Case Study On Marketing With Facebook

Case Study On Marketing With Facebook 1. Introduction What makes Facebook so successful and why it is used by all companies today for marketing? These are the two questions are going to be answered in this paper. There are other social networks available like Friendster, Orkut, Myspace etc. still Facebook is preferred due to the number of users using Facebook, amount of customization provided and peer pressure to stay in competitive in the market. With more than 500 million users and many adding many more adding every day, Facebook has become the preferred choice of marketers who are looking for more innovative ways to outsmart their rivals in all fronts. Mark Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook and it was started in 2004. It was open to all users worldwide in 2006 and it has grown in such a speed that if Facebook was a country it would have been 6th most populated country in the world. According to marketingcharts.com, US market share of Facebook in Social networking websites and forum is 61% of the total market share is for Facebook. 1.1 What is Facebook? Facebook is a social networking site which was started in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg. It has 500 million active users. Any person who is 13 years old or more and who have a valid email address can create a user profile in Facebook. Users can create a profile page, add others users in Facebook, can add their common interest groups, communicate with each other, can share photos etc, see news feed, applications etc. According to December 2010 report of Alexa.com an Internet market research company, Facebook is the second most visited website in the world just behind Google. To visit Facebook visit the link www.facebook.com and it looks as shown below. 1.2 Introducing Facebook Marketing to Business The question all the companies ask is how it will help them. What will be ROI on investing in Facebook for marketing? Anyone can create a Facebook page, but an official representative of a business can create a Page and can serve it as an admin to the page. Admin can have security given to the Page like approval needed by admin to join the page or denying permission for user from a particular demographic region. Pages are designed to provide basic information of the page and can have discussion boards, ability to comment by user assessing the page and also uploading user generated contents. Benefits for Business to Consumer marketers are that they can use this page to generate more interests in their customers. B2C were the first marketers to realize the potential of using Facebook for marketing as they can use this page to generate interests in their new products, or generating news feed using user participation which allowed them to generate more participation and also word mouth to increase their popularity. It also allowed company to improve companys search engine rankings. Benefits for Business to Business Marketers are using Facebook as a feedback loop where customer can ask any questions or can participate in appreciating a product which will help to leveraging new customers. It can also used by Big companies to share knowledge and help employee communication. To create a Page in Facebook Page, go to http://www.facebook.com/pages and give the necessary details required. 2. Using Facebook in business 2.1 Creating a Page for Business Before you can start marketing in Facebook, you need to be part of Facebook user community. It gives lot of opportunities to organizations to get exposure. In Facebook, your ability to connect and influence the users can be the main factor in success or failure in achieving your objectives. Unlike other marketing fronts, marketing with Facebook is a 2 way model where customer and companies can communicate and share the ideas. You can create an account in Facebook by going to the home page of Facebook which is www.facebook.com. When creating a Page in Facebook main thing to note will be what is the objective of the page and how can you achieve your objective. Facebook doesnt limit the number of users who can become fan of your page. To access a page, the users must become fan of the page. It is a term used by Facebook for the users to connect to a particular page. 2.2 Creating a Facebook Marketing Strategy First step for creating a Marketing Strategy would be to have a nice Facebook page. Facebook pages come in three categories. Local: These pages are for business that would benefit from a strong local market presence. A restaurant or a cafà © can be example for the same. Brand, Product or Organization: These pages are for larger businesses which can include also non-profit organization. Example for the same would be SAP, Versace, and Red Cross etc. Artist, Band or Public Figure: These pages are used by popular artist or celebrities. Barack Obama and Kraftwerk can be good examples for the same. The best way to create a good Facebook page would be to keep some points in mind like keep it simple, fresh, specific to the product or company and main would be to think about the fan base. If these points are considered thought fully we can create a very good page. Please see an example of a page. This is a Facebook page of Nike football Deutsch. You can create a page by going on the link http://www.facebook.com/pages and once created we can start with customizing of the page. Apart from some basic element we can customize Facebook according to our liking. There are many tabs which are present in your page like wall tab where users can comment on your page, Info tab is used to give information about the company, and other tabs can be used according to companies requirement. For example we can have event tab where we can show upcoming event of the company or products, some other tabs are videos tab and photos tab. You can also have applications in your tab. We can have discussion tab for users to use effectively communicate about our existing product or upcoming products. Once we have created a page, next step would be to think about the privacy. We can have different privacy ranging from limiting users from a certain demographic area to limiting users based on age group. 