How the most nimble broadcasters, print publications and even book publishers are making the most out of Facebook
In a roundabout way, a serial killer helped give HarperCollins Canada its “aha” moment about Facebook. Three months after the publishing company started its fan-page outreach in August 2010, and with a mere 1,500 fans at the time, Cory Beatty, the company’s marketing director, digital strategy, snapped a picture of a room at the office that was under construction and covered with plastic sheets.
“I posted it on Facebook and jokingly said we were building a Dexter room,” Beatty recalls. The response was incredible; several dozen posts came flooding in, there was a spike in followers and suddenly the publisher’s authors were joining in the action for the first time. “We had some of our authors posting ‘I hope that’s not for me!’” says Beatty. “It showed us that we had, without really trying, started to build a real community of readers.”
They may not have been trying very hard at the time, but that’s since changed across the board for content creators. Even though publishers and broadcasters make money by selling their content and, in most cases, ads around that content, they are dedicating a lot more effort into creating successful Facebook presence and meaningful connections with their audiences today. And, as most of them agree, the key is keeping ongoing two-way conversations with audiences.
“We ask almost more than we tell through our social media,” says Beatty. The strategy is working: with roughly 60,000 fans, the HarperCollins Canada page is creaming its direct competition. Beatty rhymes off a list of things he asks fans for input on: book covers, taglines, book recommendations, and so on.
This approach helps keep fans checking back with the page regularly. Justin Stockman, executive director of marketing, specialty channels at Bell Media, has the same goal for Bell Media’s MuchMusic and MTV. He likens it to the way people would check in with the VJs on Much throughout the day in the ’80s and ’90s when music videos would play continuously. “We really try to treat social media as our new VJ,” says Stockman. “The voice is the person who’s representing MuchMusic and telling you what’s going on in the world and they’re with you all day.”
But there’s more to Bell Media’s Facebook strategy for MuchMusic and MTV. Stockman says the long-term goal is to build loyalty by engaging with viewers and the short-term goal is to drive awareness, whether for various shows or promotions or a web destination, as well as actual tune-in and website traffic.
Shawn Redmond, vice-president of programming at TSN, admits that when the sports brand decided to venture onto Facebook “there were certainly some concerns that we were creating a web destination to drive viewers to that wasn’t TSN.ca.” For content providers theoretically competing with Facebook for consumer eyeballs, it’s important to think strategically about what value a Facebook presence holds. How will it ultimately help distribute more content or pump up the bottom line? In TSN’s case, Redmond says the decision was made to launch a Facebook page because “at the end of the day it is our mission to serve sports fans wherever they are, and our fans are heavy users of social media. It’s a great place to generate discussion, debate, emotion and passion around the broadcasts that we carry.” And, of course, the more engaged fans get on Facebook and start talking about TSN programs, the more likely Redmond says they are to consume content on TSN or TSN.ca to go deeper.
Shelf the overt self-promotion
Stockman says the MuchMusic and MTV teams learned in the early days of their Facebook pages that if they simply threw up a show promo and tune-in time and said “watch this tonight” it wouldn’t generate many comments. The Facebook equivalent of crickets chirping, this type of engagement flop means it’s time to boost the interactivity factor. This can be done with a juicy theory about the plot—“Do you think such and such might happen tonight?”—or an exclusive promo so that people will talk about it.
HarperCollins Canada got a big spike in followers from a social media campaign called “The 50 Book Pledge” in which the publisher is encouraging people to read 50 books in a year. “We’re not necessarily pushing HarperCollins books; we’re asking people to make reading a priority,” says Beatty. “We have plenty of well-tested opportunities to push out our messaging through either PR or various types of advertising, but we have fewer opportunities there to actually engage with a community,” adds Rob Firing, director, publicity and communications at HarperCollins Canada. “Cory’s decision to keep advertising and that kind of messaging out of this process has led to the success we’ve seen.”
The web editors at TC Media’s Style at Home use Facebook to share their shopping finds and tips with fans. They also give advice about home renovations. “It’s an expert’s voice, but made accessible,” says Caroline Bergeron, a social media advisor at TC Media (who has since left the company.) “It’s insider access into all of the discoveries they make.”
Bergeron has a no-nonsense summation about the relationship between the editors and their Facebook fans: “You have to have a real conversation; you can’t just write about yourself and send links and hope that people will want to be your friend. Just talking about yourself is not interesting; you want people to be able to talk to you and give you their opinion and feedback.”
Conversations are a two-way street
Getting followers engaged in conversations doesn’t have to be complicated; simple questions can do the trick. For MTV and Much’s part, Stockman says “What song represents how you’re feeling today?” gets a lot of feedback. And in this medium, quirk works. Beatty asked HarperCollins Canada fans to replace a word in a book title with the word “bacon”—they had 70,000 impressions for that. “We’re an office that likes to have fun,” he says. “We’re a bit irreverent and that’s the tone we want to maintain. We’ll post the occasional cat video just because we think it’s funny.”
Jokes aside, HarperCollins also uses its Facebook page to help build buzz (and ultimately sales) for lesser-known authors who wouldn’t necessarily have access to major media brands for media coverage. Those authors’ profiles aren’t high enough yet in Canada to justify the expense of advertising, says Firing, but “we do have a way into a community where we can talk about a book and author and generate a response simply because we have the numbers [and responsiveness] within our community.”
