Oct
Those of us who have been marketing directly to consumers since the 1980’s or before have experienced the evolution of channels from mailbox to internet and email. My work now involves encouraging clients to begin to look at Facebook as another prime environment for managing communications with customers and prospects.
While thousands of companies have hopped on board Facebook from pure instinct that they need to be there, few really understand Facebook well enough to be able to design a contact strategy that is effective.
What follows is a primer meant to help you to relate the old ways to the new.
Key #1: Think of Facebook as a public online environment for building your “house” lists. In days past, we’ve referred to this process as acquiring names and addresses. We can thank Facebook for adding a human element by introducing the term “fan”.
Your fans will include:
- Current or past customers
- People who are becoming familiar with your company
Key #2: Think of Facebook as a public online environment for broadcasting messages to your fans and visitors to your page who are not fans.
These messages are:
- Broadcast on your page wall
- Streamed into your fans’ news feed
Key #3: Think of Facebook as a private online environment for sending messages to your fans.
- Messages are delivered to your fans’ inbox as status updates
- Updates can be sent to all fans
- Updates can be targeted
Questions? I’m happy to answer them.
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2 Responses to “3 Basic Keys to Direct Marketing on Facebook”
A question about Fan vs. Group pages in Facebook:
Was on the Palo Alto Software website today and noticed they had both a Fan and Group page. Why?
Which should businesses use?
Good question, Dave, and very timely! There has been a lot of confusion about the differences between Pages and Groups, an issue that has been made fuzzier now by Facebook’s redesign of the Group layout just released yesterday.
Up until yesterday, the functionality of the Page was far more robust than the Group. Now the two layouts mirror one another. Facebook created Pages to represent a company’s “official” space on Facebook; only company “officials” are supposed to create a Page. Anyone can launch and manage a Group.
Besides that difference, a key current benefit for Pages over Groups is the vast array of applications that have been developed to support a Page. It is unknown at this point whether the Group environment will also be a platform for applications.