6 BEST PRACTICES TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE

SECTION TITLE
Subtitle

6 BEST PRACTICES
TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE

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2012

6 BEST PRACTICES TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE

INTRODUCTION
The social engagement potential of social media and Facebook
According to a recent report by the Mckinsey Global Institute, The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies, social platforms draw 1.5 billion users globally, and Facebook claims 64% of them. With such a large user base - in the U.S. alone, 51% of the population uses Facebook - companies cannot ignore the massive opportunity Facebook presents for finding and engaging the new social customer. Not only does Facebook provide businesses with the opportunity to connect with consumers, but consumers expect this connection. Regardless of whether your brand is business-to-consumer (B2C) or businessto-business (B2B), all companies can utilize social media to their advantage, and as Facebook represents the largest social network with 955 million active users, this white paper will detail six best practices to make the most of your brands Facebook presence. These best practices include: 1. Follow a new fan engagement framework 2. Engage in Social Activation 3. Conduct multiple, frequently promoted campaigns 4. Offer Facebook exclusives that fans wont find elsewhere 5. Enable social endorsement 6. Measure results and adjust as needed (with a focus on Return on Fan) Following these best practices will help your brand achieve positive results in the estimated $1 trillion social media market.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION BEST PRACTICE #1 BEST PRACTICE #2 BEST PRACTICE #3 BEST PRACTICE #4 BEST PRACTICE #5 BEST PRACTICE #6 CONCLUSION

1 3 7 9 10 11 13 15

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6 BEST PRACTICES TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE

INTRODUCTION
The need for a new way to capture social marketing ROI in Facebook Most fans follow brands for games, contests, and promotions. Despite the potential for social engagement commerce, marketers still find Facebook ROI elusive.
According to recent data from Alexa, Facebook is currently the second most popular website in the world. Individual visits to Facebook last an average of 24 minutes, with almost a minute spent on each page view. These facts position Facebook as the perfect venue for interaction between brands and their customers. McKinsey predicts that companies that rely on consumer insights for product development and marketing, such as those in the consumer packaged goods industry, can use social media to create additional value up to 30% of current spending on these activities. However, most companies have not yet perfected their technique for maximizing Facebook returns in terms of both business ROI and new consumer insights. According to an eMarketer white paper , only 20% of marketers believed that social media produced a quantifiable ROI in 2011. One of the major reasons why brands have not fully tapped into the Facebook potential is due to the fact that most of them fail to offer fans what they want first and foremost from brands they follow a recent Lithium survey points to 65% of fans connecting with brands on Facebook for games, contests, and promotions. The apparent digital divide between potential returns and actual results on Facebook indicates the need for a new approach and measurement of social media success a framework that helps brands engage with Facebook fans, and enables interaction and transaction on the social and mobile level (for more on Moontoasts framework, read this spotlight on Social Media, Return on Fan). Social engagement and commerce, defined as engagement and commerce conducted in the social space, represents a simple but powerful premise that lies at the core of generating ROI through Facebook. McKinsey reports that 1/3rd of consumer spending can be influenced through social shopping, highlighting the untapped potential of social commerce. Companies spend effort building and engaging with communities on Facebook, but in order to benefit from these communities, brands need to turn community members into active consumers. To do this, brands can follow these six best practices:

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6 BEST PRACTICES TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE

BEST PRACTICE # 1:
Follow a new fan engagement framework
In order to succeed and drive ROI on Facebook, companies first need to follow a new method for engaging with fans. This method, called Discovery-InteractionTransaction-Endorsement (DITE), combines the community-building value of customer insights and positive branding with the need to move these customers through a transactional funnel. DITE takes potential customers through four distinct steps, driving value at each phase:

NEW FRAMEWORK
1. Enable social discovery

2. Enable social interaction

3. Enable social transaction

4.Enable social endorsement

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6 BEST PRACTICES TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE

#1

ENABLE SOCIAL DISCOVERY

To enable social discovery, your brand needs to meet consumers where they spend their time online. On Facebook, this means researching demographic information such as what your customers Like or what city or state they live in. Your brands should then share your content in conversations aligned with your followers interests and passions. Additional information such as whether consumers browse the internet using laptops, tablets, or mobile will also influence your method for enabling discovery. In Top Digital Trends for 2012, eMarketer reports that the use of mobile phones and tablets will continue to rise in 2012, meaning that companies need to facilitate discovery across multiple platforms and screen sizes; for example, a user browsing Facebook on their smart phone will not see standard Facebook ads, so that user will only discover your brand through what they see in their newsfeed.

