Facebook Timeline: Do you Speak Brand?

By DonoWhite

It’s a guy thing, a girl thing, a techno thing, brand thing, your thing, my thing, our thing. True but Facebook is becoming more than just a ‘Thing’ in the world after the Facebook Marketing Conference (fMC) held on 29 February 2012 at a packed Museum of Natural History in New York.
For Africa, which is home to some of the world’s fastest growing economies, it’s a winning scenario for brands to truly make themselves heard. 

Facebook transforming Marketing – Colour up digital
Coming out of fMC, a couple of new elements to the platform will assist brands in social media to yield positive returns. With the goal to connect brands and humans, the Time line concept is introduced. This rich and customisable canvas allows brands to customise cover images, avatars (or ‘profilics’), integrate applications, gestures, as well as pin and star content at the top of the time line to intrigue and keep potential new fans as companies express their identities.
Sheryl Sandberg, COO Facebook: “It enables brands to find their voices and have genuine potential relationships with their customers”. 

Starbucks showing off where your existing tabs will be positioned, talking about, and cover image.

Part of the users experience starts with the primary sense of sight, so give them eye candy.  Pages using the new timeline, set to come in on 30 Mach 2012, will need to create a Gestalt and make the elements work together as an enticing whole and give fans pure sugar, pure sweetness and make it Roar with Flavour.

1. Premium Offers – Drive it

Advertising models are out with the static and it is in with a breath of fresh air. Everyone on Facebook is accustomed to those Market Place ads sitting on the right hand side of the newsfeed, measuring user’s interaction with brands via click throughs.
With new Premium Offers, You always get something out as brands are brought to life and into stories, filtered into target audience’s newsfeeds, even if users or their friends are not fans of the page. Here a brand’s content is the ad, whether a status update, image or video.  

2. Reach Generator – Touch the impossible!

Moving toward a broadcasting model, Premium ads can be re-run in the newsfeed of the target audience. As the elements of Timeline and Premium offers work together, fans start becoming brand ambassadors of the page. It is the Reach Generator Product that helps brands interact with a fan or potential fan and have us all working Today, Tomorrow, Together.
In comparison to a page’s reach of only 16% today, Reach Generator will ensure that up to 75% of fans see a page’s content every month and therefore increase ROI.  Now we can truly target your friends and their friends, and their friends. 

3. Facebook Mobile – Where ever you go!

In 2010 Africa, with its population of 1 Billion and 500 million cellphones, mobile is the number one way to access the internet.  It came as sigh of relief for South Africa, as well as other top mobile users like Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt and Ghana, Facebook now caters for people on the move with premium ads filtering into the mobile version of the network.  Globally Facebook says it will have access to 845 million users across all internet spheres. For South Africa we can say we have reached the possible. 
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Africa’s mobile use in context (source: praekeltfoundation)

4. New Offers- So Much More 

What’s novel in the house of Facebook is that stories will appear to users as they log out, ensuring they don’t leave home without it. Additionally, Brands will be able to engage in private discourse with fans. The personal touch of 'helping you', the fan, will lead to less distraction on the wall and increased customer satisfaction. 

5. Content- The power is now in your hands

“Brands on Facebook are the best content creators”, revealed Facebook VP of Product, Chris Cox a fMC . Content is still king, even more so now that it will become part of the advertising exposure. Coca Cola has plotted their entire history in Timeline and Kia has turned their timeline into a virtual show room. 

History Today with Time Line and your relationship with the brand revealed 
Coupled with real time analytics, the ORM team must work closely with the Community Managers to understand what content should be promoted, starred and pinned. More than ever it is time to innovate! 

Window Shopping: Real life product experiences go digital 

Ultimately the true indicator of these changes will be judged by the fans. When they feel over exposed and invaded they may jump to Twitter, where there are only Promoted Tweets, or take to Google Plus, to spend time in video based ‘Hang Outs’. It will now come down to content being interesting on Facebook to keep the fan. Despite the changes, the rule will still be the same- don’t just keep the fan, ENGAGE! 

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More about Popimedia Innovations

Popimedia Innovations is a Specialist Social Media Marketing Company providing bespoke social media marketing solutions with a unique focus on interactive and viral marketing.
With extensive experience in Social Media strategy development and campaign creation across many industries, Popimedia Innovations' brand of social media marketing is recognisable by its leverage of social media networks like Facebook delivering results for marketers initiating social media activities.

Making a case for social media in small(er) businesses

Few small business owners and entrepreneurs have the bandwidth or the budget to launch a full scale marketing campaign. Combine this with a lack of the critical mass in terms of audience so frequently associated with the medium to large organisations / brands, and it almost seems hopeless to try and compete.

However, with the dawn of the digital age and the rise of social media platforms and opportunities, the sky has quite literally become the limit. It is no longer just about having the traditional above-the-line campaigns spanning across radio, TV and print, but about creating an online brand presence, about having a conversation, about listening and responding in real time to customers, potential customers and even potential detractors.

