Page me up before you go, go! Tips before creating Facebook business pages

by Ioana and Raluca

Setting up a presence on Facebook can sometimes be challenging, so we thought of taking a very angry bull by its horns and of putting together a check list that will help you choose between Product Specific Pages and Global Pages.

Go product! Why, oh, why?

Plenty of reasons here:

• a clearly targeted type of communication. You’ve got something unique to communicate so you just go ahead and do it. Let’s not forget that we’re living in an age where talking about something will inevitably create a web of secondary or related topics that you would not have much to say about in the long run, but which do matter. So that’s where you must work  some magic and decide if your product’s life and evolution is rich enough to grab attention over a longer period of time, specific enough not to count as just another spin off and likely to be sought on the very platform that you’re using.
• to satisfy the needs of a niche audience. That’s where you really need to understand who you’re talking to, how much specialized knowledge that audience holds and, to be honest, how much  chit-chat (cats, dogs, coffee beauty shots and the regular Friday “fun” piece) they are likely to accept. The characteristics of this target audience very much depend on the way you acquire it and on the likelihood that your platform of choice is perceived as a reliable source of info about a specific product or product range. However, when you say “niche” you should mean it. So, good-bye expectations of reaching humungous heterogeneous audiences and welcome more realistic, specialty-specific targets!
• to help filter support requests coming in via social media. In this way, the plaintiff will, most likely post his/her complaint on the page related to the faulty product/service. Nevertheless, this is not a fail-proof tactic as it does not take a huge effort to post the same complaint on several pages, corporate one included! And your sea of grievance spills on and on…
• to create a real sense of community and connectedness. Inside jokes, for one, are easier to crack on product-specific pages, as almost everyone will know what the cryptic reference is all about.  Then again, if you like crowds, that’s not the way to go as you’ll be feeding resources into a channel whose audience is limited from the very start.

Go global! Why not hold on to your umbrella?

Got two words for you: benefits galore! Here they are:

• to gain prominence in Facebook searches. If you’re a known brand it’s easier for fans or customers to search for your page and connect with you. They know you, already,  so they know what types of content they can interact with on your page. Plus, if you have several products you want to talk about, your fans are likely not to be put off as sooner or later their own product of choice will get into the spotlight.
•  to build a consistent brand identity on Facebook. If your brand is at the beginning of its Facebook social media marketing journey, this is your best option for an unified user experience. You will therefore have a community built to back up your brand, and your products will all benefit from that.
• to efficiently manage your content creation efforts. You can create your social editorial calendar to include communication around each, any or all of your products, depending on the overall marketing campaigns you have planned.
• to manage your pages more easily, for less. The math here is simple. With an umbrella page (i.e. brand-specific rather than product specific) you’ve got one Facebook insights dashboard, one community manager, a single  property to build a community around and to share your content with. If you decide to have a contest, you will have a centralized point of entry to collect all participants’ contributions and feedback.
• to make the best of the Facebook Global pages. Say you’ve already created several local-language pages. Not to worry! Facebook now makes it easier for you to merge them into one single global page. Your audience will be able to select from a drop-down list the country they want to see content from so that they are not overwhelmed by global posts that could be less interesting to them.

Whatever model you choose, make sure you first have some objectives set up and an editorial calendar filled with content to accommodate your target audience’s needs and expectations.

Good luck!

Image courtesy of  imagerymajestic/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

How to look good not naked, but aggravated. On crisis management made cool.

 By Ioana and Raluca

What to do when they shout at you? Shout back or just crawl into a dark corner and wait for the storm to simply go away? Or, perhaps, ignore them into silence. Dealing with critics when they don’t really have a point, but they are desperately trying to make one is a delicate matter. Whatever you do, it might come back and bite you in the rear end, especially in cases where an individual, THE customer, stands up to an organization, THE company. The David in this story may very well hurt Goliath unless said Mr. G puts some clever icing on the cake it is about to respectfully throw into the little guy’s face.  

Do we hear a daring “Pictures or it never happened?”. Pictures and articles you’ve got! We’re discussing today about social media crisis management with some examples that we’ve recently stumbled upon.

I: Kim’s hubby, Kanye made a tweet booboo. Everyone’s been raving about his attack on Zappos, consisting of a reference to a matter which, when hitting the fan, means big, big trouble. The company responded in a very clever manner, namely taking Kanye’s words literally. Yes, we do sell what you said, and there’s a nice irony-laden product page to prove it. To me, that’s a magnificently bold way of halting the shameful matter’s course towards the fan. When you’re right, dare to fight back the clever way, that’s their lesson to me.

R: When companies choose to have a presence in the social sphere they also have to be prepared for possible challenges from any Twitter/Facebook user. Let’s not forget about the guy who used promoted tweets to complain about British Airways. Things could easily go wrong when a celebrity like Kanye is involved  – what with 10,103,083 followers-, but Zappos turned what looked like a major crisis into an opportunity for conversation and for creating  buzz around a clever message.

How can brands cope with a social media crisis? There are a few steps to follow and many of them can also be used in the case of Real time marketing.