2.3 Advertising your Facebook page Now that we have created a page, we need to advertise our page. We need to have more user interaction in our page that gets noticed. There are many ways to promote our page in a smart way. The following are the smart ways to promote. Adding Application One of the ways is to add application to our page. We can do by posting in our wall and also in the news feed of users who are there in your page. Facebook has different apps for different categories like Business, Entertainment, and Sports etc. Posting information We can post some link of the company newsletter or blogs which are interesting news about your company or business. Commenting on Discussion tab By commenting to members discussion or your page shows that you are engaged in the feedback and this adds value to the discussion. This will make your customers more eager to discuss various things and will show your transparency. When a user become fan of our page, it is shown on their wall and can be seen by others who have not seen your page and this can help in promoting your page indirectly and this can be effective as this can be a way for endorsement of our product or business. 3. Strategies for Advertising Success There are different ways to advertise in Facebook. Some of the key strategies are as follows. Our marketing strategy should be based on following objectives like Building brand awareness, Increasing Sales, and active participating in discussions with the customers. 3.1 Different Advertisement Strategies Building brand awareness A brand is something how you define your business or product. It is a major factor in defining marketing goals which can help in creating more brand awareness in our existing and potential customers. Here you can discuss with your customers to know about customer needs. You can promote about your presence in Facebook by using your company website or using printed newsletter. You can also sent email to people who are not in Facebook about your page. Increase Sales Main aim of advertising is increasing sales. Facebook page can be used to promote various offers and discount in your products. You can have a link in Facebook which will lead the customers to your company website where they can read more about special offers and various things about your brand. Facebook Marketplace can also be a nice place to advertise if your products are tangible goods. You can have some exclusive events to Facebook customers using events tab. This way you can show them you are taking the Facebook customer seriously and it can also increase the fans for your page. Participating in discussion You can discussion with your customers from your page. There is a discussion tab which can be used for many things. We can use these results when we are thinking about launching a new product. Facebook ads are like online banner ads. But here when a user clicks on the ad it will redirect them into your page, Facebook ads are made of image, some information and a title. Ads on Facebook are purchased with pay for clicks (CPC) and pay for impression (CPM). You can buy Facebook ads by going on the link www.facebook.com/advertising. If you go to the link you can make the advertisement. You can have your specification listed like what demographic region you are targeting and other specifications are needed and then Facebook will calculate the cost for the advertisement. Below is the way how you can create an advertisement on Facebook. Next step in advertising on Facebook is deciding on the budget you want to spend on advertising. For example, a Blog will cost nothing, a podcast can cost around $2000 but for advertising using Facebook is free unless you add some apps or have dedicated advertising created using Facebook advertising. The real cost of creating a steady stream of content in your website which has to be managed. 3.2 Buying and Selling in Facebook Marketplace This is a free service from Facebook where you can buy and sell products. Here users can have classified ads for the following category like For Sale, Housing, Jobs, Rentals etc. We can access this website from the link www.facebook.com/marketplace which is as shown below. Here we can sell anything which is advertising our Tangible goods. This can be a good way for selling goods as this is free service and we dont need to spend any money on the same. So whatever goods sold in this way can be added to our profit. 4. Facebook Viral Marketing Facebook Apps have become the most important tool for the marketers. There are more than 52000 apps in Facebook according to Facebooks Statistics. Facebook apps are the software application that we can integrate in our Facebook page or profile which can add a unique personality to our page. We can either create our own apps or we can use other apps. There are many apps which is available for free and also we can have a pay per install model. In this model we need to pay when a user installs the apps. To see the list of apps go to the link www.facebook.com/apps/directory.php which can seen as below. There are different categories of apps available and we can select apps according to our needs. 4.1 What is Viral Marketing? Viral Marketing means how your marketing suddenly gets popular among the customers. The sudden rise in popularity of your brand can be termed as viral. When you offer good incentives, customers get excited and through word of mouth your brand will get popular. 