I agree, therefore, to get customer or prospects to come back, you will need to have a publishing calendar for your blog, or a tip message which is sent periodically to keep the consumers or prospects in your group engaged.

Many marketers out there only focus on one thing, and that is SET and Forget, like SEO, but they do not focus on having conversation with their community online. Marketing has shifted from Interruption (old School) to Engagement (new school). It is not supposed to be a one way communication in which the Web Publisher publishes and the user reads only. The User now wants to INTERACT with the website to gain participation and belong to the community.

Marketing on Facebook is really about engaging prospects in online conversation, disseminating information which is valuable, and once the consumer or client or prospect sees the value of the stuff you are giving, whether it be tips or content, they will view you as a good person or brand to follow. This will generate word of mouth. Of course, this is not a one time thing, but it is better than investing millions in newspaper, TV or radio for one time short term return without branding and targetted marketing.

Further to that, Facebook has to be tied in with a blog or a website so that you can get the crowds or your prospects to be constantly engaged in reading your posts, and finding good value and relevant information in it. Marketing in Facebook is not purely Facebook Social Advertising, but it is a continuous engagement process through online conversations.

What do you guys think?

Facebook marketing using groups/pages is like an email newsletter without the cost of sending or risk of being marked as spam. Because the email arrives into a recipients inbox with Facebook in it's title.

I believe the biggest challenge in Facebook marketing is getting the fans to participate in discussions in it. Otherwise, using Facebook is only a means of updating fans (like newsletters).

Though the most important factor is directing the traffic back to the website.

Yourself for example, constantly reminds members here to attend your seminar (as if it's free) by visiting your website. This is a method of redirecting traffic back to your website. Which coincidentally should be done using Facebook as well.

So my question to Facebook marketing is:

Besides sending updates to fans, what other tangible effective benefits can Facebook marketing be used for marketing to clients especially in Malaysia?

Hi etsuko,

I am really glad you asked this question, as it is a very relevant question.

As most people in Malaysia still thinks the Facebook, or even online or Internet has not taken off, I would like to share my 2 cents worth.

Something really spot on which you did say is this, that it sends traffic back to your own blog, or website,

To answer the question posed, Online Marketing has shifted from just banners and sending traffic, to Online Conversations and Engagement. What this simply means is that, marketing is not about pushing a brand or a product through email broadcast or even having newsletters. It is about conversations.

I have 3 strong Malaysian case studies that exhibits this.

First, is Malaysian Business Network, which is a group we started with Branding Association of Malaysia to engage seminar participants for the Branding Conference Malaysia 2009, recently held in Palace of the Golden Horses in March. We used Facebook to gather 3000 business professionals into 1 single group, and using Groups, we send out an email to them using a story and personal copywriting style. After which, we took over the Group to constantly send business information and tie in to a social network for business owners in Malaysia which we built at Malaysian Business Network Online By having a separate social network for the business owners to connect, you will be able to engage them in online conversation and allow them to do business in Malaysia, as well as market themselves to other business owners which is may be a potential Joint Ventures for themselves.

Secondly, through another group on Facebook, which is Booksterhub, we have managed to engage 1500 Malaysian Book readers and have successfully negotiated with MPH Bookstores who is now in partnership with Booksterhub to leverage this group as a Branding and Marketing platform. This is the tangibel effective benefits for MPH, whereby they are now tapping into BooksterHub Facebook group, and also not the newly built Malaysian Book Lovers Social Network, BooksterHub Update: MPH just put in the Booksterhub link at their website at MPH Online - http://www.mphonline.com on the top left of the their website.

