chapter 9
Leveraging Facebook as a Platform
Your website is a crucial part of your online marketing, overall identity, and sales efforts. Without a website, you cannot compete in today’s marketplace. When you have a website, customers can find your products and services through search engines and use your site as a powerful resource for information on what you sell.
Smart businesses are going beyond just using Facebook to post comments and interact with customers — they are leveraging Facebook as a platform for enhanced communication and collaboration on their websites or other digital properties.
Integrating Facebook and Your Website
Case Study: Leveraging the Facebook Platform to Raise Brand Awareness
Why Platforms Are Important
As a small business owner, you want to focus on selling your products, supporting your customers, and growing your business. However, you are not an expert in everything. You must work with a lawyer to draft contracts, an accountant to do taxes and manage cash flow, an office space consultant to design your office, and other experts to help with many other things.
You also must connect with customers on mobile devices and through social media. Instead of you creating and maintaining all the services your company needs, larger companies, such as Facebook, provide ecosystems of services. You don’t have to build an infrastructure to connect with your customers; you can leverage Facebook — a platform — for this.
Here is one nontech example. Sure, you could store money in your home, under the pillow or in a safe. But when everyone pools money in a bank, the bank can provide services leveraging all the money in its care. Similarly, using a technology platform is more powerful than relying only on your website. Technology platforms have built-in features (such as Check-in Deals, location services, and the ability to indicate if colleagues are online and available for communicating) and large numbers of users.
Sure, you could hire a programmer to develop one or more of these services. But by using the platform of a larger infrastructure (such as Facebook), you save development time and money and take advantage of the pool of potential and current customers already on the platform.
Although many of the tools platforms offer out of the box are interesting, companies can also “mash up,” or combine, the tools or features of the service or of other services to make something uniquely beneficial to the business.
For example, the soft serve retailer Tasti D-Lite linked its loyalty cards with its social media sites, including Facebook. Every time Tasti D-Lite customers used their loyalty cards, their friends were automatically alerted on Facebook or on sites that they linked with their loyalty card — friends would see a post on their Facebook Wall (now the Timeline) or a tweet in their Twitter feed. Customers who linked their loyalty cards to their social network got more loyalty points. Pretty innovative! You can watch my interview with BJ Emerson, vice president of technology at Tasti D-Lite, at http://bit.ly/hnxgWa.
This is the power of using Facebook as a platform in your business. Phil Simon’s book, The Age of the Platform (www.theageoftheplatform.com) is good reading for more on this issue.
Integrating Facebook and Your Website
Social networks have become so popular because they connect people with one another. Traditional websites don’t have social connectivity built in to them. Sure, you can comment on a blog post and see what others have commented on, and there are other things you can program into your website. But Facebook’s natural social connectivity makes it much easier to ensure your website connects your users around your brand and its online content (see Figure 9.1).
9.1 Coca-Cola does an amazing job of integrating social plug-ins with its website. It makes good use of the News Feed and the Connect and Like buttons to encourage customers to interact with the website, Facebook Page, and products.
There are three key pillars of integrating Facebook’s platform into your website:
• Social plug-ins
• Authentication
• Personalization
Social plug-ins
Many small-business websites get very little traffic compared to those of big national brands. By adding a social plug-in to your website, you provide online visitors with instant comfort and the validation of seeing who else in their networks are also reading or otherwise engaging with the website.
Examinations of companies who have started using social plug-ins have indicated that their overall traffic and user engagement have increased.
It’s pretty easy to add a Like button to your website (see Figure 9.2):
1. Visit https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like.
2. Scroll down until you see the Get Like Button Code form and type the URL of your Facebook Page into the URL to Like text box.
3. Select a layout style from the Layout Syle drop-down list. You can choose between standard, button_count, and box_count. Each style can be previewed in the open box to the right.
4. Enter the width in the Width text box.
5. Select the Show Faces check box if you want to show the profile photo of those who have liked the Page.
6. Select the verb you want displayed, either “like” or “recommend.”
7. Select the color scheme of the plug-in, either light or dark. Again, each choice can be previewed by selecting the option and viewing it in the open box to the right.
8. Choose the font that you want to use in the plug-in. There are multiple choices and each can be previewed by clicking it and viewing it in the open box to the right.
