Think about why people go to Facebook: to connect, socialize, and catch up on what the people they know and presumably care about are doing. In the process, they also find out what their friends and acquaintances are reading, listening to, wearing, and eating; what causes they are championing; what ideas they’re hatching; what jobs they’re hunting; and where they are going. Facebook wants users to see things that they find relevant, fun, and useful, not annoying and pointless, or else they’ll abandon the site. Which means you’d better create content that’s relevant, fun, and useful, too.
Now, if it were that easy, this really would be a short chapter. Hire better creatives, make better content, and you’d be good to go. The problem is that there are three forces that have made it more difficult than it used to be for even the most talented creatives to organically deliver awesome content on Facebook: the masses, the evolution of the masses, and Facebook’s response to the evolution of the masses.
The very thing that makes marketers want to have a presence on Facebook—the sheer number of users—makes the platform a marketing challenge. A billion users, and all the content they generate, creates a conundrum: with so many pieces of content streaming into consumers’ News Feeds and competing for attention, it’s unlikely they will see any content you post, even the good stuff.
In addition, users are human. They age and mature. They grow up, break up, have kids, quit the guitar, take up fencing, or go vegetarian. The user who became your fan in 2010 will not be the same fan in 2014. But even though he’s changed, he probably hasn’t thought to go back and remove outdated information about his tastes and preferences on Facebook. We’re always going to follow more people and brands than we need to. We may not be watching this TV show anymore nor following that actor, but we don’t unfollow their pages as we move on in life. As those bygone interests fade from our consciousness, we expect them to fade from our pages and News Feeds, too.
Facebook knows this. Long ago, when college students were the biggest population on Facebook and the user pool was relatively small, people’s News Feeds were organized chronologically. But as the user base grew—and grew and grew—Facebook had to figure out how to prevent users’ streams from getting clogged up with posts they weren’t interested in. It didn’t want to be Twitter, with its waterfall of content from every person, organization, brand, and business in which users ever expressed interest; it wanted to curate our News Feed and make sure the majority of what we saw was always important and relevant to us. To help mitigate the consequences of literal TMI, Facebook finally settled on an algorithm called EdgeRank. Every interaction a person has with Facebook, from posting a status update or a photo, to liking, sharing, or commenting, is called an “edge,” and theoretically, every edge channels into the news stream. But not everyone who could see these edges actually does, because EdgeRank is constantly reading algorithmic tea leaves to determine which edges are most interesting to the most number of people. It tracks all the engagement a user’s own content receives, as well as the engagement a user has with other people’s or brands’ content. The more engagement a user has with a piece of content, the stronger EdgeRank believes that user’s interest will be in similar content, and it filters that person’s news stream accordingly (a randomizer ensures that occasionally we’ll see a post from someone we haven’t talked to in years, thus keeping Facebook fresh and surprising). For example, EdgeRank makes sure that a user who often likes or comments on a friend’s photos, but who ignores that friend’s plain-text status updates, will see more of that friend’s photos and fewer of his status updates. Every engagement, whether between friends or between users and brands, strengthens their connection and the likelihood that EdgeRank will push appropriate content from those friends and brands to the top of a user’s News Feed. That’s of course where you, the marketer, want to see your brand or business.
That’s why it’s never been more important to produce quality content that people want to actually interact with—a brand’s future visibility on the platform depends on its current customer engagement levels (and soon this trend will spread to all the other platforms, as well). Unfortunately, the engagement that marketers most want to see—purchases—is not the engagement that Facebook’s algorithm measures, and therefore not the engagement that ultimately affects visibility. More than anything else, marketers want users to respond to their right hooks. That’s why they put so many out there. What they don’t realize, however, is that on Facebook, it’s the user’s response to a jab that matters most.
Here’s why: Through EdgeRank, Facebook weighs likes, comments, and shares, but it currently does not give greater weight to click-throughs or any other action that leads to sales. EdgeRank doesn’t care, actually, whether you sell anything, ever. Facebook’s greatest priority is making the platform valuable to the consumer, not to you, the marketer. What it cares about is whether people are interested in the content they see on Facebook, because if they’re interested, they’ll come back. What proves interest? Likes, comments, shares, and clicks—not purchases. You could put out a piece of content with a hyperlink to your product page that garners $2 million in sales in thirty minutes. Facebook would take note of the heightened interest, and the algorithm would push you to the forefront of your current fans’ News Feeds. But link clicks do not create stories, so if no one shares that piece of content, or even likes or comments on it, the content will reach your current community, but Facebook will not deem it interesting enough to show it to a wide number of people outside that. If you want to maximize your eyeballs, it’s not enough to get people to read your article or buy your product—you have to get them to engage with it so that it spreads. On Facebook, the definition of great content is not the content that makes the most sales, but the content that people most want to share with others.
