We’ve recently been researching Facebook pages for a client proposal. This post shares some of the more general findings, as well as some of our own tips and recommendations. Hope you find it useful.

This document provides a Social Media Proposal for a Facebook Profile

The average Facebook user:

1. has 130 friends
2. spends 55 minutes each day on Facebook
3. “likes” 9 pieces of content each month
4. leaves 25 comments a month
5. becomes a fan of 4 pages a month
6. joins 13 groups a month
7. is invited to 3 events a month
8. sends 8 friend requests a month

Facebook Insight

Biggest site on earth
Gaining 30M new members monthly
550M users worldwide
Half login daily
700B minutes/month

30B pieces of content shared monthly

Global marketing on one platform at scale for the first time!

What makes a Facebook page work?

Pages related to current events can have up to 5 x the engagement.

How often they post …

How open you are to customers – how much you let them in on things like product development …

How much you comment and engage with individual fans …

How much Facebook-specific content you produce …

How many applications and games you develop

How many competitions you run – a big traffic driver …

How well you integrate social plugins …

Like Button
The Like button lets users share pages from your site back to their Facebook profile with one click.

Activity Feed
The Activity Feed plugin shows users what their friends are doing on your site through likes and comments.

Recommendations
The Recommendations plugin gives users personalized suggestions for pages on your site they might like.

Like Box
The Like Box enables users to like your Facebook Page and view its stream directly from your website.

Login Button
The Login Button shows profile pictures of the user’s friends who have already signed up for your site in addition to a login button.

Facepile
The Facepile plugin displays the Facebook profile pictures of users who have liked your page or have signed up for your site.

Comments
The Comments plugin lets users comment on any piece of content on your site.

Live Stream
The Live Stream plugin lets your users share activity and comments in real-time as they interact during a live event.
How many engagement ads they buy – engagement ads drive a lot of sign up – here is a video of how they work.

Use the Live Stream to engage users during live events. The live stream box can serve as a way to reach your audience, facilitate sharing of your content, and get them involved in what you’re streaming, be it an interview, conference, or other type of event. This week we released new updates to the live stream box. More info here.

Understanding “Like”

What does the “Like” button mean for the web?

Increased Engagement

Simply Hired: +2.2X more job searches, 52% more jobs viewed/search

NHL: +92% more articles read; 85% time spent on site; 86% video views

Dailymotion: 30k Likes per Day

Who are “Likers”?

People who click the Facebook Like button are more engaged, active and connected than the average Facebook user. The average “liker” has 2.4x the amount of friends than that of a typical Facebook user. They are also more interested in exploring content they discover on Facebook — they click on 5.3x more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user.

What are the best ways to reach these people?

Implement social plugins, beginning with the Like button. When a person clicks Like, it”

(1) publishes a story to their friends with a link back to your site

2) adds the article to the reader’s profile

(3) makes the article discoverable through search on Facebook.

Optimize your Like button. By showing friends’ faces and placing the button near engaging content (but avoiding visual clutter with plenty of white space), clickthrough rates improve by 3-5x.

Publish back. Publishing engaging stories or status updates (things that are emotional, provocative, related to sporting events or even simple questions) increase on-Page engagement by 1.3-3x

Integrate the Activity Feed or Recommendations plugins. Highlighting most popular content on your site leads people to view more articles. Those who click on the Activity Feed plugin in particular generate 4x as many page views as the average media site viewer. Place it above the fold on your home page and at the bottom of each article for maximum engagement

Publish: focus on content and status updates to increase engagement

Stories that get more engagement and their expected increase above average post*

Touching, emotional stories 2 – 3 x

Provocative, passionate debates 2 – 3 x

Sport game important Wins 1.5 – 2 x

Simple, easy question to the user 1.5 x

* Based on internal analysis of posts from the largest news media pages

Reporting/Sources

> Use Pages and Profile to find sources and solicit feedback

Crowd sourcing

> Engage readers on your Page and answer them in your articles or on air

Promoting it

Grow fan acquisition by using existing audiences (email)
Drive conversions within Facebook
Utilize “fan only” content to drive connections
Give people easy tools to share and distribute content
Create a social calendar
WALL – Message Your Fan Base. Drive new fans by scheduling posts/updates to encourage likes, comments and shares
TABS – Scale Your Brand. Create multiple tabs for  brands, campaigns and projects
Engage Your Audience – Launch engaging, content-rich  social “applets,” like quizzes, polls, sweeps and more
Acquire New Fans – Drive new fan growth through friend referrals and Newsfeed messaging
Share – Give users a way to share content with their friends with one click …
LOGIN with Facebook – Give users a way to connect with your site using their Facebook credentials.

