Top 10 social networking tips for enterprise – part one

You may be forgiven for thinking that social networking is all about orchestrating riots and stalking celebrities. However, the truth is that social media is a business tool that no enterprise can afford to ignore. But how can you implement a social networking strategy that actually works? IT Pro has been asking those in the know…

If your customers are spread around the globe, this affects not only what language you communicate with them in, but also what time, and the content and tone.

1. Be human

Kate Craig-Wood, managing director of Memset, has found that having a ‘face’ on your business account is really important, abiding by the old sales adage of people buy from people.

“It might sound a little odd coming from a technologist who is a firm believer in the future of the cloud IaaS market as an automated, interoperable commodity market place much like the electrical power grid is today” she explains “but we are not there yet and even then there will always be people and values behind companies”.

Craig-Wood also advises against the PR department approach to social media business. “Too often you see blog posts and Twitter accounts that are clearly generated by a PR department, or done generically from a company,” she warns. “I think they are missing that important objective of presenting a personable face”.

2. Globalise it and scale it

Any investment of resources into social media has to have longevity. To set up a Facebook or Twitter account without a long term plan would be folly.

To turn this from theory to reality, enterprises need to ensure social media presence is managed in a unified way by creating and maintaining one that is scalable, whether your company needs a global presence now or in the future.

Luca Benini, European managing director at Buddy Media, explains the business reasoning and advises to look at location first. “If your customers are spread around the globe, this affects not only what language you communicate with them in, but also what time, and the content and tone,” he says.

Then there’s the small matter of analytics as your presence on social media grows. “It has to be tied to all enterprise social media channels on a global scale including applications” Benini warns, adding “so you can use historical benchmarks and adjust your activity accordingly. You have to work with key stakeholders within the business to determine appropriate KPIs, for large enterprises.”

This also means making sure the KPIs apply to the performance of social media in every country and to every audience. What’s more, businesses have to make sure the internal processes to manage this are also scalable.

3. Let community conservations drive your SEO

Adam Mertz, senior product marketing manager at Jive Software reckons that it’s far better to create your own social community than simply rely on the likes of Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to do it for you.

“It’s more effective as you have 100 per cent control over the look, experience, SEO benefit, and most importantly the data behind the interactions” Mertz insists, adding “the best way to approach your community strategy is to tightly integrate it with both your Facebook and wider social web strategy.”

Indeed, any decent community provider should be able to expose your community conversations within Facebook as an app living alongside your Wall. “This exposes people on your fan page to your community, and in addition, when people post on the community app there’s a double bonus” Mertz explains.

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GUEST COMMENT Five Tips for Retail Success with Facebook Advertising

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Ed Stevenson, managing director EMEA APAC at online advertising management platform Marin Software, looks at how search is moving beyond Google and into other areas such as Facebook

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by Ed Stevenson

Online retailers have long been a driving force behind the growth of search marketing. As early adopters of search best practices, many now see it as an essential marketing channel. However, they undoubtedly need to continue to stay ahead of the curve to generate a return in one of the most competitive verticals in online advertising.

Having established campaigns using the traditional search engine to website user journey, retailers now need to consider adapting to cater for the ever-increasing number of users reaching websites from elsewhere. With growth in online retail slowing to 7.5% per year, the slowest performance since online sales started being recorded, it’s clear that the sector is maturing.[1] This just heightens the need for online retailers to innovate further through new channels and platforms to maintain online market share, let alone grow it. To remain competitive, it is unwise to rely solely on the website, but instead look towards investments in other outlets, especially social networking sites. And as Facebook in particular takes 55% of all social network visits, it’s definitely the force to be reckoned with.

When you consider that Facebook is the second most visited website in the UK after Google and accounts for 7.27% of all visits from UK internet users, it makes sense that brands are rushing to build a social presence on the networking site. In terms of internet pages viewed, Facebook is comfortably the UK’s biggest with 16% of all page views going to the social network – that’s twice as many as Google. Clearly the phenomenon cannot be ignored, and yet marketers are still in the early stages when it comes to advertising on Facebook. In fact, in spite of Facebook’s sizeable and growing ad revenues, many advertisers in the retail industry are still limiting their efforts to testing on Facebook to evaluate performance. So what can retailers do to take advantage of Facebook display ads? Here are a couple of best practices to drive optimum results from your campaigns.

