three must haves for facebook success

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we help companies unlock the passion of their customers. The Lithium Social Customer Suite allows brands to build vibrant customer communities that:

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Lithium social software helps the world’s most iconic brands

to build brand nations—vibrant online communities of

passionate social customers. Lithium helps top brands such

as AT&T, Sephora, Univision, and PayPal build active online

communities that turn customer passion into social media

marketing ROI. For more information on how to create lasting

competitive advantage with the social customer experience,

visit lithium.com, or connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and

our own brand nation – the Lithosphere.

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So you’ve got pages, fans, and likes. Now what? Your brand, like many, likely struggles with deriving value

from your Facebook investments. What’s a fan worth? A like?

What do you really even know about your Facebook fans? And

how can you create something of lasting value from such an

enormous, yet so fleeting a channel?

Everything about Facebook is so enticing, yet just beyond

our grasp. It’s free. It’s huge. We find many thousands of our

customers there. They “like” us. They tell us what they want,

need, and wish for on our Facebook page walls. It seems the

perfect social media engagement platform.

Yet with each status update, each positive comment, every

customer inquiry, and all the ingenious product ideas we

see disappearing from the Facebook wall every hour, we find

ourselves wondering what we’re doing there at all. What good

is Facebook as a platform for social customer engagement

unless we can engage our social customers in ways that

make real sense for our customers and drives real business

outcomes for the brand?

The first thing to remember is that as an online social

network the Facebook platform wasn’t built for social

customer engagement. It lacks many of the essentials

needed to pursue a successful social strategy—data capture,

for one. But the good news is you can turn Facebook into a

vibrant social customer online community with the addition of

just a few key must-haves.

Peer-to-Peer Engagement Peer-to-peer engagement is one of the most important types

of social customer engagement because messages carried

from peer-to-peer have more influence. Eileen Brown of

the Social Customer explains the reason why peer-to-peer

engagement works so well quite simply: “We tend to identify

more strongly with people like us. We love those who are like

ourselves. We identify with them.”1

An excellent way to start getting value from your Facebook

pages right away is to give them a customer experience that

includes interaction with each other. Enabling your own fans to

spread your messages and answer each other’s questions adds

enormous trust and credibility to your Facebook presence.

“Start by creating an environment that encourages peer-to-

peer interactions”, says Altimeter Group Partner and Principal

Analyst, Jeremiah Owyang, “Ask fans to respond to each other,

showcase fan contributions, and recognize top contributors.”2

Harnessing the crowd’s energy and fulfilling customer need is

what social customer marketing is all about. Harnessing the

crowd’s energy to fulfill customer need is what peer-to-peer

engagement is all about. Peer-to-peer engagement—enabling

your Facebook fans to help each other—with question and

answer applications, community moderation, and rank and

reputation features makes immediate sense and can even

scale to a full-blown social support solution. It gives customers

value when they get there—they can search for and find useful

information. And it drives real business value for the brand—

less support calls means less support costs.

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Influencer Tracking

Not only must your Facebook fans engage with each other, they

must recognize and trust each other in order for customer

community dynamics to spark. The 90-9-1 Principle holds

that content creators are just 1% of your audience, so it’s

important for the rest to know who they are and what they

bring to the table.

But first, we as marketers need to know who these key

influencers are so we can amplify their voices. Who are they?

What social attributes do they have that help us identify, track,

and motivate their activities?

Dr. Michael Wu, Lithium Principal Scientist, spells out 6

key factors of social media influence: credibility, bandwidth,

relevance, timing, alignment, and confidence. Those of your

fans that are credible, have large social networks (bandwidth),

and very importantly send the right messages at the right

time in the right channel to the right people are those

you want to cultivate. If any one of these factors is absent,

influence doesn’t happen. A true social media influencer

doesn’t just have thousands of Facebook friends. They have

an area of expertise relevant to your offering that gives them

credibility and they have social media savvy—they know which

messages will resonate within their social network.

Finding these key influencers, motivating them, helping

them along is critical to Facebook success. Rewarding your

fans publicly for their contributions—elevating their status,

featuring their content, giving them additional privileges—is

a sure fire way to discover who among your fans are your key

influencers—your brand superfans.

influence tracker model #90.9.1

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Deep Analytics

We all realize that quantifying the value of Facebook

engagement means customer intelligence—data, and lots

of it. In order to determine whether your investments in

Facebook are worthwhile, some measure of quantitative

analytics is essential.

In the absence of real Facebook data, we are forced to fall

back on proxies to assign value—counting likes and fans. But

as Forrester Sr. Analyst, Augie Ray, points out in the ROI of

Social Media Marketing, using proxies to weigh the value of

social media efforts has a number of nagging drawbacks.

Just counting likes and fans not only fails to measure the true

business value of the channel, but measures it incorrectly and

gets in the way of achieving our objectives.

What should you know about your Facebook fans? Everything.

Not only how many fans you have, but how many actually

return, what percentage are active, how deep are their

conversation threads, how many unique fans engage in each

conversation, how quickly they respond to your messages

and each other’s, and how many actually return—as well as

whether or not they return to the same conversation threads.

Only when you have deep insight into how engaged your

Facebook fans are will you have the ability to assign

quantitative value to your social success on Facebook.

Conclusion

A sound social strategy for your Facebook pages means

moving beyond counting fans and likes. It means leveling

up, outfitting your Facebook presence with a more oomph,

and showing up on Facebook like you mean it. Enabling

peer-to-peer engagement will bring immediate value to

your Facebook fans by letting them interact with and help

each other. Right away, they’ll discover a new and vibrant

community feel to your Facebook pages. Finding and

cultivating your influencers will get you more power out of

the channel by amplifying the most credible social voices

you can harness. Lastly, instituting a system of quantitative

measurement with deep analytics will give you a true

measurement of the business value of the Facebook channel

so you can make informed decisions about what really works.

resources1 http://thesocialcustomer.com/eileenb/38681/online-peer-influence-and-its-effect-engagement

2 http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2010/07/27/altimeter-report-the-8-success-criteria-for-facebook-page-marketing/