Mantras for launching a brand in
Phase1: Know what’s on Facebook regarding your eco-system
Before doing hard work recruiting and leading any Facebook community, stop a moment and get used to Facebook implicit rules, organization, Facebook chaos management (it’s a real chaos inside, but an arranged one).
Then have a look at what’s being written on your eco-system: your brand reputation and awareness, your competitor presence and activity on Facebook, the groups related to your brand or your business,your traditional targets, and have a check on people who included your brand or related info into their profile (interest, music, TV shows, books, or activities) to know who’s already in your business scope (and double check your target is the right target on that platform)
Phase2: Choose your Facebook strategy and select relevant communication and marketing Facebook tools to implement it
3 different ways to market your brand are at your disposal: Facebook guerilla marketing, branding and communication around your brand equity, or application development. For explanation on each way, read this post from InsideFacebook.
My advice would be not to use the application development method to market your brand since after having done your application you need to spread it while people don’t use them anymore (or at least find the fact to “install” the application too much intrusive). Prefer guerilla marketing or brand equity leveraging approaches; they’re way more engaging and creating conversation. Which is why you’re on that platform (thought you could generate direct sells using Facebook?)
To implement your strategy (I now only speak about brand equity and guerilla ways to market your brand) you’ll have to choose how to. Social ads seems to be interesting and somehow competitive, but don’t do that alone, it’s “old school” and above all won’t work by itself. You have to generate an echo within the community that tells people they can click on your banner/ social ad because it worths it. You should have a look at fan pages like Victoria Secret, MSN, NBA, Oreo, or (RED) ones to see what’s in it and why there are so many people visiting and returning and collaborating to this page (whether there’s activity or not from the fan page owner).
Phase3: recruiting and leading your community
That’s the big part of leveraging and growing a Facebook community but also a great opportunity to engage more people with your brand and turn them into fans and brand ambassadors. Here some advice on how to recruit and leverage your soon to be vibrant community:
- Invite your already existing community to join the Facebook community (don’t tell me you don’t have any community around you because you definitly have one, think about your friends, your partners, your employees, your CRM program members)
- Look at online influential people and connect with them online & OFFLINE (if possible, or reach them through phone to create a “physical” connection) to explain your goals and start a conversation that you can continue online
- Use social ads to create point of interest among Facebook users
- Create ready to share marketing material like Youtube video, Slideshare presentation, HTML badges, T-shirts, and any other goodies that can expand your community awareness (here you can think about developing a Facebook application), but think twice about recruitment vs. cost vs. time consuming before starting anything
- Sustain conversation (i.e activity) around your community and within it by creating and continiously feeding a dedicated blog about the main communty’s subject (bear in mind a community is always related to a specific topic), suggesting and managing online/ offline events (whether you are 5 in your community or 200, starting is a good point, waiting for more people before moving forward a bad idea - people did take time to join you so be respectful, that’s the first milestone to glory)
Phase4: maintaining and leveraging the community
After developing your community using tips and tricks you eventually find on the Internet, you’ll see the community would stop growing. Don’t be afraid it’s ok with it; it means you’ve done quite a job and now can start the 2nd part: maintaining pressure and interest to keep members visiting and returning.
At that time, loyalty is the keyword: continiously creating content won’t be enough, you need to create a federative event, whether online or offline, to generate a strong belonging feeling to the community and pride. Pride to speak about it, pride to collaborate and attend events, pride to spread the word. And that ability to create pride would definitly be the key to a successful community; when members are proud to belong to a community, they just become your best ambassadors (by ambassadors, I mean best sellers/ awareness vector/ influencers/ representatives) and would now recruit for you.
Phase5: don’t limit your community to Facebook
Go beyond the bound of Facebook and create a dedicated community platform using social software platforms, invite your community members engage more and more with your brand by developing business related activities like Dell is doing with its whole new websites (managing different kind of targeted communities), Amazon offering to pay fees for sells generated through users, launching a co-creation operation like Google with its favicon contest, and anything else that involves users and keep them proud to be your “friend” (traditional advertising is a good idea).
What about you? Are you willing to embrace your community to move forward smarter and faster or will you stay out of the conversation and hope your consumers would stay by your side because of you (which they will until they find better than you and go without saying anything)?
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