Facebook Events – another great free way to the brand …

You can use it to promote almost anything, it only needs to be something related to a specific date and a location. You can use it to promote a product launch, or you can use it to promote an existing product by offering a certain day’s discount. You can use it to promote a gathering, or corporate milestones.
When it comes to location, it doesn’t have to be a specific location. You could create an event where the location is “everywhere”. You just have to turn off the lights for one hour between 8.30 and 9.30 pm wherever you are.
All Facebook events will include by default, a wall, discussion board, links, photos, and videos, making it a lot easier to communicate with people attending the events.
You can invite all your fans to join the event, just by the push of a button. If you add more admins to your event, they can invite all their friends as well. And you can add new friends whenever you feel like it. This only takes a few seconds, and your event will be read by a large audience.
It’s very easy to spread the word and it’s very easy to communicate with the members of the event. This is the power of networking (the same goes for Facebook groups).
You can send messages to all the members of your event, even though you might have more than 1,500 members. If you have more than 1,500 member of a Facebook group, you can’t send a message to all of them. But Facebook events and Facebook pages have no restrictions when it comes to sending messages to all members.
You can also use the wall, the discussion board, links, add videos and photos, in order to communicate with people attending your event.

Optimize with insights …

What portion of Facebook users are logged in?
What type of users like this article?
What are people liking and sharing the most/least?
Where are the users liking?

Management

We strongly recommend that brands manage their own Facebook presence with the commitment to increasing the resource necessary to manage the growth. If you acquire 1 million fans after 12 months as many brands before you have achieved then you effectively have a database of 1 million people who are interested in hearing about your brand. Therefore any brand committing to this form of media has to take on that responsibility.

By the very nature of it, it will be within your organisation and you will need to develop that dialogue with your customer base. If you sign the responsibility of that dialogue over to an agency then you end up having much less control.

Many brands in the same arena have already proven massively successfully that this is totally achievable. It’s achieved in part by from the onset working out the boundaries and the accessibility you are going to allow your fans to have. We don’t believe that can be done by an external agency.

Have a community strategy –don’t jump without a parachute. Companies (and their agencies) have often been allured to adopt the latest tools like Facebook pages without thinking it through.

Don’t go without a clear set of policies, roles, and experienced staff. Approach your Facebook fan page as you would opening a real-world store –don’t relegate management to an agency or an inexperienced intern.

Unlike traditional advertising or email marketing, this is an ongoing relationship, so budget the right set of resources, budget and programs for this long term effort.

Think of your Facebook fan page as your physical store. Hire an experienced community manager that knows how to deal with angry members, foster relationships with advocates, and handle crises without breaking a sweat.

Plan and practice for the worse – yet live for the best. Develop a social media crises plan and develop internal fire drills to anticipate what would happen.  This doesn’t mean you should live your social efforts in fear, but instead forge key relationships with members now that will defend your brand in the long run.

Expectation of Users

Initial seeding to 500 people/friends of the team – there would be a high initial conversion rate because they would be people the brand team know. We imagine it would be around 20%.

We know from the stats that each of those people has 130 friends on average. This means that 20% of the 500 people will include the page in their status and their 130 friends will see it. If we then say that 1% of these people then also like the page or sign up on a weekly basis then we can start to see how the site might build. These figures are based upon stats that we have seen in the past for pages we have worked on and also internal Facebook stats. The monthly build figure will look like this:

Suggesting that by the end of week 27 you would have 496,472 friends.

Purchase Intent

A Collaborative Study by Psychster Inc. and Allrecipes.com (2010)