In the couple of years that I have been involved with social media marketing, I have seen much correlation between what what works for driving engagement and what works to drive a direct marketing response. I have become convinced that there is one area of focus that is sorely overlooked by brands seeking to build a vibrant and constantly growing Facebook community. There lacks an attention to the influence of copy.

Over the years I have pushed hundreds of millions of offers out to consumers and learned that what drives response holds true to the old folk wisdom—

“It’s not what you say, but how you say it.”

I have seen numerous tests where a different set of words or something else said or not said can produce a variance that can amount to a huge pile of cash to the bottom line.

Translating this idea to today’s social media world, most Facebook marketers haven’t quite realized that the Wall is a vehicle for generating response and that post copy should be formulated with care. Don’t let the real-time nature of the platform fool you into thinking that your messages should not require some planning.

5 tips for writing effective Facebook updates:

1. Speak to your fans in a style that makes them feel like you are addressing them individually. Develop the message to read like you were speaking 1:1.
2. Keep it short. No more than 4 lines in the post wherever possible. Make every word play a role in the message. Eliminate those that don’t.
3. Say something designed to inspire enthusiasm or emotion. Keep in mind that many Facebook users are hunting for posts to like and comment. Give them a reason to stop at yours.
4. Create sentences that flow smoothly. Awkward wording can lead to abandoned eyes.
5. Always have a photo or a link with an image attached to the post. Pictures are more engaging and heart-inspiring than flat text.

I’d love to hear any tips you have to add!

Last week we met with a small retail business whose direct sales dollars depends heavily on direct marketing efforts. We were on the topic of email marketing and I learned that they had never done any testing. I described the concept of A/B testing, and while they understood the potential value, they perceived it as “too complicated”.

Trust me on this one. Over the course of a 20+ year career, I’ve tested pricing, lists, subject lines, offer copy, packages, creative, engagement devices, premiums, even stamps! Here’s what I learned:

1. Slight variances in performance can easily add up to tens of thousands of dollars. Over the course of time, a better performing effort can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
2. There is psychology involved in motivating a customer or prospect to buy. Testing enables you to learn about what works and what doesn’t, which can lead you to develop your own theories that guide you moving forward.

Where should you test? Every channel where you are delivering marketing messages should be considered fertile testing grounds. Despite popular fallacies, you can measure ROI on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Tips for testing:

• Keep your laboratory as clean as possible. Make sure you’re comparing apples to apples with regards to list and delivery times. Any variances between the two samples will fuzzy your results.
• Create test panels of equal size in channels which allow for list segmentation.
• Think in terms of having a “control” and “test panels”, with your goal always to beat your control to increase your sales.

Let me close now by passing on my mantra: Always be testing!

Having grown up in the subscription and later the catalog marketing worlds, one basic concept permeated everything we did. Every effort, every offer, every list and every test is assigned a key code, an alpha-numeric code that enable results to be tracked, measured, and attributed to the source from which the customer acquisition or sale came.

This practice of using key codes can and should be used to measure social media marketing efforts.  If it sounds too complicated, it’s really not. It’s more about discipline than it is sophistication, and measuring ROI is all about discipline.

How do you capture key codes?

1. Create a code to attach to your special coupon or offer.
2. Publish the codes from Twitter, Facebook or whatever social network where a majority of your customers reside.
3. Create a field on the input screen that the customer will use to redeem the coupon or offer.
4. Refine a system for ensuring the codes are added to your customer database.

How do you create key codes?

Depending on how expansive your marketing programs are, you’ll probably want to think about a 5 to 6-digit coding system. Consider this as a possible structure:

Digit 1: Alpha or numeric character to identify source of conversion. A simple example would be T=Twitter, F=Facebook, E=Email.

Digit 2: Year of campaign/effort.

Digit 3: Month or season of campaign/effort.

Digit 4: Type of effort. Examples: coupon, contest, special promo.

Digit 5-6: Specific identifiers for the effort.

If you follow these instructions, you will create for yourself  a vehicle for measuring results and the opportunity to approach your social media marketing as the fascinating science it can be. What’s stopping you?

Over the past decade, companies who market directly to customers added email as a vital element to their contact strategies. Capturing email addresses has become a higher priority than postal addresses for many businesses. Here we are now in the early age of social media marketing, yet few companies have adopted a practice of capturing relevant social network data for their customers.

In a future article I will discuss the resources that are now available to purchase data that enables you to know what social networks your customers are on and the URL of their profile. While I consider myself an evangelist for these kinds of resources, I also heartily encourage any company who recognizes social networks as a serious direct marketing channel to start capturing social data on your own. Here’s why:

1. Communication preferences are changing as more options in which to communicate become available. Depending on demographic, the emails you send to your customers’ non-work email addresses may pile up unseen as they rely more and more on Facebook for their personal communication.
2. Measuring the impact of social networks at the customer level is only possible if you apply  social network activity to your customer records.
3. Targeting customers with social efforts can only be done if you can identify where your customers can be reached.
4. Being the initiator of the social relationship shows your customer that you care about engaging with them. Don’t sit back and wait for them to fan or follow you. Ask them for their social contact data and start cementing your relationships!
5. Don’t give your competitors an opportunity to engage with your customers before you do! When a loyal customer is followed by your competitor and you’re not on the scene, what message does that deliver?

I’d love to answer any questions you might have on this evolving topic.

Over the past few days, Facebook has unleashed an overhaul of their news feed that I believe has implications for marketers that go deeper than the surface. With hundreds of thousands of Facebook users revolting, only time will tell how long this particular feature will remain in its current design. In any event, one trend does seem clear. Like the sidebar Highlights that proceeded this particular redesign, Facebook seems to be in favor of delivering content that is based on a user’s prior engagement history.

What has changed?

Prior to this redesign, users would log on and see their home page streaming the most recent updates from all their friends and all the pages they are fans of in reverse chronological order. Now Facebook has changed this landing page to include only the stories they believe the user will be most interested in based on an algorithm that looks at the user’s prior engagement history.

A number of my Facebook friends today were passing on tips on how to configure their settings to see all their updates on their home page proves that there are users who dislike the filtering enough to learn how to disable it. Yet these types of users are not the majority, so any business using Facebook as a channel for delivering marketing messages to customers must understand the implications of the new feed.

Marketing implications of the new feed

The bottom line is that Facebook’s algorithm is determining what level of importance your message is  to your fan. Facebook decides whether your message should be included in the landing page News Feed, or whether your fan will need to click on the Live Feed option to find your message with all the others from their friends and pages which didn’t make the cut of importance.

In order for your Facebook messages to be effective, they first need to be seen. You can increase the chances of your messages getting seen by increasing your chances of getting them picked by the Facebook algorithm as important or relevant stories.

Clues to what Facebook deems important or relevant

I will not pretend to be an expert on Facebook algorithms, but observations I have made from studying the updates selected for my own News Feed give me some insight about how updates get chosen.

Criteria I have observed:

• Updates from people I have sent direct messages to recently
• Updates from people I have commented on the most
• Exact keyword match with another status update I commented on

How to use this information

Once you understand a bit about what Facebook looks at, you can then begin to incorporate this knowledge into your messaging strategy.

Do you have more observations to add from your experience? I’d love to learn and pass them along here.