How to get a better return on your Facebook efforts and get people to really “like” you for the long haul
First thing’s first: asking how to measure the return on investment on Facebook is perhaps not the right question.
“That is like asking ‘How do you measure the ROI of e-mail?’ or ‘What is the ROI of the phone system?’” says Eli Singer, founder and president at Entrinsic, a Toronto-based social media monitoring firm. “The answer, of course, is it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.” It also calls for another marketing acronym or two. “A more timely question is how do we ensure we are investing in ROR (return on relationships) by creating extremely compelling content that drives audience engagement in a world where the demand to be entertained increases every few hours?”
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Or, as social media expert Amber MacArthur puts it, it’s not about ROI, it’s about ROE: return on engagement. “We try to measure how much people are engaging and interacting with brands we’re working with.” The vice-president of social media agency MGImedia and author of Power Friending adds, “What you don’t want to do when you’re starting out in social media is start to sell to fans and look for that ROI right away because you’ll turn a lot of people off. You’ll come across as being too sales-y. Focus on the ROE first and then you’ll be able to measure the ROI once you’ve established a good foundation.”
But where do you start? Here are five practical steps to generating ROI (or ROR or ROE) and getting a better return on your Facebook investment.
1. SET GOALS
To determine ROI, you first need to determine how you’re going to use Facebook, says Singer. For example, if you’re primarily using the social network as a PR platform, you should include Facebook metrics as part of your overall PR calculations, and ROI should be measured by the number of people you reach (number of unique users) and the number of times your content is displayed (number of impressions).
On the other hand, adds Singer, if you’re using Facebook as a marketing tool, you might be more interested in conversion rates and the contagious nature of your content—how much your messaging gets passed around.
Leona Hobbs, vice-president and partner at Social Media Group, agrees that it starts with a strategy. “What are you trying to use Facebook for? Is it about converting customers to brand advocates? Is it about increasing your overall likability? Is it to recruit quality talent? There’s just so much potential there that to plan any activity on Facebook without first having a clear understanding of what you’re trying to do is a great way not to understand your ROI.”
2. BUILD YOUR CHANNEL. HAVE PEOPLE “LIKE” YOU
What is a “like” worth anyway? Hobbs says you can get right into the “nitty gritty measurements” by measuring how much you spent on acquiring a “like” divided by how many “likes” you received, which gives you a cost per social action. “So, that is very measurable and you can track that,” she says.
But the real value of “likes” is simply in building a channel in which to engage—and market to—consumers. “That is a fairly wise place to place your emphasis,” says Hobbs. “It’s not, ‘I just need a whole bunch of likes’ but ‘I’m going to build my Facebook channel because I need to fish where the fish are.’”
Singer believes each “fan” or “like” has value, “assuming it’s organic and real.” Essentially, he explains, a “like” is an invitation from a potential consumer to a company to market to them. “The consumer is saying, ‘tell me more,’ and publicly announcing their allegiance to your brand,” he says. “Can you really put a price on that?”
But the key is finding loyal fans of your brand, not people who just “liked” your page to get a coupon or other rewards. “If you just encourage people to ‘like’ something because you’re doing a giveaway, those aren’t the people you necessarily want or need to be part of your page,” says MacArthur.
3. DO THE SOFT SELL
Some companies consider “likes” as the equivalent of gathering a list of e-mail addresses they can blast information to, “which obviously is not the way to look at it,” says David Alston, CMO at Radian6, a Fredericton, N.B.-based social media monitoring firm bought by Salesforce.com for more than $320 million last year.
“First of all, people don’t like to be shilled by marketing material, and secondly, it’s completely missing the point that it’s not just a long list of names. This is a group of people that ‘liked’ you for a reason, they want to be affiliated with your brand, and they don’t mind sharing the fact that they ‘like’ it in their timeline or status updates to others in their community.”
That said, Alston believes you can use Facebook to sell, you just have to do it right. For example, Malaysia Airlines created a Facebook service that allows passengers to see where their friends are sitting and they can arrange to sit next to each other. And Dutch airline KLM is introducing “Meet & Seat,” a service that lets passengers choose seatmates based on their social media profiles.
“The idea of this social graph to make a person’s experience either easier or enhanced is something that we have yet to see a lot of,” says Alston. “I think only a few companies are scratching the surface on this.”
Singer believes that as companies become more used to operating in the social media space, a more sales-oriented approach is emerging. “Less experienced companies are often happy to stay in the content/engagement space, which is essentially easier,” he says. “As the honeymoon period ends for social media and companies become more comfortable in dealing with the space, you will see more of a push towards a more sales-oriented approach to Facebook in industries where that makes sense.”
4. COMMIT TO THE LONG-TERM
“To build a Facebook page for a six-week campaign and then abandon it is so wasteful, it makes me want to cry,” says Hobbs. “You paid to attract all those eyeballs and all that attention to a page, and when the campaign was over, you abandoned those people.” So what needs to happen? “You’re going to have to put a community manager on it and you’re going to have to program content into it forever and ever amen.”
MacArthur agrees you need to be in it for the long haul. “Most of the clients that we’ve worked with that have been [on Facebook] for a couple of years are seeing their community be an authentic community of people who are true, loyal fans—not just ‘liking’ the page because they wanted to enter a contest.”
For example, when Canada Goose began working with MGImedia three years ago, it had no presence on any social networks. “They had this really ambitious goal to get 50,000 friends on Facebook,” and they now have more than 46,000 fans, says MacArthur.
Much of the fan page consists of people posting photos and talking about where they’ve been in Canada Goose jackets. “It’s a perfect example of a brand that has grown really organically and started with nothing,” says MacArthur.
Measuring this type of ongoing engagement doesn’t have to be complicated either. “You can measure based on how many people are sharing content and posting to your wall and commenting,” says MacArthur. “These are pretty simple things you can measure within the Facebook platform. I don’t think there’s much more magic to it than that.”
5. START WITH THE BASICS
Success on Facebook comes when you find fans that will act as brand ambassadors and become part of your community. But that’s assuming you have a good brand to start with, says MacArthur. “You can’t put lipstick on a pig. If you suck offline, you’re going to suck online.”
Singer agrees. “Having an excellent product or service helps too. If your stuff sucks, stay off Facebook.”
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