Online Education

Sharing is the cornerstone of social media. The exchange of ideas between users, businesses, and communities is what makes it such an effective way of getting word around. That holds true even between channels: from Facebook to Twitter to personal and corporate blogs. Indeed, thinking that Facebook content should be limited to Facebook, and Twitter content to Twitter, is one of the biggest yet most common mistakes in online marketing.

So how do you integrate your Facebook marketing efforts into other social media? Let’s start with the biggest players in the game: Facebook and Twitter. You’ve probably seen Twitter updates cross-posted into Facebook posts, or tweets that link to Facebook albums, pages, or polls. These are the simplest ways to coordinate your work in both platforms. It saves you the trouble of administering two or more accounts, and helps ensure consistency in your content around the Web.

Blogs are another way to push your presence beyond Facebook. If you have a corporate blog for your business, it’s a simple step to work in a Like button or a Like box, as well as a Twitter share button. This makes it easy for readers to share interesting content on Facebook–no need to copy URLS, open a new tab, and log on to Facebook every time. The same goes for one-click Twitter shares. It also works the other way around: if you want to direct people to your blog, set up a Facebook page and post updates for people who are more likely to hang around Facebook than surf the net for the information you have.

Integrating Facebook comments is also a great way to encourage community activity. How many times have you felt like commenting on a blog post, only to decide against it because you’re prompted to create an account? Facebook gets rid of that hurdle by allowing you to use your Facebook account on any blog that has that feature. A lot of users are automatically signed in, so they can start typing as soon as the comment box loads.

Of course, users on different channels might have different preferences. For instance, Facebook usually commands the user’s full attention with all the content on one page, while Twitter is more for people on the go. So it goes without saying that you should package your content accordingly. Consistency is key, but it does pay to keep the user in mind if you want them to engage in conversation rather than just passively read your text.

The role of Facebook in online business can be summed up in two words: community building. It’s really all about exploiting the two-way link that the internet allows between you and your readers. But that’s a lot more easily said than done, especially when you look at the number of businesses that flood users’ news feeds with by-the-minute updates. How many of your “fans” are actually engaged in what goes on in your page? You might be surprised at the numbers.

Building a real community starts with good content. It’s the only reason people will come back to your page: to get useful, entertaining, or relevant information. Whether it’s just a “Photo of the Day” or a quick update on one of your top products, you need to offer something that’s worth people’s time. Often, this means a good deal of planning and research. A single well thought-out article can be worth more in community activity than a dozen spur-of-the-moment updates.

Content isn’t just good writing and interesting images, at least not where Facebook marketing is concerned. Make use of any other feature on offer, from apps to video boxes. These will get your fans to use your page, rather than just visit it and passively receive information. That’s where involvement starts, and where the community begins to take hold.

If you’re not the writing type, RSS feeds can be a good alternative. This basically involves syndicating content from other sources (relevant to your business, of course) and publishing them onto your site. The danger with this is that the feeds might end up crowding your page, so make sure to keep the content coming in under control.

Perhaps the most underrated Facebook feature for marketers is Social Ads. These ads link back to your fan page, rather than Facebook itself, so the traffic is more targeted. Many experts agree that it’s one of the strongest sources for marketers. What’s different about it is that it relies on customer trust rather than sheer traffic, which takes you back to the community-building theme.

Finally, make sure there’s always an exchange going on. You can do this by regularly posting discussion questions, soliciting opinions, and generally engaging your readers in conversation. Once in a while, call out to a user who made some good fan art, or share a photo from someone featuring your product. These little gestures make people feel like part of the group, and help create customer loyalty over time.

Analytics is a key to successful marketing, whether online or offline. Anyone who’s worked with Google’s marketing tools can attest to the importance of keeping tabs on site stats, from number of visits to click-throughs to the portion that ends in a purchase. Facebook was a little late in providing good analytics tools for marketers–even today, Google still has far more advanced metrics–but new features now give businesses a lot more insight into how their marketing efforts work.

Most of the activity happens on the relatively new Insights dashboard. This essentially brings together all the information you need to analyze your marketing results. In particular, it allows you to perform analytics for your websites that use Facebook plugins, Facebook apps, and your own Facebook page.

One of the more useful tools is the availability of event-specific information. For instance, you can view statistics on individual updates, links, or videos you posted, so you can see which ones generate the most traffic and where this traffic comes from. Besides views, you can keep track of how many comments, likes, and shares were made. What you get from this is an idea of what people find interesting, which in turn will tell you where to put most of your efforts. For user privacy reasons, you can only get the numbers–there’s no information that will make users personally identifiable.

If numbers aren’t your thing, don’t worry: under the new dashboard, the data is given in easy-to-understand graphs. This is great for spotting patterns in activity, such as periods where visits and comments tend to be high, or where most of the traffic comes from. It also tells you which of your outlets–a Facebook app, a Facebook page, plugins on your own website–are doing most of the work, allowing you to redistribute your time and budget accordingly.

To get Facebook analytics to work for an external website, you will need to link your domain to a Facebook ID that you use to administer your Facebook page, app, or plugin. This can be done through the “Insights for your Domain” button, which you will find on the dashboard. This generates a meta tag that is then inserted into your website code. Note that you’ll have to do this on the root file for subdomains, if you are using them. Once you’re past the initial hurdle, most of the work will be fairly automatic: all you need to do is check the numbers and put your marketing plan to work.

Facebook’s role in online marketing is undisputed, but it’s just as essential in market research, a less glamorous but equally important field. Recent research has highlighted the usefulness of social networks in learning more about current and potential customers. Indeed, with the volume and amount of activity taking place on Facebook every day, market information practically offers itself to you.

To be sure, Facebook surveys are not the end-all and be-all of marketing. It certainly won’t be replacing traditional methods anytime soon, and its services definitely do not come for free. However, it does offer access to what amounts to the biggest customer pool in existence, including many people who would otherwise not be bothered to do surveys. In other words, you get a much larger sample for practically no additional effort.

There are several ways to integrate Facebook into your market research. The easiest is probably by posting questions on Facebook Pages. If you have a Facebook Page, it’s a simple matter of putting up an open-ended question and letting the comments roll in. Carefully chosen language can elicit more elaborate responses; for example, “What do you think of…” is likely to bring in lengthy opinions. This is good if you’re after an exchange of ideas, but you won’t be able to generalize a handful of opinions to that of the entire sample.

If you want a generalized picture, a poll would be a better idea. Facebook now allows you to post a multiple choice-type question where people can simply click on their choices. They have the option to voice out their opinions or even add new options, but you can base your results solely on the poll results if you want to.

Of course, you also have the option of using a third-party survey (for example, a form on your company website) and linking to it through your Facebook page. It’s harder to get people to click outside of Facebook, so most businesses compensate for this by offering some form of incentive. You could offer them a free e-book, free limited access to otherwise paid features, or a discount at your online store.

The biggest advantage Facebook offers to market researchers is the sheer size of its audience. Despite its numbers, it’s easy to target your message to certain demographics. Facebook Ads allows you to control which groups can see your material. It takes a bit of effort to find your audience and craft the right message, but the results–whether in market information or actual conversions–is often more than worth it.