Feb 12th, 2011 |
Facebook earned nearly $2 billion dollars in advertising revenue for 2010, and some estimate this will grow to $4 billion for 2011. While it may be clear why advertisers are throwing money at the social network en masse (uh, their audiences are there), it’s not always clear how you – the individual advertiser – can make the greatest impact with your campaign and maximize your brand.
Web 2.0 Expo speaker Justin Kistner (Webtrends), along with co-presenter Dennis Yu (BlitzLocal), covers just this subject in two presentations this March: their workshop Effective Facebook Ads and Applications, and session Supercharging Your Brand on Facebook.
“Most of the conversation around social media marketing has been focused on more of the organic side of social,” Justin said. “But now what’s clearly emerging is a paid approach to social media marketing. It’s a very different discipline.
“Our session is going to go into a lot of those details not only just explaining the theory but also then getting into showing actual customer examples and sharing practices and insights that we’ve been able to gather from all the work that we’ve been doing.”
Justin and Dennis will look at the elements of effective advertising and share benchmarks, not just the creative executions. (For a look at some of the Facebook trends Justin studied, see his blog post on Webtrends.)
Why People Become Fans
In his research, Justin found a recurring trend of what people look for when deciding whether to become a fan of a brand’s page.
“Very strongly the message was ‘We became a fan because we wanted to be treated special in some way by the brand.’ be that they got exclusive offers or early access to information or exclusive content,” he said.
“A lot of the same things that we sign up for lists for are what we are hoping to get out of our relationship with a brand on Facebook. Now the goal is giving your customers, your fans, all that stuff: driving those offer campaigns and that exclusive content or early access to things, giving them that VIP treatment.”
But the main lesson learned he offered in our interview with him is for brand managers to focus their efforts on fan nurturing rather than just worrying about acquiring fan page followers.
“The lion’s share of your budget really needs to be allocated toward fan nurturing. This is very much familiar to people who do email marketing,” he said. “First you’ve got to build up your email list and then you have to drive campaigns to that list, and that is what actually delivers the ROI that you’re looking for from your investment.”
Converting Fans to Customers
To keep fans engaged with your brand, Justin recommends reaching out to users not just through the Wall (which his research says isn’t effective in and of itself) but through targeted purchased ads.
“The scalable way that you make sure that you actually reach all your fans is going to be taking out ads that target only your existing fan page and thinking about that cost as very similar to the cost that you pay when you do your email campaigns.”
One downside to this, Justin said, is that advertisers can’t yet use past visit behavior as a target option.
Although it may seem counterintuitive to pay money to target people who already Liked your brand for free, Justin argues that the best campaigns go after core users continuously.
“Fans are your heavy, happy users of your product. These are the people that consume your product on a regular basis, who have the most friends on Facebook – the standard person on Facebook has 130 friends, but people who click the Like button have an average of 310 friends.”
“More than half of [fans of any given brand] are on Facebook multiple times a day. Forty percent of them reported that they’ve used a product more now that they’ve become engaged with that brand on Facebook. What you’re reaching is a very lucrative audience – that is heavy users of the internet, heavy users of Facebook. They’re highly connected with other people. Because of their engagement with brands on fan pages they use the product more. And they’re there engaging with the brand specifically because they’re looking for offers from that brand.”
For more information about how to maximize these ads, Facebook fan page custom tabs, and community management of brand pages, check out Justin and Dennis’s session and workshop at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco this March.
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Kaitlin Pike is the Web 2.0 Expo community manager. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike. To see Justin speak, register for Web 2.0 Expo SF now with discount code websf11bl20 to save 20%.
