Research and Webinar: Facebook Marketing Criteria for Success

We’re embarking on yet another research report to identify how some top brands are using the Facebook platform well.

While no longer a one-off effort, many brands are already using Facebook for customer communities, word of mouth marketing, and are starting to integrate it with their own corporate website.  At the end of July, I’ll be publishing our findings, as well as grading some of the world’s top brands on their Facebook efforts.  We’ll be conducting a heuristic evaluation (acting like actual customers) and rate and rank these efforts with a variety of diagnostics.

After we publish this independent Altimeter research study in late July, I’ll be sharing the findings on a webinar sponsored by LiveWorld, where I’ll discuss what we found in the study. Sign up for the webinar to learn more about the success criteria, the research findings, and to join in on the discussion.

Now back to you, what criteria to you deem as key for brands to use in Facebook?  I’ll kick off with a few:  1) Enable social features.  Some brands have disabled the ability to have discussions or post information.  2) Encourage efforts that spread the experience to friends. Many brands are just talking directly to their members, but don’t explicitly enable the community to pass it on to others.  3) Engage in a dialog.  The social web is about behaving in a way that consumers already are, and this means brands should also participate in the existing conversation.  4) While we have a list of over 10, we’d love to hear from you.

Update: The submissions are pouring in, to date, we’ve included, Vendor Contributors such as:

360i, AKQA, Awareness Networks, The Community RoundTable, Context Optional, Digital Evolution Group, Edelman Digital, Facebook, Horn Group, Janrain, Inside Facebook, Kickapps, Gigya, Lithium, LiveWorld, Ogilvy’s 360° Digital Influence, Razorfish, RockYou, SHIFT Communications, Spredfast, StepChange a Powered Company, Vitrue and Wildfire Interactive.

53 Replies to “Research and Webinar: Facebook Marketing Criteria for Success”

  1. Jeremiah: Really looking forward to having you share your findings during our LiveWorld webinar. To add to your list, I think it's important that brands build out–and stick to–a content and engagement plan on their Facebook Pages. The effort has to include publishing on a regular basis, giving people a reason to come back to the Page they've just Liked!

  2. Jeremiah: Really looking forward to having you share your findings during our LiveWorld webinar. To add to your list, I think it's important that brands build out–and stick to–a content and engagement plan on their Facebook Pages. The effort has to include publishing on a regular basis, giving people a reason to come back to the Page they've just Liked!

  3. How about “freshness of content” as a key criterion for brands use of facebook (I'm sure you can find a better way to phrase that)?

    Users are not going to return to your facebook presence if it is stale. I would suggest that brands can ill afford going two weeks (at most) without updating their facebook content. Users log on to facebook daily so two weeks with no new content is a long time (while competitors for our attention capitalize).

  4. How about “freshness of content” as a key criterion for brands use of facebook (I'm sure you can find a better way to phrase that)?

    Users are not going to return to your facebook presence if it is stale. I would suggest that brands can ill afford going two weeks (at most) without updating their facebook content. Users log on to facebook daily so two weeks with no new content is a long time (while competitors for our attention capitalize).

  5. Respond to your fans who comment. I know this may be difficult for large brands that get huge amounts of comments, but I find it frustrating when I comment and the brand doesn't respond. They don't have to respond to me necessarily, but it's like they start the conversation and don't finish it and we the fans are merely their conversation minions. As a fan page administrator, I always make and effort to respond to most of the comments. (But, we have about 1700 fans compared to some that have hundreds of thousands so it is easy for me.)

  6. Respond to your fans who comment. I know this may be difficult for large brands that get huge amounts of comments, but I find it frustrating when I comment and the brand doesn't respond. They don't have to respond to me necessarily, but it's like they start the conversation and don't finish it and we the fans are merely their conversation minions. As a fan page administrator, I always make and effort to respond to most of the comments. (But, we have about 1700 fans compared to some that have hundreds of thousands so it is easy for me.)

  7. Right, Annie. There ARE some brands who are jumping into the comment streams to respond back to their fans (if not necessarily to each individual comment, then as a response to some of them or at least a general acknowledgement of the feedback), but those would be the ones who AREN'T treating Facebook like just another brodcast marketing channel!

  8. Right, Annie. There ARE some brands who are jumping into the comment streams to respond back to their fans (if not necessarily to each individual comment, then as a response to some of them or at least a general acknowledgement of the feedback), but those would be the ones who AREN'T treating Facebook like just another brodcast marketing channel!

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