Want to win brand advocacy on facebook? Take-small-engaging-steps-often
Read this super post today on Marketing Prof entitled “Four Ideas for Activating Your Brand Advocates”. Theresa Trevor of Amplifinity describes ways to convert Facebook fans who ‘like’ a page (and who probably don’t “…promote your brand in any measurable way”) to become brand advocates who are actively engaged in promoting your brand, bringing in new business, writing reviews etc.
At Mozilla where word of mouth marketing and brand advocacy are key to both our engagement and acquisition strategy, we already actively employ these types of brand advocacy programs and have done so successfully for many years (its partly how as a non-profit, we’re able to compete alongside those tech behemoths).
Particularly with regard to growing a larger Facebook audience (currently 8.5 million fans) and the debate of quality over quantity, I believe audience size is actually incredibly valuable, but much like Trevor asserts, only if you continue to effectively encourage group participation and action. Said another way, you can’t invite someone to dinner and not serve any food — nor would you want to cook a 5 course meal, only to then have no-one eat? We engage with our Facebook fans every day and over the last six months have gone a level deeper. We’ve begun to focus beyond our monthly Facebook activity rate as a core metric (averaging 45-50% of our fans liking / commenting/ sharing p/m), to doing that plus specifically focusing on increasing the number of Facebook shares (# of people talking about this).
We are able to calculate the number of friends our Facebook fans have, and therefore understand (i) what is effectively our entire ‘potential Facebook audience’ and (ii) the audience reach for a post that was talked about by our Facebook fans. That multiplication number for Firefox on Facebook is 81. Over the past six months we’ve been able to successfully increase the number of shares on Facebook by 20% each quarter respectively. Think about that with a Facebook audience of our size, and think about how much amplification that translates into? (In the first quarter generating more than 2 million people talking about Firefox on Facebook).
Most companies these days have a serious Facebook strategy, some with big and expensive campaigns, — for me, that’s not always necessary. Rather nurturing daily interaction with thoughtful content and building social gravity is what will create loyal users, who will ultimately want to talk about you with their friends. And just about anyone can do that!
Taking very small engaging steps —> The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Hugs, handshakes and high-fives
In the realm of social media as king, having friends is easy, but keeping all those new friends engaged and nurturing that friendship isn’t as simple as it sounds. At Mozilla we have nearly 6.5M friends on Facebook, and we work hard to engage with our fans on multiple levels.
Our content is split pretty evenly between being (i) informative about Firefox as a product and sharing the latest news, (ii) offering helpful advice and tips on how to make the most of Firefox, and (iii) most importantly balanced with fun, engaging and inspiring engagement activities.
Throughout 2011 we’ve been able to significantly grow Firefox engagement activity on Facebook, with between 45-50% of our fans interacting with the brand on a monthly basis. We’ve also doubled the number of fans who ‘like’ Firefox. That’s pretty impressive given our size and compared to other high-profile brands.
The basis for all this? A hug, a handshake, a high-five. Every time we post and consider content in our direct communication channels we do that remembering our followers are our ‘friends’. We tell news, share tips, give virtual hugs, smiles and pointers to fans we care deeply about.
There are many more ways we can improve our interactions with fans and increase our direct engagement further - we’d love to hear your thoughts on how we can continue to make our social media channels engaging.
We’re in the business of building friendships at Mozilla. Its those friends who have made us, and will continue to make Mozilla successful.
