Over the last year or so I've been asked to do an increasing amount of Facebook consulting. Most weeks I get a couple of emails asking for help and asking how this sort of consulting works so I thought I'd explain my experience.
First off: Facebook is not all that hard. Putting a great-looking Facebook page up to support your group, cause or school doesn't require any programming. But it can be confusing, partly because Facebook is always in-process. They keep adapting it and tweaking it. If you bought a book on Facebook campaigning a year ago, it would already be out of date.
My first job is to ask a few good questions about what you want to do on Facebook and then set up the beginnings of a site. I spend too much of my time already on Facebook but I also keep up with a lot of Facebook blogs and have recent copies of such wonderful tomes as "Facebook Marketing for Dummies." In most cases my job is to recommend a Facebook strategy based on best practices and then to start up a Facebook Page for you. There are certain flourishes I can give, such as picking a good icon or making a customized tab for first-time visitors. But the real value of Facebook is clients sharing information directly with their audience so my most important work is getting you excited about doing it yourself. I'm really just a cheerleader for you.
I typically spend anywhere from two to eight hours helping a client put together a Facebook page. If it looks like a project on the small end of the scale, I just charge the expected amount upfront. I do keep track of my time: if we go over a little bit, I let it slide; if we still have a bit of a balance then I'm there for ongoing questions. Facebook consulting is not the core of my business but it can be a nice break from a big six-month development project and it's helps with the cashflow. I'm also a naturally curious fellow so I like learning a little bit about the kinds of things.
Popular children's entertainer/educator Slim Goodbody is one busy guy: most weekdays of the school year find him spreading the message of good health in his trademark body suit ("When a Body needs somebody there's nobody like Goodbody!").
He's been doing this work for decades now and has a vast storehouse of videos, products and fans.
Slim came to me to build a branded Facebook presence.
A typical workload for a Facebook branding project is:
Set up the Page;
Coordinate with the client for a good profile graphic;
Adding a number of photos and videos;
Help set up a posting strategy;
Provide phone support to answer questions on best practices;
Give feedback on campaign (like Facebook's "Insights" stats)
For Slim, we decided to rely on Facebook's native apps as much as possible. This became especially important when Facebook shifted it's feed layout (yet again) to focus less on user streams and more on an algorithmically-determined best posts. The more integrated your site is with Facebook, the better chance your pieces will have of showing up on Fan's user streams.
We used Facebook Markup Language (FBML) to create custom Page tabs for integration with his existing online store and listing of tour dates. We would have liked to use FB's Events application but it doesn't allow for the volume of tour dates necessary to cover a busy entertainer like Slim Goodbody!
I'd like to talk today about social media and nonprofits. I've had a couple of interesting projects lately helping nonprofits put together Facebook Pages, LinkedIn Groups and Twitter sites. I think this is an exciting way to reach out to audience members.
Today: Email Lists
Over the last few years we've focused on email lists. We all have big email lists--tens of thousands of users, segmented all sorts of different ways. We send out dozens of emails a week and they end up seeming not spam.
Facebook Pages
A new era is coming with social media. A big change is Facebook Pages. These are geared toward advertisers although you don't need to have a Facebook advertising campaign to use them. In March 2009, Facebook redesigned Pages to act much more like typical user profiles: there's a wall, there's an activity stream, and you can associate different applications with them.
Two things about Pages are exciting. One is the activity stream. People who sign up as "fans" of your Page see what you're putting out in their individual stream. They'll log into Facebook and see that messages like "Jen just got engaged!" or "Joe is having a bad hair day" and that your organization is having some great event coming up this weekend. You're seen in the association of happy news from their friends. It's different from a spammish email because it's coming in with the context of their friends, which is very powerful for publicity.
The other nice thing about Facebook Pages is that they're public. A lot of portions of Facebook aren't but making Pages public means you can point to them from your website or other social media campaigns.
I think Facebook fan groups are going to be the new email list. They are the way we'll be able to reach out to people. I'm very excited about this because there's all sorts of easy multimedia possibilities. You can integrate with Youtube, with Twitter, with podcasts, etc., embedded for fans of your Facebook page to see as it's happening. This is much more exciting than some of the emails that we send out. They are also more interactive because fans can post things on your fan walls so you can have conversations on your sites.
Intimate, immediate, engaging
What the smart nonprofits are going to be doing is a lot of posting in a style that's authentic and intimate and less worried about being slick than we've typically been.
What I would love to see nonprofits doing is to get serious about video. I'm not talking about fancy video, hauling in videographers for six months shooting a three minute slick commercial. Get an inexpensitve video recorder and start doing five minute interviews with the people your organization serves. This will differ depending on your organization's focus. One advantage to simple videos is that you can convince even the busiest of your interviewees to take out a few minutes. You make these videos and post them to Youtube, Vimeo or directly to Facebook video. It doesn't matter where they hosted but you'll have to make sure they're embedded on your Facebook fan page.
Building our Facebook Fan Page
How to direct? You can direct in the emails you're sending out or through other sources. Twitter is a great way of directing people to what's happening: you send out a 140-character "tweet" with an interesting tease about the video you've produced and a link to the Facebook fan page.
The whole goal is to get Facebook fans. Once you're in as a fan, you show up in their activity streams. All the fans get to see the events you're organizing, the videos. If you have extra tickets to an upcoming event, post about it because people will see it immediately. It's a wonderful way to reach people quickly in a way that's not as intrusive as email (I suspect a lot of younger users are actually checking their Facebook homepage more often than their emails!).
