Platform integrations - Facebook + There.com

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Will has a nicely detailed post on there.com’s “Facing There” application that strategically integrates the experience of there.com users onto their social networks on facebook. It is an interesting way of extending the experience of their users a step beyond by synergizing with one of the more popular social networking platforms. This is also a good case to evaluate how people are planning virtual events on there.com and sharing the event details on their facebook pages. Does this level of syndication, synergies and cross-platform interactions help enhance user experience?

There.com recently launched a Facebook application, Facing There. Facing There’s app design, launch and roadmap are part of There.com’s strategy for operating in a world where their users have to manage participating in a growing number of social graphs.Michael explicitly cited the exploding number of social graphs online, and we discussed his company’s strategic decision making on how to partner with Facebook and MySpace versus compete with them. These large social networks do not have support for avatar based interaction, the core of There.com’s user experience. Facing There is an explicit attempt to allow users to take their There.com experience and make it a part of their social networking experience. 

You can read the complete post here.   

Facebook 3 - Promoting your business

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Gone are the days of traditional marketing. The strength of your Facebook presence is going to define how effectively you can promote your business, products, events or services to your market. Remember, Facebook is just the tool - you are the marketer who has to get it right.

Since we have already talked about Facebook profiles, groups and pages in our previous post, lets just quickly go through the fourth important element in promoting your business - the Social Ads. These are additional paid branding options within Facebook, to allow you to reach a wider network and reinforce your branding.

These ads can be shown based on your specific demographic and keyword requirements. It is an incredibly cost effective channel for marketing to niche segments based on pay per click (or view) modalities. Spots are given based on bids so make sure your bids aren’t too low, or you may risk losing to competitors. Because of its excessively focused placement, it is bound to get great traffic to your sites. You can make these ads interesting by adding a picture and tagline that will appeal to your market

Get yourself some ad spots before the big market players jump in with their endlessly deep pockets.

Facebook 1- setting it up for your business

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At first I thought the FaceBook hype and romance would fade away as newer and better social applications kept trotting along - until I used it myself. For businesses, FaceBook has a lot of revenue potential as it is a wealth of deep relationships based consumer data.

Having said that, its important to note that you can’t just jump into the bandwagon and start marketing there - its a gradual process.

Facebook Profile: Your first step to creating a presence there is your facebook profile - this is a personal profile of ‘you’ not your business. You need to have a personal element to your business if you want room in these social networking sites. This personal touch makes your business seem more human and thus likable. So, in Facebook, your personal profile should be about you - the image that you want to share with your networks. Eventually, when people start following you, they will also become interested in your business. But initially, make sure you get your personal profile right. Here are some tips for that:

- Add aspects of your personality that may seem interesting to your market or may help build credibility. You have to make people want to be your real friend.

- Make your profile visible and open so that people that you know can easily find and contact you. E.g. its a good idea to list down your colleges and school names so that you can find your old classmates from there. Same goes for past work experiences. Old friends can become great resources for your business.

- When you are filling out your profile, make sure you take special care to fill the activities and interests sections.

- Enlist your websites in your profile, so that people who are interested in finding out more about you know where to go.

- Make it as personal and real as possible. Put up a real picture of you instead of an avatar or a cartoon image. Get real - get focused.

- Your profile can later have multiple facebook pages for the different aspects of your business. But you have to make sure that you have just one Facebook profile for you as an individual.

Facebook Pages:

Next off, once you have your Facebook profile all set up, you can build as many separate pages as you want for your businesses, products, events or launches. You can customize and design your pages around your business and position yourself as an expert, if you want. These pages are meant for businesses, so they have ‘fans’ instead of ‘friends’ in them. I’m going to discuss how you can find and make friends and bring them to your pages later on.

Facebook pages are an incredibly powerful tool for marketing. They’re free platforms and spaces for your business right in the middle of your targeted customers. A few pointers about Facebook pages:

- To build a Facebook page, go through the simple process of creating a new page (facebook.com/business) anyone can view Facebook pages and can search for them using search engines.

- You can make as many Facebook pages as you want - theres no limit to the number of pages you can create for your business(s). Although, keep in mind that pages have to be for real entities.

- You can make your pages interesting by adding pictures, applications, posts and links (to your sites). Whenever you change something on your page, an update is sent to all of the fans of the page in their news feeds.

