Friday 30 March 2012

Creating a Facebook eco-system

CREATING AN EFFICIENT FACEBOOK ECO-SYSTEM
This was the title of a very good, sensible and practical talk by Geoff Hughes of Social Clay at the Social Media World Forum on Tuesday. I’ve tried to pick out the key points below, but you can access the presentation on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/hyuz/social-clay-creating-an-efficient-facebook-ecosystem-2012-0327 or contact Geoff on Twitter @hyuz.

His main point was that you can regard Facebook and other online sites as an overall system, and that you can plan for the various elements of it to be mutually reinforcing. The system as he described it is captured in the picture below.




Intelligently, Geoff began by stressing that you needed to define your objectives first – probably leads or revenue rather than “likes” – and decide how you are going to measure them. Only then do you develop your strategy – including in particular considerations of best practice and benchmarking. So the whole system becomes one big feedback loop, with reporting and monitoring being a critical element driving continuous improvement.

Looking at specific parts of the system: the Cover page should be a clear pictorial representation of who you are – you must reassure users that they are in the right place – combined with a definite call to action (possibly more than one, but that risks diluting the message). You need a content plan for your newsfeed and timeline that drives engagement – and content generation should come from across the whole company, not just a couple of specialists.

Then your website plays another important role. Each page should have a Like button so users can share good content – if it’s not good enough to share, why is it there at all? Use a recommendations box to point new users to the most popular content (rather than landing on your Timeline which be showing the latest user complaint.)

Other tricks include simple and easy registration with Facebook only used when relevant – “frictionless”. Recruitment and retention through ads and effective, personalised online campaigns.

All in all the talk was an impressive blueprint for developing your strategy – rightly praised by the moderator as being something many people would have been prepared to pay for. Thanks Geoff.