4.2 Different ways to promote Facebook Viral Marketing The main aim of viral marketing is to create more brand awareness and to increase sales. Keeping this in mind, we can have Contest, free gift etc. In the end we can have more customers visiting our Facebook page and also can visit our company website. We can have the following things keep in mind while making the promotional contest. Keep it simple Keep the competition simple. Dont try to put complicated rules. If the competition is simple more users will try the contest. Offer an exciting price Customers are always excited when the price you give is nice. Better the gifts more customers will try the contest. Price neednt have to be pricey. We need to think about giving some unique prices like pre event party tickets, meeting a celebrity or putting the winner in companys new advertisement. Use existing fan base Getting noticed with a promotional event is the hardest part in Facebook contest. You need to promote this event using your company website or through the Facebook pages wall etc. Run the promotional event for a month The promotional event should run for at least a few weeks up to a month. We need time for word of mouth advertising. The more time we keep the promotional event active more users will check the event. But it also has some drawbacks like it shouldnt be running for more time as it can also have a negative feedback from the customer as they might think we are not updating our Facebook page regularly. Integrate it with media campaign This is the most important part for making the event successful. We need to promote the event on our company website and other mediums through which we do our advertising. In this way we can have more users using this event and we will also generate a viral effect. We can use Facebook ads to promote our event which can be visible by larger audience and we can be sure of the event turning out to be a large success. There were many companies who tried to use this promotional event for getting popularity increased. The best example for the same is recent promotional campaign launched by Burger King. In this campaign they asked all the users to delete 10 friends from their friend list to get a free whopper burger from Burger King. This promotional event became so popular that they had to shut down the event. These are just examples which show that you dont need to spend high money or give away cost prices to attract more people. We can use surveys to collect statistics for market research. This can be done in Facebook and it will also be more cost effective and accurate than the normal way to data gathering. There are many free Facebook apps available for survey like Polls, Daily experience survey, YouGov etc. We can use these survey apps integrate into our page and can be used effectively to know more about what customer thinks about our brand and can interact with them directly to find more ideas for improvement. Below is one of the example of how survey application look like. We need to join this application to add this to our page. You can use Facebook connect to have broader reach of the viral marketing to Third-party websites, devices or applications. Facebook connect was launched in December 2008 and since then more than 15000 websites, application and devices have implemented it successfully. Facebook connect is a feature through which you can extend your Facebook platform to other websites and ask Facebook users to use their login of Facebook to connect to that Facebook- Connect enabled website. The best of Facebook Connect is that it is free of cost. The main feature of Facebook Connect is that using this facility, Facebook users can interact on other websites which will be reflected in the Facebook. The best part of Facebook Connect is that it eliminates the users from registering to a new website for accessing them. This makes users more convenient to surf your websites, blogs etc. For example, if you want to upload or wanted to comment in CNN.com previously it was necessary to have a username and password but now using the Facebook connect facility users doesnt need to have a registered account with CNN. If you have a Facebook account you can directly access the website by giving your Facebook account details which is shown as below. To integrate this Facebook connect feature to a website, we must register and receive an API (Application Programming Interface) key via Facebook Developer Apps page. To get more insights of Facebook Connect visit the following link http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web. It is free to register for a Facebook API key. Once we have the API Key, we can create a Facebook app and configure it to point it our website. This is termed by Facebook as Callback URL field. The above mentioned features are mainly responsible for creating Viral marketing of our brand. This if done properly can surge our sales to amazing levels. 5. Social Media Optimization (SMO) In the last couple of years search engine has become an important tool for online business but these days Social media optimization (SMO) has become most popular techniques to promote products and services in the market by the mediums of various social media book markings and Facebook has provided a unique and new medium for the marketer to innovate and reduce their cost of advertising. Search engine optimization techniques can be broadly classified into two Categories into two which are on-page optimization and off-page optimization; these techniques are very helpful for improving traffics for a website. Some point should be included in social media optimization Know how to target your audience create content create a SMO strategy Book marking and tagging Increase your link ability SMO should be a continuous process 6. Advantages of using Facebook in Business Facebook platform has turned out to be one of the most powerful platforms for business since the invention of Adwords by Google. Below are the key benefits of using Facebook. More Activities in our Facebook page can work as a SEO for search engine Any users in Facebook can find about our brand with the help of Facebook page. Marketing is not limited to a demographic region in Facebook Attracts more Clients Run promotional events for Fans Can Sync our company website to our Facebook Blog Can deal with unsatisfied customer more conveniently 7. Conclusion As we can see marketing with Facebook can never be termed as highly complex thing. It is simple and easy way to attract more customers in this modern competitive world where competitors are constantly trying to outsmart their rivals to gain more market share. Creating a Facebook page is a free and easy way to increase your visibility of your brand. Using different techniques like Events, Facebook Ads, Promotion, Discussions and all a company can increase their reach globally. There are more than 500 million of users and to advertise to these users using old marketing way of TV, Radio and all can be very expensive. So this is a cost effective and latest way to improve your Sales using the latest technology trend which is Facebook.