2013

How do you use Facebook to drive sales in during Christmas festivities?

Are you ready for the Christmas season? We are. We love to see how businesses use Facebook actively for their marketing efforts before and during the Christmas season.

Christmas is about tradition. Getting together, having a great dinner, and opening presents. This Christmas, technology and tradition belong together. Today, we’re more connected than ever to the people and things that matter to us. You also have to take in consideration that 2013 is a multi-channel year. It’s crucial to have your business message across as many channels as possible.

“Successful cross-channel selling will be the difference between a bulging stocking and a lump of coal for retailers this Christmas.” (Retail Week, July 2013)

We check Facebook through mobile device 14 times a day. (IDC Always Connected Report, March 2013). People are searching for, and collecting impressions not just from their desktop – but also from mobile phones and tablets. We share photos, and send greetings to loved ones - technology and tradition come together at Christmas.

There are 5 steps to drive sales via Facebook:

Use your page to drive traffic to your site or store

Set up your page to attract more traffic to direct to your site:
Include a link to your website, general email address, phone number and blog. If you have a store, make sure your address, opening hours and telephone number are accurate.
Select a cover photo that represents your product or business category.
Invite people to connect to your page – your own friends & family. Import a list of your customers to invite them to like your Page.

Identifying customers

When it comes to identifying customers for your Christmas marketing efforts – you have to consider the ones that are going to shop a gift from your store. Are you promoting a nice bracelet for women? Target this to men. Perhaps you are pushing gifts for men? Save the ladies by promoting the perfect gift for a man - targeted to women. Are you promoting children toys? Target this to women too. Statistics shows that women are more likely to shop the gifts for Christmas.

Create content that appeals to your target customers

Use a shortened link to drive fans to your website to complete the purchase. If you have a store location, create posts to drive customers to drop in.
Clear, eye-catching images drive lots of engagement from fans.
Test to learn what content works best with your customers.
Consider using fan-submitted images and always be responsive to questions and comments.
Hosting interactive calendars/quiz applications is a great way to drive engagement.
(Learn more about creating calendars for Facebook)

Advertising with Facebook

- Reach the right people

o Consider target customer segments.

o Connect with the right people

o Their social engagement will provide your word of mouth

- Every day, everywhere.

o Your business message is shown across mobile, tablet and desktop devices.

o Your potential customers are spending more time on Facebook.

- With proven results

o Targeting right message to the right people delivers great results.

o Testing and improving your strategy is imperative.

Are you linking your ad out of Facebook and into your online store? Make sure your landing page is the page with the initial product. Don’t leave your customers searching for what they are looking for.

You may also target to the right people. You have think about demographics. As stated above – if you are running an ad on a gift, it might just be a good idea to target this to moms. Now we already know lots about our target audience. We know something about their gender, their life stage and age.

Think about who are most likely to purchase your products. You can use custom audiences to segment and target the right message to the right people.

Free media listening for all Fanbooster-customers

We're now offering all our clients free media listening. The goal is to give you more control over what's being said and written about your brand and your products, as well as about your competitors and the market you operate in.

- The explosion of info in online news and in social media has made media listening tools essential for marketers and communicators, says Thomas Moen, our Chief Brand Officer, and one of Norway's foremost experts on blogging. - In today's media landscape everyone's a journalist and everyone's a critic, and you have to monitor what's being said about you.

Fanbooster Listen is a collaboration with Fanbooster and Lissly. The two systems are linked together, which allows Fanbooster customers to access Fanbooster Listen directly from their Fanbooster account.

Check out our useful Get Started Guide here.

Professional listening tools have long been for the companies with the thickest wallets. Technology has now come so far that these types of tools should be neither expensive nor complicated. Fanbooster Listen is our way of giving you eyes and ears in the media landscape.

We recently gave you Fanbooster Monitor as a means to measure your social media presence. Fanbooster Listen is the next step, and lets you set up keywords that are monitored in blogs, social networks and online news sources. We'll send you timely reports that'll give you insights such as is there a discussion about your brand, and is there an increased awareness about your product category.

