2014 saw many reports of Facebook’s rise and fall: teens left, grandparents joined, privacy settings increased (but not as much as some would have liked) and Mark Zuckerberg learned to speak Mandarin while working on connecting the world.
What does this mean for brands?
Increased security and profile privacy settings make access to personal conversations increasingly hard for brands to tap into. But with a population larger than most countries in the world, Facebook is still one of the most important resources for any brands trying to deepen their understanding of their consumer personas.
Social media requires brands to meet a delicate balance between fast costumer service response times and brand visibility, whilst at the same time not being seen as intrusive. Social media is often cited as a medium that should be out of bounds for marketers, instead being seen as a by the people, for the people medium. In a fact filled presentation, branding expert Mark Ritson even declared that social media was a waste of time for marketers compared to traditional media.
But despite all the limitations for brands, Facebook’s significance within the great focus group that is social media should not be underestimated.
So how can marketers leverage Facebook to communicate with their target audience without running the risk of becoming intrusive and turning consumers off?
With the right tools brands can leverage all social media channels to improve their performance on Facebook specifically, by making informed decisions when it comes to fan buying and ad placement.
In the era of analytics, there are 5 key things brands should do to maximise ROI from Facebook:
1 – Look beyond your brand:
Facebook is more than the interactions on your brand pages.
Some brands are so fixated in getting consumers to like their own page that they forget that it’s equally important to find out what other brands are doing, be they competitors or industry leaders in another sector that are doing a great job on Facebook.
Social buying is a game of inches; in order to buy Facebook fans efficiently and improve return on advertising spend, companies need to go beyond exploring the social conversations about their own brand, and explore the wider interests of people who expressed interest in their brand. Leading agencies are already doing this to better serve their customers and differentiate.
2 – Facebook is rich in user profile data. Use it.
Establishing the wider interests of your audience will help you to map out a more complete consumer profile – for example, you could easily establish that users talking about your brand are also talking about a particular movie release or a TV show. Why not align your communications with those interests to increase relevancy?
Being armed with this deeper knowledge of consumer personas will inform your Facebook advertising strategy and means you can create ads targeting those keywords and interests.
3 – Once you establish the interests of your audience, plan campaigns accordingly.
Marketers are often bound to the calendar year – Christmas campaigns, Valentine’s promotions… But what about focusing on your customers’ calendars? Analyse Facebook data to understand not just when people go on holiday, but when they start planning for their holiday, what they do in preparation in the preceding months etc.
4 – This won’t be news, but it can never be repeated enough – Keep on measuring the value of your keywords!
Are they performing against goals? Could there be another angle to engage with your customers? Social media keeps on reinventing itself – and it’s no wonder with 2.44 billion users forecasted to use social media networks by 2018. Brands cannot sit back and expect their target audiences to keep on sharing the same type of interests across a limited number of social networks. The only way to stay relevant is to stay on top of where your consumers are and how they want to engage with you.
5 – Even if you’ve established Facebook is not where your target audience is spending most of their time, don’t discard it just yet.
It might not be the most important social channel for you and your customers, but Facebook can be a fantastic resource for analysing what your competitors are doing (even if you’re not using it, they might be), and for gaining a general understanding of what a certain demographic is talking about, and what interests them.
Use this information to add to the context of other social networks you’ve identified as more likely to host your target audience.
Facebook really does have value for brand marketers, but only in the context of other channels and what they can tell us about the audience you’re trying to target.
By Liliana Osorio, EMEA Marketing Manager at Crimson Hexagon.
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