I’m a happy critic of webinars, I’ve also been feeling kind of sluggish lately, so I’m forever ready to crib the Facebook Marketing Bootcamp.

Here’s a summary of all 6 Webinars. What I learned: Replicate the good, avoid the bad, stop saying “um” so much. 

Guilty Pleasure: One of them was given by a Brit with a “LOVERLY” accent. 

1 - Build essential connections for your business.:

Focuses on “businesses are better” in a connected world, they have an opportunity to grow, expand and drive sales the more connected they are with their customers. Considering that 800 million people are connected through Facebook, one great way for businesses to connect is through the creation of an engaging page.

4 key steps for building a good page:

Build your page: Take the time to input essential information about who you are and what you do, add a profile photo and invite friends so that growth will occur organically from there.

Connect the virtual and the physical: Share updates and promotions, post business cards and flyers and provide loyalty offers that can be used at your business. This drives in-store traffic and increases sales.

Engage your fans: Ask questions, share industry news, and respond to comments.

Acquire new fans: Create Facebook ads and add social plug-ins (i.e. a button linking to your Facebook page or the “like” button)

Tips for businesses:

A page starts with identity: Define who you are, your mission and philosophy.

Keep posting best practices in mind: Keep it human, be timely and relevant, share exclusive content, encourage fan participation by being fun and engaging in posts. Reward your fans with special deals and offers and respond to comments, including negative ones. Facebook is a two-way conversation and if a negative comment is posted it is a great opportunity to remedy what went wrong and show others that you are taking action to fix the situation. You could provide a customer service email address and take the issue off Facebook, but don’t ignore or delete the post and certainly don’t respond to negativity with negativity

Expand your fan base: Encourage visitors to “like” your page and partner with other brands and organizations to reach new audiences.

Encourage physical check-ins: Getting fans to “check-in” creates additional awareness of your business and leads to growth.

Map out your topics: Create a posting or conversation calendar and plan out what topics to cover in your posts, use Facebook’s page insights to help you decide what types of posts are getting the best responses and at what time. So, at Seeqnce we like to share conversation/editorial calendars via Google docs so everyone has access to the document and can add or edit post ideas at their leisure.

Acquire offline collateral: Get “Like us on Facebook” signs, banners, cards, etc. that announce your online presence and drive customers to your page

Make a custom URL: duh

2- Connect to people with your Facebook Page

The power of the individual voice broadcasting to millions creates influence and identity on the Internet. Businesses have taken notice of this social behavior and are maximizing their marketing approach in two ways:

Broadcasting less and listening more. There is a conversation happening with their customers that creates strong connections and allows the customer be part of all they do.

Sharing their stories and building stronger brand connections through these stories at a much larger scale than ever before.

So how can businesses integrate this powerful Facebook strategy into their social marketing? Three new features have been released:

• Pages for Business. Customizable to better express brand identity and share who you are as an organization. The timeline can be used as a virtual showroom, a new story type called ‘Offers’ can be sent directly to the fan inbox, direct messages can be sent to the business.
• Reach Generator.  The idea behind this new tool is to evolve from ads to stories. Reach Generator will allow a business to reach up to 75% more fans on a monthly basis. Fans will comment more and “like” more; talk not only to your fans, but also friends of fans. For example, Ben and Jerry’s reached 98% of their fans, doubled engagement, and increased ROI 3:1.
• Premium on Facebook. Start with a page post. Facebook does the rest, posting on the right hand side of the Facebook feed as well as the news feed on both desktop and mobile devices. The news feed is where marketing will appear like the rest of Facebook, and less like an ad. Premium on Facebook means more stories in front of more people in more places.

What you should be measuring to determine the value of your Facebook strategy: ‘The Number of People Talking About This’. Get your fan base to spread the word. As your fan base increases so can revenues. Connecting with more fans and building a stronger community will result in more customers.

The message of this event is that a Facebook strategy is only strong when leveraging all key features that build the brand story and celebrates individual fans and users on a daily basis. Just using the Ads feature, or having a Facebook fan page is not enough. All the levers need to be active and maintained to keep the conversation alive with your customers and build those connections with authentic, relevant content.

3- Spread the word with Ads: 

Businesses function better on Facebook when they are more connected. The Bootcamp walked viewers through the ins and outs of Facebook ads, a tool for businesses to connect to their audience.

Facebook has the scale of television, the precision of direct marketing and the power of connection to spread the word between Facebook friends.

There are four types of Facebook ads:

• Standard ads
• App ads
• Like ads
•  Event ads

Before you begin and decide which types of ads to use, determine your goals for advertising on Facebook. Is it to drive sales? Is it to gain fans? With your goals in mind, you can follow these four steps for creating a successful ad:

1. Target your ad effectively: To target your ad effectively, there are several questions you can ask yourself to better understand you audience.

• Where is my audience located?
• What is my audience’s gender or age? Marital status?
• Where does my audience work?
•  What are my audience’s likes and interests?