We believe that a truly successful social media strategy is one that is not based on talking to every man, but developing a specific and personal customer and audience experience.

There is no doubt that the current platform of choice for a two way, tailored communications experience online, is Facebook. And more specifically, the Facebook Fan Page as the first line of communication for an organisation.

Using Starbucks, as an example of a brand with one of the most successful Fan Pages, we have created a set of top tips and considerations, for maximising impact and delivering value, for a company of any size.

1. Know your brand personality – who are you, how do you engage, what is the ‘language’ and tone that you use when interacting and ensure that this resonates across all your audience interactions
2. Know your audience – who are you talking to, what makes them tick, what kind of information do they use and re-use, who do they talk to and about what
3. Don’t SPAM – instead of putting out marketing collateral, share content that is industry, topic and of audience interest and relevance
4. Make time – to post relevant information, to respond to comments and queries posted to your Fan Page and to really get under the skin of your audience
5. Listen – to the conversations not only on your Fan Page, but on other blogs, newsfeeds and Facebook Fan Pages and ensure that when you do respond, it isn’t mid-stream or out of context

Once you have these five elements buttoned down, Facebook has made it ridiculously easy to set up a Fan Page. Go to the Facebook login page, click on ‘Create a page for a celebrity, band or business’ and follow the step-by-step guide to setting up your page and gaining access to more than 500 million people around the world.

Your challenge – to sift through these more than 500 million people and make sure the right people become your ‘fans’.

And unlike traditional above-the-line advertising, which can sometimes feel like a bit of a hit and miss approach to reaching your target audience, Facebook advertising is audience customisable. By deploying a customised advertising campaign, you are able to eliminate what marketing and advertising folks call ‘wastage’, resulting in a more cost effective and tangible campaign.

Engage, interact and enjoy!

Keep an objective in mind

A campaign's single most important attribute is it's objective. This enables the calculation of ROI and ultimately determines if your marketing effort was a success. Marketer's often forget this simple rule of thumb. How does this apply to Social Media? Read on to find out... It’s about the conversation. Social media addresses the fundamental human behaviors of communication, sharing and collaborating. And social networks represent a step change in how people communicate, organize, recommend and decide. It’ not much of a surprise that social networks represent new threats and opportunities in reputation management. Nor that in terms of the ad game we’ve all had a bit of a rude awakening. Message discovery is now as important as message delivery. Everything has a tag. And it’s not about the conversation. But it’s not all about the conversation. It’s not a matter of whether you get it or don’t. Like all things, it’s finding what works, building from a foundation, measuring progress, and adapting to new situations. Chris Brogan posted on how companies can choose social media channels that are right for them. He points out that what most critical in terms of social media and the decision process is that companies need to have clear goals and ways of measuring them. So actually it’s also about getting stuff sold. So if you have an FMCG brand “what works” for you is probably what drives up brick and mortar sales, incrementally or otherwise. Let’s face it - FMCG is hardly web-friendly . I’m not going to order my washing powder, a beer or tube of toothpaste online. Especially not on a whim…. it’s just not going to happen. So if you’re into the “conversation” you’d be inclined to say - it’s great , everyone is talking about you, and you’re part of “the conversation”. But what good is that when they’re talking about you in a context (such as online) where your product isn’t readily available. After all, what’s going to push me, the consumer, away from that online conversation and out to a point-of-sale (POS) where I will make a purchase? And even if I recall the buzz around your brand when I notice your product at a POS, is that going to be enough to make me buy? And if so, will your social media campaign create enough impulse buys to cover the agency fees behind that campaign? And whether it does or doesn’t, how are you going to track it? What measurement tools do you have in place or can you get access to? Social media needs an objective. Or it's just more talk. Make social media pay its way Social media can be an excellent strategy for fostering customer loyalty, but what is its potential to do so with non-web-friendly products? Your Facebook app might get me to buy today but will it keep me coming back? Burger King got it right with their Facebook app. They didn’t try to foster a devoutly loyal customer base using Facebook groups or their own social network. Rather, they devised a delimited marketing blitz with very clear objectives and measurable goals. Every consumer that participated got a coupon that could be tracked upon redemption. This would provide them with a complete cost-benefit analysis, measuring the costs of deployment against the additional costs of fulfillment alongside increased sales during times of redemption. Another great example - Starbucks added a few hundred thousand fans in a day with the launch of their application in July of 2009. What the trick to making it work? So the trick to making social media count for FMCG it seems is that campaigns have to do three things: Drive brick & mortar sales, offer a way to track and measure those sales, and keep consumers socializing with your media long enough that their increased expenditures cover the cost of your social media campaign. FMCG marketers need to be choosing social media campaigns based on how they can meet the objectives of what FMCG ROI actually is: [Sales – (planning costs + fulfillment costs)]/(planning costs + fulfillment costs) = ROI As long as that objective is kept in mind, social media can be an effective marketing channel even for FMCG. If marketers choose a medium both based on those objectives and on their need for measurement -social media does pay.