Thirdly, through another group on Facebook, which is Moviescraps, we have managed to engage 800 Malaysian Movie Lovers, and they have begun their conversations within the group, resulting in word of mouth marketing online, thus increasing exposure of the film, and that leads to higher box office. Of course, to have a better analytics and tracking, we can send them to a tracking link that redirects them to GSC Online for movie ticket purchase, which will be implemented in the near future. Social media metrics and ROI tangible calculation is still in its infancy stage in Malaysia though. You can now view Moviescraps Malaysian Movie Lovers social network at Moviescraps.com

It has been a great question which you posted here, etsuko, and of course, we have a great talk coming up on Facebook Malaysian Case Studies at Facebook Revolution Workshop We are already in talks with major brands of Malaysia that begins to see that social media or even Facebook online conversations through groups is directly affecting their online and offline sales. These are mega brands in the SuperBrands awards which we are currently in negotiations with, and I believe, corporate Malaysia is now beginning to realize the importance of engagement of consumers as a recommendation process, rather than be engrossed in old school metrics such as Cost Per Impression, and Pay Per Clicks.

Hope that this answers your question, and feel free to ask and I would be glad to share my experience and my humble opinions and case studies in Malaysia here.

This post has been edited by vckloong: Jun 9 2009, 01:05 AM

Vckloong,

Can you share with us how many percentage of the members from your FB group actually will visit and sign up at your website?

Thanks.

Hi joanneqpk,

At a normal conversion rate on online implementations, the conversion rate would be 1%. Which means, normally, every 100 person who visit your website, 1 person will sign up, if it is a paid item. If it is simply signing up for Free, normally, it jumps to 10 to 30%.

To increase conversion rates, proper copywriting is imminent, and you need some good social and personal emails.

In Facebook, we send out personal style emails, like :

"Hi Members,

How are you guys doing?

We (MovieScraps) just watched this movie, Transformers 2, Revenge of The Fallen, and we think its kinda cool. The action sequence, the Computer Animation and the acting was amazing.

--- personal opinion continues---

Sincerely,
Your Movie Lover Friend, Vincent Cheng

- End of Facebook messages -

So, since we are in Social Media, we need to be really laid back, and not send out an email entitled "Transformers Promotion" but with a header that says "Transformers Movie Preview was COOL!". The crowds on the Internet now is smart to detect corporate commercial promotion and it won't bode well on Facebook.

Hope this answers your question, joanneqpk.

This post has been edited by vckloong: Jun 5 2009, 03:56 PM

Hey vckloong, good way to address my comments with your shared case studies.

Here's a scenario, observation and possibly, premonition I've noticed in Facebook.

Many users now automatically send invitations to their other friends after joining a group. However, the friends sending out these invitations only assume their friends will join the group because they have joined. Therefore, there's no way to target the real friends who'd really be qualified that'll lead to higher conversions.

Which also means the conversion of this friend to most likely join the original friend in the group is 50-50. Plus, this is a group we're talking about and not an application - that strikes better curiosity.

Anyway, my premonition is users will be tired of getting spammed in Facebook very soon. Which may lead to:

1. Leaving a group.
2. To the extreme, deleting a friend - especially if it's one not close.

What is your personal opinion of this?

And, how do you believe corporates will overcome it?

Many people are doing this but i dont since facebook is just a media for me to keep contact with my friends. However, i did use facebook to marketing my website with other people facebook who have more than 50k network member on faebook, just pay them for marketing

Dear Lifeplayer

Why paying someone to do when you can do it yourself?

Social media (facebook) marketing is a different ball game to market your product or services.
There are methods to market to a group of members in facebook group. You need to focus on the social aspect not the media expect.

Here are some tips on how to launch a facebook marketing campaign.
1. Launch a weekly newsletter to educate your members and give them value first (of course remember to your link at the end of the newsletter)
2. Launch a meet up event to meet up and network with your members
3. Get FREE vouchers to launch competition on the group
4. Give them a link to download your ebook for FREE
5. Upload videos to talk to them on your product or services.

All in all, it's about positioning yourself as an expert status and a group leader who will go out to fight for the group members. A group network is meant for people to Recommed, Rate & Review. Marketing comes in when people recommend and review about you. Facebook user will leave the moment you try to hard sell.

If you would want other admin in a network for you, make sure you ask them to do these for you.
If not, the fastest way is to build your group and do it yourself.

Now, I hope that you can see that Facebook is not purely for your check out your friends only.
Because people are spending more time in Facebook (statistics show that average person spend 2 hours on facebook), you might want to engage with them more.

