Engaging Customers on your Facebook Page
So, you have gone ahead and created a Facebook page. It looks very pretty and has lot of bells and whistles. You have an active website from where you have managed to seduce hundreds or even thousands of visitors to "Like" you on Facebook. But how many are actually "Talking About You"?
Is your audience engaged enough to want to return to your Facebook Page? The measure of success of your Facebook page is truly the level of engagement you have managed on the page.
When comparing any two brands such as Coke versus Pepsi or Ford versus Honda or L'Oreal versus Revlon etc. you have to check not only for who has the largest and fastest growing audience but who has the largest number of fans coming back for more.
What are various ways some of these brands and Pages achieving heightened engagement?
OLAY has a significantly higher level of engagement. They have an "Olay - Freebie Friday" that is very popular. The Freebie runs out regularly keeping the demand high. They have a link for "The Grammy Sweeps", a live chat with a skin expert and significant YouTube video content viewable from the Facebook Page. They have lots of compelling content that brings customers back to their fan pages.
Ford and Honda also do a good job of keeping their customers engaged on their Facebook Pages. Both have content about the various models, let you find dealers in your area, posts from friends about their products, huge collection of photos.
In general it is a good idea to
- Run special deals
- Host competitions
- Include more images, status updates and fewer links in newsfeeds
- Allow fans to post on your wall,
- Post short messages multiple times a day
- Make info about your products more engaging and conversational
- Leverage your existing content that was used in earlier traditional channel
- Provide premium content to people who "Like" you
- Keep refreshing your content on a regular basis.
For marketers it is important to remember that when it comes to Facebook or similar channels number of likes is important but activity/engagement more so. A measure of activity could be the quality of feedback per post or number of comments posted. To track engagement levels, you may want compute the average high engagement activities such as comments on posts. Providing your consumers with an incentive encourages them to continue viewing your page.
I would like to know what your organization has done on its Pages to increase activity and promote returning customers.