Facebook 101

Make your fans feel important…

High-Level Strategy

The very first steps are to develop a high level set of strategic requirements that outline the demographic profile of your community, determine what goals you want to achieve and how you are going to achieve them using the various tools available to you within the Facebook platform.

Demographics– with over 800 million active users world-wide, and over 150 million in USA, you can target groups of people by country, state, city and language. You can refine further for individuals by age, gender, educational level, school name, company name, year of graduation, birthday and personal interests (i.e. music, sports or causes). The Facebook advertising platform also allows you to target fans of your company and friends of your connections. So, spend some time thinking about your customers’ demographic profile because Facebook allows you to target users with great specificity. 

You should also take a look at the social profile of your community. There are a minority of individuals who create original content and post comments. These people are influencers who will advocate for your company, which accounts for 10% of any user population. The remaining group is known as “lurkers” – they are enthusiastic about your brand, but most of the time you will not hear from them. Many of them do however, consume content in great quantities.

Goals – It will be useful to make a list of all the goals you would like to pursue on the Facebook platform. This will help you focus demographically, and allow you to tailor your content and application strategies. Here is a list of examples for consideration.

1. Conduct research by listening to what your customers are saying, and while you are listening provide customer service if the opportunity arises.
2. Identify and court brand enthusiasts in your customer-base because:
   • They help to recruit new fans.
   • They can answer questions in the community.
3. Engage in two-way conversations by: 
   • Answering questions directly.
   • Providing original content, such as primers.
   • Providing industry insight and reviews.
4. Monitor your brand for positive and negative sentiment for real-time response.
5. Engage in brand promotions to: 
   • Generate good will.
   • Increase awareness.
6. You can market and promote products and services with discounts and coupons.
7. Refine or generate new product ideas.
8. Generate new leads for sales.
9. Cross and up sell to existing customers.
10. Launch a new product.
11. Promote public relations.

It is very unlikely that you can do all these and succeed, so pick a couple of related goals to start, and then add goals incrementally.

To learn more please get in touch with me at: Mark@MSprague.com or call me at: 781-862-3126

About Lexington eBusiness Consulting

Mark Sprague’s 25 years of product development experience which includes expertise in Search Engines, Information Products, SEO platforms and Social Networking applications provide in-depth expertise to help you refine products and services, and improve your web sites performance by:

• Developing a superior data-driven SEO strategy for your website.
• Understanding your customers search behavior, and normalizing it to your content strategy.
• Understanding how search engine technology practically impacts SEO and content strategies.
• Understanding how search technology impacts content in a social networking environment.
• Developing a superior user experience based on sound information architecture, usability and coding standards.

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