We listen to the following sources:

Blogs
Discussion forums
Twitter
Facebook
YouTube
Flickr
Most online news sources

...and give you:

Direct links to the post, tweet, blog etc
Top mentioners. The most active users.
Most used words related to your search.
Trends -and much more.

All of our customers now get three keywords at no extra cost. This is now available in your usual Fanbooster Dashboard. Send us an email at info@fanbooster.com with "Listen" as heading if you want help getting you started.

-Oh, and if you're not a Fanbooster-customer, we're more than happy to give you a demo.

Best,

Erik

Fanbooster widget overview

Here is a list of the most used widgets in the Fanbooster Creator and a few lines on what you can do with them.

Multi Editor:
The Multi Editor is basically a text and image editor similar to the ones widely used in CMS-tools.
More advanced users will also be able to make use of the HTML-source, add targeted links, hover-over images and embed content.

Picture:
The picture widget enables you to add images to you app with just one click and add hyperlinks to external destination.
TIP: Connect a Like button to your Image and create a auto-redirect to you app, perfect if you want users to "vote" on which prize they want the most.

Form - the data collector:
This is one of the most powerful widgets in Fanbooster and it's perfect for those scenarios were you want to collect data from users. Wether it be a newsletter sign-up, a contest entry - your data is immediately accessible including timestamps on when the entry was done.
TIP: if you run a contest/sweepstake - make sure you ALWAYS add an newsletter OPT-in and convert entries to new email subscribers.

Counter:
The counter widget is an add-on functionality that is mainly connected to the form. In short it counts all entries in a form an making you able to show this Live in you app.
Say you set up a campaign with entry variable prizes, e.g. for every 100 entries you give out another prize, you can then use the counter a visualizer of what level that is reached and giving users an incentive for sharing your campaign.
It can also be set up so it's a countdown, e.g. the 200 first that signs up to your newsletter will get an amazing exclusive offer on one of your product.

Fan Gate / Broken Glass:
Convert you entries to fans. This funcitionality is widely used and even more widely discussed.
The basics of it is that you can add a layer on top of your promotion so it is only accesible for those who like you, NON-fans need to hit the Like button in order to enter.
I will not join the discussion on wether it should be used or not, but i can share my conviction that is: "if used correctly it is a great functionality!" Meaning - it needs to be a really great reason for why the users should be "forced" to like your Page, do NOT add this over every app you have without thinking it trough.
And again, in our view - if your not sure, test test test test and then draw your conclusion.

Instagram:
Set up Instagram feed either from a user (@) or a hashtag (#) display then realtime in your app.
Perfect for running your Instagram #tag contest and you want to promote it on Facebook - link to the app and users can be inspired and want to join in.
TIP: Set up your company Instagram profile and share amazing images > then use the Instagram feed as a dynamic graphical element in your e.g. company overview app or newsletter sign-up.

Video Gallery:
Set up video galleries where you display all you favorite videos from individial Vimeo or Youtube links.
Constantly updating your videos? Well then hook up your video gallery to a Youtube channel or a specific playlist.

Twitter:
This widget enables you to gather you favorite tweet, display you latest tweets or display a hashtag.
TIP: Make a "Us in social media HUB" where you can bring inn feeds from all your social media; youtube, twitter, Instagram, Blog etc.

RSS feed:
The RSS widget enables you to automatically feed in articles from your blog, news section, website or your local paper.
Set up how many articles and characters that should be displayed and easily add share buttons that are connected to you source.

Photo Contest:
Not everybody is on Instagram (sure…?) and there are terms of use that might be a bit of a hassle to work with.
So why don't you arrange photo contest where you users can upload their images and add a title and description.
The entries will be displayed in a gallery with automatically added Like, share and vote buttons - and you can moderate what is shown in the gallery.
It can also be set up so that the images are "hidden" as default for those who are of a worried nature ;)

Registration
This is a form based on Facebook's own registration widget.
Ease up the sign-up for the client by getting the fields automatically pre-filled with the users information - and add your own custom fields.

