Getting Facebook right – tips for B2B marketing success

Joe Chernov, VP of Content Marketing, Eloqua

With 800 million members, Facebook is obviously one of the most important marketing channels for consumer brands. But what about B2B companies? Is Facebook just as critical a platform for companies that sell business-related goods?

Some signs suggest, no. For example, a look at the top Brand Pages on Facebook shows that tech giant Intel only just managing to crack the top 100 … at a lowly #96. Shockingly, there are no other pure B2B businesses in this list at all.

But just because B2B brands might not have comparably sized Fan communities on Facebook doesn’t mean the medium is any less valuable to them. Instead of focusing on “vanity” metrics like Fan count, B2B marketers should instead place a priority on engagement – that is, the percentage of their community that is interacting with their content. Aside from engagement being a reliable way to increase customer affinity, it’s also the fundamental way Facebook itself determines how many Fans see a brand’s content. The higher the engagement, the more Facebook rewards the publisher with eyeballs.

We teamed up with newsfeed optimisation firm BrandGlue to detail how B2B businesses can ratchet up not only the number of fans signed up to their page, but more importantly the levels of engagement with these community members. Here are 5 key tips:

1)    Remember the landing tab: This requires very little effort and yet is one of the most effective tactics for improving your Facebook offering. The key is to ensure that new visitors arrive at an uncluttered page (not a busy Wall) with one call to action: ‘Like’ us. Tests from Mint.com have shown that businesses get a 73 per cent increase on their fan base conversion through using such landing tabs.

2)    Understand your ‘Bright Spots’: Chip and Dan Heath popularised the idea of ‘bright spots’ in their book Switch. These are seemingly small successes which, when scaled, can have a massive business impact. The concept applies well to Facebook. Work out which tactics have the most impact in generating new fans (sweepstakes, search, advertising, referrals etc.) and then repeat them for as long as they work.

3)    Know your fans: As with any social network, Facebook has its own cultural norms. For Facebook, it is vital to remember that fans engage with your content passively, but you must acquire them via direct action. This means that members must do something to become a fan (whether this is searching for your brand, clicking on an ad or status update, or entering a sweepstakes); once a member has become a fan, however, they tend to receive your messages by newsfeed. Very few fans ever return to a brand’s page.

4)    DIY publishing: There is some debate over whether content posted by third-party tools works as well as publishing it yourself. In our case, we found that there was a significant – and damaging – impact to using third-party tools (we suffered a 61 per cent drop in visibility of posts when compared to manual publishing). We would therefore urge that businesses go that extra step and make sure that they post all of their content themselves.

5)    Getting engagement right: The Facebook algorithm, EdgeRank, thrives on engagement. As fans interact with your page through tools such as Like, Share and Comment, the algorithm signals Facebook to tell it that you are a quality member, publishing content that users find interesting. This in turn improves your EdgeRank rating, meaning that more fans will be exposed to your content. So before posting anything to Facebook, stop and think: Is this engaging or is it self-serving? If it is the former, it may be another bright spot. If it is the latter, you might want to re-think hitting the “post” button.

When we asked BrandGlue to help revamp our Facebook marketing approach, they stuck to these guidelines and the results were staggering. Our Facebook page enjoyed a 2,500% increase in new fans and our referral traffic spiked by 150%. Most importantly, we tripled the industry norms in terms of fan-base engagement, the vital indicator that our messages are being consumed and not just posted.  For more tips and tricks, feel free to read our ‘10 Ways to Solve Facebook for B2B’ case study and start optimising your Facebook page today.

Follow Joe @jchernov

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