Hi etsuko,

I agree totally with you. Many users do send invitations to their friends after joining a group and assume their friends will join this group because they have joined. And yes, I do agree that the invited users may not have a higher conversion rate. This is a genuine spot on fact which you have highlighted.

And again, your premonition of people leaving a group because of getting "spammed" in Facebook may be correct again. Deleting friends will also be an option which they choose.

To answer this first part of the question, through my 2cents humble opinion, I would say that this first question can be broken down to 2 sub-questions. The questions which I perceive which is being presented here are:

1. How do we increase a conversion with all these human automatic invitation of friends to join Facebook group?
2. How do we ensure that users do not feel being spammed so that it will not result to the leaving of the group and also deleting of the friend?

I hope that my perception and guess is correct.

Going by that line, let's explore the first sub-question. There is no denying that the auto habit of group invitation of groups actually may invite the "untargetted" people who join out of peer pressure or assumption to join somebody who has invited them. Then again, that is the whole point of Facebook or any social network for that matter. First, Facebook was built on the concept of 6 degrees of separation, which says that you may know someone who know someone, who know the person you need to get in touch with. Meaning, all humans are connected through some relationship with each other or with others which we may know. The people which we know or interact directly is called the First Degree Friends. If you have 6 Degree of Friends, where you have 6 close friends, and assuming everyone has 6 close first degree friends, we may be hitting a network of 6 to the power of 6, which is close to 300,000 people. That is in theory. The first degree of friends which we invite in Facebook who join the group have may have implied the first filter for targetted market for your group of interest Facebook, as some may join because of genuine interest, and some may join because of friendship pressure. Holding this point in mind, some may not be genuine leads for your conversion. To further this, your friend who has joined may invite other friends, and so on to the 6 degrees. At the end, we will have 50 - 50 conversion possibility like you said.

Knowing that some may be genuine leads of interest in the group, and some are out of pressure, we have 2 choices as marketers. First, which is the negative one, is to discard them as non-leads and forget about them, and the second, which is a more positive one, is to make the genuine leads to influence these non-leads until they become genuine leads. At this point, the question in our minds could be, "So, how do we influence this genuine leads, to influence the non-leads?" This question will tie in with the second sub-question, and indirectly answers it.

With that in mind, we will be using the Message All Members feature within Facebook to send out non-spammy but highly related quality content on the Group's topic of interest. Assuming we are talking about Online Gaming. We, as marketers should not spam them with content like this:

Subject Line of Message : Promotion ! 30% Discount on InGame Credits
Body Message: Buy now at http://www.YourOnlineGamingSite.com !

- End of Facebook Message -

What we should be doing as marketers to make sure we engage and retain the interest of genuine leads in the Facebook Group is to not spam them with commercial message, but send out a message that is more personal and with more value like this:

Subject Line of Message : Strategy Guide for Malaysian Gamers in World of Warcraft
Body Message: (At this point, you, as a marketer, would be giving the tips and strategies on World of Warcraft, and at the end of the message, you would put a backlink to your website as a signature, like this:

Check out In Game Credits for Popular Online Games at Buy now at http://www.YourOnlineGamingSite.com

- End of Facebook Message -

At this point, we have already explored a better way of Messaging All Members and differentiate from all other Gaming Groups in Facebook, and will retain the interest and membership of the members which we have invited. In a long term, maintaining the Group by sending quality content before you link to your site, without spammy commercial messages, you, as a marketer will retain the genuine leads interest, and the non-leads will hopefully see the value of this Group's broadcasted content, and begin to play World of Warcraft. If not, they may leave the group, which is perfectly fine, as they are genuinely not interested, but still see value in this group. So with these explanation, I hope that I have answered the 2 subquestions with my humble 2cents.

The second question is "How do you believe corporates will overcome it??"

At this point, I may have conjured 2 different context to this second question.

1. How do we help the corporates to overcome the group 50-50 non genuine leads challenge?
2. How do we convince the corporates to buy in to social media like Facebook as a marketing strategy?