Embed
Embed external elements like videos, pdf's and flash.

iFrame
Frame in external sources such as custom built booking, contact form etc.

Google Maps
Create a map to your business address or the destination for you event with just a couple of clicks.

Poll:
Want to do a voting over best products, get users opinions or just set up a funny poll?
With the poll widget you can get this done, Ask a question and add your alternative answers or images.
The voters results can be shown publicly or you can set it as hidden.
TIP: You can set the poll up so users can only vote once (handled via Log in permissions) and you can even fetch the email address of the voters if you want to reward them with a great offer or draw a winner.

Social

Share
Add share button to your application so users have the ability to share with their friends.
Fill our a title, a caption and a description, and choose the image you want go along with it.
TIP: In the mobile news feed it is only image, title and caption that are displayed, but on desktop the description is also displayed > so make sure you fill out all of them.

Like
Set up Like buttons with just a few clicks.

Invite
The invite button is another way that users can share the application with their friends. The user can selects up to 50 friends at once that will receive a notification, on click the user is sent to the app.

Comment
Another great way of viral sharing is trough comments, that's why we set up the comment widget. Based on Facebook own comment plugin you can enable users to comment on you promotion and this gets shared with their friends.
TIP: Add a comments field on you promotion and eg. ask users "Which product would you like to win" or "Why should you win".

Geek wanted!

Geek Wanted!
Do you understand social media and know how to organise a project?

Wow! Do you really exist?! The online rumors say you were out there somewhere. We are glad you stumbled upon this ad.

Who are we, you might ask? The story started in the small Norwegian city of Kongsberg with the serial entrepreneur Olav Eggum and his two sons; Erik the CEO and Vegard the rock star. They wanted to help brands create campaigns on Facebook and communicate with their fans. So they developed a platform for creating Facebook applications. So far more than 10.000 applications have been created using the Fanbooster platform. Check out www.fanbooster.com if you want to learn more.

Today we are about 17 people in Norway and a total of about 30 people around the world. Now we want to do something extraordinary. Something that will change how brands communicate in social media. We have established a project for that extraordinary. We call it the Boosting Project. Its for leading this project, we are seeking a geek to join us.

We want you as our next team member

So who are you? First of all, you are a geek. Otherwise you will have no fun in this project. And since we believe in the combination of fun and work…it's given you have to be a geek. You have thoughts on how to calculate effect of advertising and are in general in to statistics and analytics. The geekier, the better.

Second of all, you know your social media. You don't have to be one of those who talk the loudest or tells the world what you had for dinner. But we are pretty sure you know the terms and have an opinion about what happens out there in the social media sphere.

Thirdly, and most important, you like to coordinate and make things happen. When you and your geek friends meet up, you like to be involved and making sure everything happens the right way.Your way. You like to get people involved and make sure they do what they have promised.

We truly believe in Passion, Honesty and Fanatical support. As a project manager for the boosting project, you should too.

If you happen to be our geek, please contact us! We know we will do everything to make you smile, be inspired and learn new stuff each and every day.

About the position

oh…almost forgot. Some practical information:

Working place: Oslo or Sofia.
Position: Project Manager.
Responsibilities: Leading projects, business development. Other tasks based on your skills and interest.
Personality A organiser and doer
Education: Bachelor in either maths, statistics or communiation/marketing preferred.
Working language: Norwegian and/or English

Contact

Interested? Please send

your social media profiles (twitter, linkedin etc)
a short description why you are an 1. geek, 2. understand social media and 3. know how to run a project.

to geir@fanbooster.com

Need more info? Please contact Geir Sand Nilsen. He's the Chief Innovation Officer of Fanbooster and is in charge of this project. geir@fanbooster.com

Ps. There are some spelling errors in this job description. A huge bonus to applicants that point them out.

Free feature to extract data from Facebook timeline campaigns

This Tuesday Facebook made it allowed to run competitions directly on Page Timelines, and utilize both comments and Likes to draw winners. What Facebook has not done is to optimize for extracting data from Likes and comments.