The New Nonprofit Outreach
I'd love to see a lot more of these intimate, almost home-made videos going up on Facebook fan pages and using fan pages as a way of connecting with people. We can think of these as the new email list.
I would strongly encourage nonprofits to use all of these these media to reinforce their message and to find new ways to reach their audiences in a much more engaging, intimate way.
I was recently working with a client who has a large Google Adwords campaign, with an annual ad budget in the low six figures. He's been very careful about the keywords he's chosen and we've both poured over the Google Analytics figures to see how the campaign progressed.
It took a third party keyword tracking system to discover that many of the ads were being served up to wrong keywords in the Google searches. I want to keep the client's identity private, so let me use an analogy: say you're a boomerang maker and you've bought a campaign intending ads to show up for those who search "boomerang" in Google. What we discovered is that Google was serving up a large percentage of these ads for searchers of "frisbees" -- close, but not close enough for searchers to care. Few people clicked on the misplaced ad. We're talking serious money wasted on ads served up to the wrong target audience.
How did a carefully constructed ad campaign get on so many poorly-targeted searches? Google allows fuzzy matching under their broad match guidelines:
For example, if you're currently running ads on the broad-matched keyword web hosting, your ads may show for the search queries web hosting company or webhost. The keyword variations that are allowed to trigger your ads will change over time, as the AdWords system continually monitors your keyword quality and performance factors. Your ads will only continue showing on the highest-performing and most relevant keyword variations.
You can disable these broad searches using negative keywords (i.e., "-frisbee") and with specific keywords ("boomerang").
But Google does not make it easy to see just where your ads are going. You have to set up a special Search query performance report. It's really essential that anyone doing a large Google Ad campaign set up one of these searches and have it automatically emailed to them every month. Google clearly wasn't tracking the "performance" of its broad search on this client's ad. I'm particularly disturbed that we didn't see these misdirected keywords listed in the Google Analytics tracking reports. It is dangerous to use the same company to both sell you a service and to report how well it's been doing.
Credit where it's due: it was the excellent long-tail blog content service Hittail that gave us the information that Google was misdirecting its ads. See my previous Hittail coverage.
Martin has worked with over two dozen nonprofit organizations, often serving as webmaster and internet evangelist:
A.J. Muste Memorial Institute
American Friends Service Committee
Center on Conscience and War Cornerstone Fellowship, Galloway NJ Council of Parishes of Southern New Jersey
Episcopal Peace Fellowship
Fellowship of Reconciliation Friends Council on Education
Friends General Conference
Friends Institute
Friends Journal Haverford (PA) Friends Meeting Haddonfield Foundation
Global Network for Nonviolence
Indymedia.org International Nanny Association
Jewish Peace Fellowship
Lutheran Peace Fellowship
National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund Nepal Foundation
New Society Educational Foundation
New Society Publishers
Nonviolence.org O'Reilly Media
Pax Christi USA Pendle Hill Conference Center Pennsylvania Ballet Philadelphia Nanny Network Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Raphael Webscapes, LLC
QuakerQuaker.org Salem County Special Services School District
Skipping Stones Magazine Slim Goodbody Productions
Steady Footsteps
Syracuse Cultural Workers
Training for Change
United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO Urban Land Institute / Philadelphia
Veterans for Peace
War Resisters League William Penn Charter School
World Game Institute
Young Friends North America
"Build it and they will come" is not a very good web strategy.
Instead, think "if I spent $3000 on a website but no visitors came, did
I spend $3000?" There are no guarantees that anyone will ever visit a
site. But there are ways to make sure they do.
Much of web marketing follows the rules of any other mode of
publicity: identify an audience, build a brand, appeal to a lifestyle
and keep in touch with your customers and their needs. A sucessful web
campaign utilizes print mailings, manufactured buzz, genuine word of
mouth and email. Finances can limit the options available but everyone
can do something.
One of the most exciting aspects of the internet is that the most
popular sites are usually those that have something interesting to
offer visitors. The cost of entry to the web is so low that the little
guys can compete with giant corporations. A good strategy involves
finding a niche and building a community around it. Personality and idiosyncracy are actually competitive advantages!
It would be cruel of me to just drop off a completed website at the
end of two months and wash my hands of the project. Many web designers
do that, but I'm more interested in building sites that are used. I can
work with you on all aspects of publicity, from design to launch and
beyond to analyzing visitor patterns to learn how we can serve them better.
Making sites sticky
We don't want someone to visit your site once, click on a few links
and then disappear forever. We want to give your visitors reasons to
come back frequently, a quality we call "sticky" in web parlance. Is
your site a useful reference site? Can we get visitors to sign up for
email updates? Is there a community of users around your site?
Making sites search engine friendly
Google. We all want Google to visit our sites. One of the biggest
scams out there are the companies that will register your site for only
$300 or $500 or $700. The search engines get their
competitive advantage by including the whole web and there's no reason
you need to pay anyone to get the attention of the big search engines.
The most important way to bring Google to your site is to build it
with your audience in mind. What are the keywords you want people to
find you with? Your town name? Your business? Some specific quality of
your work? I can build the site from the ground up to highlight those
phrases. Here too, being a niche player is an advantage.
I know lots of Google tricks. One site of mine started attracting four times the visits after its programmer and I redesigned it for Google. My sites are so well indexed that if I often get visitors searching for
the oddest things. We can actually tell when visitors come from search
engines and we can even tell what they're searching for! Google
apparently thinks I know "how to flatten used sod" and am the guy to
ask if you wonder "do amish women wear bras." I can make sure your important search terms also get noticed by Google and the rest!
