Top 5 Emerging Brand Trends on Facebook

From Mashable:


This series is supported by the Buddy Media Platform. Seven of the world’s top 10 brands drive their brand on Facebook with the Buddy Media Platform. What’s your plan? Visit buddymedia.com today.

Field of Dreams may have popularized the notion that, “If you build it, they will come,” but in today’s Facebook generation, brands are beginning to go where the masses are, instead of relying on the masses to come to them. With 500 million members, Facebook represents real-time access to the online mainstream.

For years, brands have been using their Facebook Pages to connect with customers. As Facebook blossoms, so does brand ingenuity, and in recent months we’ve seen a surge in campaigns that inspire Facebook giving, incorporate Facebook Places and feature Facebook as a prominent part of product reveals and fan exclusives. Application makers are also building tools that small and big brands alike can use to sell their products and offer Facebook-tailored customer support.

What follows is a deeper look at how and why these five emerging brand trends are bubbling up on the world’s largest social network.

In researching this piece, we solicited input from Facebook, several app makers and even our own Twitter followers. We encourage you to use the comments to share your thoughts on these brand trends on Facebook, as well as other trends we may have overlooked.

1. Facebook Exclusive

Risk-taker brands and agencies are adapting their product release cycles and marketing campaigns to account for the opportunity that Facebook’s platform promises.

Big brand names including Ford and Nike are going so far as to release on Facebook first. In Nike’s case, the athletic wear company opted to debut its three-minute World Cup () advertisement on their Facebook Page before they released it anywhere else. The ad then went on to break viral records.

You also probably recall Ford’s ambitious 2011 Ford Explorer Reveal. The car maker decided to forgo the auto show and reveal its new car on the web, with Facebook as the centerpiece of the company’s online reveal strategy.

The campaign proved to be more successful than anticipated. On reveal day, Ford produced the number one trending topic on Twitter in the U.S.; the Explorer was the number two most searched for term on Google; Ford’s YouTube reveal video garnered 11,000 views; more than 50,000 Ford Explorer Facebook “Likes” flooded in; and, perhaps best of all, 25,000 potential car buyers built and priced new Explorers on the company’s website.

Other brands including Vitamin Water and Papa John’s have handed over new product creation to Facebook fans.

Vitamin Water cooked up the “flavor creator lab” and invited Facebook users to dream up a new flavor and label design for the company’s next flavor release. Sarah, a Facebook member from Illinois, won the $5,000 grand prize for her help in bringing Vitamin Water Connect to life.

Papa John’s used Facebook to host the Papa’s Specialty Pizza Challenge. Pizza fans were encouraged to mastermind the chain’s next great specialty pizza recipe using an application custom built for the purpose. Of the more than 12,000 entries, three Facebook finalists were chosen — Blair Dial, Barbara Hyman and Kendra Chapman — and their pizza creations were featured as a part of Papa John’s menu during the month of August.

VEVO is exploring its own Facebook-exclusive opportunities, as well. The service recently launched an original web series, dubbed “ASK:REPLY,” designed to connect Facebook fans to big name artists. VEVO uses its Facebook Page to ask fans what they want to know about a top notch artist. Fans respond, and VEVO posts the artist’s video response.

“One of VEVO’s core strengths is our access to many of the world’s top artists. We’re able to let fans share in that access and peek behind the curtain with concepts like ASK:REPLY. Fans seem to get a huge kick out of watching their favorite artists call out their names and directly answer their questions. Plus, the fans come up with much better interview questions than we do,” says VEVO General Manager, Fred Santarpia.

2. Facebook Places Experimentation

The Facebook Places location product is just weeks old, but because Facebook’s checkin features integrate so tightly with the entire Facebook experience, Facebook Places is a business opportunity in the making.

One early adopter is the Westfield Valley Fair mall. The business is offering a checkin special to its Facebook members who promote their shopping behaviors through Facebook Places. The special in question offers a coupon — powered by Fan Appz — for 15% off at Betsey Johnson in exchange for a checkin. The special may resemble the variety we’ve seen on Foursquare, but it’s still an ingenious effort to turn Facebook fans into offline buyers.

Social marketing software provider Context Optional is exploring how they can serve burgeoning brand interest in Facebook’s location offering.

“Marketers have been struggling with making global brands local. Brands that have been early to the game with Foursquare, Loopt and other location-based services are now realizing that Facebook — with its population of 500 million plus — offers an invaluable marketing opportunity in the form of Places,” explains Context Optional CEO Kevin Barenblat.

To meet demand, the social CRM company released the Facebook Places Check-in Leaderboard application (as seen in action on their Facebook Page). The application is designed to help brands create their own personalized ranking system for their Facebook Place Pages. Once installed, guests who check in will have the chance to claim ownership — a feature obviously inspired by Foursquare’s mayor system. With Context Optional’s leaderboard solution, a brand can then reward top fans, based on checkins, with special deals and offers.