The recents changes has made it easy to create simple promotions, says Erik Eggum CEO of Fanbooster. But it is still difficult to extract data from the Timeline campaigns. We wanted to change that.

Free feature to optimize Facebook timeline promotions.

Only three days after the sudden change in the Page Guidelines, Fanbooster launches a feature to extract data from Posts on the Timeline. using the new feature in Fanbooster, the Page admin can download a .csv-file from the Post in question. This makes it easier to follow up, draw winners and get better information about the campaigns produced using the Timeline promotions in Facebook.

The service is free and available to all Fanbooster customers.

New rules - same game

Facebook has just removed the requirement that promotions on Facebook only can be administrated through apps.

Is that good news for all brands or will it just create tons of spam?

The discussion has started.

To us, we think there are four other major aspects to this issue its important to remember.

1. More companies will do stuff. Many of them will use the free solutions available. For sure. It is likely this will be a low-entry service to get more companies going.

2. More companies doing stuff increases the risk for spam. Luckily Facebook has algorithms the make sure the best content is shown the most. We truly believe helping others, stand out and be nice is still the best long term strategy even on Facebook.

3. When more companies do stuff, more companies will spend more time on their Facebook presence. It is likely the need for tools that creates more advanced solution and optimise presence will increase.

4. As always, if you want to succeed you have to create campaigns that differs from all the others campaigns out there. Stand out and create a story that spreads. There are several solutions out there helping creating cool things fast. Fanbooster is of course one of them.

Our general thought is that this is cool! We think its a low-entry opportunity you for sure should look into. It is always a great idea to get more data on how your customers behave. So start testing with this feature as well!

In Fanbooster we have a number of solutions to create business on Facebook. We have an advanced solution for data collection to collect e-mail, phone numbers etc, you can monitor your page and benchmark it vs competitors, listen to what is being said about your brand or selected key words all over social media and create stunning and advanced Facebook apps in a glance. Ok, that was the commercial part, but the point we are trying to make is that the new feature from Facebook is just a tiny fraction of what can be done. And if everyone rush doing similar campaigns…that campaign is less likely to work. So make sure you stand out!

Oh! And by the way. A final notice. Fanbooster's main competitor is "brands doing nothing on Facebook". The news from Facebook will for sure make more brands do something…and helping us in fighting our Doing Nothing nemesis

When to publish Facebook posts

Do you know when you should post to Facebook? Is Monday a better day than Friday? What about 8am vs 11am?

Over the last coupple of months we have analysed 116.314 posts from a number of Facebook pages. This is what we found out. (Well, some of it. Contact us if you want to dig into the details.)

Background

Number of posts: 116.314
Pages from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Both B2C and B2B.
Time period: Until February 2013.

Please note the number are averages and may not be directly relevant for all pages.

Page activity

The illustrations below shows the distribution of the posts. To no suprprise, the posts are mainly published weekdsays between 8 am and 4pm.

Number of posts per day

Number of posts per hour

Day of the week
Which day to post? The table below indicates the probability of getting a like per week day. Wednesday is used as the omitted category. In other words, Wednesday = 0.
The numbers indicate how many likes a each day will get compared to Wednesday. Here, Saturday posts will generate 22,4% more likes than Wednesday posts. Saturday is 21 % better than Friday (0.224 - 0.014)
the stars (*) indicates the probability.
* 99,5 %
** 99,9 %
*** 99,99 %

Regression: Week day

Post type
The table below compare the post categories on Facebook. Here photos generate 41,0 % more likes than status updates (1,009 - 0,599)

Time of the day
The research shows that post pulished 23:00-23:15 has the highest probability of generating most likes. The graph and table belows shows the values in a 30 minutes intervall.
When creating 15 minutes intervalls (not included in this blog post) we see pretty big variotions. Some examples:

20:30-20:45 0.368
20:45-21:00 0.180
21:00-21:15 0.392

22:30-22:45 0.350
22:45-23:00 0.370
23:00-23:15 0.530
23:15-23:30 0.369
23:30-23:45 0.130

