How To: Build a community on facebook fan page

Recently i was invited by Pradeep Chopra, CEO of India's premier digital marketing training company Digital Vidya to his workshop organized by afaqs! on building effective facebook community for a brand. I was their official twitter partner, covering the event with live tweets using #DPclub hashtag. The participants were from diverse areas ranging from finance, cosmetics, bollywood tourism, media, retail, captive call centre, ad agencies etc. So, that made it a whole bunch of interesting people with different perspective on social media by each of them.

[caption id="attachment_82" align="aligncenter" width="580" caption="Pradeep addressing participants"][/caption]

Pradeep started with a video on various facts & figures on facebook & it's emerging role & importance for marketers. Then he proceeded it with a direct question to participants that which is the first thing they will do to create a facebook page, to which the participants came up with various answers like page name, information, profile picture etc. & finally one participant came up with a simple but most important aspect that the first thing required to create a facebook page is the objective. The company or brand should be the clear with the objectives on why they want to create a facebook page in the first place. Only then they should start building the page or community to fulfill those objectives. Objectives can be CRM, setting up a sales channel or to update users on latest news/offers regarding the company etc. For example there is a small New Delhi based company "MySunshine Candles" which has set it's facebook page for the sole objective of doing sales & interestingly all their sales happens through facebook page! Companies should never seek number of fans alone. Because just indulging in a numbers game can never lead to an effective community building. The very meaning of community is a collection of people who engage with each other. So, what a company or brand should look for is how to engage people to their brand.

And when there is a talk about engagement, companies should address these three questions regarding their target audience of high importance:
1. Who are our target audience?
2. What do they want?
3. What can we offer to them?
If the companies are able to answer these questions, they will already be on track to create a successfully engaged community on facebook.

The next thing which comes into picture is positioning your facebook presence, for which companies should appropriately name their pages & portray themselves as a formal or a Cool brand using appropriate content taking care into account their corporate image. After this is done, companies should create relevant content with an appropriate use of rich media (since it brings more attention/engagement from audience). One should not forget that your wall posts on your facebook page don't reach all of your followers! Each post has it's own percentage of impressions & feedback from the users. And this depends on the edge rank. Higher the edge rank, better will be the reach of your wall posts & thus higher the engagement.

Next, Pradeep highlighted upon the publishing, promotional & measurement aspects of companies' facebook pages. He stressed on the use of 3rd party platforms like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck etc which make it easy to plan & publish the content across different time periods. Care should be taken to not spam the users with frequent wall posts. Instead, companies should use facebook insights to see when & what kind of content is getting maximum response or least response & accordingly they can continue or discontinue such a content. Then scheduling should be done because updates cannot be done live 24 hours a day. Pradeep stressed on planning content & said that content should be planned much ahead of posting it.

As far as promotional aspect is concerned, companies can or cannot choose to use facebook advertisements depending upon their objectives. For example Condé Nast India uses no ads for it's Vogue India facebook page because Vogue India being a premier brand they believe in organic growth on facebook whereas it uses ads to promote it's GQ India facebook page because they don't consider it a premier brand like Vogue India. Pradeep also shared his own learning on the promotional aspect of facebook pages & shared a thumb rule that spend half the amount of bid suggested by facebook. He said that it works & he has been able to create some successful pages using this tactic.

The final aspect is measurement, which is very critical & also forms a part of ROI in social media. It depends on the brand what are their metrics to measure success. It can be high engagement in terms of likes or comments etc., number of fans, sales (using coupons), traffic to company's main website & so on. Facebook insights play a crucial part here too.

After delivering these concepts, Pradeep asked the participants to do an exercise on work sheets on how to build community on their respective facebook pages. There was a presentation by Shanu John (Creative Consultant at Hutchison 3 Global Services - H3GS) on their company's facebook community building strategy followed by a presentation by Kiran Gill (CMO, Lakme Lever) on their intended facebook community building exercise.

Overall the workshop was a great learning experience for all the participants. Some of the view points of the participants are as follows:
1. "The learning experiance was really great. Interaction with the other participants was too good. Would really like to attend more seminars." - Chhavi Kejriwal (Marketing, Pantaloons)
2. "I would recommend this workshop to others" - Shanu John (Hutchison 3 Global Services)

What is your facebook community building strategy? Would like to know!