3. Facebook Commerce

Facebook’s brand-friendly Pages () are proving to be more than just wall-centric places for fan and brand comments and photos. Businesses of all sizes are finding that they can make their page double as a store front, and in so doing sell their products and goods to window-wall-shopping Facebook users.

Huge corporate entities like Disney and Delta are in the business of selling on Facebook. Disney, for instance, built the Disney Tickets Together Facebook application so that fans could pre-order tickets to Toy Story 3 without leaving the social network.

Even more traditional businesses are anxious to hook customers and get them to book through Facebook. Delta Air Lines released the Delta Ticket Window Facebook application in August to do just that — sell plane flights to patrons without ever forcing them to leave Facebook.

Alvenda is the application maker behind Delta’s Ticket Window. They also help power the Facebook commerce experiences for 1-800-Flowers, Brooks Brothers, Mark by Avon, and Hallmark.

The big guys aren’t the only businesses capitalizing on Facebook’s sales-friendly platform. Small businesses are enlisting the likes of Wildfire and Payvment to help them create and manage their own Facebook store fronts and deal centers.

With so many sales opportunities out there, some brands are finding that Facebook is fast becoming a shopper’s paradise and the new mall of America (and the world).

4. Facebook Support Centers

Social media has long been touted as a vehicle for brands to provide better customer service. The challenge is that so many customers are social media savvy, which means complaints and requests can get lost in the fray.

Once, a brand’s Facebook Page was a less trafficked place for a customer to get one-on-one service. Today, customers are lucky if their comment is ever seen. The customer still has the expectation of personalized service on Facebook, which makes it the brand’s responsibility to find a customer service solution that scales.

In recent months, Get Satisfaction () and Parature have stepped in to help businesses tackle this new challenge. Both companies are reporting rapid adoption for their inside-Facebook customer service platforms.

Get Satisfaction’s Social Engagement Hub, built by Involver, extends the functionality of its popular customer support service to Facebook and offers full-featured support that integrates with the client’s existing dashboard.

“Get Satisfaction has 122 clients using the Facebook integration, reaching an aggregate of hundreds of thousands of users and fans,” reports a spokesperson for the company.

Parature is a bit newer to the space, but the Parature for Facebook customer service application is already getting traction from brands hoping to channel Facebook for direct customer engagement. Recently, the company announced that 25 clients have signed on since launch to purchase Parature for Facebook. A company representative details that some of those brand names include H&M, Konami and Rosetta Stone.

5. Facebook Giving

Even for-profit businesses have an interest in the greater good, and one of the bigger trends is for them to solicit fan action on Facebook to ensure their charitable causes get greater exposure. The social good trend obviously extends beyond Facebook and to social media sites in general, but Facebook Pages and “Like” buttons are doing their part to inspire collective action.

Last year, Target launched the “Bullseye Games” Facebook application and let fans choose where the discount retailer should spend its weekly $3 million charitable contributions.

More recently, Kohl’s started the Kohl’s Cares Facebook initiative to give away $10 million to 20 schools; nearly 2 million Facebookers voted for their schools. Chase also gravitated towards Facebook to distribute $5 million to charities through the Chase Community Giving campaign.

In furtherance of the donation by action concept, Yahoo enlisted Facebook for a massive charitable undertaking designed to raise funds for Stand Up To Cancer earlier this month. Yahoo pledged $1 for every “Like” to their OMG! Facebook Page. In just nine days, Yahoo surpassed their goal, attracting more than 112,000 “Likes” and committing $100,000 to help fight cancer.

What “Like” Buttons Mean for Web Traffic

From Mashable:


The new-this-year, yet somehow-already-ubiquitous Facebook Like button has been around just long enough to generate some interesting numbers relating to Facebook users and web traffic.

The button, which launched in April at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, is now present on roughly 2 million sites around the web, from sports sites to news organizations and many other kinds of publishers.

A media analytics lead on Facebook’s Developer Network Insights team crunched some numbers and found that Facebook Likes don’t just generate interesting data about the “likers” (a.k.a. Facebook users who are also active on your website) themselves; this data also speaks volumes about clickthrough rates, time on-site and other engagement metrics.

Stats About People

On average, a Facebook user who “likes” your content has more than double the number of friends than does a typical Facebook user. This could mean the user is more “social” or more influential, but on the other hand, it could mean the user is an attention-seeking narcissist. While it’s fatuous to read too much into that statistic, the number does show that the average “liker” is more active from a social-web standpoint.

An even more interesting stat about the likers is that they click on five times more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user. If clickthroughs are what you’re looking for from your social media strategy, this is good news.

Here’s a stat just for news sites: The average Facebook user who “likes” content on a news website is 34 — that’s about two decades younger than the average newspaper subscriber. We’ve known for some time that the future of journalism and social media are, at this point, inextricably linked; this stat provides a little hard evidence for that conclusion.

Stats About Traffic

Most website owners are aware that Twitter refers a ton of traffic. It’s meant to be a content-referral network, so link-sharing and clickthroughs are a given in many cases.