Understand your audience
The segmentation that Facebook offers (being able to target via demographic, location, likes, and so on) is a real selling point for retail, and should be exploited. Using Facebook to integrate the online and offline shopping experience is a great example of this. Recently, a well-known multichannel retailer executed this superbly. It was looking to engage an online audience to drive purchases both online and in bricks and mortar stores. It created a campaign, which ran promotional ads on Facebook targeted at women who were in their core demographic, but crucially were also located in close proximity to their stores. By providing a special discount coupon via the ad to Facebook users that ‘liked’ the brand, the retailer was able to build out their fan base and drive measurable business to the physical stores using coupons. The technology made it easy for the retailer to target specific cities where the stores were located. More importantly, now they have expanded their Facebook Fan base, they can remarket sales and new merchandise directly to an already-interested audience.

Use keywords to identify likes
Targeting by likes and interests on Facebook allows retailers to serve ads to users who have expressed affinity for particular products, brands, or services. One best practice is to use paid search keywords and themes to identify initial targeting criteria, and this will help to determine relevant interests for targeting. You should be thoughtful about how you use these keywords, focusing on products and brands rather than individual terms, to translate search keywords into terms representing likes and interests. Not every term is going to work, and some iterations of ‘likes’ only reach a few users on Facebook, while others may not even be targeting options. Use Facebook’s advertising tools to estimate the reach of an ad with particular targeting parameters.

Make use of your existing fans
Just as retailers would want to serve an ad to a consumer on their second or third search, they should be taking advantage of users that already ‘like’ their products, page or app. Especially for well-known brands with an established presence on Facebook, a fanbase is likely already a strongly performing audience; they might just need that extra push or reminder from an ad to make a purchase.

Friends of your fans are also a great way to expand your audience to reach people likely to make a purchase. Users’ connections tend to be of similar age, status and location so that puts them in your target audience. Moreover, when targetting Facebook users’ friends, ads will mention their connection, giving it increased credibility and relevancy to the audience.

Enhance your Images
Images are important. The audience being targetted on Facebook is on the social network to interact with friends, share their photos, and play games, not to buy products – so adverts need to grab their attention. Facebook users are inundated with content and typically scan text and images quickly to find what interests them, so one trick you can use to attract their attention is to enlist the help of a creative image. Adding borders to photos in colours like orange or yellow, that contrast with the blue and white Facebook interface, is a simple way to pull the users’ eyes towards ads. Relating images to your audience, for example by serving an image of say a DVD for a Film or Television programme that users have listed in their Likes, is a good way to garner more attention than a generic image.

Keep your ads updated
Believe it or not, just standing out on a page is not enough; retailers need to make sure they are rotating ads to keep them fresh. Facebook ads are typically served to the same users multiple times, often in the same day, so they quickly tune-out repeat ads. Facebook doesn’t have frequency capping, so it is up to the marketing team to monitor the number of impressions each ad receives daily and watch for drops in click-through rates. Successful Facebook advertising requires that creative be rotated to combat the ‘ad blindness’ that can result from a user seeing an ad multiple times. Switching out images and headline copy typically helps boost click-through rates. Facebook itself even suggests that advertisers change images and copy every few days to make sure ads remain fresh to the viewers and encourage clicks.

These are just some of the early best practices on the platform. What is becoming clear is that, much like search, the retail sector is becoming a driver behind the Facebook advertising platform’s growth. However, there is still a lot of room for growth, as revenues only account for 5% of online display advertising revenues, while consumers spend 25% of their online time on Facebook[2]. So those brands that develop effective Facebook Advertising campaigns now will benefit most while acquisition costs are still low.

[1] British Retail Consortium / KPMG Retail Sales Monitor March 2011
[2] Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) full year online advertising statistics 2010

Ed Stevenson is managing director EMEA APAC at leading online advertising management platform Marin Software

For more insight you can download Marin Software’s whitepaper The Search Marketer’s Guide to Successful Facebook Ads

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