Inside the Suitcase

What is Social Media? An Intro to Facebook. (4 of 6) / January 25, 2010

Facebook is a social networking website that allows its users to add friends, send direct or indirect messages and update their personal profile to notify their friends about themselves. Some of Facebook’s features include status updates (including photos, videos, game results, links, etc.), photo album creation and recent highlights from their friends. Additionally, users can join networks, groups or become fans of company “pages“.

While Facebook started as a social hangout for friends, companies have starting using Facebook for marketing communications and recruiting.  Creating a company page takes just minutes and can pay off with the form of increased brand awareness, better consumer engagement and additional referral visits to the company website.

Think that Facebook is only for college students? According to iStrategyLabs, in 2009, the fastest growing segment was 35-54 year olds at a rate of 276%, meaning that this demographic doubles every two months. Not far behind them are those 55+ with a growth rate of 194%.

The benefits of Facebook:

• Generate brand awareness
• Communicate promotions, contests and events
• Drive web traffic
• Manage your reputation
• Retain clients
• Build relationships with prospects
• Show up in real-time Google results
• Build applications to further engage users
• Recruit key employees

Facebook best practices:

• Fill out all your contact information
• Configure settings to allow more participation with your friends/fans
• Use your organization’s logo as your page picture
• Ask questions to spark conversations and activity
• Add the Fan Box Widget to your website or blog
• Have more than one administrator for your page

Tostitos on Facebook A Case Study:

Tostitos launched the Race to the Bowl Facebook campaign which offered Longhorn and Buckeye football fans a chance to win a $100,000 scholarship for their university. Two Facebook apps were made for this promotion: 1. used to collected fans info, a short paragraph about why they should be selected and a photo showing their school spirit 2. used for teams to check out opponents entries.  Two teams of six fans from each university were chosen to race from New York to the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl in Arizona on game day. Throughout the challenge, they were filmed and wrote updates about their experience on the Facebook fan page.

Here’s what they achieved:

• 17,779 people became fans of the Facebook page
• 56,531 page views
• 39,477 unique visitors
• 597 wall posts
• 1098 entries with photos for the contest
• 1925 entries to the contest were shared with a friend

Have questions about how to get started with social media in general or Facebook in particular? to see how we can help you.

Check out previous articles in this series:

• An Intro to Social Media
• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Posted by Rachel

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