Facebook Marketing for Microsoft Partners: A Primer

In-Depth

Facebook Marketing for Microsoft Partners: A Primer

New functionality additions in the social networking tool mean creative Microsoft partners have more ways than ever to get the word out about the great things their companies are doing.

• By Joe Dysart
• August 01, 2011

With the rollout of Facebook’s new makeover this spring a fait accompli, many Web-savvy businesses are rejoicing that some of the service’s new features will make it much easier for them to market on the social network — both creatively, and from a business analytics perspective.

Millions of Facebook users have been watching the latest evolution of the service — which includes a new look and feel for everyone who has a Facebook account — metamorphize across the network since late 2010.

“If you look at Facebook’s growth you can see that by 2012 about half of the U.S. and a big chunk of the global population will be using Facebook once a month,” says Simon Solotko, a senior advanced marketing manager at chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. “That’s a tipping point in terms of the scope and influence in social connectivity of people everywhere.”

One of Facebook’s most anticipated marketing changes is the network’s new ability to easily add framed content to a Facebook page — technically known as content presented within iFrames. Essentially, the change enables any business to easily mirror the Web design on its Web site on a Facebook page — as long as it’s within an iFrame.

Scores of Web designers are celebrating the move, because attempting to duplicate the look and feel of a company’s Web site pages on Facebook had previously presented quite a challenge in many cases.

Moreover, Web marketers say the introduction of easy iFraming also makes it much simpler for a business to crunch visitor analytics, including tracking visitor activity on Facebook pages, and thoroughly analyzing how sales and other sought-after conversions unfold on a Facebook page.

One caveat: If you or your Web designer plans to take advantage of iFrames on Facebook, be sure that you protect such content from would-be computer hackers, who can compromise iFramed Web pages if those pages are not secured properly.

Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, has grown the social networking site to more than 750 million registered users.

“Good programming and updates [to all the software you're using] are key to protecting this kind of content,” says Catalin Cosoi, head of BitDefender Online Threat Labs, a division of the BitDefender Web security firm. “Actually, this means applying strong security policies to all of the company’s Web pages, including those on Facebook.”

All told, the Facebook makeover has stimulated marketers to update their best marketing practices for the service in myriad ways. Here are some of the most popular:

Understand Why Facebook Is So Powerful
While social networking has been around for a while — people were socializing on Web forums long before Mark Zuckerberg got his first tricycle — Facebook was one of the services that made such networking so effortless, so fun and so multifaceted.

For example, once someone signs up for your “fan” or business page on Facebook, they immediately begin getting info about your business in their News Feed, can instantly share your offers to others in their social network, can effortlessly engage in discussions on your Facebook page, can give their opinion about your products or services and can shop on your Facebook page — all of which is extremely intuitively. Small wonder Facebook now has 750 million-plus registered users, and growing.

Moreover, Facebook represents a chance for marketers to reach out to an audience that’s often pre-qualified, and often already extremely interested in what a company has to say.

“Facebook is a place where there’s self selection,” says Lisa Dreher, vice president of marketing and business development at Logicalis Group. “People choose what organizations they will befriend. That’s unique in marketing. As in most cases, we’re putting messages in front of people whether they want to see them or not.” Now with social media, the people are choosing what they want to hear about. “It means your audience is highly qualified — presuming you’re doing the right things to get the right people there in the first place,” Dreher says.

Get Creative with Facebook’s Newly Unshackled Web Design Features
For years, Web designers have bemoaned the fact that they were forced to use Facebook’s propriety programming for much of the designing they did on the Facebook site. No more. With the rollout of Facebook’s latest makeover, the service is now offering Web designers complete creative design freedom within specified framed areas of company pages on Facebook.

“I, for one, am thrilled with this long-awaited news,” says Janet Driscoll Miller, CEO of SearchMojo, a Web marketing firm. Essentially, any content that appears within these specially designed iFrames is no longer subject to the limitations of Facebook’s design format. Instead, the content can be easily designed with more robust Web design programs like DreamWeaver or Microsoft Expression.

“This is a huge timesaver when you’re trying to program pages to match your corporate brand,” Miller adds.

[Click on image for larger view.] Figure 1. Company Facebook pages no longer need to all look like a running list of status updates. While customized pages were possible before, a new approach called iFrames allows developers to reject Facebook’s proprietary programming and create pages with familiar tools such as DreamWeaver or Microsoft Expression.

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Most Small Business Facebook Page Fans Not Local

Francine Hardaway

• Most Small Business Facebook Page Fans Not Local
• More Common Small Business Marketing Mistakes
• Innovation in Silicon Valley: Finance as Well as Technology

Every once in a while I get a press release and I use it as an excuse to write a blog post. Unfortunately, the company that send me this one, Roost, will probably not be pleased with what I’ve done with their report.

The Roost Local Scorecard, which was released today, is an analysis of the Facebook fan pages of  800 small businesses. What did it find? That only 15% of the average local small business’s “Likes” on Facebook are local. From that you can extrapolate that the Facebook pages of most small businesses do them little or no good for targeted marketing efforts.

This is one of those conclusions that — since its executive team comes from Flixter, WalMart, and Merchant Circle — Roost should have already known.

Because in the last decade I’ve worked with over 600 entrepreneurs and small businesses, I know how difficult it is to build a local community on a network as large as Facebook. I also know how little real knowledge most small business people have about social media. At best, it goes like this:

Small business puts up Facebook page

Page vendor or business owner tells everyone “go ask everyone to Like our page. We need 25 likes to claim our name.”

Someone from small business starts to post content to the page. Typically, either deals or product offerings.

Very few people who receive information about the deals go to the Facebook page.

Likers of the page who did it as a favor to their former classmates or their family members mute those irrelevant one-way deal posts in their streams, so Facebook’s curation eventually makes them disappear.

Business owner or marketing person looks more widely around her for potential people to “Like” the page.

Rinse and repeat, losing all the local people in an effort to get more “Likes.”

Change the wording to “Followers” and you have the typical Twitter behavior.

Why doesn’t this work? Because social media isn’t about platforms and dashboards, it’s about community and closeness. At its best, it’s about the butcher who asks you how your dog is doing on the raw food, or the nail salon that asks you if you want this broken nail repaired free while you wait for your pedicure. It’s about personalized service, neighborhood concerns, and the same bartender in the bar for twenty years.

Let’s take a farfetched example: let’s pretend my neighborhood sports bar set up a Facebook page. It would only invite people to the page who have already been to the bar more than once. The bartender himself would man the page, posting ball scores, special televised games, recipes for the chili you love in the bar, or news about someone from the neighborhood who had been in the hospital. You’d be invited to the page only if you were already a member of the community. So the bar would be targeting its existing customers and giving them reinforcement for their business. There would be “scarcity.” because you could only get invited into the page if you frequented the bar, so new customers might have an incentive to come back, and a community might form.

Bars are like that. Hair salon and barber shops have always been like that. Local restaurants are, and so are some car washes.  Bookstores, too. They are inherently social businesses.

But many businesses think they can just slap the bandaid of social media on their existing businesses, without realizing that for social media to be effective, social business has to be the real name of the game.

So if you  don’t plan for your business to be social through and through, and to build a community of your customers, don’t bother with a Facebook page.  Or a Roost platform to monitor it.

 

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