Facebook – 6 Brand Basics

In the last few months quite a few brands have started rolling out brand fan pages with the help of their agencies. Unfortunately it seems that many of these are missing some key elements. So we decided to make an easy list of 6 basic things that shouldn’t be missed on any fan page roll out.

1. Brand Pages, not Campaign Pages!

Lots of brands are creating campaign based pages instead of all-encompassing brand pages. Over the last few months most digital leaders have been proclaiming the age of platform over campaign - this means that instead of creating short campaign bursts you have long term engagements. (Nike+ with the help of R/GA won Campaign of the Decade for just this type of thinking)

Consumers who are prepared to interact with your campaign page is most likely interested in your brand, but once your campaign ends, Facebook does not allow you to merge your newly acquired user base into your brand page, therefore losing out on further interactions with them down the line. Create your brand page and make sure your campaigns are featured as landing pages on it for maximum consumer retention (see Landing Pages below).

2. Landing Pages

This is probably the number 1 basic error that South African brand fan pages are currently making. Facebook, using FBML (Facebook Markup Language), allows you to create landing pages. Landing pages allow you to change the first page your consumers view when they hit your fan page. It allows you to instantly connect with the consumer and relay the brand messaging. Coca Cola is a great example of this.

Landing on the fan page wall (as most have it at the moment) means that your prospective fans’ first interaction with your brand could be just about anything – these could be negative interactions from other consumers or arbitrary brand statements that have no context for the consumer. They are coming to your brand space and you can still control what they see at first instance – make sure you use it to get the maximum out of the interaction, after all, first impressions last.

Sadly, there are some brands who have created great FBML pages but have never made the move to set it to be the main landing page (there is a specific setting that needs to be activated to make it your main landing page).

With regards to campaigns, the best possible way to do this is to create your brand fan page and then create a landing page for your campaign. This means that users who have seen some of your other campaign marketing collateral and want to connect further can easily interact on a campaign level but are still connected to the mother brand.

3. Calls To Action

It may well be a 2.0 world but calls-to-action are still relevant. Tell the user what you expect them to do, tell them what they can get if they do it, and make sure it is as easy as possible for them to interact.

If they need to be a fan to take part, add that in to your call-to-action (see Mashable’s great example of how they do that). Combined with good landing pages, you can kick-start your campaigns much faster than by just having them land on the page with no real understanding of what to do, nor the inclination to do it.

4. Continued Interaction

While most consumers are happy just to be aligned to a specific brand, having a big consumer base readily available to interact with, can easily add that extra layer of brand loyalty. Social media should be included into your CRM. Consumers can be turned into advocates quite easily as long as you give them reason to do so. Make sure you respond and proactively engage them.

5. Vanity URLs

‘Vanity URL’ is the term for creating a custom and easily recognisable web address for your Facebook page. You can do this by going to http://www.facebook.com/username.

This URL should be used on all of your other marketing collateral.

6. Media Spend

Social media is a great mechanism for interacting and having the right kinds of interactions with your consumers, but it is currently not yet the end-all (even though we all would love to think so). While a large amount of South African consumers are online (roughly 10 million of us according to the latest studies), traditional media spend is still relevant to getting first attention and awareness. This means using traditional and other digital media platforms to push the Vanity URL to your consumers can still garnish results and will definitely help with the initial drive of the campaign to reach a critical mass.

Make sure you add the URL to the online properties on all your collateral and make sure it’s visible and well explained.

In closing, there are various other learnings and tricks you can implement to make your social properties a success, feel free to give us a shout on Facebook or Twitter for more info.