2. Design an engaging ad

• Use succinct and clear copy and a relevant and interesting photo. (We’ve discovered in ad campaigns we’ve set up for our own clients that photos with humans work better than those with logos.)
• Use questions to engage your audience and use action oriented copy to get results.

Set a budget and bid

• Set a budget for your ad, either a lifetime total or a daily total. Facebook will never spend more than your budget.
• Facebook charges for ads in an auction. Facebook will give you a recommended bid amount but ultimately, you have control over the price of each click or impression.

Analyze and optimize

• Create several different variations of ads and then check their effectiveness daily to see which are performing best. This could differ depending on the different copy, images, target or bid used. (The Facebook team like seals and puppies)
•  Tweak your ads accordingly so that all of your ads perform well.

4- Let your customers do the talking with Sponsored Stories:

I’m a happy critic of webinars. Replicate the good, avoid the bad, stop saying “um” so much.

What are “sponsored stories?”

•  Nadine’s definition: Sponsored stories = paying for fans’ comments and actions to be picked up from wall posts and run over in the right hand column of friends’ Facebook pages, in place of a common or garden variety advertisement.
• Facebook’s definition: (paraphrase) Sponsored stories are word of mouth marketing amplified to an unprecedented scale in the social context of trusted friends.

Why are sponsored stories valuable?

Facebook’s statistics on why the social context of a sponsored story matters to business owners and marketers:

People who see a sponsored story ad in the social context of a friend’s actions exhibit:

• A 1.6 lift in brand recall
• Double the increase in message awareness
•  A 4x (quadruple!) lift in purchase intent

Therefore, brands who use sponsored stories experience a “direct and measurable performance lift.”

Facebook Ads v. Sponsored Stories

What’s the difference? Facebook Ads are for the general public; sponsored stories show up on friends’ pages only.

Six Sorts of Sponsored Stories

Here are the six kinds of stories that can be sponsored:

• Page Likes – Eric likes British Airways, and his “Like” generates a little story on the right hand side of your Facebook screen
• Page Post Likes – A similar story is generated when Eric comments on a page
• Check-in story – Eric checked in at Four Barrel Coffee for a single-varietal cupping, and a note about that appears on your page, leading you to dash out, catch the tube, mind the gap, and join Eric at Four Barrel.
• App Used – Eric played the Glory of Rome
• App Share – Eric recommends the Game of Life
• Domain – Eric thinks Red Cross is a great cause

Recommendations

Intrigued enough to consider sponsoring your brand’s stories? Facebook recommends:

• Run Sponsored Stories with Facebook Ads for best effect
• Choose the best story type for your goals
• Claim your physical “place” to enable check-in functionality
• Post regularly on your Facebook page to generate opportunities for Sponsored Stories
• For “Domain” sponsored stories, Add the “Like” and “Send” buttons to your website
• Track your performance in Ads Manager, then reallocate budget to best performing ads

5- Maximize your efforts with Insights and Optimization:

1. Craft your ad creative

2. Segment and structure your campaign clearly

3. Evaluate your campaign performance with Reports and Page Insights

Craft your Ad Creative

Body Copy

• Questions drive engagement in title or body
• Keep the body copy short and clear
• Encourage users to act immediately
• Give clear call to action with verbs like Book today to drive urgency

Discounts & Free Offers

• Everyone likes a good deal, so highlight this in your ad text
• Promote Facebook Offers/Deals!
• If possible, use words like: free, discount, promotional, trial, complimentary

Space & Logos

• Use an image that speaks to the audience demographic
• Avoid use of logos unless your logo is well recognized
• Make the most of the full space available
• Simple, uncluttered images work best

Segment and Structure your Campaigns Clearly

• Create multiple ads using different creative within the same campaign in order to identify which creative you should use.
• Use a unique URL for each campaign in order to measure which demographic delivers the best performance.
• Pause campaigns not performing well so budget is going to the right place.
• Really important to refresh your creative regularly.

Evaluate your campaign performance with Reports and Page Insights

• Within your campaign report, you can see your target audience, reach, and social reach (number of people who saw your ad with their friends’ name attached).
• Look at peak times, evaluate ads’ performance, CTR of ad, cost-per-click for ad.
• Demographics report: you can see how your ad is performing with certain audiences (and potentially modify audience).

Page Insights

• To better understand page engagement
• Understand the performance of your Page including a new public number for People Talking about This”
• Learn which content resonates with your audience
•  Optimize how you publish to your audience
•  You can now see People Talking about This (number of people who have Liked, commented, shared info about our page).

Key Takeaways

Get the creative right

• compelling copy and images for each ad
• make sure the landing page is relevant

 Segment your campaign

• By target audience, product and location
• Test 3-4 ads per campaign
• Try out different targeting options to understand best segments

Track your performance

• Run reports once per week
•  Pause low performers and adjust budget

6- Make your business more engaging with social technology:

The networking site’s belief is that “business will be better in a connected world,” and they say they’re helping us all get there with a user count of approximately 800 million.

There are two types of integration: Social Plugins and Apps.

