Mind the Statistics: Creating Engaging Fan Pages for your Brand on Facebook

In this post, we will cover the reason that maintaining an engaging Facebook Fan Page is important to growing your fan community; reasons that fans abandon brand pages; and ways that you can engage fans so that they remain interactive, using real examples of pages as case studies.

What is the value of an engaging fan page? Creating an engaged and interactive community on your brand’s Facebook Fan Page is about more than capturing a population of “likes” and leaving it at that. We know why you want to build a sizable fan base: 51% of Facebook users say they are more likely to buy from a brand that they like on Facebook, and 60% of users say they’re more likely to recommend a brand to their friends if they like it on Facebook (CMB 2011). The promising message of these statistics spur marketers to build fan communities, and try to do it fast. However, users can be fickle about maintaining this commitment to a brand, and will unfollow brands for many reasons, such as posting too frequently or with uninteresting content.

Because disinterested fans are nearly as good as non-fans, a static fan page is of little value to your brand without continued engagement. This blog post will introduce a number of goals you can set that are supported by industry statistics about user behavior. Each goal will be accompanied by methods of accomplishment as well as several examples of real-life case studies that exemplify these achievements. These goals, when set as part of a complete social media marketing strategy, help brands create and maintain “sexy” and engaging Brand Pages on Facebook.

Why does engagement fall over time?

What reasons do fans give for unfollowing brands? (source: ExactTarget 2011)

Now that you know the top causes of the fan “break-up,” avoid them! Don’t rely solely on an automated messaging stream to send out uninteresting posts at a predetermined rate. Create engagement on your page, giving visitors a reason to stick around and interact. Most interactions lead directly to an activity update being posted to the fan’s wall displaying their interaction with your brand, which can be seen by their friends.

How to increase engagement?

Now, lets consider the marketing goals you can set for your page, and how to achieve them:

Go beyond the newsfeed

To avoid having your fans unlike your brand because your page posts became “repetitive and boring”, create reasons for your fans to interact with your page, including applications that encourage participation and activity from users. For example, Wildfire Page Manager can be used to create pages with limitless plugin capabilities. Use these plugins to get beyond the wall, creating engaging interaction scenarios for your users on multiple tabs across your fan page. Let’s take a look at ideeli, whose fan page is demonstrating great success with this challenge:

• ideeli frequently switches up their profile picture, effectively using the valuable bottom half to point out a new feature to engage with.
• ideeli also seeks to attract new users with consistently running promotions. Recently they gave away “3 fabulous getaways”. Running promotions like this allows ideeli to draw in existing and new fans via advertising which promotes the giveaway.
• ideeli plans for the future: what happens to a user after they’ve entered into a promotion, for example? Typically, the user wonders what they can do next, and looks around for interesting items on your page that might keep them there.
• ideeli has created constantly rotating engaging plugins on the other tabs within the fan page, where users can spend time browsing and interacting.
  In particular, notice the “Shoes” tab, where users are encouraged to voice their opinion about whether the flat shoes pictured are “Dainty or Glam?” In addition to voting, which yields an immediate poll count, they are encouraged to be more specific in a comments plugin right below the shoes box. The comments they leave can also be shared straight to their newsfeed, an example of a great way to create social sharing.
• Also within the shoes tab, ideeli captures eyeballs on the same page by prompting users to become a member of the retail merchandise club, in a plug-in right below the comments.
• If that weren’t enough, ideeli also includes an element of e-commerce in a creative but unobtrusive way, by including a small photo carousel that displays one image of a shoe available for sale at a time, including a button that links right to it. Users could browse through all the photos in the carousel, and always have the option to complete a sale, all while spending time on the ideeli Facebook fan page.
• Finally, just on that page ideeli makes sure to capture the very last of the lingering eyes with an RSS plugin, drawing users in to various other content they’d enjoy with short descriptions and links to it, such as the post featuring Jessica Simpson.

Create social sharing.

18% of users become a fan of a brand on Facebook because they “want to show others that I like and support this brand.” (eMarketer). What can your brand do to drive this kind of social sharing?

• Give your users something to share! What do users love to share? Interesting or funny content, jokes, comic strips, pictures, and video. Here is an example of an entire tab on Infiniti’s Facebook page dedicated to just videos: four newly produced commercials for their cars. Each one is included with its own Facebook “Share” button, which is programmed to send the video straight to the user’s newsfeed, where all his friends can see it too.

Create brand affinity.

8% of users become a fan of a brand on Facebook to be the first to know information about it, and 6% do so to gain access to exclusive content (eMarketer). Treating your users like insider VIPs, and creating an environment which expresses this relationship, can help to create brand affinity. Look at how Infiniti is using pages on its Facebook Fan Page to create brand affinity:

• In advance of the reveal of the Infiniti JX Concept car in August, the Infiniti page has a timed photo carousel plugin installed to a page on its profile: this plugin reveals exclusive, never-before-seen photos of the concept car, only to the Facebook users of the page. To add fuel to the fire, Infiniti reminds users of the exclusivity of the content and stokes anticipation by including a countdown to the time the next picture becomes revealed on the fan page and is added to the carousel.

In addition to Infiniti, the fan page for EA Sports SSX video game has interesting exclusive content for its fans as well:

• To engage with its gaming fans, EA Sports is releasing a series of character comic strips, one at a time, at different dates. This encourages users to come back and view them as they are released, but it also reinforces the user’s affinity with the brand, as each comic that is released is a piece of exclusive content that only visitors to the fan page can access.

How else can you foster interactions with your fans that go beyond the wall on your page? Show fans how else you’re being social, and where else they can interact with you.

• Insert a plug-in to your tab that pulls in the Twitter feed for your brand, as Infiniti does in its Welcome page.
• Note that on the same content page, Infiniti takes care to draw attention to where else users can “Stay Inspired” with buttons that showcase its other social identities on Flickr, Youtube, and Twitter.

Use the wall for nurturing fans over time.

Now that you’re armed with a set of goals and the strategies to achieve them, messaging your users continuously over time should remain top of mind. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that not all posts are created equally, nor are they treated that way by Facebook. So how can you optimize your messaging strategies to reach the most people, and remain engaging and interactive?

Stay tuned for the next post from Wildfire where we’ll analyze the efficacy of different types of Facebook posts, and outline a strategy for creating engaging posts for your page.

What did you think of the strategies outlined in this post about creating and maintaining engaging Facebook pages? Are you already implementing these strategies on your own Pages? Leave us a note in the comments; we’d love to hear from you!