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Several clients have told me recently they don’t think their Facebook pages have as many fans as their brand seems to warrant. They’ve asked me what they were doing “wrong” and how to improve their pages. One executive compared the “coolness” of his brand to a larger, boring brand that drew many more fans to its Facebook page, adding, “I don’t get it.”
I think one of the issues here is the inflation of language so pervasive in social networking. There’s a big difference between a real fan (short for fanatic) of your company, and someone who decides to “Become a Fan,” on Facebook with a single click of the mouse, and who may never again engage with the company.
Still, big business is creating fan pages and a study released in January 2009, commissioned by Princeton, N.J.-based interactive marketer Rosetta, found that 59% of the 100 leading retailers, including Best Buy, Kohl’s and Wal-Mart, are using Facebook. In fact, when I made informal inquiries into what companies had the best Facebook pages, large retail brands were most often cited. Victoria’s Secret’s Pink and Whole Foods were both mentioned.
Among smaller businesses, Boom Boom Cards of Santa Cruz, CA, does a nice job with its Facebook page. The page is frequently updated and makes good use of video and images. On the home page of its regular web site is a link titled Community Hub, which leads to the company’s blog as well as providing links to its Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts. I noticed Boom Boom Cards’s link opened to the Wall section of their Facebook page which is probably the right place to send people. Victoria’s Secret’s Pink on the other hand opens to a tab called The Scoop. There’s obviously some degree of choice and customization available. (For information on the mechanics of setting up a Facebook Fan Page, check out Facebook’s help area on this topic.)
The first step in Facebook Fan Page success is to have a strategy. You have a Web site, maybe a blog, perhaps a Twitter account and a few other social media vehicles. Why do you have a Facebook Fan Page? The answer is not “to engage with fans of our company,” though that may be an outcome. You should have a business strategy, like “grow revenue by 20% in 25-34 year olds.” That strategy will in turn “suggest” communications strategies and vehicles. If you think Facebook offers the right platform and demographic to achieve this goal, the time spent building and maintaining the page might be worthwhile.
While Facebook pages reside within Facebook, they should be thought of as simply Web sites when it comes to attracting and retaining visitors. Many of the same principles apply:
- Determine the purpose and audience for the page
- Use it as a standalone communications channel, with a unique charter and frequently refreshed, unique content not available elsewhere. It’s OK to have some content from your other channels, but don’t just recycle content and run it through your Facebook page.
- Provide something of relevance and value, such as how-tos, schedules of industry events, and informative or humorous videos. People are not going to return to the page simply because they love your company. They need a reason to come back.
- Use your Facebook Fan Page to launch time-sensitive promotions. This creates a sense of urgency and drives people to the page.
- Staff your Facebook page with one or more company representatives who can keep it up-to-date, and can respond to comments and questions left on the page
- Take advantage of the features Facebook makes available, like the ability to upload images, integration with YouTube and Twitter, status updates (which will appear in fans’ news feeds), creation of discussion boards, etc.
- Watch out for overposting. If you have too much automation through FriendFeed, etc., you might find your blog posts displaying multiple times on the same network, which really bothers most people.
- Coordinate your Facebook pages. If you have several that serve different purposes, name them and describe them in a way that helps people understand what each one is for, or consider deleting extraneous ones
- Support independent (non-company owned) fan pages as long as they are largely positive.
Link from your regular web site and your blog to your company authorized Facebook pages (and all other company-maintained social media destination for that matter) to drive traffic and help people know which ones are sanctioned by the company. Ignore most (see #9 above) independent Facebook pages that use your logo and company name unless they are making gross misrepresentations or seriously harming the company’s reputation. Even then, consider the backlash before taking legal action against an independent page. It’s probably not worth it.
For some top, global brands, participation will mirror the enthusiasm surrounding the brand’s actual popularity, but for most, a fan page should not be seen as a direct measure of a brand’s appeal. The top three Toyota pages have about 90,000 fans combined (and nearly half of those are Prius fans.) The top three BMW pages have over 500,000 fans. Apple and Starbucks, predictably, have huge numbers. Apple has1.3 million fans on its main page, and Starbucks has 3,837,365, with another 1,362,237 fans on its Frappuccino page.
So how does this influence consumer behavior? I think many of Starbucks’ 5 million Facebook fans have not modified their habits since stepping up and clicking the “Become a Fan” link. They were already fans of the company and they aren’t drinking more coffee since they joined the Starbucks page. Many of the people I spoke with as I prepared this article said they didn’t pay much attention to the fan pages they had joined on Facebook. Often it’s a gesture, a way of saying, “sure, I like Starbucks.” Sometimes it’s aspirational. Ferrari typically produces 3000 to 4000 cars, so the majority of the 650,000-plus members of its official Facebook Fan Page are just that, fans, and not customers.