Unfortunately for marketers, as with all platforms that you can’t test in a controlled environment, it is still difficult to make a direct correlation between high levels of engagement and sales. However, it stands to reason that the only way you can make any sales is if as many consumers as possible see your content (and if customers are seeing it, it had better be what you want them to see). Consumers’ eyes are on Facebook. If the only way to reach those consumers is to get them to engage, then it’s up to you to create not just great content, but content that’s so great they want to engage with it. To put it in boxing terms, you have to jab enough times to build huge visibility, so that the day you do throw a right hook—the day you do try to make a sale, say, with a post that’s not particularly shareable but where the link takes people to your product—it will show up in the maximum number of News Feeds.
Unfortunately, while it tries hard to guess what is important to users, Facebook still can’t determine their intent. Which action, or edge, indicates more interest—commenting on a post or liking a post? If a person actually clicks on a picture, is she showing more interest than if she shares it? Is a picture more valuable than a video? Does liking a video post show equal interest as watching the entire video? Facebook doesn’t know, but it desperately wants to, so it keeps tweaking the algorithm to figure the mystery out. This is why even though most of your content might get seen today, you can’t trust that it will tomorrow. One minute your brand could be popping up at the top of a user’s page; the next it could be buried six pages down. For example, Facebook may decide that sharing is a much stronger call to action and brand endorsement than liking, so it will give sharing more weight than a like. If your content happens to elicit many shares, you’re golden. But then Facebook could change its mind and decide that likes are actually as valuable if not more so than shares. Your content doesn’t usually get that many likes. Now what?
The speed with which we have to keep up with these changes, and create matching content, is enough to give even the most seasoned marketer a case of whiplash. How are we supposed to jump through the hoops to reach our consumers if Facebook keeps moving the hoops around?
By staying vigilan
t. By accepting that you’re going to reinvent your content every day, if not more. And by getting to know your community like your own family. How do you do that? You tell them stories they want to hear. You give openly and generously. You jab, jab, jab, jab, jab.
JABS IN ACTION
The key to great marketing is remembering that even though you’re all about your brand, your customer is not. As with any first date, getting a second date depends on you doing your best to learn more about what the other person is interested in, and directing the conversation in that direction. In the end, boxing and dating are really not that different. After all, the goal is to score. Sometimes the score is measured in points, and sometimes in a marriage proposal (or something else), but in either case you won’t win if you play your most aggressive move first.
Let’s say your company sells boots. It would make a lot of sense for you to talk about weather. It would make a lot of sense to talk about rock climbing. It would even make sense to talk about hunting or maybe even something like how the boots protect people’s feet during rowdy concerts. These are all topics that are directly related to boots, or at least only about one mental step away. So for your first jab, you put out the following status update:
“So long, 30 Rock! Thanks for seven hilarious years!”
If the CMO of this boot company knows only as much about social media as the average businessperson, as soon as she sees that first status update she’s going to storm up to you and question the living crap out of it. What does 30 Rock have to do with our boot company? How off-brand can you get? Why are we doing this? How does this sell more boots? And your answer will be, it doesn’t. Yet.
As the CMO of the boot company stands there looking, at best, curious and, at worst, furious, you will calmly point to the analytics (called Page Insights), which will reveal that that particular post is getting higher than usual engagement over more traditional boot-centered posts, just as you thought it would. Why? Because through previous jabs asking things like “What’s your favorite TV show?” you had already gathered the consumer insight that 80 percent of your fans were crazy about 30 Rock. And you knew that the series finale was approaching. So by putting out a “Good-bye, 30 Rock” piece, you are connecting with your community and showing them that not only do you get them, but you are one of them. All of a sudden your brand is talking like a human being, not a boot company. And as the overindexing (meaning a post performs above normal for that brand) reveals, people like that. They respond. This is good for you, because the uptick in engagement tells Facebook that this brand matters to people. So when you put out your next piece of content, a fifteen-second user-generated video of people showing off their boots, Facebook makes sure your customers see it in their News Feed. Again, the piece isn’t selling anything. Nor is the next one, a Valentine’s Day card that doesn’t show a single boot. Then you put out another three or four pieces of content that don’t sell anything, either, like this:
Third jab: Post—A fifteen-second video about rock climbing.
Fourth jab: Poll—“Would you rather wear your boots in the summer or the winter?”
The point is to give and give and give, for no other reason than to entertain your customers and make them feel like you get them. And the more you give, the more you really will get them. Before, every piece of content had to be a right hook because all we knew about customers who bought boots was that they needed protective footwear. But if we jab wisely, Facebook can give a detailed and nuanced understanding of the people who buy our products. By testing and jabbing and giving, we learn what they find entertaining. Content that entertains sees engagement. Content that sees engagement tells Facebook and the rest of the world that your customers care about your brand, so that when you finally do put out something that would directly benefit your bottom line—a coupon, a free-shipping offer, or some other call to action—4 percent of your community sees it instead of a half percent, which gives you a much better chance at making a sale.