The Facebook “Like” button, however, might be bringing Facebook closer to competing with Twitter in the area of referral traffic. Since the button launched and was integrated on millions of sites, many publishers are reporting large increases in traffic specifically due to this kind of social plugin. ABC News reported a 190% increase; Gawker’s traffic shot up by 200%; Sporting News said their site traffic was up by a shocking 500%; and NBA.com said that Facebook had become their second-largest referral source.

Facebook relays messages from publishers saying that these users “are more engaged and stay longer when their real identity and real friends are driving the experience through social plugins.” As an example, NHL.com reported that pages per user was up by 92%, time on-site was up by 85%, video viewing increased by 86% more videos and overall visits went up by 36%.

Clearly, Facebook is only part of social media referral traffic, but it’s becoming a larger part as the network grows and users become accustomed to interacting with third-party and external content from within the comfort of their social graph.

Social Media Promotion: It’s About ‘Stickiness’

From Social Times:

We all know that content is the most important thing when it comes down to having a REALLY successful viral campaign. Sure, you’ll need some promotion to help with the initial push of the campaign but as your campaign gets more popular, you’ll notice the increasing power of content to retain your readers, users and buyers. How do we classify what content works versus that which doesn’t? Well, according to Dan Heath in his book Made to Stick, it’s all about stickiness.

Personally, I’m shocked by the amount of garbage advice on social media, the self-proclaimed ‘social media gurus’ who have virtually n0 experience in getting viral on some social media/bookmarking website (Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon). As for me, I’ve been featured on many of those sites so I I must be doing something right, no.

What’s stickiness? In his book, Made to Stick, Dan Heath describes several principles that make ideas spread and ‘stick’ to peoples’ minds. I found it amazing how powerful those principles were and yet, nobody bothered to translate them into the online world and see how they can be applied . I’ll try to do that here:

Some of the most important principles there are:

CONCRETENESS. People. Animals. Things you can imagine. Love is not concrete, nobody can clearly imagine love. But everyone can imagine sex (now, which is more likely to spread, love or sex? If you take a look at most viral videos you’ll see they involve something concrete…and object or a person. Something easily imaginable.

UNEXPECTED. My viral article on Stumbleupon was unexpected..pulling Google Analytics data and analyzing it to get a conclusion of the ‘average StumbleUpon user’. I bet that many commercials you remember had something unexpected happen while you were watching.

How do you create something ‘unexpected’? By breaking expectations. Psychologists have shown many times that peoples’ tendency is to try to predict how something is going to fold out in advance.

A good example of breaking expectations are those studies you see in the media like:

• Study Shows That Mobile Web Will Rule by 2015
• Study Shows Women Attached to Men in Red
• Study Shows People Eat Less when They Know More

I bet you’ve seen a ‘study’ of this type on some friend’s Twitter/Facebook. Although I can’t guarantee how accurate they are, I can say for sure I was surprised when I read those headlines.

- EMOTIONS. This has some touching points with concreteness. People care about things that make them experience some emotion. Now, the hard part is answering the question: “What emotion should I elicit in my viral campaign?” The real answer is, it depends.

Here are some tips though:

• People respond to people. There’s been various studies that have shown that people are more willing to donate if they see a particular person having a problem (like a hungry kid in Africa) then a statistic of people being hungry (eg. 60% of people in Ethiopia face hunger). Empathy is the key word here.

• Associations. Politicians are masters in this. They associate some major events during their mandate with their campaigns. So what happens? If these events brought joy previously in peoples’ eyes, people are likely to associate those events with the political party and have positive emotions about them as well. You may have seen hot girls standing next to cars, why is that happening? The advertisers hope you associate the beauty of the girls so you perceive the car as more beautiful than it actually is. This actually works pretty well, although not many people are willing to admit it (probably because they do the association on unconscious level).

STORIES. If you think about stories, you’ll see that many good stories are concrete, have a dose of un-expectancy in them, and almost always elicit some emotion at the end.

There’s an interesting theory of why stories have those attributes. Some people claim that over the years, stories contained some abstract information as well. But as time went by and the stories were transferred from generation to generation, people didn’t focus on the abstract things but only left the concrete parts. The concrete parts ‘sticked’, while the abstract didn’t.

Explaining your core message using stories is a powerful and proven concept of making ideas stick (and getting them viral).

REMEMBER: These are only principles and using all of them won’t guarantee your message will go viral. However, they dramatically increase the probability people will remember and spread it. The evidence for this comes from the introduction of the Made to Stick book (which I highly recommend you read if you’re interested in learning more on this topic).

I can summarize the whole evidence in few sentences. Chip is a professor at Stanford University and has a huge passion for education. Back in 2004, he began analyzing hundreds of famous stories/urban myths and finding common characteristics. He also took stories/urban legends that didn’t took off and analyzed those too. So the principles he devised were from hundreds of hours of research.

And if you think about it, most of these principles will be common sense to you after you read them. But remember, common sense is not common use.