Thinking there must be more ways to make use of the fans on your branded facebook page? There is and its not about pushing content, promoting engagement or organising sweepstakes – it’s about advertising.

This post will show you how to use what seems to be a forgotten yet incredibly powerful feature of the facebook advertising platform, the ‘connected to’ button. The best thing is, employing this feature and reaping the full benefits of it only takes a few seconds to learn and understand.

You have a qualified, captive audience – use them.

Fans of your facebook page want to be there, they trust your brand and have opened themselves up to receive communication from it.   For most facebook page admins/marketers, regular page updates is where the engagement with fans starts and ends, this is simply not true.   Using the ‘connected to’ feature on facebook allows you to only advertise specific ad’s to your pages fans, the consumers you know most about, the consumer that will be most receptive to your message – the consumers that will return you the highest ROI possible.

How do I do it?

Step 1 – Access facebooks advertising suite by clicking the green ‘promote this page’ button or simply click the ‘Advertising’ link at the very bottom of the screen.

Step 2 – Begin creating your ad, make sure what you are advertising is relevant to your page fanbase and is something that they will want to know about.

Step 3 – Key Step – Targeting, before you start entering what specific age group, sex and interest’s you want to target, head down the page to the ‘connections on facebook’ section.  Here you will see three options:

- target users connected to

- target users who are not already connected to

- target users who’s friends are connected to

you want to focus on the ‘target users connected to‘ section.  Now add in the name of the page (you admin) who’s community it is you want to advertise to, almost instantly facebook should give you an estimate of how many people will be in that selected pool.

Step 4 – Start advertising.

The crucial thing to understand here is not the size of the market, it’s the quality of the market you are advertising to.  You’ve targeted them based on their connection to your brand page, so make sure the proposition you are pushing to them via ad’s matches up to the original proposition you offered them when they first encountered your page – the proposition they accepted.

Main Benefit’s of this Strategy

Generate incredibly high ROI on advertising – The market you are advertising to using this technique already know your brand and are willing to receive marketing messages from it.  For them, receiving relevant advertising from a trusted brand will likely be welcomed over most of the other noise on facebooks advertising platform.

You have the power to direct – Say your brand has a new website/microsite or online survey that has just launched, yet none of your consumers know about it.  Using this technique you can effectively drive qualified traffic to that destination for a fraction of what you have had to pay before.

Constant, qualified brand exposure – By varying your advertising daily/weekly you can expose new products/services to consumers who love your brand in an ongoing fashion.

Hopefully this small strategy will give page administrators out there another avenue which allows them to make the most of the facebook fan page communities.   It is also a great way to ’sell’ the idea of facebook advertising to others who would otherwise be skeptical on the subject.

From here, my advice to you is to give it a try and see what results you come back with, pay particular attention to the click through rate (CTR) of your ad’s, anything over 0.06% is considered solid.

See above, the bottom two rows show ad’s that were run through specific targeting without using the connected to feature.  The top row shows an ad that was run through the exact same targeting perameters, but did use the connected to feature.  Notice the dramatic rise in CTR when using the feature, it’s risen nearly 450%.  A healthier CTR means a higher ROI for advertising, also note the lower bid due to your ad targeting a selective audience, that only you have access to! Again, this contributes to a lower overall ROI.

I hope this post helps, if you do have success, or failure using this strategy I would love to know about it in the comments.

Over the past 18 months as an agency we estimate we have sent out roughly 1200 individual facebook page updates for various clients and brands across Australia and the world.  During this time we’ve noticed that small, seemingly subtle differences in how updates are written and presented can make a massive difference in terms of engagement.  So, in the first post of many, we want to share with you what we’ve come to adopt as the first 3 rules of facebook page update creation.

Rule #1 – Keep it short.

The human brain only has so much available processing power at any given time therefore it is imperitive that your message be quickly and easily digested by the brain in order for the user to engage.  If it appears too long, the brain will pass it off as too much work and quickly move onto the next update in the feed, leaving your update with no engagement.

Rule #2 – Keep it clean

When adding a link into your update do not include the actual URL in the update itself, it appears unprofessional and does a great job of confusing users.  Once the link is loaded into the update, clean up the text and copy that appears to the right, often there is too much information here, making the update too big.  Once the update is too big — see Rule #1.

Rule #3 – Take the thought process away

This is probably the most fundamental insight we have learned so far.   In taking the thought process away from users, we guarantee your updates will produce more engagement.  Instead of writing updates with open-ended questions which requires the user to muster significant brainpower in order to engage, write the update with 2 answers already supplied.  This way the user doesn’t have to think in order to engage, they quickly choose which answer suits them then submits the one word answer to the update and boom, they’ve successfully engaged.