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6 BEST PRACTICES TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE

#2 ENABLE SOCIAL INTERACTION

Social interactions involve getting customers to click on your content and follow your calls to action. To do this, you need to listen to what consumers want and need, and then cater to those individuals to create proportional value. A recent Lithium survey found that 67% of consumers connected with a brand for exclusive offers, while 65% did so for games, contests, and promotions. From a CRM standpoint, interacting with customers through social media is also important for customer retention; Carol Rozwell of Gartner stated that failure to respond to customers via social channels can cause a 15% churn rate.

Creating meaningful interactions

To create meaningful interactions, give consumers what they want. Run contests, promotions, games, and exclusives to give consumers a reason to continue interacting with your brand. This can also include giving the consumer control over events, such as voting on which flavor to create for a snack company or what design to discount at a clothing store. As important as creating this content is presenting it, and to do this, make sure the offer provides a strong call to action, value proposition, and bold graphics.

Example of an ad that does a good job of enabling social interaction

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6 BEST PRACTICES TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE

#3 ENABLE SOCIAL TRANSACTION

This third step represents the transition from enticing customers into clicking on your content to actually completing some sort of transaction. Companies in this phase of social media marketing can utilize different transactional methods depending on the end goal, ranging from obtaining an email in exchange for a free download for lead acquisition, to hosting a flash sale on your Facebook page to close direct sales. The key in the social transaction phase is the completion of your call to action (CTA), whatever that CTA may be.

#4 ENABLE SOCIAL ENDORSEMENT

Arguably the most important step of the DITE framework, enabling social endorsement allows the social sales cycle to propagate itself. According to McKinseys recent study, 1/3 of all purchases could be influenced by social, creating an enormous potential for companies to successfully utilize social media, and specifically, Facebook. Social endorsements have a potent effect on sales; social analytics company Spinback claims that each social Share of a product, service, or event, leads to an average of $2.10 in incremental sales. To leverage fans own network and marketing abilities, companies should easily enable fans to share with their social graph. Adding a large, easily seen Share button after completing a transaction is a good way to remind fans to share with their friends, and simply posting a call to action asking fans to share their transaction will increase their likelihood of sharing.

SHARE

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6 BEST PRACTICES TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE

BEST PRACTICE #2:

Social activation
Facebook has evolved over the past eight years, and for brands, the most recent wave of Facebook marketing centers around social activation. Following the first wave of listening to consumers and the second wave of publishing content, social activation entails reaching customers on Facebook and effectively engaging with them. Facebook announced that only 16% of brand posts reach fans of those brands, and, according to Michael Wu of Lithium, 70% of customers do not reengage with a fan page after Liking that brand. To engage with fans on Facebook, brands cannot rely on the traditional disruptive marketing tactics of pushing customers to brand pages. Instead, companies need to meet the customer on their own ground in the newsfeed. Meeting the consumer with the right offer at the right time means that brands will not only engage with their current customers, but they will also have the ability to reach into the social graphs of those customers who eagerly share content they find valuable with their own friends and connections. Whats on your mind?

MEET YOUR

CUSTOMERS
IN THE

NEWS FEED
Hi!

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6 BEST PRACTICES TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE

Tools to engage in social activation

Companies cannot simply create Facebook stores with the hope of attracting visitors to their page. Apps such as Moontoasts Social Activation Engine, which includes social marketing and social commerce applications that allow distribution anywhere within the Facebook newsfeed, play a crucial role in effective social activation. Using Moontoasts distributed store, a new consumer packaged goods brand took just three hours to outsell what that brands tab stores had sold in the past year! Another example of successful social activation on Facebook comes from a recent cause campaign originated by Hans Zimmer, which included the use of a contextual app for completing a downloadfor-donation within the newsfeed. This initiative helped over 8,000 people donate to the Hans Zimmer campaign for the Aurora victims.

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6 BEST PRACTICES TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE

BEST PRACTICE #3:

Conduct multiple, frequently promoted campaigns
The social space moves very quickly, and social media users enjoy and expect this fast pace. Consider the popularity of livetweeting, which is defined by Twitter developers as the practice of engaging on Twitter for a continuous period of time anywhere from 20 minutes to a few hourswith a sequence of focused Tweets. While Facebook users measure time in hours rather than minutes, remember that according to a study by analytics company Edgerank Checker, customers actively engage with the average Facebook post for just three hours. Combined with the fact that only 30% of fans return to brand pages, the data suggests that in order to cater to social users short attention spans, successful campaigns on Facebook must be promoted every 3-4 hours for a short timespan, usually one to three days.

