Over the past two years, we’ve worked with a huge range of companies to help them market themselves effectively inside Facebook. We’ve built dozens and dozens of interactive applications and campaigns, and throughout this we have learned that the most important aspect of a company’s presence in Facebook is the ability to speak directly to their customers. All of the advertising to push people to your fan page, and getting them to press that ‘like’ button, is money well spent - because once they’ve liked you, you can speak to them directly, through their newsfeed, every single day. 80-90% of all engagement with fan pages happens through the newsfeed - which is also where users spend most of their time. The interactive applications and competitions we build are always most effective when they are promoted to highly engaged fans - which only comes when companies have learned how to communicate with their customers properly through the feed.
By engaging properly with your fans in the feed, you build up their trust and interest in what you have to say - so when you have an application, or a video, or a new product you want to promote, they’ll listen; and if it’s good, they’ll share it with their friends. Without this trust, it doesn’t matter how many fans you have - they’re not listening.
Twitter has taken the lead in companies’ minds when it comes to having conversations with followers. It’s a great platform - and because conversation is the only thing you can do there, it’s easy to understand why companies have jumped into it. But, the great mass of your customers are on Facebook. The availability of the Facebook platform and engagement ads has meant that a lot of companies have focused purely on its potential as a broadcast medium - but the newsfeed and status updates were invented in Facebook first, and the amount of comments and engagement can dwarf what you get in other platforms. We believe that it’s time for companies to start really engaging and having conversations with their customers in Facebook. This is especially important for companies who have already invested in large pages with lots of fans (it’s likely that you have customers asking you questions right now, and you’re just ignoring them) but it’s also a powerful medium for all companies, big or small, to interact with their customers.
We want to help companies have these conversations, and manage them in an effective way. It can be difficult for companies to keep track of all the comments they are getting, especially if more than one person has responsibility for responding and engaging back. To help address these problems, we’ve been working on a new software as a service product, Conversocial. Conversocial pulls in every user interaction on your fan page or pages, and makes it easy to manage your responses and actions, individually or as a team, with tools to make your day to day management more efficient - including keyword tracking and email alerts for flagged content.
You can read more on what Conversocial can do here.
Conversocial is already being used, by numerous customers, to manage fan pages with almost 10 million fans between them. Over the past couple of months our early customers have been helping us test and scale. We have bold plans for where we want to take Conversocial, but we also believe in following an agile process - we release basic features early, and focus on learning what you actually find useful and use, and then use that knowledge to improve.
If you are managing your company’s fan page, and struggling to keep on top of what comments you’ve already read or responded to, Conversocial can help you right now. And if you’re not managing your page yet - you should be! Get in touch now.
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