Example

Update requiring high thought process to engage

“Our new shoes are so awesome, what do you like about them?”

Update requiring minimal thought process to engage

“Our new shoes are so awesome, what do you like about them – the colour or the design?”

Ask yourself, which one would you seem more likely to engage with?

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As mentioned above, this will become the first of many such posts in a series with an aim to share insights that we’ve learned over the past 2 years working on facebook that will hopefully help you in your facebook marketing efforts.

Rules #4, #5 and #6 will be posted shortly.

facebook has released another change of how we can view info through the newfeed.

When you hover your mouse cursor over either a friends profile name or event in the newsfeed a small popup will appear above it, giving you a small amount of extra information about the content you are highlighting.

This added functionality will no doubt further increase engagement users have with the site as the friending/attending process gets simpler.

As of 30 mins ago facebook released a new feature that will, yet again, change the way we use facebook.  We are now able to ‘like’ comments made by others in a comment thread.

Above anything, this new feature will further continue to strengthen facebooks knowledge around our own personal social graphs as it will be able to start logging the relationship strengths between a 3 person dynamic, rather than a 2 person dynamic (which was what was available before this change).  View a breakdown of this below:

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The three person dynamic

1) The post writer The individual who actually wrote the wall post that comments are being made on.

2) The commenter The individual who commented on the post writers post.

3) The comment liker The individual who ‘liked’ the commenters comment, on the wall post.

Using the data that this type of dynamic will produce is going to allow facebook to gain a new angle into how we associate with our friends, predominantly in terms of which groups of friends are closer than others and what content draws these groups together.

Ultimately, through this change, facebook is allowing you to express more about the social ties you have with your friends – on the flipside, they have opened up yet another channel which will allow them to better understand who you interact with and why.

Just a quick post before I head off to Thailand for 6 days.

I’ve been curious to see if facebook was starting to index profile updates into their advertising mix.

Basically, the premise is, if you write an update, facebook would index keywords in that update and begin pushing advertisements to you based on those keywords in realtime.

I was unsure if they had started this process in Australia, as I was yet to see any evidence of it happening, until this morning.

On Thursday morning I wrote this update “Heading to the land of Thai’s v soon.”

Then this morning I get this ad.

I don’t have the word Thailand anywhere in my profle info. The only indication I had given to facebook that I was leaving to Thailand was that update. It didn’t even include the countries full name, yet still, I managed to receive a relevant ad specific to Thailand.

Looks like facebook are starting to ramp up their real-time advertising activities.

“Noone wants to be advertised to through facebook, it’s a place to connect and share with my friends & family, why would I want a brand in that space? It’s disruptive and it doesn’t work.”

Advertising - is a form of communication intended to persuade an audience (viewers, readers or listeners) to take some action.

Disruption – is the (usually deliberate or intended) interruption of normal work or practice.

Advertising has always been disruptive. It is primarily designed to interrupt you from your normal everyday activities and pursuade you to take some action. The constructs of traditional mass media (print, TV, radio) have always facilitated this model of advertising, the advert or message is always pre-packaged, aimed and broadcast at a pre-determined group of consumers, mostly via generic fields such as age, sex and location. It interrupts these consumers whilst they are watching TV, reading the newspaper, sitting at a bus stop or listening to the radio. It’s forced, it’s a push of content towards consumers. Whether they like it or not, they’re still going to be fed the message.

Along comes something like facebook. It’s a place to connect, share, interact and keep up to date with things happening in your world. It’s also a place where you can become connected to non living entities like brands, common interest groups or companies.

YOU decide to be connected to these things.

If you have an affinity with a brand, you fan them. You are then connected with them. You have given that brand explicit permission to have access into your social graph, you are effectively welcoming that brands message into your social world, because you find it relevant to you.

If the brand is smart, they will understand and respect your social space, grateful for the personal access you have granted them and send you information that interests you, is relevant to you and can help improve your life in a helpful, meaningful way.

Understand that this approach is still, very much, advertising. The brand still needs to sell products and make money. It still needs to pursuade an audience to take action.

The thing that doesn’t need to apply to advertising anymore, the part that is irrelevant now, is disruption.

I picked up the latest edition of the economist today.

It’s got Steve Jobs on the cover (why i picked it up), but also features an 18 page special report on social networking.

If you haven’t picked one up yet, I suggest you do as it makes for some very interesting and insightful reading.

As I initially flicked through the report a small graph caught my eye, it was labeled ‘Money Talks’ and forcasted the growth of web 2.0 revenues from 2009-2013.

