Understanding Facebook - A Marketers Guide

Social Media Marketing has become something of a minefield these days. There are just so many options that knowing which is the best for your company’s marketing needs is baffling even to the experts - everyone claims to know the secret, but the truth is, without knowing your business, it’s impossible to truly pick the right option.

With this in mind, I have determined to examine the social networks that I use, and try to identify the unique challenges, and opportunities, that each possesses. Over the next few weeks we’ll take a look at the major social networks and, with a bit of tongue in cheek, look at how marketers can use them to best effect.

This week we’ll start with the biggest...

Facebook

For me Facebook is a collection of people that I know / have known / don’t know but I know someone who does know / wish I didn’t know / am forced to know by means of family bloodlines.

As such it is imperative that, under no circumstances should my real life be portrayed on my Facebook page - selfies of me lying on a sofa watching Top Gear in my dressing gown whilst eating Doritos would simply send the wrong message entirely. Instead, this assembly of people to whom I am somehow familiar must only see me as the most interesting person that ever lived!

As such, my Facebook page is full of funny pictures (because I’m so incredibly witty), shots of me out and about with my family in exotic locations (never of me shouting at my daughter because she’s just emptied an entire box of Frosties onto the floor and is proceeding to stomp them into the carpet in some sort of tribal war dance), pictures of my beautiful wife beautifully looking beautiful (she will read this so I cannot put a joke in here) and lots of other interesting things that make me look like I’m overwhelmingly successful, attractive, clever and hilariously funny.

As a marketer it’s VERY important that we understand this. If you want to appeal to Facebook users in your marketing, then you have to give them a reason to interact with your content and share. Marketing to Facebookers means flattering egos and appealing to the narcissist in all of us - everybody sees how we interact with Facebook, so our content needs to be worthy of interaction - and overtly selling is a bad practice.

If you want the best example of A-Class Facebook marketing, check out Red Bull’s page. You won’t find an ad in sight - rather just awesome, sharable, entertaining content that people want to share because it makes THEM look awesome, sharable and entertaining.

That, of course, would be wonderful if we all had multi-million pound budgets to make awesome video content...but of course we don’t. We have limited budgets and we need to be able to display an ROI on every penny we spend on marketing.

When I look back over Flint|Hosts posts, there is a clear trend. We try to share loads of content that relates to our core audience - articles and opinion pieces, cartoons and how-to’s. But by a country mile, the content that gets the best interaction is when we share something that’s truly of ourselves - awards that we have won, bits about our staff when they have achievements (in or out of the office), things that are going on in our office. This content gets well over ten times the engagement than anything else we post on Facebook.

The majority of Facebook marketing is about branding - letting people know that you’re there. This is why overtly salesy posts get little if any interaction. You need to strike a balance between valuable content and selling your business - and for every business this will be different.

To strike this balance you need to experiment and monitor which content gets the best response. It may seem simplistic, but the truth is no two audiences are the same, and your audience want something unique from you.

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