Facebook Best Practices: Building Your Brand & Your Community

Facebook
Best Practices:
Building Your
Brand & Your
Community
threadmarketing.com®While marketing via Facebook may require specific channel expertise in terms of strategies, tactics and execution, the approach is not dissimilar to the basic tenets of Marketing 101:
33Understand your consumer and define your brand's value proposition
33Build awareness and acquire fans
33Deliver value and engage your base
33Test, track and measure performance
33Optimize your efforts based on your learnings and performance
Easier said than done? Not really. By sticking to the following best practices for marketing on Facebook, you can build your community one step at a time.
Copyright © 2010 ThreadMarketing, A StrongMail Company. All rights reserved. 2Listen.
Understand. Then Frame the
Conversation.
Before attempting to develop a full Facebook fan page for your brand, you must first determine the nature of the conversation between your brand and your consumers. When it comes to framing the conversation, the brands that build successful Facebook communities take their cues from their consumers and don't try to dictate or dominate the relationship. They do this by listening.
The ultimate goal of listening is to identify a shared passion among your consumers. That passion will serve as the thread for discussion and driver of engagement throughout your community. Brands should tap into multiple listening sources in order to uncover and define points of shared passion:
Brand Audit - Type your brand's name into the Facebook understandable dashboards and reports. These listening search bar. This is a simple, quick and free way to take tools, such as those from providers like Radian6 and the pulse of the nature of conversations about your brand. StrongMail can help monitor conversations on Facebook Any given brand may have several different kinds of pages and identify discussion key words, sentiment and other organically created by consumers that have distinct trends associated with your brand.discussion tones and trends. Segments of consumers who build and engage with these brand pages can include brand enthusiasts (usually positive in tone), brand bashers (negative tone), and employees or former employees (tone may vary). Track and understand the nature and topics of the conversations on these existing pages - not just when you are starting out, but also as part of the never-ending process of listening and learning. If you are working with Facebook, you may even consider coordinating with them to move "unofficial" pages over to your official page once you are prepared to launch.
Leverage traditional market research to collect information about how your consumers use social media As an example, when Castrol USA sought to dedicate and what kind of content and conversations are important additional resources to operate a Facebook page, it first to them. Survey your consumer base through database conducted a rigorous listening and monitoring exercise marketing, website intercept surveys, third-party research to identify a shared passion among its consumers. That panels and other touchpoints at your disposal. Conduct shared passion - racing - served as the foundation of focus groups to drill down into the attitudes of your content, conversations and engagement on its revamped Facebook consumers and even how they interact with Castrol USA fan page. With the right passion identified different features and functions on the site. and propagated, your brand page can quickly evolve into an interactive community that is a true collaboration Utilize powerful listening tools that crunch through between your brand and your consumers.the immense amount of discussions and activity on social networks and organize that information in clean, Copyright © 2010 ThreadMarketing, A StrongMail Company. All rights reserved. 3Acquire & Grow:
Build Your Fan Base
So you have identified a shared passion among your Facebook consumers that will underpin your general community framework. Up next: building your base. Even with hundreds of millions of people on Facebook, it still takes a strategic, coordinated effort to attract and grow a brand's fan base.
It is helpful to devise Facebook acquisition strategies and When it comes to using the "Like" button outside of tactics by grouping them into two categories... [download for more]