I’ll detail the list below as I can’t find a link to it online (all behind a paywall),

web 2.0 revenues by technology, $m

2009 2013

RSS $190m $575m
Blogs $200m $325m
Wikis $180m $450m
Mashups $100m $675m
Podcasting $75m $275m
Widgets $75m $350m

Social Networking $425m $1.997b

I knew social networking was no where near being mature from a monitsation point of view, but a near 500% jump in revenue over a 4 year period is insane.

Who or what do you think is going to take in most of this revenue an how do you think its going to be done?

Cut out the usual 1/4 of the results below (as they’re spammers or screenscrapers) and you reach a relative figure of around 620M.

Thats almost as many videos on youtube (684 according to Google).

There is currently around 2.5M fan pages on facebook, so you get an idea of how integral groups really are to the entire facebook experience.

Groups are old school though and produce far less engagement than Pages, this is partly due to the way facebook has engineered pages, they have more reach into the social graph therefore they’re going to produce more engagement and more insight for brands.

With that in mind, the real benefits of Google having access to facebook data will be seen when facebook Pages become more widely available to the search engine.

Pepsi have created the US$20M ‘Refresh Everything’ Social Media campaign to replace their traditional 1-2 Superbowl ad’s during the uber huge sporting event.

Coke has taken a philanthropic turn and wants to ‘do a little good while refreshing people’ by offering all fans of their ‘Live Positively‘ facebook page the chance to give gifts to their friends. Coke will donate US$1 to a charity for each gift given during the Superbowl period.

So is social growing up, are big brands finally seeing the benefits of social media over traditional media or are they just willing to take a gamble and see how it goes?

If well, social becomes a very viable primary channel for big brands. If not so well, social will slip back into the backroom as a ‘bolt on’ solution that a few marketers now feel comfortable dismissing it as.

Will Pepsi get more qualified exposure and consumer engagement out of a US$20M social media campaign than if they ran their traditional Superbowl ad’s? I think they will.

What do you think?

A major hurdle has just been overcome in the ‘how do you measure social media’ debate.

About 3-4 hours ago facebook page admins will have noticed that one new line of data appears under their branded page updates, impressions and % feedback.

This is significant to the advertising industry for three reasons – marketers now have justification to create a pricing model around facebook updates through CPM, smart marketers will be able to determine the best time of day to send updates for the most exposure/engagement and lastly marketers will know the effectiveness of each individual update in realtime, as engagement is occuring.

Below are just a few thoughts about how this development could really change things.

Creation of a ‘per update’ pricing model

Marketers now have a concrete and tradititional measurement unit with which to charge out facebook page management and update creation. The days of facebook pages being ambiguous and hard to sell to the boardroom in terms of reach and cost are effectively over.

Updates can now justifiably be sold to 3rd parties

Now that page admins have access to the amount of impressions each of their updates receives, its conceivable that owners (brands) that have a large fanbase will now be able to sell updates to outside advertisers through a traditional CPM pricing model.

Realtime engagement monitoring

Being able to track feedback in realtime is incredibly insighful for fb marketers as it allows them to keep brands informed on consumer sentiment as it happens, effectively allowing them (the brand) to react instantly.

Lastly, I think the biggest question is….how much is a fb update CPM worth compared to a traditional CPM?

Traditional CPM

• Usually targeted at a cluster of ’similar’ websites that have a ’similar’ audience.
• Your message can often be associated with content that doesn’t suit your brand.
• It can be relatively unclear who is actually seeing and engaging with your message.
• There is no flow on (viral) brand effect when a consumer engages with your message.
  

Facebook CPM

• You know exactly what type of consumer your message will be getting exposed to, as the consumer connected themselves to the page, the relationship is voluntary, they want to receive the message from the page (basically the inverse to traditional CPM banner ad’s offerings).
• You can monitor and communicate with consumers who engage with your message in realtime.
• You can see the exposure/reach the message is getting and how effective it is as it happens.
• There is significant flow on effect through facebooks social graph when your message is engaged by each consumer, increasing brand exposure throughout the platform.

I think a facebook CPM should inherently be more expensive than traditional CPM’s because

1. the market they reach is more qualified
2. consumer sentiment data and reach are both offered in realtime
3. consumers can actually engage and share opinion about the message
4. brands can respond to consumers engaging with the message instantly
5. their is significant flow on effect for brand exposure, ensuring your message will reach more consumers.

Will facebook update CPM’s become an integral part of the advertising landscape?

Will they will be more or less expensive than traditional CPM’s?

What do you think?