It’s the Wild West for brands and businesses figuring out how to use Facebook as a platform for marketing and promotions.
The potential is significant to move away from websites for movies, stars and retailers to Facebook fan pages where the fans are already congregating in mass numbers.
But somehow, so far, the social connector from most Facebook fan pages is missing. The fans are there and easy to aggregate. But the content and social campaigns that work within the Facebook ecosystems are still being discovered through trial…and a lot of errors.
This problem defines the next great opportunity for businesses on Facebook. Those who discover how to build a viral, social funnel with their fans on Facebook are mining a great new frontier. Truly opportunity abounds here.
Some background on fan pages
They have been around since 2007 and were created to clean up the confusion between people and companies on Facebook. People have profiles and brands have pages. Fan pages are basically a profile page for a business with some built-in marketing and search capability.
The numbers per Facebook on fan pages are starting to grow after a slow start.
- More than 3 million active pages on Facebook
- More than 1.5 million local businesses have active pages on Facebook
- More than 20 million people become fans of pages each day
- Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans
Top 5 reasons why fan pages are such fertile ground
1. The fans are on Facebook and easy to round up.
Approximately 500,000 more people are migrating to the platform daily. And it is so much easier (and cost effective) to find your fans on Facebook then on the open web. Think of the pain and cost of PPC and SEM over spurring viral spread through friending.
2. Liking and Fan-ing are part of the Facebook community culture and powerful expansion channels.
People like to like and share those likes. This is a brand dream world. There are also some astounding facts that show that on Facebook becoming a fan actually drives buying behavior.
3. We live in a world of earned social respect.
Facebook is the sandbox for social behaviors, and the infrastructure and the culture for social sharing is already in place.
4. The fan page is free…well sort of.
You can buy widgets, build apps, port media but honest hard effort and connections with the fans is what really works. There is a democratization at work that levels the playing field and rewards honest and interesting communications.
5. Facebook advertising is a powerful tool to drive both fans and prospects.
Not only is the demographic targeting powerful but new abilities to target friends of friends redefines and expands earned support to a great degree.
The two problems to solve to make fan pages work
1. Boring content on the web makes unacceptably boring content on Facebook.
Most brands are simply porting over and reusing content from their open web URLs to their Facebook pages.
Photos, YouTube links to videos, Twitter and RSS feeds. Nothing new here. There is little or no acknowledgement that the social web requires social activities. No understanding that a brand is a personality and that on Facebook, and on the social web, people communicate with people, not companies.
A list of share buttons with some streamed video does not a community make. You may attract some fans but you are missing the bigger and more powerful connection.
2. The Facebook platform is more comment-based than conversational at its core.
The things we do on profile pages to deepen our relationship with our friends work less well on fan pages. Person to person communications is not the same as person to brand. There is a twist that is not fully understood.
And the Facebook platform itself makes it easier to link out to a conversational blog than to build a dynamic structure within Facebook on the fan page. This has created a void that is starting to get filled by new start-ups with a variety of approaches to social brand marketing.
Something is missing and it’s the authentic social connection
Think for a second about the power that the social web brings. It’s about connecting. About authenticity. And about transparency. Standard fare, even basic share channels aren’t enough.
I’ve blogged on the Star Connection. That magic on Twitter where millions of fans can connect and converse with a star like Shaq or John Mayer or your local politician. This one-2-many personal connection is what fan pages haven’t discovered how to accomplish yet. Sure you can chat but Facebook requires a face and real-time connections.
Fan pages need something new and fresh and social. Something different that takes advantage of the power of the social graph. Something that connects personally with the stars or the faces behind the brands.
One of the solution areas will be under the umbrella of what I’ve termed social video. I’m an advisor to Vpype, a start-up company who is innovating in this area on Facebook and providing commercial solutions to most of the examples I outline below for brands.
Other points of conversational video are starting to crop up all over the web, especially in the online dating world. Most are pretty rough in format but social video without a doubt and a directional marker for what is to come all over the social web.
Some examples of what ‘might be’ may stimulate some thinking
-Facebook variation of ‘video Twitter’ connecting stars to fans
A Twitter star like Ashton Kutcher broadcasting live to his millions of fans and having a video chat conversation. Impromptu, authentic and fun conversation that just happens on his Facebook page.
-Interactive reality-TV Facebook connections
Think of Survivor and Project Runway and Top Chef. Countless reality shows with weekly interactive conversations with the fans. Not boring chat, but a light as air conversation with the star that was ‘cast off’. There are scores of possibilities for these every week.
-Self chronicling star vblogging from Facebook fan pages
Ongoing video conversations to the fan page wall, interactive with any fans that happen to be around. Storable. Sharable. Reviewable. Think Miley Cyrus or John Stewart or Chris Rock.
There are innumerable options and solutions not yet thought about. Or even imagined.
My point…social media is authentic. Real. Interactive. And fun. Our relationships to our brands needs to be with real people in a new way that suits the platform it sits on.
Facebook is where the populations are. Brands need to find a way to communicate not just broadcast if they want to unlock the keys to a dynamic brand community.
This is a great challenge. A huge upside. And something new to be invented.
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For more information:
-See The State of Facebook for Business Report from the Hubspot blog.
-Check out Inside Facebook Pages from Sysomos.
My thanks to Tyler Willis, a smart guy and head of brand strategy at Involver.com for pointing me to some of these resources and being open to my questions and opinions. Involver is one of the innovative start-ups that is building solutions for brands on Facebook fan pages.
