The other day, a colleague pointed something out to me that brands like Starbucks and Pepsi don’t have any ads on their Facebook Pages, while smaller brands do. What gives?
My first reaction is that as brands achieve stardom (and enjoy millions and millions of fans) Facebook gives them a break and kills ads from showing up. This helps reduce any distraction from the main brand, and eliminates the possibility of competitive ads from appearing.
Now, this seems pretty fair to me – after all, Starbucks, for example, has invested heavily in building a Facebook presence — which in turn, helps build the overall user experience for Facebook. On the flip side of the coin, this decision would also cost Facebook money, in missed revenue opportunities (after all, they’re missing out on serving ads to any of the 20+ million fans who visit Starbucks’ page, for example)
Now the question is — and I couldn’t find anything on this — what is the threshold for ads to disappear?
Starbucks and Pepsi with 20.5 and 3.5 million fans, respectively, have no right hand side advertisements appearing. While Photoshop, with 1.9 million fans, does.
After observing this, it makes me wonder if its based off a pre-set threshold of fans (reach the magic number, and the ads disappear), brand advertising spend levels (assuming Pepsi and Starbucks buys ads on Facebook), or something else all together?
And, is it something that lesser brands (say with less than 1 million fans) could pay for the privilege of — can I offer to pay $XX,XXX+ for an ‘add free’ environment for my brand?
Someones always got to push the limits on Facebook… and today’s winner was Conan O’Brien. From what I gather, he spent an hour “hosting his show” on Facebook, to his 1.5 million fans.
Sounds like a smart idea — but rather than sharing a live video stream, he posted status updates… again and again, and again and then some more, non stop.
Now, this could go either way — either be incredibly annoying, or insanley brilliant. Annoying, well, because they took over their fan’s news feed. Brilliant, because for every ‘like’ or comment one of their fans would post, means ANOTHER group of friends would be exposed to CoCo and his show.
My first impression was that people would unlike the page en mass. When I first noticed it, they had 1,523,043 fans… by the end of the episode, they dropped to 1,522,047 — a loss of just under a thousand?
I’m guessing they lost a bunch more, but for every unlike, they probably picked up 5 more likes, simply because of the viral aspect of Facebook.
And on top of that, I suspect CoCo will pick up some additional exposure somewhere on broadcast news and blogs.
The only real question I had at the end of it, is why didn’t this trip some sort of Facebook alert, to freeze his account after the 50th post, all a minute apart? (I counted 96 in total…)
All in all — I’d rank this one as a clever use of Facebook. Though, I don’t think every brand could pull it off.
With the Canadian election underway, I ‘liked’ all of the major parties on Facebook to see what they’re doing to leverage social media. For the most part, I’ve been unimpressed…
When the USA had their presidential election, there was a much more active outreach through social media. In Canada, much like Canadian politics… we’re boring! Everything’s been safe — almost too safe, for such an innovative medium, but I digress.
What has caught my attention, isn’t WHAT the parties are posting, but HOW. In particular, how the NDP is dealing with a bilingual country. Rather than targeting users based off their language (which is dead easy to do…), they post everything twice, within minutes of each other: Once in English, and once in French.
Why? Who knows…
Here’s my advice. Work under the assumption, that whoever “Likes” you on Facebook, is viewing Facebook in their preferred language. With that, target them accordingly… here’s how:
- Below the status update box, select the ‘Everything’ drop down.
- From here, a popover window will appear — simply start typing in the language you’re speaking in, and hit ‘Okay’. You’ll have to do this twice, to target those speaking English, and those speaking French — but it will leave the page much less cluttered, and not double message the fan base (ultimately reducing ‘unlikes’).
And while we’re at it… the political campaigns can take it one step further…
- Go Beyond French and English: With Facebook, you can target any language, so why be restricted by just French and English? Open it up to even more languages, using the same steps as above.
- Add Some Branding: The party leaders all have their own Facebook Fan pages, but none of them have any party branding on their profile picture — sure, they have branding on the Party pages, but not their own. This is a missed opportunity in terms of further tying themselves in with their party.
- Add in a Welcome Page: Give me a reason to ‘Like’ the page (and make it clear, via a giant arrow on where to click), along with links to your YouTube, Twitter, Email and Website.
- Thank Me for Liking You: Provide an exclusive ‘welcome’ video to whoever likes the page. Its fairly simply to do, and will help guide the fan on what they can do to help the campaign further.
- Integrate an Email Capture Form: Try to collect an email address at every turn — this gives you another way to reach out and share your messaging with supporters. Don’t just rely on Facebook, look for engagement on every medium.
- Make it a Conversation: Most of the post are simply “telling” us things… how about asking us something once in a while? (eg: what’s our take on healthcare)
With Canadians now in the midsts of yet another election, politicians of all strips are gearing up to make their case to the voters…. while at the same time, Chapters is gearing up to… sell political books?
Below is one of the more interesting email campaigns I’ve received from Chapters as of late. The main reason why this campaign caught my attention, is because it almost has a sub-conscious message to readers on who to vote for (or not to vote for). The most prominent book listed, is called “Harperland” with the description “An examination of the dangerous growth of executive power, including spear campaigns and control of the media that have resulted in Harper and his team redefining the office and undermining democracy.”
Following that, are two books listed under the headline “Political Satire”, then finally a few “More Political Reads.” In seeing this email, I instantly wondered if it was a simple coincidence, or if Chapters trying to say something more? After all, the subject line was “… books that will help to inform your vote.”
You would think, that leading in which such a negative slant towards one party leader, may offend some of their customers. I wonder what type of conversion rate this email got. Sure, its quite relevant to current events in terms of the election, but did it go too far for their customer base?
I’ve been on LinkedIn for several years now, and have probably deleted a 100+ of the update emails they send out within seconds of scanning it. This one, however, caught my eye, for obvious reasons.
Rather than names and text, they actually used the faces of my contacts in the email. So now, I have this piece, that is telling me who changed their titles in 2010, and gives me one-click access to their profile. Aside from being visually interesting, they really tap into personalization on this one.
From a technical perspective, its not that hard to do… All it really is, is a bunch of dynamic variables sucking in a particular contact’s pre-sized picture. Eg: Have the past 46 contacts appear in an 8×6 grid — simply put in their picture, and a link to their profile, and you’re set.
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Hi, I'm Dave. I'm an online marketer in Vancouver.
