherently resistant to a hardline definition. Anyone that tells you that Engagement = X+Y with a dash of Z mixed in is either deluded or deceitful. The definition cannot be static, by virtue of the varying metrics of success placed on a social media campaign by the brand running it.

In the past hour, while doing my daily blog crawl for news & notes, I’ve come across FIVE articles that address “Facebook Engagement” or “Driving Twitter Engagements” or “Pinning for Success”. All of them lost me within the first two lines of text. I’m done with articles that start out telling me “Social Media is here to stay!” or that “People are 10 Trillion times more likely to engage with PHOTOS on Facebook”. Really? This is still news?

You know why social media isn’t going anywhere? Because neither did the Internet. It makes life easier. Things happen quickly. Businesses can invest less and get more return. You know why photos work better than anything else on Facebook? Because people love pictures more than they love words. We are drawn to bright, colorful & evocative images. Beautiful sunsets? Sure. Beautiful people? Check. Beautiful ANYthing that doesn’t involve me having to read a lot of text in my Newsfeed? Like.

1 Comment

Mar 12
1

In Defense of Excellence

Posted by Ed Gazarian
Published in Industry Commentary, Social Media

Mediocrity should be a hard pill for your brand to swallow. You should not be OK with doing a job that can be considered “good enough”. This isn’t a rally-time bar hookup, and just doing a thing isn’t the same as mastering its craft. Are we all guilty of falling prey to this sort of cantankerous folly? Hells yeah. Do we know better? For sure. Does realizing either of those things make us in any way, shape or form immune? Nope. But when it comes to a well-designed, and well-executed social media strategy for your brand, simply put: mediocre won’t cut it.

You’re not the only brand out there that does what you do. You don’t have the smartest team, most clever copy, or most compelling visual material. You know why? Because you’re in the 99.9999999999% of people who are not the best. And guess what? None of this matters. The best aren’t thought of as such because of any of these things. The best are the best because of everything else they are surrounded by. If we hold them up against the ocean of mediocrity that characterizes most brands in social media, sure – they look shiny, and clever, and innovative, and fun. But if we take them for what they really are – people who see a need (or in some cases create that need), and find a way to communicate with their target consumers in a meaningful way – then we have unlocked the secret to excellence: good, old fashioned, critical thinking.

Social media has, among other things, made it possible for small players to compete with the Coca-Colas of the world in a tangible way. If social media were running for office this November, it would do well to talk about how it’s empowered Main Street, and made it possible for Mom & Pop to take on The Good Old Boys – and kick their collective asses. But it only works when brands realize that it’s people – not promotions, programs, ad buys, commercials, radio spots, and blah blah blah ad nauseam – that connect today’s consumers. It’s people that spread your message; it isn’t you, as a brand. If you don’t have strong critical thought at the core of your social media strategy, you are all but doomed to absolute, colossal, and tumultuous failure. You will have your mediocrity revealed in a way that – back in the days when printed ads were king – wasn’t going to cause much of a stir. You will only make the people that are better thinkers than you, look better. As for them – the more thoughtful of your comrades – their consumers will never know what hit them. All those consumers will experience is a message – be it visual, auditory, or in spectacular smell-o-rama – that contains exactly what’s relevant to them. Social media is a marvelous tool for the brands that understand these things. As for the rest of you – thanks are in order:

Thanks for syncing your Twitter feed to Facebook.

Thanks for forgetting that when people check-in on Foursquare, they are already at the place they’re checking into.

Thanks for posting 3 paragraph-long status updates to Facebook with no photo.

Thanks for thinking that Google+ is “the next big thing”.

Thanks for forgetting to optimize content for the feed.

Thanks for your rabid, and incoherent adoption of Pinterest.

But most of all, thanks for making it so easy for us to show our clients who gets it, and who’s going to help us make them look really, really good.

1 Comment

Oct 11
25

Stand Apart on Facebook – Don’t Pander

Posted by Ed Gazarian
Published in Advice and Tips, Brain Food, Industry Commentary, Online Reputation Management, Social Media, Social Media Marketing

There’s a growing trend in online communications, and I – for one – am not too thrilled. With increased aggression and startling frequency, quotients of the brands on Facebook are lowering their standards of communication. You know the type. They use words like ginormous and irregardless, both of which have become so pervasive in the American lexicon that they’ve been entered into the ranks of reverence on Dictionary.com (somewhere, another Wordsmith of some repute is rolling over in his grave, but doing it with a wink and a smile). These are the same folks that start every sentence with “Actually”, or “I feel like…” and in the spoken word utter every statement with a sickly sweet sense of mild, bland surprise, and a frequently falling intonation (“Oh, really? No kidding.) They have seemingly no regard for the fact that an exclamation point is meant to do just that – exclaim. If you can’t express the sentiment with language, then using !!!!! as a crutch is not an acceptable workaround.

These grammatical slights are not creative. They are examples of lazy, uncreative people expressing themselves in lazy, uncreative ways. Like telling an old joke over and over again to the same person, what once was impactful for its uniqueness has become ineffectual by way of ubiquity.

1 Comment

Aug 11
18

Food For Thought: No One Goes To Your Facebook Page

Posted by Ed Gazarian
Published in Brain Food

image by katerha

So you know that Facebook Page you’ve got for your brand? Remember the hours you spent thinking about what sort of custom tabs you want to put there? Remember the design comps you poured over, and the slick little graphics you threw together? Guess what – they don’t matter. Because no one goes to your Facebook Page.

Read it again and make certain it sinks in: no one goes to your Facebook Page.

This is a bitter pill to swallow, so here’s some supporting evidence to help wash it down:

Fact: 95% of Facebook users view only their “Top News” feed
Fact: Over 20 million people interact with Facebook from an iOS device, which doesn’t display custom tabs (and that was back in 2010)
Fact: Just 3% – 7.5% of fans see a brand page’s posts

Overwhelmingly & unequivocally, the lion’s share of interactions with your Facebook Page – upwards of 90% – are happening in the newsfeed, and most brands either don’t know, or don’t care. Interactions are not happening on your Page’s wall. Interactions are not happening on the custom tab you spent hours developing so that people can watch a talking, animated snake-oil salesman. Nope. Interactions are happening in the newsfeed, and they are happening with pieces of content that involve simple (but thoughtful) language, and rich media (e.g., pictures and video).

Now that you know this, what do you do? Post too often, and you risk the dreaded unsubscribe link being clicked. Don’t post often enough, and watch your active user base dwindle, and disappear. What you need is The Goldilocks Principle; you need a strategy that isn’t too hot or too cold – it’s just right.

Start by learning about your Page’s fan demographics. Track your impressions against your actual fan count. What percentage are you really getting your content in front of? Where are your fans – active and inactive – located? Figure out what days and what times are best to reach them. That is, don’t post once a day, at 9am, New York time, if most of your fans are in San Francisco, and won’t do their morning Facebook trolling until it’s ~1pm in New York. What time does your audience use Facebook? Is there another audience you want to reach, that operates under slightly different rules?

Sure, there’s more to it than that – but start there. You’ll be leagues ahead of most, and well on your way to a winning strategy on Facebook.

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Food For Thought: No One Goes To Your Facebook Page

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