Taking the first context, I believe, we need to convince the corporates with my humble explanation in the first question and help them see it. I believe some will discard it, to their loss, and some may be logical and open enough to see it, and embrace the solution which you are providing to your prospectful corporate clients.

Taking the second context, we will have to know the Marketing Managers and Directors, educate them about the concept of a recommender community in a niche market, being more powerful than sending commercial messages to spam the consumers. This in itself needs to be a combination of relationship level between you and the corporate client, as well as your convincing and negotiation skills.

I must say, it is not easy to convince the corporates, as middle managers are too busy running the daily operations and is not open to Facebook marketing as they may still see Facebook as a kiddy social network, which in actual fact, at the time of this writing, has 1.6 Million Malaysian Facebookers, in which half of it is above 25 years old, and is working in organization with middle and higher level income, with disposable income to contribute their product sales.

Hope that I have got it right in terms of the perception and understanding the question yeah.

what if facebook gets too big and get too crowded? will twitter take over?

Hi DeLoong,

Your question is truly relevant as this is what is being thought of by most people, not only in Malaysia, but globally.

Facebook, to lots of people's opinions, is still a growing social network. As the advent of Friendster and MySpace shows that there is a possibility of a slowdown after a few years of climax and glory, in terms of signup and active users, Facebook seems to remain strong, for now.

As most of the trend indicate, any social network which forgets to innovate to the needs of consumers and its users will fall behind. Looking at friendster, what happened as a strong and biggest social network has rendered weak because of the slow loading time and technical issues which plagued it after too many users have signed up and began using its system. Its database structure and data infrastructure was crippled with the sheer mega volume of activity. Apart from that, once a Social Network begins to be controlled by investors and venture capitalist, the user experience like loading time and targetted relevant features begin to suffer, thus resulting to the members leaving or migrating to another social network.

Facebook has begun to slow down in terms of processing power and loading time, but makes up with the various features offered by third party Facebook applications, which is tailored to each group of interest in Facebook. There are currently more than 1 million applications installed in Facebook, and this is a great architecture and platform to keep engaging users and to maintain their interest and activity in Facebook. Therefore, if Facebook is able to upgrade its infrastructure with better processing power in its servers, I believe it will be here to stay for awhile, at least for the next 5 years.

Twitter, is a microblogging social network, and is very big when it is tied in with any telecommunications company. This simply means that, Twitter, at present, which is in Joint Venture with US telcos, are really big in the US, but not the case in Malaysia. This is because, in US, Twitter is used more as a mobile status marketing tool, rather than an online tool, as any status updates or tweets, as they call it, will send a SMS or text message to the Twitter follower's mobile phone. As of present, Twitter has yet to partner any telcos in Malaysia, rendering and limiting it as only a web status update tool. Furthermore, the adoption rate of Twitter is not as high as Facebook, and the features within Twitter is by far the least richer than Facebook. This leads to lower engagement activity between the social network with its users as they have less things to do on the site, as opposed to Facebook.

To summarize, I believe, in my humble opinion, that Twitter will take some time before it becomes big in Malaysia, and Facebook is here to stay if they fix the slow loading time challenge they are facing today.

Hope this answers your question, DeLoong.

Hey vckloong, the answers are definitely great insight of your knowledge on Facebook and the current trends of it.

And indeed, I've to agree with Twitter not taking over Facebook in Malaysia just yet. It's still very new here - like when Facebook started. Plus, we could've had a very popular Twitter-like application running but it somewhat lost focus. If you guys remembered PacMee, you'll know what I mean.

Anyway, I've a new question which came to me while reading your answers.

Does Facebook Marketing take as much commitment as SEO?

Note; I'm not weighing Social Media Marketing (SMM) to SEO but specifically only Facebook Marketing.

Hi Etsuko,

Thanks for your agreement and encouragement. That helps to validate my humble opinions and to motivate me to continue to give value in this forum.