9. Click Get Code to retrieve the code for the plug-in.
You’ll then be given HTML code that you can copy and paste into your website content management system.
9.2 Complete the simple form to create code for the Like button plug-in that can be inserted in your website.
There are a variety of social plug-ins that you can use with your website. Which one you use really depends on how you want your website visitors to interact with your Facebook Page and the design of your website.
Here are some of your options:
• Send button. The Send button enables your users to easily send your website address to their friends in a Facebook message.
• Subscribe button. The Subscribe button enables people to subscribe to your updates on Facebook. When a user subscribes, your posts and content appear in their News Feed.
• Comments box. The Comments box lets users comment on any piece of content on your site. If users leave the Post to Facebook check box selected when they post comments, those comments appear in their friends’ News Feeds.
• Activity Feed. The Activity Feed plug-in shows users what their friends are doing on your site, such as likes and comments.
• Recommendations box. The Recommendations box gives users personalized suggestions for pages on your site they might like.
• Like box. The Like box enables users to like your Facebook Page, see the number of users who already like the Page and who among those users they are friends with, and read current updates from the Page.
• Login button. This plug-in shows profile pictures of the user’s friends who have already signed up for your site in addition to a Login button.
• Registration plug-in. The Registration plug-in allows users to easily sign up for your website with their Facebook account. Say you have a website that requires users to register to access information. Instead of having users type in registration information (such as an e-mail address), the registration plug-in lets them register by typing in their Facebook e-mail address and password.
• Facepile plug-in. The Facepile plug-in displays the Facebook profile pictures of users who have liked your Page or have signed up for your site.
• Live Stream plug-in. The Live Stream plug-in lets your users share activity and comments in real time as they interact during a live event.
Authentication
On your website, you want users to authenticate themselves and indicate who they are. Sure, you could develop your own system and ask users for lots of information and verify their e-mail address. However, Facebook allows your visitors to log on to your website (or other online content) using their Facebook logon information.
Using this part of Facebook might require a programmer to help you integrate the code into your website.
According to Facebook, there are three steps to the complete authentication process: “In order to log the user in to your site, three things need to happen. First, Facebook needs to authenticate the user. This ensures that the user is who they say they are. Second, Facebook needs to authenticate your website. This ensures that users are giving their information to your site and not someone else’s. Lastly, users must explicitly authorize your website to access their information. This ensures that users know exactly what data they are disclosing.”
The authentication feature of Facebook is tremendous. Instead of asking your users to fill in information about themselves, you can obtain their basic information with their permission through Facebook. This information includes their ID, name, picture, gender, and locale.
Personalization
Another way that you can leverage the power of Facebook for your business is to personalize your website for each user, depending on his or her logon information. Part of this personalization is publishing things to the users’ Facebook Timeline and News Feeds. This means that not only are you engaging with particular online users but they are also your mini-evangelists telling their Facebook friends about content on your website.
Apps and Mobility
Many companies are finding success in leveraging Facebook’s platform by creating apps that customers and prospective customers can leverage to enhance their customer experience with the company. This might include something for productivity, such as a tracking and shipping application within Facebook, or something more fun, such as a game related to the product or service you sell. This all happens within Facebook.
Overall, apps are a great way to not only engage your customers but also provide information to the network of your customers, encouraging digital referrals and word of mouth about your brand.
These are just some of the ways that apps can be used to extend your reach and engagement to customers and prospective customers. Check out Chapter 10 for more information.
Designing for Community
Prior to social networks, websites and e-mail newsletters were designed as one-way communication mechanisms. They were thought of as digital brochures at the least and online megaphones at most.
With the advent of social networks, in particular Facebook, web designers have been challenged to ensure their websites are not only filled with great content for their users but also enable customers to connect with other customers and facilitate engagement and conversation.
Your customers are for sure speaking about you online — they’re praising your new product or flaming the bad service they got from your new hire. By being proactive and facilitating these conversations, you can at least be one of the first to discuss what’s happening at your company specifically or overall in your industry.
Say you operate a small bed-and-breakfast and want to go beyond just posting pictures of your rooms. By having a website designed for community, you can leverage Facebook (working with a programmer to help you) and help users find the best room for them based on recommendations of other users.