Successful flash campaigns

In 24 hours, a consumer goods company used Moontoast apps to host a flash sale, and the supporting ad campaign experienced over 14x ROI. Even more telling, one consumer packaged goods company conducted a successful 24-hour flash campaign with Moontoast, and 80% of total sales occurred in the first 7 hours. Targeting consumers in the newsfeed leads to greater success than attempting to drive them to separate Facebook tabs or a branded page. Creating multiple mini-campaigns within an overarching Facebook campaign strategy will allow your company to reap the benefits of flash sales and numerous short bursts of revenue.

FLASH SALE

SOCIAL STORE

INCREASE ROI

By creating a Moontoast-powered social store to support their flash sale, a consumer goods product launch achieved 14x ROI

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6 BEST PRACTICES TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE

BEST PRACTICE #4:

Offer Facebook exclusives that fans wont find elsewhere
As we explained in our Direct to Consumer eBook, three out of five individuals who Like brands on Facebook do so to receive special deals. Statistically speaking, over 50% of people following your company expect to be rewarded for Liking your page, so offer them exclusive coupons, sales, or clearance items that they can only find on Facebook. Even something as simple as offering an exclusive product combination can be enough to make Facebook users feel special and generate a significant return on their Like. Such an approach in turn increases direct social sales and, in fact, becomes a powerful way to create social marketing campaigns that are self-funding. Lady Antebellum used Moontoasts distributed store to combine best practices #2 and #4, driving their largest online sales day on Facebook ever by selling bundle packages of 8x10 autographed photos with a hoodie and making the sales through fans newsfeeds. Speaking about the sale, A Lady Antebellum representative stated: The Moontoast test we did for Lady Antebellum blew us away. Not only was the campaign a success from a sales perspective, but it was also a success from a consumer engagement perspective, with more than 85% of the sales from new customers not part of our existing email or sales databases. This deal sold out in one hour targeting an exclusive offer to fans in the Facebook newsfeed. That night the hoodie was reintroduced by itself and sold out in ten minutes. Adding to the initial inventory, the hoodie continued to sell throughout that weekend.

Driving social sales

Two key points from Lady Antebellums success are that the offer led to more sales, and equally important, by putting their exclusive offer in the newsfeed, the sale drew more new customers, suggesting that the deal reached a larger, previously untapped audience.

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6 BEST PRACTICES TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE

BEST PRACTICE #5:

Enable social endorsement
Social endorsement plays a pivotal role in the DITE methodology, and due to its importance, it warrants its own best practice treatment. According to Buddy Media founder Mike Lazerow, social media influences 90% of purchasing decisions, creating an enormous opportunity for those companies who can successfully channel this influence. By creating opportunities for positive mentions on Facebook, companies like TicketMaster can earn an average of $6-8 in new ticket sales for each socially referred prospect. For non-group focused products and services, further incentives help convince consumers of the worth of sharing their purchase. Promotions may include basic referral bonuses for sharing such as: X% off next order Free shipping on the current order for clicking Share at checkout $X off coupon Free gift for Sharing More sophisticated incentives may focus on performance-based referrals, such as: One free month of service for every successful referral $X for each customer directly referred These referrals may prove very effective, but be sure not to get caught up in the excitement of heavily discounted referral sales; after all, your net revenue still needs to result in a profit!

Social media influences 90% of purchasing decisions

HOW TO INCENTIVIZE SOCIAL ENDORSEMENT

Large, easily visible Share buttons put the thought of sharing in the customers mind. When combined with a specific call to action to share with their friends, fans are more likely to take part in Facebook referrals, especially for group activity purchases like concert or movie tickets.

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6 BEST PRACTICES TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE

SOCIAL ENDORSEMENT MAY REPLACE TRADITIONAL SALES

Just as Facebook and content marketing have challenged traditional disruptive marketing, social endorsements will challenge the traditional view of sales. New mobile service provider Solavei attempts to place customer endorsements at the core of its marketing and sales strategy, with Solaveis CEO stating We are going to make a difference in peoples lives by shifting billions of dollars from traditional mass-media advertising into the greatest advertising vehicle today people. The mobile provider will offer customers $20/month for every three new members that they (or someone in their personal network) refer to Solavei. This creates the potential for customers to earn a recurring monthly income through acting as salespeople for the mobile company, potentially eliminating the need for an official sales-force. Only the official launch of the company in September will prove whether such a bold social endorsement strategy works in practice, but if the increased trust people typically put in other customers proves true in this scenario, Solavei may have the most cost-effective salespeople in the mobile world.

