The New Media Breakfast series proved to be another success in July with this month’s topic focussing on Facebook for business. Held in Glasgow on the 2nd of July and in Edinburgh on the 15th of July, both events had great turnouts yet again.
Organised by fatBuzz and Winning Entrepreneurs, the morning sessions included a talk from Gordon White on Facebook settings & pages and a cameo appearance of Attacat’s Joel Lumsden talking about Facebook Advertising. However, Gordon seems to have an issue with Joel – having called him Ben throughout both events!
Here are our collective notes to summarise what was discussed:
Facebook Settings & Pages by Gordon
Privacy Settings for Personal Profile
People worry about privacy but don’t bother changing their settings. Facebook’s recommended settings include making a lot of information public. However it is actually possible to really customise settings to yuor requirements. When you post status updates, you can even hide them from being seen by specific people, as well as being able to choose specific individuals who can see your updates. Gordon advised to make use of the maxim: “Don’t put anything up you wouldn’t want to appear in the papers the next morning”.
Did you know that you can specify which friends appear on your profile page? This is also possible to customise in settings.
Something to be aware of is photo sharing, pictures can be seen by anyone unless you alter your settings – it is advisable that you do make them visible to your friends or chosen friends only.
Personal Profile vs. Fan Page
IMPORTANT: It is against Facebook’s terms of service to use personal profiles for a business profile. It’s very easy for your competitors to report you and as such your account could disappear over night. Use Facebook pages instead.
It’s all free, of course. With personal profiles, you can only have upto 5,000 friends too whereas a fan page will allow you to gain much more! Also, profile pages are not fully indexed by the search engines whereas pages are more likely to be found by the likes of Google.
If you have more than 25 ‘likes’, you can ask for your own username which then gives you a nice web address for your page e.g. www.facebook.com/attacats (It works on a first come first served basis so consider it as part of a branding name grab). To set this go to www.facebook.com/username
Benefits of using a Fan Page:
- Can customise pages to add in a lot of additional info about your brand
- One tip is to specify and customise a landing page optimised to encourage “Likes” such as the fantastic fatBuzz page.
- Can embed your YouTube channel to automatically feed your videos into Facebook, and also similarly with podcasts.
- uploading videos to YouTube first then embedding your channel is a lot easier than uploading a video directly to Facebook
- can track number of views through a YouTube channal
- once you upload a video to YouTube, it automatically updates on Facebook.
- Advanced users: Use static FBML (facebook’s mark up language that is similar to html code) for more extreme customisation & create a YouTube tab. Just search in Facebook for FBML & you’ll find more details there.
- Dlvr.it application – nice application for syndicating content from say your blog to your Facebook page (or LinkedIn profile etc)
- For B2B examples see Cisco and Dell
Groups
Use groups for causes, interests or charity organisations rather than for a business. A good tip is to look for any groups already set up around your brand, as there are a lot of ‘hate’ groups on Facebook which can obviously damage brands. Check out the I hate BT group for an example. It is easy to report these groups if you do come across any problems.
Facebook Advertising by Joel
Like them or Loath them, Facebook Ads are working. It’s a market that isn’t saturated and currently it’s cheap!
How does it differ from PPC Search Marketing?
Similarities:
- Familiar ad layouts (but with a the social element of “Likes”)
- Charged on a cost per click basis (but also CPM possible but no Cost per Action model yet)
Differences
- Pictures in adverts – scope for greater creativity
- Strong demographic and location data that is generally very accurate as it is information users input themselves (rather than survey research or similar)
- Did you know that their are 80 single wanabee Ninjas in Edinburgh!?
- Can even target employees of specific companies
- Branding benefits
Can use FB ads for:
- Increasing “Likes” of a page
- Advertise an event
- Advertise apps
- Or direct response/lead generation
Can get CPM rates of £0.10 on Facebook. Compare that to the equivalent rates for advertising on the Guardian (that offers less targeting) prices at £30-40!
Getting the Most out of your Adverts
- Use a strong call to action
- Be creative – think laterally
- Keep them fresh – creative will burn out quickly
- Experiment with bidding
- Segment your account by demographics and have demographically tailored landing pages (rather than keyword)
