Social Media Marketing is considered by many to be the marketing frontier for small businesses, but poor execution is leading to a poor return on investment. This poor execution can be synthesised down to businesses exploiting their fan base’s trust and constantly pushing products and services at them. This disincentives fans from engaging with a brand on Facebook because there is no value being created for them by consuming the brand’s posts.
So how do you create value? Value is created by posting contextually relevant content. This content must have one of these four components:
- Helps to enhance your credibility
- Curate’s content, content that appeals to your target customer & is displayed as compelling native content.
- Creates engagement through conversation facilitation.
- Creates future leverage.
Bupa Australia’s Facebook page is an example of this approach, you can see that they are achieving more than one of the above components in a single post:
In this an example, the font and colours are all part of our brand, but the content serves no function other than to appeal to our fans. Who are these fans? small business owners, so the content has a high probability of appealing to them because of its relevancy to them.
90% of the content your business shares should be able to be classified as one of the above categories. The other 10% can be used for more traditional marketing, consumption of this content is going to be a lot higher than it otherwise be if you were exclusively posting marketing. This approach is often referred to as the jab, jab, jab, right hook approach. The metaphor relates to the sport of boxing, where the same approach is adopted. If a customer is able to predict every action that your business makes, they will be guarded against them. Alternatively, if only 1 in 10 actions is the knockout, they are going to be exposed to it.
Another example is a friend recommending a cafe because it makes ‘the best coffee’ they have ever had. Other factors aside, you are going to believe what they are saying is true. However, if its the 10th time they have recommended a cafe as the best this month, the recommendation has no creditably. The same is going to be true for your fans. When you post 9 consecutive marketing posts, how do your Facebook fan’s differentiate one post from another. Your page’s posts become background noise in their feed.
Creating meaningful value to facebook fans creates leverage that can be used to ultimately create more sales.
The above post is an example of a right hook. It has only one function, to funnel customers to the AIC Technologies website. In its own right, it creates no value for a fan of the page. This post is pinned on the facebook page to always be the first post a customer sees on the page. This is because no facebook fan is going to visit the page unless they are engaged with the content and looking to purchase products and services.
Me writing this post is an example of both creating value to you while at the same communicating my expertise in the field. There may be a ‘jab’ somewhere in this post that links to a sales page for example but its not the core function of this post. The core function is to create value and engagement with my brand.
So next time you are posting something to your business’s social media presence think about its function and its value to your fans. What behaviour is the post likely to generate from its viewer? are they going to share it, open it, agree with it? Disagree with it? If it’s just an advert the answer is going to be no. An Advert at a fundamental level does not change because of the medium that it is communicated. Ask yourself, if this was in a magazine, would the reader cut it out and share it with a friend? Physical effort notwithstanding.
Has this post creating value for you? Why not share this post on Facebook as a way of saying thankyou.
