Day 6 Wrapup: Facebook Success Summit 2010 (#fbss10)

The Facebook Success Summit concluded on Tuesday, October 26 with three more information-packed sessions, picking up where last Thursday’s Day 5 sessions left off. The final sessions were:

• Session 1: Using Facebook to Create Mega Events
• Session 2: Preparing for the Future of Facebook and What Tomorrow Means for Business
• Session 3: From Fishers to Farmers: Bringing Your Brand to Your Customers Using Facebook

Session 1: Using Facebook to Create Mega Events

Presenter: Mike Stelzner (SocialMediaExaminer.com

Mike’s presentation was about using Facebook to help promote a large or small event and included many examples of how this year’s Facebook Success Summit was promoted using that channel. Note that we’re not talking about hosting an event on Facebook, but promoting an event hosted elsewhere through Facebook.

Takeaways

1. Facebook is the perfect platform for promoting events, including conferences, parties, webinars and meetups. Expect more functionality in the future as this is an important feature to Facebook.
2. A lot of the same benefits available from your wall are available on Facebook Event pages (Share, Like, etc.). Meaning posts about your event (and the event itself) can go viral quickly and attract new attendees.
3. Promote your event on Facebook even before you create the Event page. Create buzz with posts like, “We can’t wait to share an exciting announcement….” Encourage your fans to comment and share the news to generate buzz. “What could it be?”
4. Send promotional updates to your fans. Go to your Fan page, click Edit Page and on your wall under Promote Your Page click Send an Update. That update will go to all your fans or you can select specific targets by location, gender or age. Your updates shows up under Messages… Updates in your fan’s profile. This could have limited reach as many people don’t check this area of Facebook and may never see the update.
5. Facebook makes setting up an Event page easybut there are a few things you should know:
   • Once the dates are set, you can’t change them.
   • If you want to generate buzz leading up to the event, don’t create the Event page until you’re ready to launch. As soon as you create the Event page in Facebook it will show up. Deleting it doesn’t prevent other users from seeing it in their feed.
   • Use good images and copy. Mix up your content by using images and video on your Event wall.
   • In the Event information area, only the first 50 words will display so keep your most important copy and link to your event’s landing page in the beginning. Most people don’t click the See More link to expand the text.
   • Consider using a unique bit.ly URL for use only with your Facebook promotion so you can better keep of track of traffic.
   • Be sure to show the guest list on the Event page and allow non-administrators to write on the wall for maximum benefit.
   • Once the Event page is set up, anyone on Facebook can invite others to the event. You can also invite your Facebook friends, use lists of friends to include and send invitations by email by importing email address lists.
   • Make sure to promote your Facebook page on your event sales page. This will increase event exposure and get
     people engaged.
6. Consider changing your avatar to a mini ad after the event is announced as that ad will appear on all pages.
7. The moment your Event page goes live you’ll want to invite a lot of people. There are a variety of ways to do this, including:
   • Use the Select People to Invite feature on your Event page. You can invite individual people from your personal friends, Friend lists you’ve created, or choose All.
   • You can also invite people via email or import your email address lists. Your invitees do not have to be Facebook friends, or even have a Facebook account.
   • Ask your friends (and your admins) to invite their friends.
8. Add a personal note with your invitation. Once invited, your Event will appear in the invitee’s Event page if they are already on Facebook. This leverages the power of numbers because while you you are ‘awaiting replies’ from thousands of people, your event instantly looks important.
9. Use Facebook ads to promote your event. You’ll want to place the ads both on Facebook and on your external landing page. Use Insights demographics for ad targeting. (See Leveraging the Power of Facebook Ads from Day 2′s FBSS Wrapup post.
10. Guests can RSVP for your event from the Event wall. When your guests RSVP, it posts on their own wall and is sent out into the news feeds. When a guest RSVPs, they have the option to also include a personal note. The note shows on the Event wall and on their wall.
11. Your Event page needs to be managed in the same way as your Fan page. Some great tips were already provided in Day 2, session 2.

Session 2: Preparing for the Future of Facebook and What Tomorrow Means for Business

Format: Michael Stelzner’s Interview with Justin Smith

Justin Smith is the founder of Inside Network, which publishes Inside Facebook, Inside Social Games, Inside Virtual Goods and AppData. He is also the author of Facebook Marketing Bible.

Discussion Highlights

1. On what he’s seen regarding the evolution of Facebook. He started Inside Facebook in 2006 and has seen mega growth in Facebook since then, both for marketing and as a platform for application development.
2. On Facebook’s latest announcement regarding the release of a PayPal widget for Facebook. This is essentially a payment widget that will enable people to conduct transactions inside the widget instead of having to go to PayPal. He sees continued growth for payment widgets that allow users to conduct transactions inside Facebook and from within Facebook apps.
3. On where he thinks Facebook is taking its user community in the future. The most important thing Facebook is worried about is that users trust it with the services it provides and the data it captures. Over the last three years Facebook has been increasingly focused on creating products for businesses of all types and sizes around the world.
4. On the new version of Facebook Groups. Motivation for creating the new Groups was to allow the sharing of content with a subset of friends in a way that’s easier than using Friend lists. You can just go to the group and post content and know that the content will only be accessible to group members. Instead of inviting and requiring acceptance, you can just add people to the group, much as you might tag people in a photo. This has made Groups more viral. Facebook has since added new controls around notification channels because some users found they began getting swamped by Group messages. To his knowledge, the old Groups will not go away, but Facebook may not continue upgrading them. You can no longer create an old type of Group.
5. On Facebook Places. Local businesses have become a larger part of Facebook’s ecosystem recently due to its support for micro-targeting. Places (just launched a few weeks ago) is one way that will allow businesses and users to connect on Facebook based on location data. A Place page emphasis check-in data. Its layout is different than a Fan page. Facebook has created an initial set of Place pages for nearly every business in the U.S. Owners have to confirm ownership in order to edit the page.
6. On Facebook’s use around the world. Facebook presents a huge international mobile opportunity. In the U.S., Facebook is still primarily desktop-based and accessed using a traditional browser. Overseas, Facebook usage is quite different. It’s more mobile and more focused on sharing location activities. Facebook has created a number of partnerships to accelerate the growth of Facebook internationally. In many countries, Facebook is the number one use for mobile.
7. On Facebook’s ad platform. Facebook continues to add more features for advertisers, including connection features that allow advertisers to target people who have a friend that are already a Fan of your page. Facebook is now rolling out an API for advertisers, which will allow advertisers to create ads with thousands of variations.
8. On Facebook Questions. This is Facebook’s new Q&A tool that’s still being developed and tested, but has great potential.
9. On Facebook search. Facebook search now has the ability to show if your friends Like something within the search results. Facebook is still in the early stages of integrating content into the search experience. Facebook search could be a very powerful concept as the number of Likes continues to grow by leaps and bounds and provides a means of social filtering. He believes Facebook search will grow in popularity over time.