A Facebook Fan Page can be a useful part of the social media marketing mix, but expectations should be realistic. A fan page is particularly well-suited to promotions and unfolding stories, like a road trip, or a campaign tied to a sports team, a television program or a movie about to be released. The key is to keep content unique, relevant and engaging, give people a reason to come back, and most importantly, have objectives for your Facebook page and design and manage it accordingly.
Note: This article originally appeared in my September, 2009 Talent Zoo column.
 Tags: Facebook, Fan Pages
Despite the imminent end of the print era, Hewlett Packard has announced a partnership with the University of Michigan which would make over a half million of the books in the university’s library available in print. That’s right, in print. In book form.
HP has a huge advantage over Google in an endeavor like this. The company knows how to print things.
I was at HP from 2004 to 2007 and one year I was fortunate enough to be a judge at the company’s OneVoice marketing awards. Amongst the brochures, trade show tchotchkes, and web site designs that I was asked to evaluate was a table of hardbound, commercial quality books produced with HP’s on-demand printing technology. The quality of the books was stunning, and there were dozens of entries that would fit in comfortably in any collection of fine books.
HP’s on-demand printing is behind Blurb, a web-based, print-on-demand service that asks “What will your book be?.” (For a look at the kinds of books people are publishing with this technology, check out Blurb’s book contest entries.)
Two pages from Roma, by Amberlea Williams, produced on (and available from) Blurb
As Information Week reports, HP calls its print-on-demand initiative “Print 2.0.”
I’m encouraged by this news for two reasons. First, it’s much healthier to have a competitive marketplace instead of a monopoly in which Google owns all the world’s content. Second, the deal brings something new to consumers, a way to buy books and read them that isn’t exclusively wed to an LCD.
Tags: Hewlett Packard, Google, Blurb, on-demand printing, print-on-demand, HP, Print 2.0, University of Michigan
(20:00 PST, Feb 10, 2009, Updated, see below)
Twitterland is chirping with this morning’s news that Twitter has announced its intention to start charging commercial users of the service. If anything good comes to Web 2.0 out of the economic downturn it’s the realization that the “free” (don’t get me started on free) business model is not sustainable and actually hurts users.
The report appeared in a piece by Fiona Ramsay in Twitter to Begin Charging Brands for Commercial Use* in Marketing Magazine (UK), in which Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said, “We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.” Stone did not elaborate on what those ways are, or what kind of charges might be assessed. He also gave his assurance that individuals would not be charged for Twitter.
Why It’s Good News
The announcement is great news. First, Twitter could use the revenue to build more reliable IT infrastructure. Service interruptions, unpredictable availability of features and spotty performance are chronic Twitter problems. The monthly service charges probably wouldn’t fund a new data center, but the validation that Twitter can make money would increase its valuation and attract more investment. Ultimately, a commercial model will bring new reliability and new functionality to all users.
The other important outcome of this was touched on by Chris Anderson in The Economics of Giving it Away in the February 2 Wall Street Journal:
“Free is not enough. It also has to be matched with Paid … today’s Web entrepreneurs have to not just invent products that people love, but also those that they will pay for. Not all of the people or even most of them — free is still great marketing and bits are still too cheap to meter — but enough to pay the bills. Free may be the best price, but it can’t be the only one.”
By making the move to at least a partially commercial model, Twitter is sending a signal that the service has worth (and costs). Not everything in the online world wants to be free, nor can it be.
I know it sounds like I am arguing against my own best interests when I advocate the transition from free to paid for the services and content I use. But when I consider the alternative, a world in which everything is “paid for” with spam, contextual crap advertising, and phony informational content that is not so subtly marketing a product or service, I am glad to pay for a few choice things.
What Is a Twitter Account Worth to a Large Business?
Along with HTML and the web browser, e-mail, and instant messaging, I doubt there is anything that has changed the way people use the Internet, and the way they communicate, more than Twitter has. But just what is Twitter worth to a business? Twitter hasn’t made any such announcement, but let’s assume that “commercial users” are companies over a certain size, say, 100 people. (I would hate to see my good friends at House of Jerky or Etsy craft people charged to use Twitter, for example. That would certainly drive them off the site.) How much does a large corporation pay to keep up its web site home page, and what are the comparable benefits of using Twitter?
I have no idea what Twitter is thinking about this, but $20 a month or even $100 seems like nothing to GM (no bailout joke intended here), Dell or Comcast. And speaking of Dell, according to the Marketing piece “Bob Pearson, vice-president of communities and conversations at Dell, said: ‘If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move elsewhere.’” Where Bob, Plurk? Pownce? If you’re a consumer business and you find benefit to being on Twitter, there is no elsewhere.
