A couple of years ago I wrote a post about how consumers and brands are friends on Facebook. The new Facebook changes reinforce this frame. It’s now more important then ever for brands to cultivate meaningful relationships with consumers. The new Facebook user Profile, Timeline, provides brands with an amazing opportunity to incorporate themselves into the fabric of consumers’ digital lives.
While the landscape is changing, the fundamentals haven’t. The simple truth is that a successful friendship takes work; it takes investment from both parties, and just as in real life, friendships on Facebook are cultivated through experiences over time. For brand marketers, this equates to: (I) listening to and understanding consumers’ wants and needs; (II) creating experiences that consumers actually want to engage with; and (III) making sure to communicate consumer-centric value to consumers on a regular basis. The change that is about to come about is tactical in nature. Let’s delve deeper into those three points, and provide updated approaches for each through the lens of social business and the engagement toolkit (Page, News Feed, Ticker, and Timeline) available to brand marketers on Facebook.
I. What does it mean for brand marketers to listen to and understand consumers within Facebook?
The fundamentals are the same here, except the sophistication, the amount of data to analyze, the tools and methods of listening are changing at rapid pace. Moving forward it’s going to become even more important to listen to and understand what’s on consumers’ minds in order to create a narrative that fosters meaningful two-way dialogue, ensuring that consumers feel valued. The science of synthesizing data into insights and the art of turning marketing into storytelling are now critical to success.
II. What types of experiences do consumers want to engage with on Facebook and how should such experiences be executed?
With the new Timeline, things are coming back to where they started back in 2007, but with a much richer, more meaningful experience for consumers, bringing about an opportunity and challenge to brands to create new types of experiences that weave themselves into consumers’ lives. Generally, experiences on Facebook can be broken down into three types:
Always-On Page experiences (old with opportunities for new features and extensions)
- These are the landing tabs on pages that introduce the consumer to the brand and what’s happening with the brand at any given time. They present a low barrier to entry to the consumer, usually feature a variety of lightweight interactive modules, and are normally powered by and managed via a SaaS platform such as the Buddy Media Platform. These types of experiences are now able to publish consumer actions into the Ticker, which drives further distribution and brand impressions.
Campaign based Page/Canvas experiences (old with opportunities for new features and extensions)
- Campaign centric programs are fully custom experiences developed for the purpose of engaging consumers with the brand in a rich manner. The key for campaign-based programs to be successful is the value that they add to consumers. Following Social Program Design principles will set a brand up for success. Such experiences can now, in addition to the distribution of the News Feed, tap into the Ticker and Timeline when appropriate. Brands are going to want to get everything they do into the Timeline, but a word of caution here – brands should only tap into the Timeline when the experience truly intertwines with the narrative of consumers’ lives. This cannot be stressed enough, as those brands who decide to push the envelop with experiences that do not fit naturally within the Timeline will feel reverberations from the community, and in turn, their Brand Love and Brand Advocacy can be negatively impacted.
Evergreen Timeline experiences (new)
- Timeline experiences are a new type of social experience that enables a brand to weave themselves into the fabric of consumers’ digital representation of their lives. These experiences require careful crafting from the narrative to the technical design. As mentioned above, every brand is going to want its share of the Timeline, but not every brand is meant to be in the Timeline. Those that will succeed will focus on the narrative of the consumer rather then on themselves. The fundamentals for the development of a great Timeline experience are the same as for the development of campaign based experiences – consumers need to have a want and/or need to engage with the experience and now an additional want and/or need to showcase their actions from within that experience in the digital autobiography of their lives. This raises the bar for brands. Now, the brand should view itself as an enabler of social actions that integrate into the everyday experiences of consumers. For example, if a consumer posts a birthday wish to a friend, that’s a prime opportunity for Hallmark or Kodak to create an app that powers this action via a richer experience. Imagine getting a personalized card from a friend rather than the plain old happy birthday post. Such is the type of experience that will be cherished by consumers and showcased forever in their Timeline.
Each of the abovementioned types of experiences will continue to have their place within the brand marketing toolkit moving forward. Like a great meal is more than just a steak (or block of tofu, for the vegetarians out there), success for brand marketers is developing and deploying the optimal mix of experiences at the right times.
III. What is a consumer-centric communication strategy and how often should it be executed on Facebook?
A strategy that focuses on only communicating items that are relevant and actionable. Brand marketers should not communicate with consumers just for the sake of communicating — communication needs to be genuine and planned out in timely intervals to touch on general brand marketing efforts.
I’ve been here before. Back in 2007 when Facebook first launched Platform. Then, there were only 20 million people on Facebook. Now there are over 800 million engaged consumers on Facebook. There are a few things that mattered then that still matter now. Back then, there were very few brands on Facebook, but companies such as Zynga and others that moved fast secured first-leader-advantages that served to be invaluable to their current business success. Now, it’s brands that have the opportunity to move fast and secure a place in the hearts and everyday lives of consumers through their Timeline. The brands that move smart and fast will be the brands that win.
In the end, it still comes back to doing as one would in real-life friendships — listening and understanding each other, engaging in fun experiences together, and making sure to keep communication relevant for both parties. Friendships are two-way streets. A brand is more likely to get what it wants by creating an environment wherein consumers are valued and receive value. By cultivating friendships, brand marketers can turn consumers into brand evangelists in any social channel.