Time of the day

0:00 - 0:30	-0.344
0:30 - 1:00	0.103
1:00 - 1:30	-0.188
1:30 - 2:00	-0.882
2:00 - 2:30	-1.048
2:30 - 3:00	-0.990
3:00 - 3:30	-1.322
3:30 - 4:00	-0.252
4:00 - 4:30	-0.373
4:40 - 5:00	-0.030
5:00 - 5:30	0.233
5:30 - 6:00	-0.005
6:00 - 6:30	0.110
6:30 - 7:00	0.143
7:00 - 7:30	0.056
7:30 - 8:00	0.040
8:00 - 8:30	0.023
8:30 - 9:00	0.000
9:00 - 9:30	0.069
9:30 - 10:00	0.088
10:00 - 10:30	0.093
10:30 - 11:00	0.047
11:00 - 11:30	0.065
11:30 - 12:00	0.091
12:00 - 12:30	0.079
12:30 - 13:00	0.091
13:00 - 13:30	0.096
13:30 - 14:00	0.080
14:00 - 14:30	0.184
14:30 - 15:00	0.197
15:00 - 15:30	0.238
15:30 - 16:00	0.244
16:00 - 16:30	0.245
16:30 - 17:00	0.296
17:00 - 17:30	0.368
17:30 - 18:00	0.339
18:00 - 18:30	0.268
18:30 - 19:00	0.330
19:00 - 19:30	0.258
19:30 - 20:00	0.346
20:00 - 20:30	0.279
20:30 - 21:00	0.235
21:00 - 21:30	0.309
21:30 - 22:00	0.293
22:00 - 22:30	0.248
22:30 - 23:00	0.319
23:00 - 23:30	0.431
23:30 - 0:00	0.101

Webinar with Facebook's Head of SMB marketing

Did you miss Felicity McCarthy’s webinar yesterday? Here’s a short summary:

Facebook allows you to connect to people who matter to you, whether they are family or colleagues. People also care about companies and organizations. And vice versa – companies care about people.

In UK 33 million users are active on Facebook – about 66% of them daily. 27 million use the mobile app or interface. Here’s a couple of cool observations:

- The reach on Facebook is twice the reach on TV-commercials. Daily.

- In UK, Facebook gives twice the ROI of newspaper- and magazine ads.

In UK, 61% of all Facebook users are connected to at least one business Page. Think about what this number is using Facebook 1,1 billion users instead of UK’s 33 million.

People want to connect and support their local businesses. As a business, it is important that you add value to this support.

Facebook allows you grow your reach at every step of the sales-cycle. Every impression gives you the possibility to be top-of-mind when someone wonders where to have lunch, or buy his or her next TV.

Key factors:

- Find your target, and add value for them

- Be on Facebook. Or, not only be there, but share your passion on Facebook.

- How are you going to change the world?

- Share stories about your customers and showcase your products also allowing feedback.

Finish your Page:

- Fill in all About-info (location, opening hours etc)

- Use a profile picture that represents your company

- Use a Cover photo that represents your companies values

- Claim your Facebook username

Top tips:

- Be short and sweet

- Use eye catching images and videos

- Be quick and relevant. If It happens today – post it today.

- Plan your posts, and be consistent. Once a week, twice a week, every day, whatever suits you. But be consistent.

- Don’t wait till over the weekend. Post via mobile if you have to.

Find your customers:

How to get more customers? Fans who care?
Facebook allows growing companies with limited budgets to reach more people.

- Use targeting functions

- Create creative ads worth strong call-to-action and “exclusivity”

- Vary your ads (at least 4 of each)

- Monitor and change

Maintain relations:

Your fans Likes, Shares and interactions drives your Word of Mouth, by creating a story on their own Facebook timeline. Be engaging, ask for feedback. Their honest opinions will boost your reach.

- Promote your posts to reach more

- Use Facebook offers

- Sponsored stories

- High-quality content

- Lead-capture by apps

- Measure. Measure. Measure.