A week ago, Facebook announced a revamp of the Facebook profile at the annual F8 conference. Among the multiple updates announced, Facebook introduced “Facebook Timeline”, A revamped profile that let’s you share the events, highlights, places, photos happening in your life with your friends on Facebook. One interesting point about timeline is that it allows users to go back in time, and update important events and photos that happened in their lives.

Here’s an introduction video of Timeline to get an idea of how your Facebook page is going to look like!

Besides allowing you to have a chronological order to the events updated on your Facebook page, one new addition featured in the updated timeline is the introduction of updated Facebook apps, which will alert you to the online games, apps, which your friends are using. This new capability will change the experience of using Facebook in a very fundamental way. It will have the more immediate, real-time feel of Twitter–when you merely “like” something, your friends might see that sometime later. But if you click on a stream to tune in, your friend will know that immediately.

This all looks great, but what does it mean in terms of social media marketing?

Moving beyond the Like

One aspect of Facebook timeline and the apps that are featured (e.g. social cooking, spotify, etc) is that our considerations for Facebook’s performance has to go beyond the number of Likes to a page or the number of interactions for an app. It is important to start looking at how your apps and your page are performing in terms of its usage among users, as well as its viral effect in influencing others to using your app.

Going forward, facebook apps would need to consider further on the sharing options of their application, to focus on more methods to allow users who want to share their usage of the application with their friends. As these application updates are automatic without users doing the sharing on their own, Application developers need to consider the right updates which users would like to share about.

More information from users

By encouraging users to go backwards to update their timeline, it is expected that such information would play a part to allow marketers to gain more information from users in Facebook. In addition, all data in timeline is kept stored on Facebook literally forever, which would give marketers even more data to use in their options to market to these users.

For example, besides targeting Facebook users based on those who have “jogging” listed in their interests, marketers can eventually know and target the users who have used a jogging application, or those who have participated in running or jogging events previously.

When it comes to changes on Facebook, the immediate response from users would be initial resistance to the change (as per all changes which occur to Facebook previously), followed by security issues of users unwittingly exposing their information to other users due to changes in page security settings. Eventually, users would get used to the new changes implemented.

Timeline is expected to be launched in the next few weeks. We are definitely looking forward to its official launch! In the meantime, if you have more questions on Facebook marketing, or would like to find out more about social media marketing, feel free to contact us!

Social media marketing (SMM) will soon be inevitable for all business in the next few years. It might even be a substitute to some form of  traditional advertising. The objective of SMM is to forge bonds with your fans, eventually convert them into your customers, and build up the loyalty of these customers towards your product/business.

But most owners do not know the best way to maintain their pages, and eventually these pages would die off due to lack of correspondence and updating. To prevent that from happening, here are some tips to keep your Facebook page alive!

Make Your Posts/Updates Interactive

Most of the time, we would know what to update in our Facebook page when we first started using it. However as times goes, we are uncertain of the things that we want to share on.

In order to connect with your fans, it is recommended to have updates that would allow your fans to share their views on the subject matter. For example, a simple post to share on your pages could be, “Share with us what do you like about (your product name)?”

Frequency of updates

It is especially important that you constantly update your Facebook page, so that your fans would not think that your page is inactive or dead. In particular, take the effort to update your page on every alternate day. The preferred time to update would be in the morning or in the evening during the day, as that is the time that most people are online and active on their Facebook page.

Variation of updates posting

Updates may not be just a sentence or two. It can take in the form of a video or picture or even an article. Fans tend to pay a lot more attention towards video and picture, so look out for interesting things that is happening in your business. Snap it and post it up!

There are definitely more ways to keep your facebook page up-to-date. If you are interested in finding out more how Facebook marketing can help, feel free to contact us!

Many people join franchises is because they have a proven system, which allows individuals to take part in a proven business. Furthermore, it is less risky to join a franchise system as there are slightly lesser risks involved compared to a new business venture.

Not only will franchisees receive training from the franchisors on business operations, they would also gain marketing benefits when there are nationwide marketing campaigns provided by the franchisors. Marketing campaigns will include advertising, sales promotion, public relations and branding of the franchise business.

Besides traditional marketing campaigns, franchises can also leverage on social media as an additional platform for their A&P campaigns. Here are some ways to do so!

1) Decrease cost by substituting print coupons with e-coupons

This will seek to eliminate the cost of printing coupons and vouchers. Furthermore, when users use e-coupons, it can be spread virally to their friends and family members. This promotion can also be easily communicated through the use of smartphones. This will help businesses to gain more conversions which were spread by users, when they were to share it with their friends on social media. One good example is McDonald’s, where Facebook and other social media tools were used to spread their “one for one” promotions.

2) Nationwide Advertising
This form of advertisement through the social media offers a great value. This is because it is an inexpensive way of advertising instead of the traditional advertising channels such as newspaper and magazine advertising. This will be especially effective when your fans share the information that was posted. This will certainly benefit franchisees in their business, as they are part of the same franchise brand.

3) Increase public relations
Using social media will allow the franchise business to strengthen the image of the company as they are able to highlight on reviews and articles by independent organizations as well as individual users. This will benefit not just the franchise business but also the franchisees, as they will be able to increase more sales through the wider spread of benefits from the A&P.

Therefore, through social media, it would not only increase the overall franchise’s brand name, it would also have a larger impact on the franchisee’s individual businesses.

If you would like to find out more about how social media can help your business, feel free to speak to us to find out how we would be able to help