August 7, 2018

5.1 : Facebook

5.1 : Facebook

Dr. Gordon Fletcher, Senior Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK

Facebook is, hopefully, a familiar thing for most people. Facebook has a lot of opportunity for businesses, Facebook provides lots of potential ways of gaining buyer persona’s attention and getting buyer personas through to your own blog and your website.

The first thing you need to do is to attract the attention of the buyer persona. You need to make them stop in their timeline and look at an item that is potentially a video, an audio track, an image, or something that appeals to your particular buyer persona.

Facebook is one of the dominant online platforms for gaining the attention of your audience and attracting them to your website

Whilst it offers the option to share images, video, audio, links to your blog posts – leading to community development on Facebook it also encourages visitors to your main site

If you’ve got them to stop, you’ve then got the chance for them to look and to ‘’like’’. ‘’Like’’ isn’t the end of it, “like” is only one indication that you’re doing something right. Ultimately, you need to be building a community, you need to be building a community that is on Facebook, but a community that is also encouraged and is, in fact, happy to visit your blog for more detail, for more detail about the imagery, about the audio, about the video that they’ve already found there. And by doing that, you’re creating a line of communication with your buyer persona that spreads from one platform, Facebook, through to your website and your blog.

Asta Cepulyte, Chief Executive Officer, Sharecruit, Lithuania

Well actually the key tools would be probably Facebook ‘cause we can reach a maximum amount of people, passive candidates, and to reach passive candidates and job seekers is very important because then we can find different talents, and basically even a company when they share a job post with their employees, they kind of do the marketing campaign as well because their employees are sharing the job post and they are attracting more people to our website as well. So but Facebook is known for personal networking actually but it’s more and more closely bridged and linked with the business world.

Sharecruit uses Facebook to reach the passive buyer persona and relies on the community to share the job posts and ultimately lead the visitors to the company website

Colin Telford, Managing Partner, The Candidate Ltd, UK

We use Facebook really to create and build a network of candidates that want to engage with our business and with our company and it tends to be a little bit more relaxed and a little bit more leisure-driven on Facebook so the types of activity and the types of content that we would produce there are potentially competitions, for example, or it would be light hearted research or information or sort of content that we want to share through Facebook.

The Candidate Ltd uses Facebook for relaxed communications with their buyer persona

Key activities on this platform are – competitions, light-hearted research

Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece

We are talking the language of different channel, ok, you have to be more serious in the search, in the display you can play with images, but on Facebook, I think it’s a channel with more fun and more entertainment.

Facebook is a relaxed plaform for fun and entertainment

It is the preferred form of communication for some consumers who don’t like filling in forms on company websites

And I can see that people are more keen talk to you on Facebook, leave a comment or even send an email. We can see that a lot of prospect clients are sending us messages through Facebook, asking for prices, and they are not going to the online chat we have on e-shop; they think it’s something more, I don’t know, a more cozy place for them.

Kristina Chokoeva, Marketing Director, DINO, Bulgaria

We follow the motto ‘’Say what you mean, and mean what you say’’. We’ve learned that people like when they see some faces behind a company name, in other words building the sense of community around the brand involves content that appeals to the customers emotionally. Therefore, we regularly post content with our employees or at the back stage of the production process.

Dino regularly publishes images of people behind the production process

The Facebook community is engaged by asking them for advice about product designs

First, throughout the season, we produce hundreds of designs, only some of them go into production. There are times we have five great new products and we can only produce one of them. So, instead of our designers making the decision, we put it to a vote on Facebook to see which one is the best. So, in this sense, we use social media to test our designs.

Exercise

Takeaways from Facebook success story

Visit https://www.facebook.com/business/success and select an industry, business size, goal, region that is of interest to you and read your top three case studies. Is there a common element that unites your chosen case studies that makes them benefit from Facebook?

Share your main lesson

Share your main lesson with others below by introducing the Business Size, Goal, Industry, Product and Region.

There are over 500 stories there. Therefore, use filters provided to find a case study that is close to you in some way (geographically, industry-wise or in some other respect). Mention the specific story in your post, if relevant.

Before posting your comments below, see if the same point has been made by others and if so reply to their comment. Once you have posted your contribution, comment on at least three contributions of your peers.

Additional materials

Learn more about Facebook

There are a number of guides that share ideas on how you could benefit from Facebook engagement:

Noteworthy guides

Kissmetrics guide to facebook marketing: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/facebook-marketing/
Moz guide to Facebook marketing: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-social-media/facebook

Video material:

Learn how to use your Facebook page to engage with your business’s audience

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmRGn-vdcO8

Customising Facebook pages

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMBTD0vNYqs

How to control posts on your page

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yQcMBiD2yo

How to Untag a photo on Facebook:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHjVMhR2i4M

How to edit a post on Facebook:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nccw5BKLTEQ

References

Gary Vaynerchuk Talks About a Facebook Dark Post Example

 http://blog.jobsinsocialmedia.com/…

Barriers and usage of social media marketing

 https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-…

Measuring ROI through social media

 http://www.researchgate.net/profil…

Viral advertising through Facebook

 http://www.jiad.org/downloade539.p…

For chapter 5 related sections, follow:

5.0 Choosing the right digital profiles for the right audience
5.2 YouTube
5.3 Twitter
5.4 LinkedIn
5.5 PPC optimisation
5.6 What makes content to go Viral?
5.7 How to create content viral?