TARGET YOUR JABS AND RIGHT HOOKS
Sometimes, though, you don’t want everyone to see the same information. On any other platform, where your posts are entirely public, every jab hits everyone in the face. On Facebook, however, you can be extremely selective, customizing your jabs and targeting subsets of your fan base. Want to target a post for thirty-two- to forty-five-year-old married women with college degrees who speak French and live in California, and post it on New Year’s Eve? When you know how to use Facebook properly, you can (and I imagine the largest liquor store in California would).
Targeting your posts is a strategy to keep in mind when you’re jabbing; it’s flat-out essential when you’re throwing a right hook. Let’s say you’re a national fashion retailer, and today is Black Friday. You’ve created a piece that highlights one of your most coveted purses. You know that the buyers of that purse are generally twenty-five-year-old females. Does it make any sense to send that content about a purse to your fifty-five-year-old male customers who primarily come to you for belts? Of course not. So when you post the announcement about tonight’s Black Friday sale, with a picture of the purse, you post it only to fans of your page who are twenty-five- to thirty-five-year-old women. By speaking directly to the right demographic, you’ve increased the probability that people will engage with that content, which keeps your EdgeRank numbers up, instead of giving Facebook the impression that people don’t care about your brand anymore by posting it to men who are never going to click or engage with a post about a purse.
Now, you could post the piece to your fifty-five-year-old male customers if you change the content so that it resonates with them. Maybe it reads, “Hey Dad, it’s never too late to remind her that she’s still your best girl. Our Black Friday sale starts tonight, 6:00 P.M.” You go even further and design the content so that it goes out to consumers in Texas in the shape of Texas, and the content that goes to New Jersey is in the shape of New Jersey, and so on and so forth for any of the states whose residents have a particularly strong streak of state pride. For any jab or right hook to have impact, it has to speak to the consumer and hit his or her emotional center.
SMART SPENDING
It’s worth taking a step back and examining the cost-effectiveness of this scenario. With very little lead time, a retailer can create two distinct pieces of content, send it directly to two separate demographics, and watch in real time to see how the recipients respond. If the excited comments start to pile up, or the content starts getting shared, that retailer knows the right hook made its mark. Its consumers engage, thus kicking up the retailer’s EdgeRank, which shows Facebook that its users value the retailer. It makes sure the content shows up in more people’s stream, which therefore allows the retailer to show its content over and over again to an ever-larger audience without having to pay any more for it.
To accomplish the same thing on television, a national retailer might create two different TV spots targeting different demographics. For example, it would launch one mainstream targeted ad that would run on CNN during primetime, and a multiculturally targeted ad that would run on UPN channels during the local 10 P.M. news. The creative team would have to develop the ads weeks before they ran. Typically, the spot would need to run enough times so that the retailer’s desired reach population would have seen the spot three times—about a two-week flight of spots. It would cost the retailer between $7,000 and $13,000 to reach this audience. Then, once the pieces had run, it would have to sit and cross its fingers that people had actually watched the ad even though they had just forgotten to turn the TV off while streaming a movie on their second screen. And if it wanted to run more content, it would have to pay all over again.
Which scenario sounds more time- and cost-efficient to you?
Now, there’s nothing wrong with spending money when you’re spending it smartly. All along you’ve probably been buying the Facebook ads that line up along the right side of the site. Those ads have until now been one of the most efficient ways to spend dolla
rs for any brand or business, big or small. On average, the cost of running an ad on the right side of the page on Facebook runs the gamut between $.50 to $1.50 per like, though depending on the specificity of your targeting, the length of your campaign, and your budget it’s possible to acquire likes for as low as $.10 and as high as several dollars. That’s a steal, even when you compare it to the cost of email acquisition, which can run as low as $0.49. How can a dollar spent acquiring a Facebook fan be worth more than forty-nine cents anywhere else? Because a social user on your fan page has more potential reach than anywhere else.
I should know. Back in 1998, I was using email marketing, as well as search engine marketing (SEM) and pay-per-click ads, to build WineLibrary.com. People loved my product and my business and were happy to subscribe to my emails and to buy from me. My business model then was no different from that of any of the successful email marketing companies of the last half decade like Fab.com, Groupon, or Gilt. The difference is that their fans aren’t as beholden to their email as mine were in 1998. If my fans wanted to talk to or share information with friends, they had to use email. Today’s fans don’t. So today’s email marketers have had to offer huge rewards for sharing, such as $10 off a first order if the customer can get five friends to subscribe to the site. Without that incentive, people won’t spread content or invite friends to join them on your site via email—it feels too much like spreading spam. Social media, however, is built for sharing, so those targeted Facebook ads, though costing $.50 to $1.50 per fan, are actually worth much more because those fans are more likely inspired to share your content for free, and possibly more than once—if you give them what they want in terms of content and service.