There are two important concepts in any marketing campaign that must be understood — Reach and Frequency.
To illustrate, let’s look at a traditional advertising campaign for a brand like Taco Bell before delving into some non-traditional Facebook marketing tactics. About once a month, Taco Bell releases a new product – recently they had success with the release of the Volcano Taco. If you watch any television, listen to the radio or casually look at billboards as you commute you have heard of this new taco.
Taco Bell is absolutely relentless in “carpet bombing” the country with advertisements about their new products. In fact, while watching one NFL football game you might see the same Volcano Taco commercial 5 or 6 times — this is called Frequency.
However, if you aren’t a fan of the NFL there are plenty of places that you can get the Volcano Taco message. Perhaps an ad will be printed on the back of the bus you are driving behind or it is running radio ads on your favorite morning radio show — this is called Reach.
Frequency = # of times the ad is seen/heard by the same person
Reach = # of different people that have seen/heard the ad
A Less Traditional Approach To Gaining Reach and Frequency
Facebook.com has become a powerful Internet property boasting nearly 400 million users with 50% of that group logging onto Facebook in any given day. That second statistic is the most amazing, 200 million unique visitors to Facebook each day.
If you aren’t convinced that Facebook is a powerhouse web property, visit their statistics page.
From the statistics mentioned above and on Facebook’s official statistics page, we can see that there is opportunity for both Reach and Frequency on Facebook. With such a large number of people logging onto Facebook each day there is tremendous opportunity.
Facebook Pages & Groups vs Profiles
One of the errors typically made by those new to Facebook marketing tactics is determining the difference between pages and profiles.
Facebook is about individuals at its very core. A Facebook profile is the root of all activity for any particular person on Facebook. Best practices is to limit your activity on the Facebook profile for friends and family.
Many businesses will begin to syndicate blog content or ask business related questions to their personal network through their Facebook profile. Even worse, many businesses will begin running “hard sell” ad-like messages into their personal Facebook stream.
The Facebook profile is not the place for this kind of message. Remember that it is very easy for a person to “unfriend” you and thus turn off your messages completely.
Businesses, organizations and groups are encouraged (by Facebook and users of Facebook) to conduct their messages on Facebook Fan Pages or through Facebook Groups. The difference between groups/pages and profiles is that profiles require permission to connect from both parties. Groups and Fan Pages are open for anyone to join in the case that no restrictions have been put into place by the Group organizer or the owner of the Facebook Fan Page.
Creating Facebook Pages and Groups is a great way to build an audience for your company, brand, products and services. As more Facebook users find your pages and groups, you will begin to see a community develop.
What about you? How do you use Facebook marketing to build your business? What questions do you have?
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