Your question on Facebook Marketing may take as much commitment in SEO can be divided to a few aspects which is as follows:

1. Does it take as much mathematical calculation for KeyWord density, meta tags and backlinks and etc ?
2. Does it take as much time to optimize the Facebook Group, Events, Pages within the Search function in Facebook?
3. Is it hard to optimize Facebook Group to appear in Google and other major search engines?
4. What kind of job tasks is needed to perform Facebook Marketing?

Taking the first question, I would say, Facebook requires less of the mathematical calculation. In my experience as a SEO consultant for the past 4 years, until I gave up as I felt it is too robotic and risky to optimize for keywords in Search Engines only to find the clients typing other keywords, and losing the ROI on SEO, I decided to jump ship to Social Media and Facebook Marketing, particularly, as Facebook is the best new media for Malaysians as of present date. The next few answers to the questions will answer your question in a more complete manner.

Moving on to answer the second question, is that, you do need to take care of the various fields in the TextBoxes that Facebook asks you to fill up when you create your Group, or Page or Events. These are equivalent to your meta tags optimization in SEO process. To make it simple, put in organic keywords of your target market's interest when they search for your Group in Facebook so that the Group, Page or Event will rank high in the Facebook Search Results. Though, to my opinion, not many people are going to find a Group through the Search function, but more to a friend's recommendation or invitation.

Answering the third question, since Facebook has a PR 8, and if your groups are accessible without logging in to Facebook, the Search Engine spiders will be able to find your group. Therefore, the only things you can play around in optimizing the group in SEO rankings is again, tying in to the second answer above, is of course, meta tags of the Facebook Group which is the Description, Group Name and News fields.

Coming to the fourth question, which pretty much is game changer, the job tasks has changed from mathematical calculation, to becoming more of a human infuencing skill, that is if you choose to shift from the SEO domain and embark on Facebook Marketing. Many people thinks marketing online is using technical calculations and SEO to beat or game the system, therefore, they begin to go really technical to understand a lot of things on the technical side. This happens especially to those who are Chinese Educated Programmers and also highly Technical people, who become excited with SEO and thinks it is the solution for marketing online. As the field of marketing online is shifting to Social Media, our Chinese Educated friends may find it difficult to market in the English speaking community, and therefore, they may see Facebook as a threat. This is because, the command of their English may not be high, thus defeating their purpose in engaging Social Media Marketing and Facebook Marketing per se. But they can target the Chinese Language markets by putting in Chinese characters and setting up Chinese based groups. This is in actual fact, my weakness, as I don't know how to write Chinese. (chuckles)

Continuing from that point, Facebook marketing is really about copywriting a nice personal email, with value, and send out periodically to engage the group, without appearing spammy or too commercial. It is also good copywriting in your Invitation messages to convert a non-member to a member. Further to that, it is also about partnering with companies and give out freebies to entice them to stay on to be a member as they see benefits, much like what Booksterhub.com in its Facebook Group has done for its members through partnership with MPH, and Moviescraps.com with Golden Screen Cinemas. These are the real human factors of Malaysians or any person for that matterm, requesting for benefits, before they join a Group or any other network.

So the new task is really about scheduled copywriting, localization in business development, and engaging crowds by giving out benefits.

I hope that this answers your question as I am still in the process of learning as we go along a moving target in Online Marketing yeah.

Cheers.

Thanks for the info.

How about marketing using FB application? Can you elaborate more about using applications as a marketing tool??

Thanks.

Hi joanneqpk,

Great question!

Well, Facebook application is one of the wonders of online marketing, and in my humble opinion, is the best strategy that Facebook has ever used to differentiate and dominate the industry of social networks, eclipsing both Friendster and MySpace, as Facebook was the first to introduce third party application to be installed into its FB platform.

For starters, Facebook application demands marketers to be able to talk to programmers to learn up something called the Facebook Markup Language (FBML) or Facebook Structured Query Language (FBSQL). Further to that, you will need to have additional programming language knowledge on the web development side, which would be PHP, ASP and MYSQL. Of course, these are French and Greek to marketers who may not understand the world of IT and technology. One last piece in terms of Facebook application deployment is that you will need to have a dedicated web hosting server to host the FB application.

As the FB application structure and infrastructure has been explained and taken care of, let's move on to the marketing aspect.

