We just finished our latest white paper on Social Media vs. Advertising. Read the article below are download the PDF here: Rovrr Whitepaper – Monetizing a Brands Facebook Presence.
As part of a larger lecture I was giving, I focused on the difference between user account, groups and pages. We have found that the majority of question that we get from clients center around a fundamental misunderstanding of what a page actually is and how it fits in the Facebook ecosystem. This portion of hte lecture I gave focuses on the three major entities within Facebook that an average user can create: user accounts, groups and pages.
Brian R. Stuckey
Need help adding Stuff I Like to a Facebook Fan page? I created a quick video to help you out:
All of the instructions in the video apply to any application that can be placed on a fan page. I’ve tailored them specifically to our application but the same principals can use used for nearly any other application.
Brian R. Stuckey
This is a segment of the lecture I gave on 10/18/2008. It focuses on the best practices for creating and maintaining a fan page. This video primary focuses on easy things you can do to encourage your community and grow your fan bases. Additionally, I spend a few minutes on things you may want to avoid doing to ensure that you don’t alienate your community. The actual slides from the presentation can be found below the video.
I apologize for the sound quality. The microphone wasn’t working properly which makes the sounds a little difficult to hear at points.
Social marketing is unlike any form of advertising. It requires a different perspective and different sets of tools to achieve success. There is a higher risk of failure and there is also a greater potential reward.
Let’s begin with some distinctions:
Advertising is a numbers game. You can pay for the raw number of impressions, per clicks, or some hybrid measurement of the two. Success is simply reaching an audience more efficiently using one vehicle than another.
Advertising works. When David Ogilvy laid the foundations for contemporary advertising in 1948, he came with the concept of “360 Degree Brand Stewardship.” The goal of advertising was to gain the consumer’s trust by reaching them through every available channel.
Clearly his strategy worked; Ogilvy Group (then called Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather) became the largest worldwide agency in the 1960’s. It is now a subsidiary of WPP which is the world’s second largest communications agency in the world.
Social Media marketing is the next step in advertising. Customers no longer trust advertising. Instead, they trust their friend for product review and new product exposure. The following graph is originally from emarketer.com
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007067
Trusted Sources Online
People have become callous to advertising but they still trust their friends. This forces a major overhaul in how we look at advertising. Exposing your message to large audiences still works, but it is becoming less efficient. More impressions are needed to generate a conversion. To solve that, we have placed more ads online. More advertising leads to more clutter and more clutter leads to a lower signal to noise ratio. Your message is now more likely to be lost.
Traditional Advertising Approach
Rovrr’s approach is to focus on what people trust. People trust their friends, as the EMarketer research above shows. Therefore, the way to reach people is through their friends. The trick, however, is doing this in a credible and socially acceptable way.
At Rovrr, we tell clients that “We take your fans and turn them in to your brand advocates.” The power in social media is that the focus is on the community and the interpersonal relationships within it. People are the content. This is the basis for the Rovrr Social Growth Approach
The Rovrr Social Growth Approach
I am not going to discuss specific tactics that work well for social media. No one knows your customer better than you do. All tactics derive from your relationship with your customer.
In terms of execution, this can take many different forms. Rovrr specializes in creating tools that allow your content to be spread virally throughout a network. We create strategies and applications that allow people to share their positive brand experiences with their friends. Maybe for your company, it is an application that allows people to brag about their purchase to their friends. Maybe it is a small game that encourages friends to interact within the context.
There are, however, some basic guiding principles that Rovrr has developed to assist in our strategy:
The key takeaway is this: Advertising still works and has its place in an integrated marketing campaign. Social marketing enables deeper customer interactions and has the potential to convert your fans and customers in to your vocal brand advocates. The most trusted source of information online is one’s friends. If you can find a way to make your customers your brand advocates, you will have an efficient new customer acquisition tool. The caveat is your existing advertising tools are ill-equipped to take full advantage of a full social experience.
Looking for help getting started with a social marketing campaign? Maybe we can help. Contact us.
