Facebook's New 'Best Practices Guide' a Winner

Building a Facebook fan base can be extremely time-consuming, but the company has made iteasier with its new "Best Practices Guide." The 14-page guide does a good job of explaining not only how businesses can build a fanbase but also how to use Facebook to reach specific business objectives.

The guide opens with five "guiding principles": build a strategy that is social by design, create an authentic brand voice, make it interactive, nurture your relationships and keep learning.

Next comes common business objectives and ways to reach them. These include building awareness, differentiating yourself from the competition, increasing traffic and sales, building loyalty and gaining insights by observing customer's actions and comments.

What I found really helpful are 14 actual case studies of some of the bigger brands and how they've used Facebook to reach a specific objective. Here are three of them:

To build awareness of its new M&Ms Pretzel line, Mars created a Facebook app called the M&M's Pretzel Vending Machine. By liking the page, some 40,000 fans were able to get a free sample delivered to them and, if they chose, two of their friends. Mars ended up distributing 120,000 samples within 48 hours.

• To increase traffic and sales, Levi's launched its fall 2010 Workwear Collection with a 40 percent off coupon offer that resulted in a two-fold increase to the Levi's website within 15 minutes of it being posted on Facebook. Levi's also used Facebook ads to drive traffic to its stores, where customers received an in-store discount.

• To gain insights about its customers, VisitBritain used a Facebook ad campaign to raise brand awareness that would attract visitors to Great Britain. Every day, it posts something related to the UK for discussion. With a relatively small budget, Visit Britain has been able to write a post and know within a few minutes if it is resonating with people. Compare that to an expensive billboard campaign where it's much harder to gauge a reaction.

What's your Facebook success story? Send it to me via email, and I'll share it on my Facebook fan page, in a future blog post and in my e-newsletter, PR NOW.

Image by MoneyBlogNewz/Creative Commons.

Share:

Chris Ruys is founder and president of Chris Ruys Communications, Inc., a marketing/public relations firm that specializes in high visibility campaigns using both traditional and social media strategies. She invites you along on her journey to become a social media master in “Getting Social.”