Social Plugins: A “lightweight method” that involves adding a few lines of HTML code to a website to make it immediately more engaging for users.

Most common types of Social Plugins include:

• Like Button- Immediately shares a story on the News Feed when someone “likes” your page.
• Send Button- Allows users to send specific content to a select group of friends.
• Comments- Shares findings from external websites with friends on Facebook. ()
• Like Box- Allows users to “like” your Facebook page from your website.
• Login and Registration Buttons- Allow people to login/register to your website.

Apps: More of a “heavyweight” approach that involves further integration and development, but also delivers more personalized messages. Apps are a great way to spread the word about your business using all distribution channels, and can live on page tabs, your website, or even mobile devices.

I’m getting a lot of requests to write a post on social media metrics and measurement.  I’m getting to it, I promise. Here’s an infographic for now. 

Growing a multimillion-dollar corporation during a recession is no small feat and it’s no accident. Companies that are swimming against the economic tide are doing things differently than those that are treading the water, or worse, drowning. These are numbers from a PwC: Accelerate report.

So, what exactly separates the best from the rest? In a world of tech-empowered consumers and employees, companies that are bucking the economic trend exhibit key behaviors that allow them to exploit technology and weave it into their businesses - the company’s Digital IQ.

PwC surveyed 489 companies across industries with annual revenues of more than $500 million to find out what successful companies are doing that the others aren’t. Following is how the ‘top performers’—companies that grew by 5% or more last year—are making the grade.

1) Integrate Technology into Strategic Planning: Naturally, creating a strategic plan is the first step in implementing any sort of large-scale corporate effort. However, the effectiveness of this strategy is what counts. 89% of top performers feel confident about their strategy versus 63% of the pack.

Top performing companies are also more likely to integrate IT into their strategic planning process. Of the companies that are excelling, 86% said that their CEO is an ‘active champion’ in the use of information technology to achieve corporate strategy. That number drops to 56% for the remaining respondents.

Moreover, the crème of the crop is more likely to have a CIO who not only reports directly to the CEO, but has strong relationships with other C-suite executives. In growing/winning companies, the CIO is seen as a ‘business champion’.

2) Set and Share a Single, Multi-year Roadmap for the Overall Business Strategy: In the mobilization stage, executives create a blueprint for breathing life into the strategy. Too many companies bypass this critical step. Not the best companies.

77% of top performers have a single, multi-year roadmap. That number sinks to 54% among average performers. Furthermore, sharing that strategy throughout the company is also critical to success. 76% of top performers say that their strategy is well communicated throughout the company. Only 44% of the rest make that claim.

Additionally, 78% of top performing companies say that their business and IT leaders share an understanding of the strategy. Only 49% of the other survey respondents feel that everyone is on the same page.

3) Look Beyond Delivering IT Projects on Time and on Budget Setting: a strategy leads to IT projects that are delivered on time and on budget so it’s no surprise that superior corporations are meeting their goals more often than the others.

67% of top performers say that their initiatives were delivered on time. In stark contrast, only 38% of the rest of respondents hit the mark. Coming in at or below budget proves to be more difficult for both groups, but nonetheless, 54% of top performers did so compared to 35% of the larger group.

However, many organizations downplay the trade-offs in cutting scope and therefore potential business value in favor of bringing a project in under cost and time targets. Almost 100% of top performers say that they frequently or always deliver their planned scope versus only 35% for all surveyed.

4) Invest in Mobile Workforces: Top performers spend more on empowering their workforces with mobile devices than the rest. 44% of the high performers will invest between $250,000 and $1 million and 33% will invest more than $1 million. For the remainder of respondents, those numbers are 37% and 27%, respectively.

5) Interact with Customers Using Mobile Technology: Only 44% of the pack interacts with customers via mobile devices “quite or very significantly.” That number jumps to 66% among the top performers. And, top performers are putting their money with their mouths are: 50% of them plan to invest more than $1million in mobile solutions for customers in 2012. That number plummets to 29% for the rest of the group.

6) Reap the Rewards of Social Media: Both the best and the rest are investing in social media at almost the same rates, but the top performers claim to see more of a benefit from their efforts than their lower-performing counterparts. 41% of top performers say they are benefiting from their investments in social media compared to 24% of the others. To gain a greater edge, 40% of the top performers expect to increase their use of social media. Only 26% of the rest of respondents plan to spend more in this area. In fact, 36% of the top of the heap plan to invest $1 million in social media for internal communications in 2012.

7) Invest in Cloud Computing: Top performers are investing more aggressively in cloud computing than the pack. 52% of top performers will spend more than $1 million on public cloud applications. Only 34% of the remaining survey respondents plan to spend that much. For private cloud investments, the gap is even wider: 58% of top performers will invest more than $1 million, compared with 39% for the rest.

Overall, top-performers link strategy to specific programs and actions while mobilizing the organization around that strategy. Everyone knows what role they should be playing and what success looks like. Top performers also don’t shy away from opportunities to innovate. The role that the CIO plays is to drive superior execution and innovation.