Most of the companies are now aware of the effectiveness of Facebook and the necessity of being present on that social media; however business should also know how to use that tool and judge its effectiveness. In order to discuss this point we choose two articles from a website called Econsultancy that tries to help business in the domain of ecommerce and digital marketing.
I think it is important to understand that social and interactive Medias are a new type of marketing tools with their particular functioning and rules.
The first one called “Opening a Facebook Page is like opening a flagship store” (published on 16thFebruary 2011 by Jan Rezab), describe the effective Facebook page and the second untitled “Which Facebook marketing metrics matter the most?” (published on 1st March 2011 by Jan Rezab) will help entrepreneurs judge their Facebook page.
First of all, according to him a Facebook page must be similar to a store, for example someone needs to be in charge and constantly updating it. The design, content and pictures should be properly chosen. The author considers that not taking care of your page is the worst you can do and that your “fans” are deserving attention. For example when the website is changing its layout you need to adapt your page accordingly. He thinks that “The dynamic approach is the right approach when it comes to marketing on Facebook".
Now I’d like to share my opinion as a customer and I am really agreeing with the author, even though it seems obvious many companies are not acting accordingly. As a frequent user of Facebook I will be disappointed not to find a company on the media but it is even worst to find the company page with bad display and 2 years old update. I could say that I think that companies need to be on that media but only if they have the time and means to offer a proper page.
His second article concerns the tools to judge the effectiveness of your Facebook page which he considers are:
Fans (now called Likers) and their growth
It is actually the basic metric to measure the impact of your page but it is important to keep in mind that a Fan is not a customer. The author recommends comparing your number of fan to the number of users for each country to get your “country reach”. Moreover as the website itself has a very rapid growth a good page should have between 3 to 5% growth.
Of course you’ll need to compare it with the results of your competitors as well. You also need to understand that the more fans you have, the more you’ll get proposed to other users through the website (contagious marketing).
Content
As we already know content is the key to successful online strategies but the author considers that many companies have not get that yet. The best way to judge if what you are posting is appropriate is to benchmark. It is really helpful to surf on your competitor’s pages, study what there are writing about and the response they get from their fans.
Engagement
Using an engagement rate (number of interaction per post/number of fans) you will be able to judge the quality of your posts. He even gives number for the companies to be able to esteem the effectiveness of the content. According to him a good engagement rate is above 0.1%.
We can consider that the qualitative tools will be benchmarking your competitor’s content and the quantitative one calculating your engagement rate.
Response time
The minimum required is to him responding to 70% of the questions within 6 hours, the best companies will even be 24/7 on the media with a response time of 10 to 30 minutes.
Finally, I would like to say that while most of the companies are aware of the importance of Facebook, most of them are not using it properly. It is a specific marketing tool with its own metrics and in order to be effective on this media it is important to use the proper strategy and to audit it.
Special thanks to Jan Rezan for his articles http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/authors/jan-rezab and Renjith Krishnan for the picture http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=721
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