E com2012 Geneve-facebook_timeline Virtua from Haider Alleg
When preparing eCom 2012 in Geneva this year, we asked our clients what do you want to hear? The winner was Facebook. Indeed a lot of brands invested in the booming social network, and a lot got surprised by the number of changes they needed to adapt.
In this keynote, using concrete cases, we will explore the attitude, strategy and governance to adopt to make sure you get the most out of social networks like Facebook.
Nothing is free
That’s no surprise. You have to pay to get visible. You have to nurture your organic presence with good content of the course, but you’ll have to advertise on the platforms to get your content served to the feed. You can also use partners and influencers to point back to your page and account; combining them is the winning recipe.
On the page
We talk about content, but we aim for rich media like videos. Indeed, we see increasing consumption of videos online, and Facebook is not absent of this. Moreover, we have trends telling us that the algorithms running the feed and articles pushed to audiences will serve more content with a higher chance of engagement. No wonder why you see those videos now in your feed, right?
Pictures, contests, interviews, games. All of it is highly intense content that will generate likes and comments. Be aware also of the limits and rules of the platforms. You can’t monetise links, and you can’t run contests freely.
If you build apps, of course, you’ll have to comply with the API and framework given by the network.
Advertising
Same for advertising, rules exist. You have to be comfortable testing during a defined period what’s the best combo of ads, audiences and keywords to make sure you can optimise your creatives and your results.
Advertising is a link to your conversion points and funnel. Do you have one? Are you trying to achieve visibility, volume or conversions? Easy when it is an eCommerce website, but what if you are selling drugs and you are regulated?
Metrics?
The last point well neglected is metrics and KPIs. We urge you to think about the data that will make you smile or scream at your agency. If these are sales again, they are relatively easy to understand. But again, direct sales from Facebook aren’t easy if you don’t pipe all the data.
Hopefully, this gives you an intro to the realm of possibilities with social media. Please don’t believe in gurus; I am certainly not one of them, and be pragmatic. However, people like me have an edge on this topic because we test it with our team’s first hands at scale.
If you get s surgery, perhaps trust the clinic running 50 operations a day rather than the fancy one running daily in a beautiful city centre. You might be surprised by who is the best from a performance perspective. Data will not lie to you.
Peace, and see you at eCom.