- When you have your basic page set up, allow the community to build around it. Let people join, become fans, upload photos, write on the wall - make them feel like its their space. All of these activities become incentives of their friends to join, when they get to read about the activities on their news feeds.

- Make everything an experience. Make the pages interesting and interactive so that they appeal to or empower your targeted audiences. If you’re launching an event, make an event page and get the prospects to contribute to the event setup. You have to give people reasons for being a part of your community. This goes back to your initial relationship building strategies and techniques.

The other elements of Facebook like their walls are simple enough to understand once you have the basic profile and pages set up. Walls are just places where you can communicate with others with messages or comments. Now that you have it all set up, in the next two posts I’m going to talk about how to network using Facebook and how to Promote your products or launches on Facebook.

Creating traction online

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One of our commenter asked a very valid question, Do social applications (like Facebook) only begin to help in marketing events after a critical mass is already achieved in your following?

In my own experience I would agree that greater hype is built when more people are talking about it. However, having said that, the powerful thing about social media is that you can attract “more people” to your page without even knowing them. Initially when you’re just starting out, it doesn’t matter how many people you have on your Facebook network, what matters is how you get through to the people who could potentially be interested in attending your event.

For example, let’s suppose your target audience for an event are college students and frequent travelers (25-35 age-group) in Florida. We already know that the market demographics on facebook are skewed towards college students and professionals. So the potential of your market size is considerably huge. Theoretically, all you need to do is reach out to these people!

I’ve noticed that when events are built into fun activities, they can turn into great powerhouses for generating hype. You can build a page on the social networking apps with customized navigation and add applications over it to get the people involved in the pre-launch stage. You can get them to plan some elements of the event, or have competitions (e.g. poster design competition for the event). These competitions can be linked to real-life prizes like “accommodation discounts”, “free tickets”, “free drinks”, etc. You should also be able to show a list of other people who are attending. That will make them want to be there as well. There has to be an incentive for people to participate and refer you to their friends.

I believe that once you can find your potential customers, they will market your event further for you. In many ways, it depends on how you are branding your event. You can read our thoughts on event branding here.

So, to sum it up, I feel that even if you are a small shop or are planning a local club party, you can create movement and traction online if you play your moves well. Hopefully, we will be discussing these little tips, thoughts, ideas and strategies in this blog and our other Launch Strategies Blog over the next few months. Stay tuned!

Facebook 2 - Expanding your network

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Networking on Facebook can be broken down into two initial steps:

1- Finding existing friends
2- Joining groups

Finding friends: Once you have your profile all nicely set up. Look for people that you already know from your past or present life that are on facebook. It doesn’t matter whether or not you think they fit your market segments - the bigger your network the better it will be. So, get down to some serious people hunting. Remember not to add people that you don’t already know or they may report you as spammers.

A few great ways to find your friends are:

1- get Facebook to check addresses from your email account to see if anyone has a Facebook profile. (this can be done automatically, in the “find friends” section)

2- search for people from your schools and colleges based on your years of graduation. (this can be done using the “more ways to find friends” option at the bottom)

3- search for activities that you have been involved with to see if there any Facebook groups for them. This could be anything from childhood spacecamps to college sketching classes.

4- search for people using the search bar with their names. Make sure you’ve got the right person before sending them invites.

5- finally, go to the profiles of your Facebook friends and look at their friends network to see if you know anyone there.

Joining Groups: Once you have exhausted your ways of adding people that you know, the next step is to find people that you want on your page. These could be your target markets, your perfect audiences, possible future evangalists. Anyone. The way to do this is by finding groups that these people are in and joining those groups first. After having an active presence in the group, you can invite them to be on your friends lists. The best way for this would be to get them to add you instead. Some tips:

1- Make sure you join several networks instead of restricing yourself to just a handful. These groups should be chosen based on your targeted markets. To look for groups, simply select the “groups” section on your homepage, or you can browse through the groups recently joined by your friends to get a head start. Find those groups that are already active and have something going on all the time.

2- After joining, get a feel for the group first. Never start to promote yourself. Take time to participate, answer questions, get help, give help and build reputation and credibility amongst the group members.

3- Based on how well you participate, the members of the groups may want to start following your blogs or add you to their friend networks etc. Once you have this kind of following, you can announce events, find people to test your products, find people who can promote your products for you, get opinions and feedbacks and get a chance to really understand how your market behaves.