1. Plan ahead – draw up a crisis management plan and set the task force in charge of managing it ; make sure you develop the right procedures, policies and strategies for your crisis communication.
2. Listen- monitor your social channels for mentions and conversations. Make sure you’re using the right tools for the job. Get a real-time, accurate picture of the dynamic of the crisis.
3. Act – based on your monitoring results, establish the best strategy and actions to take. Choose the right channel to respond, but don’t hesitate to use a mix of platforms. Most of the times, images and Video will do the trick.
4. Stay on top – turn the crisis into your competitive advantage. Your company is already in the lime light, why not use this opportunity to send your message across? Just make sure this message isn’t only clever and creative, but also in tune with fans’ expectations.
5. Follow-up – Put together a list of best practices based on the crisis experience. There’s always a good lesson to learn!

We hope you enjoyed our tips and examples and we invite you to share with us your tips and experiences with social media crisis management 🙂

 To paraphrase Gloria’s joyful tune “Turn the tweet around/ Want to hear percussion (as in drum rolls, ya’ll!)/Turn that post upside down/Love to hear discussion…

 

Image courtesy of  Michal Marcol/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Ouch-ing one’s way back into social. The JP Morgan case.

by Ioana and Raluca

How ‘bout that! $omeone tried to pull a “TwitterTakeover” stunt and got hurt. The financial giant’s “ouch!” was heard loud and clear, with plenty of ironic to angry chirps raising up from the virtual branches we’re all perching on, waiting for the next 140 character key to the mysteries of the universe. Didn’t they see it coming?

What in the tweet’s name were they thinking of? That’s exactly what we asked ourselves in our second round of social chit chat. Here’s what we ended up with when trying to find not something that went wrong (everybody knows that!), but something that shoulda/coulda/woulda gone right.

 J: Everybody’s wearing their devilish grin when looking at this story. Honestly, so am I. But for a lawyerish, as in “devil’s advocate” reason. What good could come out of this story? How about some pressure relief? Let’s say they’d postponed this type of activities on Twitter for when things got a little calmer. Well, given the size of the crisis financial institutions are blamed for, that would have been a very long while. Making the move now, they handed a “Kick me” note to Twitter users out there on a silver plate. But they also offered them the chance to vent a bit, thus increasing the chances of the next thing they do on Twitter to be met with less outrage or anger. So, what do you say, R? Ouch much?

R: I see you’re taking the silver lining approach to this. Not sure the pressure venting scenario worked here. “How are you planning to spend the savings made from firing your social media team?” That’s only one of the embarrassing questions they were clearly NOT expecting to find on their TweetChat. Ouch indeed! Was banging their head against a brick wall the objective of their Q&A? Were they seeking to make the best of a bad situation? One thing’s for sure: Twitter didn’t seem the right channel to open up to the public, and that definitely was not the right context for an open conversation. The internet has witnessed many hashtag hijacks and the #askJPM will, unfortunately, end up on this list of shame. As a fellow social media professional I can only imagine the mental strength it takes for their staff to deal with the rancorous tweets pouring in every minute.

To end our second post on a more positive tone and praise the “HOW TOs” that help social media stunts from backfiring, here’s a pretty cool Twitter Brand Conversation that we can all learn from. Natural and fun. Right words in the right context. Well done!

Image courtesy of  bp bplanet/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It’s not that I don’t LIKE you, but I’d rather STAR you

by Ioana and Raluca

The social star news is out. Slowly testing out the new feature, Facebook seems to be on its way to sending good old Mr. Like into retirement. Or not. Raluca and I sat down, not because of the shock, mind you, but to think this change through and see how it might impact the performance of business pages. Are you pondering what we’re pondering? Let’s see:  

J: So, Ralu, let me get this right. Are they really saying that stars will kick likes’ butts?

R: I guess for Facebook pages, if the option is mandatory, it will mean making managers more aware of the fact that they should provide interesting and valuable content for their fans and not rely on fan acquisition and post promotion only. Even though eliminating the iconic like could offer a more sentiment-like endorsement from the fans, the rating system could get brand owners confused. Are fans starring the page or the products? Or are they expressing an opinion about the service they received? How do you feel about the stars?

J: I think you’re right in saying that this is another wakeup call as far as content quality is concerned. What troubles me is that if it did not work out with the likes, I don’t really see the stars doing the trick. Why would they? Just because they’re stars? One more thing: rating systems, to my mind, work if there’s some kind of similarity or common ground of the compared items. Simply put: apples go with apples, pears with pears.  Where do stars fit in with the variety of business domains that pages belong to? Is a two star rating for a niche brand as good as a four star rating for a widely used consumer good brand? Who’s doing the math there, do you think?

R: Totally agree with you, Jo!  Some brand pages could naturally attract more stars than others so the ratings wouldn’t actually reflect the precise amount of love that the fans really express. Anyway, we’ll keep commenting on any updates on this story from Facebook. Plenty of social chit-chat material there!

Meanwhile, if you feel like rating something we invite you to share or like our first post here. That is, of course, if you find it reeeeeeeeealy interesting.  🙂

Image courtesy of Pixomar/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net