One of the hardest things to do when building a social media strategy is deciding how you’re going to engage influencers and brand evangels in your industry. I’ve put together a technique for easily finding people that are already publicizing your brand to their friends on Facebook. I’ll first outline the how to do it, and then why it works. Finally, I’ll explain when it can be useful.
Understanding the How and Why
The beauty of Facebook is that it gives you a way to advertise to users based on what they have in their profile. I know I said before that social network advertising is a waste, and it is if you’re trying to push conversions. However, for community building within Facebook, advertising can help build fans to a Facebook page and can be a great way to find and engage people that already love your brand.
You’ll want to first setup Facebook advertising on your account. Once you do that, your Facebook Homepage sidebar will look like this.
The “Ads and Pages” is what interests us.
Create a page about your product, brand, or service, since you’ll need somewhere to send users (check out the fan page for Left the Box). Once you have your page setup to how you like it, go back to the “Ads and Pages” section of Facebook.
This time we’ll be setting up an ad to drive traffic to our fan page. We won’t just drive anyone to our page, instead with Facebook’s interface and the option to only advertise to specific users with targeted keywords in their profile, we can advertise to only our biggest fans. For example, consider if Sony wanted to find only those that love Sony products. They’d simply create an ad that targets only users with the keyword Sony in their profile.
The flaw with this method is that you’re not ranking the members based on how important they are, or how influential they are. The hope is that of those that love you, a few will be influencers. Since all are brand evangels though, (why else would they advertise your brand name in their Facebook profile?) you’re able to target those most likely to join and share your community site.
When It Can Be Useful
The best time to use this strategy is when you’re trying to build a community, whether it be on Facebook, your blog, or any other social media site. Laying the foundation with consumers that love your brand and are willing to talk about you is the best way to help your community go viral.
What other ways have you seen used to create an initial following on Facebook? What have you leveraged to increase and engage people on social media sites?
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{ 6 comments read them below or add one }
Ken I understand what you mean about 3100 “fans” but that’s just the target. The number of people that actually have contact with the brand is much higher than that. Consider if you have 3100 fans, but each fan has another 500 friends. If all your fans are active, and are part of your community. Indirectly, they also each drag in their 500 fans.
In the end 3100 might be a small number, but the indirect connections are important. Also, don’t forget the 80 / 20 rule, that 80% of your profits are made from 20% of your consumers. Keep those that buy from you often happy, and they’ll continue buying from you.
I highly doubt that Sony or any other larger corporation is reading this looking to find out how to target 3100 “fans”- 3100 is such a small number it doesn’t even register to Sony Execs……..so if this is a great idea for larger corporations, what is the strategy you expect “startups” or smaller companies to use your ideas. My problems are similiar to John’s in that I am starting a web application company- so would I target those that had my competitors or similar compies “fans”?
I would think that the flaw here is not in the ranking, but in the keyword search. Using your example, who puts Sony in their profile? (By the way – is your example accurate? There are 3100 Facebook members 18 and older in the US who put Sony in their profile? Are they Sony employees?)
I am an author, and I would want to find and engage potential readers of my book. For something as ambiguous as a novel, a keyword search is pretty useless, I would think. What are the keywords that identify a reader?
The demographic information might be useful, but I would end up with a huge audience, and wouldn’t this be just shotgun advertising, essentially a banner?
@John That’s the issue between using it as an author and using it as a brand. Larger brand such as Sony have the ability to look at only people who are huge fans of Sony. Sure it might be an employee, and that’s fine. You need these people to help get your community off the ground.
And instead of Sony, think the core demographic of Facebook, what about Hollister or Victoria Secret? I can guarantee you a lot of people put those brands as things they are interested in. (By the way, the Sony example is accurate 3100 Facebook members put Sony in their profile, taken straight from Facebook Ads.)
As an author this strategy might have little value to you, because of exactly the pitfalls you highlighted. But for a large corporation that tends to have a following, or a company with an already recognizable brand, this is an easy way to highlight “brand fanatics”.