A sound social strategy for your Facebook pages means moving beyond counting fans and likes. It means leveling up, by utilizing peer-to-peer engagement, influencer tracking, and deep analytics on your Facebook pages. Enabling fans to engage each other, finding and cultivating your influencers, and quantitative measurement of your Facebook efforts are three critical pillars for Facebook success. Learn the three must haves for Facebook success, and find out how to start driving real business outcomes from your Facebook pages.

1. three must
haves for
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So you’ve got pages, fans, and likes. Now what?
Your brand, like many, likely struggles with deriving value Peer-to-Peer Engagement
from your Facebook investments. What’s a fan worth? A like? Peer-to-peer engagement is one of the most important types
What do you really even know about your Facebook fans? And of social customer engagement because messages carried
how can you create something of lasting value from such an from peer-to-peer have more influence. Eileen Brown of
enormous, yet so fleeting a channel? the Social Customer explains the reason why peer-to-peer
engagement works so well quite simply: “We tend to identify
Everything about Facebook is so enticing, yet just beyond
more strongly with people like us. We love those who are like
our grasp. It’s free. It’s huge. We find many thousands of our
ourselves. We identify with them.”1
customers there. They “like” us. They tell us what they want,
need, and wish for on our Facebook page walls. It seems the An excellent way to start getting value from your Facebook
perfect social media engagement platform. pages right away is to give them a customer experience that
includes interaction with each other. Enabling your own fans to
Yet with each status update, each positive comment, every
spread your messages and answer each other’s questions adds
customer inquiry, and all the ingenious product ideas we
enormous trust and credibility to your Facebook presence.
see disappearing from the Facebook wall every hour, we find
ourselves wondering what we’re doing there at all. What good “Start by creating an environment that encourages peer-to-
is Facebook as a platform for social customer engagement peer interactions”, says Altimeter Group Partner and Principal
unless we can engage our social customers in ways that Analyst, Jeremiah Owyang, “Ask fans to respond to each other,
make real sense for our customers and drives real business showcase fan contributions, and recognize top contributors.”2
outcomes for the brand?
Harnessing the crowd’s energy and fulfilling customer need is
The first thing to remember is that as an online social what social customer marketing is all about. Harnessing the
network the Facebook platform wasn’t built for social crowd’s energy to fulfill customer need is what peer-to-peer
customer engagement. It lacks many of the essentials engagement is all about. Peer-to-peer engagement—enabling
needed to pursue a successful social strategy—data capture, your Facebook fans to help each other—with question and
for one. But the good news is you can turn Facebook into a answer applications, community moderation, and rank and
vibrant social customer online community with the addition of reputation features makes immediate sense and can even
just a few key must-haves. scale to a full-blown social support solution. It gives customers
value when they get there—they can search for and find useful
information. And it drives real business value for the brand—
less support calls means less support costs.
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Influencer Tracking
Not only must your Facebook fans engage with each other, they and very importantly send the right messages at the right
must recognize and trust each other in order for customer time in the right channel to the right people are those
community dynamics to spark. The 90-9-1 Principle holds you want to cultivate. If any one of these factors is absent,
that content creators are just 1% of your audience, so it’s influence doesn’t happen. A true social media influencer
important for the rest to know who they are and what they doesn’t just have thousands of Facebook friends. They have
bring to the table. an area of expertise relevant to your offering that gives them
credibility and they have social media savvy—they know which
But first, we as marketers need to know who these key
messages will resonate within their social network.
influencers are so we can amplify their voices. Who are they?
What social attributes do they have that help us identify, track, Finding these key influencers, motivating them, helping
and motivate their activities? them along is critical to Facebook success. Rewarding your
fans publicly for their contributions—elevating their status,
Dr. Michael Wu, Lithium Principal Scientist, spells out 6
featuring their content, giving them additional privileges—is
key factors of social media influence: credibility, bandwidth,
a sure fire way to discover who among your fans are your key
relevance, timing, alignment, and confidence. Those of your
influencers—your brand superfans.
fans that are credible, have large social networks (bandwidth),
e tracker model
enc
flu
#9
0.9
in .1
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Deep Analytics Conclusion
We all realize that quantifying the value of Facebook A sound social strategy for your Facebook pages means
engagement means customer intelligence—data, and lots moving beyond counting fans and likes. It means leveling
of it. In order to determine whether your investments in up, outfitting your Facebook presence with a more oomph,
Facebook are worthwhile, some measure of quantitative and showing up on Facebook like you mean it. Enabling
analytics is essential. peer-to-peer engagement will bring immediate value to
your Facebook fans by letting them interact with and help
In the absence of real Facebook data, we are forced to fall
each other. Right away, they’ll discover a new and vibrant
back on proxies to assign value—counting likes and fans. But
community feel to your Facebook pages. Finding and
as Forrester Sr. Analyst, Augie Ray, points out in the ROI of
cultivating your influencers will get you more power out of
Social Media Marketing, using proxies to weigh the value of
the channel by amplifying the most credible social voices
social media efforts has a number of nagging drawbacks.
you can harness. Lastly, instituting a system of quantitative
Just counting likes and fans not only fails to measure the true
measurement with deep analytics will give you a true
business value of the channel, but measures it incorrectly and
measurement of the business value of the Facebook channel
gets in the way of achieving our objectives.
so you can make informed decisions about what really works.
What should you know about your Facebook fans? Everything.
Not only how many fans you have, but how many actually resources
1 http://thesocialcustomer.com/eileenb/38681/online-peer-influence-and-its-
return, what percentage are active, how deep are their effect-engagement
conversation threads, how many unique fans engage in each 2 http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2010/07/27/altimeter-report-the-8-
success-criteria-for-facebook-page-marketing/
conversation, how quickly they respond to your messages
and each other’s, and how many actually return—as well as
whether or not they return to the same conversation threads.
Only when you have deep insight into how engaged your
Facebook fans are will you have the ability to assign
quantitative value to your social success on Facebook.
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