Lets Talk About Facebook
Posted by Lauren in Entertainment Marketing |
Facebook is currently one of the dominant social networks and can be essential to your marketing plan, but Facebook can be a pesky little guy too. Facebook recently performed a massive upgrade last week which included many changes to their API. This means that applications all across the internet that interface with Facebook have not been working as efficiently as before. Facebook is, however, being very accommodating in helping developers update their apps, but unfortunately there a whole lot of apps needing updated for example, the Social Forward feature that many direct-to-consumer and direct-to-fan marketers use.
So, what does that mean to you as a direct-to-fan marketer? Well, hold tight, social forward will be fixed soon, but also keep in mind these new wall features that can really impact how you communicate with your fan base. Jay Baer wrote a blog on Facebook news feed changes called, “Is Your Company More Interesting Than My Wife?”. The blog offers a great marketing perspective reminding marketers and company social media users that Facebook decides what actually shows up on one’s news feed. This is based on what you’ve “liked” and commented upon in the past, and what your friends have “liked” and commented upon, according to Jay Baer that can mean that, “only 2 out of every 1000 Facebook updates will show up in your news feed”. Which means , that you are competing with every “friend’s” mom, brother, husband, wife, friends and co-workers for feed space.
So, make every message count and involve your “friends”. Ask questions, encourage interaction. Jay Baer notes that one can now easily use one-click the share functionality for facebook updates, but only updates with links, videos or photos. So, make your updates include these– It will help weed out unnecessary posts as well.
Another great idea is to incentivize the friendship. Many marketers use this tactic to get people to opt-in to their email, sms or voice campaigns. We suggest offering a free download for becoming our friend or a social contest where the winner gets merchandise. Check out what the indie-rock/ soul band Dr. Dog did to interact with their fans: They posted on their Facebook Page, “Get us to 20,000 fans on Facebook, and we’ll let you hear the first track off the new album”.
This simple, incentivized call-to-action took their fan list from 7,000 fans to 17,493 just two weeks after posting. So, be creative, include your fans and keep an eye on Jay Baer’s awesome blog on social media.