In terms of marketing, you would be looking at GIVING value to the consumers who use your Facebook Application. The first thing is, let's say, you want to create a gardening related application as you may be selling gardening related products. What I would suggest from my humble opinion is to create a virtual plant, where you would need to fertilize and use tools to soften the soil and also simulate the whole gardening process. What I just did was creative conception, means, as a marketer, you need to have creativity in creating the FB application. Then next, is of course the storyboarding, where you draw a structure and the reaction of the users who will be using the application. Of course, last but not least, you would need to have a place in the application, where users are supposed to click, which is a Call To Action, whether it is signing up on your webpage, purchasing online, or opting in on your autoresponder newsletter.

Developing an FB application, depending on its complexity, may set you or your company back by RM 5000, right up to RM 100,000, depending on the amount of programming and storyboard creative which you are requesting from the developers. And again. the time of development also coincide with the specifications complexity requested by your company.

Adding on to this, a completed FB application may not have users in the initial stage. Therefore, at this point, you may want to consider launching a Facebook Social Ads to generate users to Add your Application and use it, and within the Application, hopefully, you would have included a function for the user to Tell or Invite their Friends to use that application. As more users are generated, you may be having some conversion or action taken by the users, that gives the ROI to your FB Application Marketing investment.

Hope this answers your question conceptually about using Facebook application for marketing. Please feel free to ask in more detail in any area which may not be explained clearly yeah.

Hey vck,

You were mentioning Facebook Social Ads. Did you mean FB advertising or something else? Anyway, I was wondering if you knew how effective is Facebook advertising because I had a client do it before and I've seen the results of another client before. The results were a steep climb and drop within 2-3 days. Unlike long tail affects.

Hi etsuko,

Great question again! Very relevant one especially many are considering Facebook Social Ads versus Google Adwords.

Well, to answer your question, it is really about where you send your prospects or clickthroughs. If you are sending them to another website, the effect will be as you said, steep climb up first 2-3days and then goes down after that.

The real answer to the question, is really, about copywriting of your social ads and where you send them to. Assuming you send them to a website of your client, then it is as good as burning money as there is really no engagement and online conversation.

What many people do, is that they forget that Facebook is not a commercial media platform, it is a SOCIAL platform. Therefore, it is really more effective if you send them to a group, like Malaysian Business Network and then engage them in conversation. Meaning, after they click the Social Ad, it is actually sending to the Facebook Group. This is because, people who are in Facebook like to remain in Facebook when in session with Facebook. Very much like, if you are from KL, and suddenly I send you to Penang, it is a strange and unfamiliar feeling even though it is in the same country. So Facebook users are really attached within Facebook, if you know what I mean. It is just the familiarity factor.

Further to that, after sending them to a group, you would need to engage them in conversation through Messaging good valuable tips, rather than promotional and spammy commercial messages.

Hope my humble opinion answers your question on how to increase ROI on Facebook Social Ads, in combination with Facebook Groups Online Conversations Engagement tactics and strategies.

Indeed, our conversation has been deep and insightful until many here are busy digesting and commenting much on these.

Hi etsuko,

Yeah, Facebook is just a technology and platform. To market within Facebook is not merely having Social Ads and send them to the advertisers website. Marketing now involves being involved in online conversations and giving value, before even taking any action to sell or send the commercial message. Any promotion will no more be done from the commercial company but shifted to the testimonials and satisfaction word of mouth by the consumers themselves.

This is because, many a times, consumers nowadays are smarter and has a detective eye on any commercial spammy promotional message and will be quickly put off by it. A USA research says that 83% of people buy because of word of mouth, not because of of advertising.

Facebook marketing is now about marketers being involved in conversation and giving value as their marketing job description, no more about media buys.

Hope my humble opinion has been beneficial to the readers and hope that all of you will ask more questions for us to learn and share together.

Woo...... this is so beyond me.....I would have to engage a programmer if I want to develop an application. Any idea where I can engage programmers who can develop FB applications?

Sorry for asking so many questions.

Thanks.