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6 BEST PRACTICES TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE

BEST PRACTICE #6:

Measure results using Return on Fan
All of the best practices found in this white paper will help your brand achieve the seemingly elusive Facebook ROI. However, without measuring the right things, you may experience a positive return without ever knowing it.

RETURN ON FAN (ROF)

With the DITE methodologys focus on relationships, relevancy, and results, tracking the process as a whole provides marketers with an important social media metric: Return on Fan (ROF). Instead of focusing solely on ROI, which is contained within the transaction and endorsement phases of DITE, ROF accounts for all four steps, measuring the unique value each step contributes for social media marketers.

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6 BEST PRACTICES TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE

TRACKING SOCIAL DISCOVERY (SIMILAR TO CPM)
Measuring social discovery requires recording impressions of a Brands social presence. To do so, simply add up all possible impressions across Facebook to determine your brands visibility to customers. According to eMarketer, the majority of marketers relied on these metrics in 2011, but as discovery only covers the first step in the DITE framework, the metrics do not provide meaningful ROF.

TRACKING SOCIAL INTERACTION (SIMILAR TO CPC)

Measuring social interaction involves tracking anyone who opens and navigates through content once they have discovered it. Measure social interaction by recording the number of meaningful engagements users have with your Facebook content, including clicks, completion of polls, comments, contest submissions, etc.

TRACKING SOCIAL TRANSACTION (SIMILAR TO CPA)

Measurement of social transactions is more similar to traditional marketing and sales metrics. Measuring social transaction involves tracking how many customers completed your call to action (CTA), which may include recording qualified leads, social sales, and revenue.

TRACKING SOCIAL ENDORSEMENT

Social endorsement represents an entirely unique measurement and should be measured by your brands ability to grow organically by tapping in to your fans social graphs. Enabling fans to share their transactions can provide a low-cost method for brand growth, and successful social endorsements will allow for exponentially increasing growth with considerably lower expenses than those associated with traditional marketing. Moontoast offers a full analytics suite for our customers that provide comprehensive tracking of metrics at each step of the DITE framework. Our analytics suite ultimately gives customers actionable insights on how to enhance performance with subsequent Facebook efforts.

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6 BEST PRACTICES TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE

BEST PRACTICES: THE SYNERGISTIC EFFECT

Combine best practices to maximize ROF
The six best practices outlined in this Whitepaper will help any brand improve their Facebook ROI and ROF. Although each best practice stands effectively on its own, combining them produces a synergistic effect and offers the best cumulative results. For example, targeting users in their own newsfeed (#2) with a timesensitive flash deal (#3) that they can only find on Facebook (#4) will likely lead to a higher ROI and ROF than conducting each campaign on its own. Its time to expand your use of Facebook past monitoring conversations, gathering consumer insights, and abstract branding. Facebook has the potential to directly impact your companys bottom line, and following the best practices in this white paper creates a positive end-result for both your company and your customer.

6 BEST PRACTICES
#1 #2 #3 Follow a new fan engagement framework Engage in Social Activation Conduct multiple, frequently promoted campaigns Offer Facebook exclusives that fans wont find elsewhere Enable social endorsement Measure results using Return on Fan

#4

#5 #6

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6 BEST PRACTICES TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE

SECTION TITLE

ABOUT MOONTOAST
Moontoast is an emerging leader in social marketing, social commerce and social analytics. Moontoasts Social Activation Engine enables brands to effectively focus their social efforts on relationships, relevancy and results through a library of social engagement and commerce applications distributed on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, blogs and affiliate websites. Brands can directly measure social and transactional results using Moontoasts patent-pending Social Analytics Suite. Gartner Research has named Moontoast a Cool Vendor in Music and eCommerce, and Billboard Magazine called Moontoast a Top Startup of 2011. For more information, visit www.moontoast.com.

GET CONNECTED

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Direct-to-Consumer 2.0 How We Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Data Bomb The Social Commerce Opportunity The Fan Brands Guide to Facebook Commerce

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