Case Study: Leveraging the Facebook Platform to Raise Brand Awareness
Here’s one example of how a company, Hiscox Insurance, used Facebook to promote and manage a contest.
In the fall of 2011, small-business specialist insurer Hiscox launched a contest on Facebook called MyStartupStory. The purpose of the contest was to collect from entrepreneurs and small-business owners their start-up stories, best advice, and lessons learned when they first launched their business.
Objective
The objective of the contest was to help maintain and increase brand awareness of Hiscox in the United States, because although Hiscox has a strong U.K. brand and a 100-year history, the company is a new entrant in the U.S. small-business space. By combining interactive content on Facebook as well as other social media platforms, including Twitter and LinkedIn, Hiscox engaged with current and potential customers, increased interaction with current followers, and attracted new followers.
Execution
The Hiscox MyStartupStory contest was conducted from September 27 through November 11, 2011, and asked passionate entrepreneurs and small-business owners to create either a 2- to 5-minute video or a written essay describing their start-up story for a chance to win $10,000 and other prizes. Entrants shared their advice for other small businesses, including the biggest challenges they faced, how they overcame them, the best advice they received, and the biggest lesson they learned in the process.
Strategy
Hiscox planned a multipronged media strategy to promote the contest:
• A blast e-mail was sent by Hiscox to current clients to encourage their participation.
• A description of the contest was posted to Facebook and that link was tweeted to followers.
• A media alert about the contest was posted to Hiscox’s website, which was linked to via Twitter and the Facebook Page to drive participants to the Hiscox site.
• The contest was promoted daily via social media channels to drive the participation rate.
• Hiscox reached out to bloggers and Twitter influencers to assist in the promotion.
• Entries were posted on the Hiscox blog as ongoing promotion for both the contestants and the contest itself.
• The submissions were sent through the Facebook Page and monitored by Hiscox on the back end.
Hiscox chose to execute the contest on Facebook because of the reach and flexibility the platform affords. Hiscox was able to both run the contest from Facebook and promote the entrants and winners through its Facebook Page. Most concerted social media activity before the contest was focused on Twitter, and Hiscox was able to use that growing following and cross-promote the contest on Facebook, which until then had been a less-utilized platform.
Cost
Hiscox used online survey service Wildfire App for Facebook Marketing to execute the contest. Wildfire charged a $5 initial fee and an ongoing fee of 99 cents per day. In addition to the nominal execution fee, Hiscox also provided a $10,000 grand prize to the winner and an option of items from Hiscox’s “Supply Closet” (which included business essentials such as a paper shredder, an office chair, and an iPad, among others) to the second-place winner. The third-place winner received registration for a small-business conference (chosen from a list provided by Hiscox). In total, the cost for the contest and prizes was approximately $11,550.
Success and results
The cross-promotion on many social media platforms as well as a targeted media strategy garnered more than 70 submissions from small-business owners across 19 industries ranging from IT to health and wellness. The winning submissions were featured on the Hiscox Small Business Insurance Facebook Page until November 30, 2011.
In terms of measureable results, the MyStartupStory contest had the following impact across social and earned media channels:
• Post views increased 34 percent.
• Post feedback (comments and likes on the posts) increased 150 percent.
• New likes on Facebook increased 239 percent.
• Active users increased 134 percent.
• Twitter followers increased 152 percent.
• Seven articles were published in a variety of small-business outlets promoting the contest and directing people to the Hiscox Small Business Insurance Facebook Page. These publications had total reach of more than 400,000 based on circulation.
You can learn several lessons from this case study:
• It is imperative to do the majority of the legwork beforehand. Before launching, pay close attention to Facebook’s contest rules and execute a thorough review of different contest vendors and contest plan options to ensure clarity on what is required versus what is prohibited and what to expect overall.
• Draft the questions in the submission criteria carefully to ensure you can elicit the proper tone and content from submissions.
• Make things as easy as possible for applicants. Hiscox found that allowing applicants to submit either a written or video entry allowed busy entrepreneurs who may not have time to film and edit a video to participate.
The MyStartupStory contest was an opportunity for entrepreneurs to share their real-world experiences with others, and Hiscox was encouraged by all the great stories and practical advice it received. Overall, the contest was a great success and enabled Hiscox to forge relationships with the entrants and winners of the contest, and even to leverage the winners for other business opportunities and referrals.