Engagement Wins the Facebook Marketing Game for Brands, Not Broadcasting

Facebook Likes

Facebook Likes

When it comes to Facebook marketing, the temptation is strong to just simply broadcast your brand and your services to as many people as possible. You get a person to like you on Facebook and “boom!”, one more person is seeing your page’s activity on their newsfeed. Now you may think that just as long as you are getting your message in front of as many eyes as possible, you are winning. Well, unfortunately, you’re not. In the end, it all comes down to conversions; turning your Facebook community into paying customers. The secret lies not in widespread broadcasting across social media channels, but in engaging the people in your Facebook community to talk about your brand.

How can Facebook engagement impact sales? Well, in order to even make a sale, you have to be in the buyer’s set of options of who will sell them what they want. Consumers have their ‘go-to’ vendors for particular purchases. Since we are talking about engaging your current Facebook community here, we will skip the lead generation phase, and get right into moving the customer’s consideration set.  If you are on the customer’s mind, then you’ve already won a major battle in winning the sale. If someone has liked your company on Facebook, that is nice; but if they have talked about it, that is fabulous!

Think about it like this: you’re having a big clearance sale starting next week. You could create a post that simply says, “Year-end clearance sale – starting next Monday.” You may get several likes to this post, but your followers do not have any compelling reason to respond or have a discussion around this topic. However, a post along the lines of, “What’s the best deal that you’ve found at our shop? You’ll have the chance to even more next week!” opens the door to start conversations. Shopify did an awesome job of doing this in the following post:

 


User-generated content is also a great opportunity to engage your Facebook following. If one of your customers was mindful enough to go to your page and talk about your product, responding shows that you value your relationship with them. That is exactly what Dodge did with this post on their Challenger product page. By acknowledging and responding to the user-generated content, it shows appreciation. And these customers deserve it. According to a study by Syncapse, fans who like a brand’s Facbook page spend $174 more on the brand than non-fans.

For Facebook post to be engaging, it should be rich in content. According to Belle Beth Cooper, Facebook posts with pictures, questions and emoticons have increased levels of engagement. Of course, you do not always have to stick to a formula…in fact it is better if you don’t. Contests and coupons do a good job of winning likes for your page, so those posts are very valuable as well. But posts created with the specific goal to engage your audience is part of the effort to move some of your Facebook fans over into paying customers.

If your customer shares your content, that is just the first step. You also want them to come back for more.

Creating viral content on Facebook is exciting. However viral content is not always popular content. In fact, the correlation is a mere 36%. What’s the difference between the two? Take an online petition for example. It’s virality is determined by the number of shares; but its popularity it determined by the number of people who sign it. This explains why viral content does not always convert over into sales. If it did, then you could look at your Facebook reach numbers on your Insights page and say those are your customers. It is more accurate to say that the reach of your content is just an audience. Those who engage are the real set of customers or potential customers, because that is the group who is actively thinking about your brand.

Remember, the ultimate goal in marketing is to get into your customer’s consideration set. By creating engaging posts with a genuine desire to connect, you are on the right path.

via Convince and Convert

Photo by Facebook(LET)

Rishona Campbell

By Rishona Campbell

Rishona has been blogging since the '90s and is now a social media evangelist. She has an MBA in Marketing has the daily goal to leave the world a little better place than how she found it.