What Makes the top 50 Facebook Fan Pages Work? Part 2
What Makes the top 50 Facebook Fan Pages Work? In the case of Best Buy (#13 on The Big Money list), some real creativity and commitment.
Best Buy has often been used as a case study for how online communities can develop and improve employee performance. In the book groundswell, six pages are dedicated to blueshirtnation, an online employee community credited with improving service at Best Buy stores. If you look at the Best Buy TV ads over the last few years, you will see that the focus is on their sales associates – supporting the premise that good employees = good service.
Their Facebook Fan Page – although not literally a person – has personality. It is rich in interactivity, and also shows that the creators understand Facebook culture. Make no mistake, they are selling, but they are also engaging. I took a look at BestBuy.com – their ecommerce site – and it looked flat and dull by comparison to what they offer on Facebook. This is not a slam on their ecommerce site – it is actually a good site by Web 1.0 standards. However, they should definitely add a Friend Us On Facebook link on BestBuy.com and continue to grow their 1 million+ fan base.
So what am I raving about? The Best buy Fan Page has an active Wall with fans praising, complaining and asking questions. Best Buy is actively engaged there, but there are some other tabs that really caught my attention:
What Makes the Top 50 Facebook Fan Pages Work? Part 1
The Big Money published a list of the top 50 companies on Facebook the other day. They measured both the number of fans and the amount of fan interaction. They did not include pages run by fans – though the company in the top spot (Coca-Cola) has a site that was founded by a fan who continues to run that page with Coca-Cola’s support.
It would have been nice to have some more analysis from The Big Money so – over the next few days – I will try and drill down and provide some additional thoughts.
Facebook ads seem to work. This should be good news for Facebook since, from my outsider’s vantage, old-school advertising is their only real revenue potential at this time. The Big Money reported that JC Penney purchased Facebook ads for the back-to-school shopping season and its fan base went from 22,000 to nearly 500,000. Kohl’s (another retailer in basically the same category as JC Penney) ran a Facebook ad in August and grew its fan base from 10,000 to 350,000 during that time period.
Product Launches in the Age of Social Media
As a former product manager who has launched literally dozens of products and new business lines, I had a checklist of all of the touch points needed for a successful launch. However, in the age of Web 2.0 and social media that checklist now has some new steps with more extended new timelines, and some old steps have either been eliminated or diminished in terms of the amount of effort put into them.
The rule in the past was to line up everyone within your organization to be trained and ready to go on Day 1 of a product launch. It still holds true that sales, customer support, and operations need to be fully trained and ready to go when a product is put on the shelves. For services and software that go through a Beta release stage, there is often a more extended launch period, not just one day when everyone symbolically cuts a ribbon. How to roll out a product internally has not changed that much.
Social Media Tools Week: Twitter | Social Media Prospecting Tool
November 17, 2009 – Thanks for attending today’s webinar. My goal was to help you understand the unique value that Twitter brings in terms of being able to prospect for new customers. In the spirit of “Social Media Tools Week” I wanted to keep this presentation light on theory but heavy on how-to actually build a quality group of followers.
Presentation – Twitter: Social Media Prospecting Tool
There are a lot of tools out there but I selected those that I felt got the job done best. I don’t know exactly what works for the rest of you, but I like a step-by-step guide on how to get started. Once you learn the ropes, then swapping out one tool for another one that you like better or enhancing your own follower strategy with lessons you have learned is great. However, I think that everyone needs some guidance to get in the game. Please use this blog to ask questions or share your advice / best practices with the rest of us.
Some additional thoughts about the Twitter List function…
