Consumers and marketers have vastly different perceptions of and expectations about Facebook likes, which presents a problem for marketers who are slow to move, but an opportunity for those who pounce on it.
That’s based on a survey of more than 1,300 consumers and 132 senior marketers, conducted by Lithium and the Chief Marketing Officer Council.
The top three reasons why marketers believe consumers like their Facebook pages were:
We’re all learning about how best to use timelineright now, so it’s probably a good thing that brand pages haven’t migrated to this new layout yet.
While we do know that Facebook is working on upgrading brand pages, no dates have been given for anything new and it’s unknown what the changes will be. Most likely individual users’ experiences with timeline will dictate whether the social network will extend the format to pages.
Meanwhile, timeline profiles have other implications for brands on Facebook.
Facebook is a particularly appropriate medium for companies and causes to use when joining forces to engage consumers because “it’s a prime mobilization platform” explains Marc Blinder, creative director for Context Optional, a social media marketing company. “People want their friends to see them doing something good — those types of activities are very palatable in this medium.”
A new white paper from the Cause Marketing Forum traces the history of cause marketing on Facebook back to 2007 and explains the current lay of the land through these 4 popular campaign types:
The latest look at what types of content on Facebook draw the most likes turned up results that were completely inconclusive.
Audience research and targeting company Crowd Science conducted a study to determine what types of content Facebook users like, and why, and three types of content finished in a dead heat at 16 percent apiece: wall posts, pictures, and comments.
Facebook took a year to develop the advanced profile currently called timeline, but I see it as part of a much longer evolution — dating back to Vannevar Bush’s Memex vision from the 1950s.
The Memex was a hypothetical machine that would record everything; now Facebook stands to be the first realized version of the Memex, recording everything (well almost) and allowing us near-instant recall of the minutest details of our lives—or at least the ones we posted on Facebook.
Online behavior tracking has been successfully employed for nearly a decade, but its tools do not uniquely identify users, and rightfully so. Tracking was only designed to group users into audience segments; for example, golden retriever owners who live in San Francisco, CA, or baseball and wine enthusiast females in their 30s who live in Seattle, WA.
Of course, certain laws restrict combining offline data sources with online user behavior tracking. Therefore, how do brands get to know users individually, rather than as one of many in an audience segment?
Require a social network login to access your website. You request permission to access visitors’ social profiles and, when approved, you’ll have an opportunity to build a wealth of knowledge on the individual user. Learn about their hobbies and interests, friends, likes, age, marital status, places visited and alma mater. And the best part is that your users have consciously opted to share this information with you.
Marketers say they worry the most about how to achieve a return on investment in Facebook, along with how to create two-way dialogues.
Those two worries surfaced in a survey of social media professionals conducted by Shoutlet, which summed up the findings in an infographic (the second one we’ve seen today with a Halloween theme).
Facebook used to require pages and individual users to have at least 25 friends in order to claim a customized address extension. That meant any newbie had to accept an ugly URL usually including a long number.
Years ago, if a marketer wanted to run a contest, he’d have to run print ads and hope that people would take the time to fill out an entry form and then mail it in. The Internet made things easier, but you still assumed that consumers would somehow find their way to your website.
Facebook adds another layer of ease to the process: Consumers are already there doing something else. If the promotion looks interesting enough, filling out an online form isn’t that big a deal. Rodney Mason, the chief marketing officer of promotions agency Moosylvania, says Facebook-only promotions have a lot of advantages. “One would be the ease of use,” he says. “You can also connect with people who’ve already opted in for past promotions, and everybody’s on there all the time.”
The deadliest sin of Facebook marketing is being boring. To gain fans’ attention and keep it, marketers need to create novel campaigns, or put a unique spin on familiar techniques. Otherwise, brands’ efforts are largely ignored or used by fans to score free stuff.
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