Redmond says TSN’s Facebook followers are also an enthusiastic bunch, and tapping into their passion is key. He says while the brand’s on-air presence is polished and professional, its Facebook persona is TSN as a sports fan. “The type of discussion we generate on our Facebook page is the type of stuff sports guys sit around and talk about with their buddies,” he says. “If they’re interested, they’ll go to TSN.ca to read Bob McKenzie’s Hockey Insider report to go deeper on that subject whereas maybe it’s not our job on Facebook to go so deep into it; it’s more to get people talking, debating. Then if they want to get informed, they know where to go.”
Make Sharing Simple
The Facebook share button is ubiquitous around most media companies’ web content, and for good reason. Jeremy Barker, social media editor for the National Post, says having it on every story on the National Post website drives a lot of traffic to the newspaper’s Facebook page. Since many readers are signed onto Facebook during the day anyways, when they click on the share button the story immediately goes out to their friends. “It’s not anything we have to do and it’s not a big push; it’s just part of our story pages,” says Barker.
At the busiest times, Barker says a story from the National Post website (most often in the form of a headline and short excerpt from the story) gets posted on its Facebook page every hour or so. These stories are, as Barker says, the ones “you think are the top stories or are going to be the most shareable.” The benefit of people sharing the stories on their own pages is that their friends start coming to the paper’s site to read the full story or perhaps explore another part of the site and share another story. “It’s a virtuous circle,” he says. “We’re potentially reaching an audience that wouldn’t necessarily otherwise see a National Post story.”
The same thing can happen if Post reporters enable the subscribe button on their own Facebook pages. By allowing people to subscribe to their personal pages (the reader doesn’t have to become a “friend” to do so), the subscribers can see whichever posts the writer makes public. The writer controls the level of privacy for each post and makes the choice to only allow friends and family to see pictures of, say, their cottage weekend.
Barker is always keen to find out how to best integrate the new tools Facebook puts out. “The base [strategy] is all about sharing our stories no matter what changes come along, as long as it’s a way that we’re putting up our stories for more people to read.”
Offer Exclusives
Monogrammed bathrobes. Bartenders that remember your name and usual order. There are plenty of ways to make someone feel special and, in the world of Facebook, holding exclusive events for followers definitely helps. For instance, HarperCollins Canada hosted a cocktail reception at its offices last fall for 40 fans of thriller author Stuart MacBride. “For a lot of these avid readers, the draw of attending anything in a publisher’s office is quite alluring, but when you have an author of his calibre, it’s that much better,” Beatty says. Attendees were treated to advanced copies of MacBride’s newest book and were enthralled as he took out a whiteboard and planned out the perfect murder. “It was a really unique experience,” says Beatty.
TSN recently launched a check-in app available on its Facebook fan page that allows people to unite as they watch select TSN live events. “The idea was that Facebook Places recognizes where you are through the GPS in your phone and when you check in it marks your location on a map,” explains Redmond. For example, during the 2012 IIHF World Junior Championship, people checked in during the broadcast and could then see their geographic location indicated by a flag of their choice on an interactive map of Canada. The number of people who participated (which Redmond isn’t able to share) was “double or triple” what TSN expected.
The Flipside: When Facebook Influences Content
Sometimes Facebook ends up influencing a media company’s content. A new show called MTV Creeps, produced by MTV Canada, stemmed from Facebook. A panel scrutinizes people’s Facebook pages and then makes assumptions about their lives. The admitted narcissists are brought in and questioned about their profiles by the panel. “We’ve made a show out of all the stuff we know [our viewers] are doing on their own privately,” says Stockman. “People say ‘Oh, you can embed Facebook comments into shows,’ but we’ve actually taken Facebook and made it a show.”
Over at the National Post, Barker points to the success the brand has had with increasing traffic to the newspaper’s website through Facebook. An internal system tracks where the traffic for a story is coming in from and, as it turns out, sometimes 10% or 15% of it is from Facebook—even though it’s not a story that’s posted on the Facebook page. In that case, people have visited the story on the website, then shared it with others by clicking the Facebook “like” button underneath the headline. “Then we see that that’s where traffic is coming from, so sometimes I’ll say ‘the audience is interested in this story; we’ll put it up on our page.’ So we have a considerable amount of website traffic from Facebook, but not all of it is generated by our Facebook page. That’s actually something that’s worked well,” says Barker.
Posts Are Public. So Is Your Learning Curve
It’s only natural to go through growing pains as you figure out the best way to use Facebook. HarperCollins Canada held a contest last May in which people entered by tagging themselves in an image of a map of Canada. The problem was Facebook had a cap on how many people could tag the same photo; at the time, it was 200. “It was just poor planning on our part; we angered a lot of people,” says Beatty. Two hundred people signed up very quickly and several hundred others couldn’t, so the publisher ran a second iteration of the contest that was open to everybody. The silver lining was HarperCollins learned that people respond to its posts extremely quickly. “When we post something, the average response is under five minutes,” says Beatty.
Rock The Vote
In the past, voting for the MuchMusic Video Awards (MMVAs) was done through its website with open access. But for the 2011 MMVAs, Much moved the voting onto Facebook. Within the body of Much’s website, music lovers had to log in with their Facebook ID. “We were concerned the voting would go down by adding that barrier, but it actually went up,” says Stockman. “It was an organic way to take over Facebook because when people voted it showed up in all of their friends’ feeds who they were voting for, so it created this whole competition amongst friends to say ‘Oh, they voted for this person, I’ll vote for this person.’”
Much received 350,000 new “likes” over five weeks just from voting, which nearly doubled their previous totals. “We were blown away by the results,” says Stockman. Plus, the more than one million viewers that tuned in made the 2011 MMVAs the most-watched broadcast in MuchMusic’s history. “It was a great example of how we were able to drive tune-in, but also engagement.”
 |
