DIGITAL BLONDE
Digest
What opportunities does Facebook offer when engaging with our customers?
The Digital Blonde continues with the second in her three part series of discovering the potential of social media marketing. This month she is focusing on Facebook and the opportunities for customer engagement
The fi rst thing I want to get across is social media is not a channel for you to push out the messages you wish and then walk away. Social media is all about engagement and interaction with your customers.
WHAT CAN FACEBOOK OFFER YOU? You can setup a Facebook business page as a local authority, a contractor caterer, a school or supplier. It’s free and gives you the opportunity to engage with your customers on a daily basis. Using a combination of status updates, blogs, links, images and video, you can promote your product or service.
GROWING THE LIKES
Don’t rely on the concept of viral marketing. Unless you have the coolest content on your Facebook page you won’t have thousands of people fl ocking to it.
For people to ‘Like’ your business page you need to promote it. You can do this in the same way as your website and put the Facebook URL on all your promotional materials. Remember to use the other digital channels, tweet about the page, add something to your email signature and contact the people on your database. The alternative is Facebook advertising. You will be amazed at how successful the adverts on the right of your Facebook screen can be. They are highly targeted and generate good return on investment. For example, you can pinpoint a female aged between 27 and 35, living within 10 miles of Northallerton, who also ‘Likes’ Change4Life.
DEBATE
I have recently taken over the management of the LACA social media channels. LACA launched its Save Our School Food Standards Campaign within a few days of me running the channel. We are using Twitter to spread the message and Facebook more as a community. It’s a place for people to share their responses from MPs, feedback from schools and support each other pushing the campaign forward.
WATCH AND LEARN Monitoring your social media presence will give you opportunity. There is software available to help you discover the optimum day and time
to post and with what type of content. By monitoring their Facebook page, Evoid drinks has created a community that enables them to get customer feedback which they are using to then drive sales.
“Facebook has achieved for us at both a micro and macro level,” says Peter Hindley of Evoid Drinks. “At the micro level we get feedback from students covering topics such
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as the new fl avours that they would like and how sales are performing at their school. Being told by a student that their school is out of stock of one of our drinks is an opportunity for us. We then make a quick phone call to the catering manager sometimes on the same day as the
original post. “At the macro level it has given us a better understanding of our customer base. Whilst we predominantly operate in the educational sector we do have retailers in some prestigious business accounts. So whilst 53% of our Facebook users are aged under 24, perhaps surprisingly we also discovered that just under 14% are over 45. We do recognise a few of the profi les as being members of the catering teams in schools that we have visited.”
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