This raises a number of questions. Is the move is a good thing for individual users? For businesses? What criteria should be used in identifying “commercial” Twitter use? Would the term apply to anyone selling a product or service? How much should Twitter charge for commercial use?
Update: Apparently the Marketing UK reporter misinterpreted Biz Stone’s remarks. According to a blog post by Stone, ideas for how Twitter might make money have been “shared publicly for quite some time,” and there is nothing new to report.
* Why do marketers refer to corporate entities as “brands”? They’re businesses, not brands, in this instance. Stop the industry doublespeak madness!
Tags: Twitter, Biz Stone, commercial use, paid, charge
On January 29, a large number of followers (including me) were dropped from Whole Foods corporate Twitter account. I was curious as to why this happened and what was being done about it.
I looked at the Whole Foods timeline and saw that the company was attributing it to a Twitter-generated glitch. I contacted Whole Foods via email, and Winnie Hsia, online community moderator, told me the company had sent Twitter a “Support Request (#16647) to address the issue … and shortly afterwards a Twitter staff member notified us that they were aware of the problem and currently investigating it. At their request, on Feb 2nd we gave them a handful of user names of some of the folks who were unfollowed.
@WholeFoods did not respond to my questions either on the public timeline or by direct message, so I contacted the company’s PR people via the web site and received Winnie’s courteous and reasonably prompt reply.
I also exchanged emails with Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s founders, in an attempt to find out what happened. He confirmed that there was a problem with the account but said it “was a cosmetic glitch on the number displayed on their profile page.” When I pointed out that I was among those unfollowed by Whole Foods the morning of the 29th, Biz said “I’d have to look at that as a separate issue.” I asked him on February 5 to confirm the root cause of the problem, but have not heard back from him.
I would love to hear something like “we had a corrupted database which has now been fixed” or “during the migration to newer faster servers, about x followers were accidentally dropped, but we are able to quickly restore them.” I think Twitter users, both companies and consumers, would feel better if the company owned up to the occasional IT problem and talked openly about its resolution.
Here’s why I think this all matters to businesses on Twitter. If you’ve been on Twitter for any period of time, you’ve experienced or heard tell of serious IT problems. In general, these have improved a great deal, and high marks to Twitter for improving availability and response times, and for smooth sailing during high load events like the Consumer Electronics Show when people tweet like crazy. Still, features like search and direct messaging get switched on and off or have limited functionality as Twitter IT people try to keep the Millennium Falcon of social networks running.
Where else do we tolerate so many IT problems? If a company like Salesforce dropped a few hundred contacts from a company’s CRM system, people would be really upset. Web 2.0 companies like Twitter should be held to similar standards.
I say similar, because I realize Twitter and Salesforce aren’t the same thing, but I also think the argument that “Twitter is free, so you should be grateful it’s there and stop complaining” doesn’t hold water. It isn’t free. Companies invest time, resources, opportunity costs and reputation by establishing and maintaining a presence on Twitter. This presence results in the creation of often huge numbers of connections (people who follow the company, people the company follows) which in turn increases Twitter’s valuation. So it’s not cash, but companies are not participating on Twitter for free.
Obviously, situations like this put companies in a difficult spot. In assuring me that Whole Foods values its Twitter followers, Winnie told me:
“We believe strongly that Twitter is a unique channel, allowing us the opportunity to listen to and respond to our customers, fans and critics in a way not afforded to us through other channels and we would certainly not intentionally shut down any of those voices.“
Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE Twitter. It’s one of the most powerful and amazing communications tools every conceived. I just think it still needs some clean-up and a little more professionalism before it’s viewed as a serious (and reliable) business tool.
Tags: Twitter IT problems, Whole Foods, Winnie Hsia, unfollow, unfollowed, Biz Stone, @WholeFoods
I can just picture Darren Murph at Engadget laughing out loud, tears of joy rolling down his cheeks as he wrote with unbridled glee about the shutting down of Ruckus, a music download service that catered to college students.
Murph writes:
“Ruckus’ homepage now directs to the image you see above, giving the four avid users no indication of whether any partial refunds or gratis hugs will be given out. Rest in peace, Ruckus — we’re sure you’ll find comfort in knowing that you were already dead to 99 percent of us.”
That’s some funny s***! Some people are probably out of work as a result of Ruckus’ closure. Investors lost money. Some entrepreneur’s dream has died. It’s a yuck fest all the way around.
I’m sorry, I just don’t get it. I know I comment on this WAY too often, but what’s the point of trashing a company like this? I don’t think it’s necessary. This kind of commentary isn’t funny or clever. It’s lame.
Tags: Engadget, Darren Murph, Ruckus
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