Session 3: From Fishers to Farmers: Bringing Your Brand to Your Customers Using Facebook

Presenter: Jesse Stay

Jesse Stay is a speaker, author and entrepreneur specializing in social media technology. He is the author of I’m on Facebook, Now What? and FBML Essentials.

The presentation was about “Fishing where the fish are”: taking your brand where your customers are, and “Give a man a fish you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”: getting your message to one person can really spread to potentially billions of worldwide users in the future thanks to social media.

Takeaways

1. Facebook ads:
   • Target your ad creative to your target audience by customizing your ads.
   • Target the friends of those that like your page and already have an interest in your brand.
   • Link to your Facebook page, not your website if possible, because as people Like your page, you’re building a distribution list. The Like button on the ad will add them as a new fan (Liker) even if they don’t click on the ad.
   • Get a Facebook ad rep. for your brand if you have the budget. If you don’t, you can use other strategies to promote your brand.
2. Facebook Pages:
   • Use Static FBML (being phased out) to build your own.
   • Require people to Like your Page for promotions
   • Build a Welcome tab
   • Use SMS to get people to Like your page (text “like pagename” to 32665 – without the quotes)
   • Place placards with your Facebook URL in your store windows, add to your site, etc.
   • Creating a call to action on each post (give them something to do) will result in more comments and Likes
   • Integrate your Facebook page with Twitter (to use your existing audience). You can hook up the two to automatically put your Facebook posts on Twitter by going to Facebook.com/Twitter.
   • Add a Facebook Like box to your website.
   • Use AppBistro.com to find Facebook apps.
   • If needed, hire someone to customize your app.
3. Facebook Places:
   • Claim your Places page. (Check in at your location and look at your Facebook profile. Use the link at the bottom of the Places page to provide proof that you’re the owner of that place.) Once claimed, your place turns into a Facebook Page others can like and get updates from, you can post updates to, etc.
   • Track who’s checking in. Use a leader board, which shows lists of who’s checked in the most at your location, and then offer specials or deals to top check ins.
   • Build deals just for those who check in. Apps are in development for this purpose now, but in the meantime you can enlist the help of a Facebook developer who can tap into Facebook’s API to set it up. For example, “Check in and we’ll give you 50% off.” In the meantime, you can just ask your customers to show you they are checked in by looking at their cell phone.
4. Facebook Questions:
   • Briefly discussed in previous session. Now in beta and not available to all users. At the top of Facebook as you enter your status you’re presented with a Questions option you can use to ask questions and have your friends vote on answers.
   • You can use the Questions feature to create a feedback channel, a customer support channel, poll your fan base or post questions to start a discussion. A poll option is also available where people can vote on what they think are the best answers.
5. Facebook apps:
   • Most apps have moved into gaming or tools (tabs) for Facebook pages.
   • Apps allow you to create a custom version of your brand right on Facebook as well as custom Like buttons for your website or blog.
6. Social Plugins. Social plugins provide a simple form you fill out to get HTML code you can copy and paste into your website or blog. Some popular plugins are:
   • Recent Activity plugin that shows fan activity. This plug in can be useful for making presentations to management about the reach of your Facebook Fan page.
   • Like button plugin that you can use with any unique URL, article or on any piece of content.
   • Comments plugin allow users to post their blog comment to their Facebook stream.
   • Recommendations plugin shows posts that have been liked by Facebook users in a list.
7. Graph API (graph.facebook.com). You or your developer just need to append a Facebook username to the graph.facebook.com URL to pull up Facebook ID information your programmer can use in other places. For example, to see the Market it Write Facebook page’s social graph, you’d go to graph.facebook.com/marketitwrite.
8. Facebook Insights (facebook.com/insights). You can get code you can put in your website or blog page to allow Facebook to immediately start tracking Facebook users on your site anonymously and provide you with the data in a graph format. Includes gender, age ranges, etc. Highly recommended.
9. Examples of how sites are integrating with Facebook: Loads of examples are available at developers.facebook.com/showcase.

That concludes Facebook Success Summit 2010. Watch for my wrapup post of the entire Summit in the next few days that will feature the very best takeaways from the Summit (and possibly some I haven’t even mentioned yet), much like my final post for the Social Media Success Summit, 17 Crucial Things You Must Know for Social Media Success. Till then, thanks for reading my session wrapups!

Facebook Success Summit – Index of Session Takeaways

Did you attend any of the sessions of the Facebook Success Summit 2010? If so, what were your takeaways? If not, what are your thoughts on the future of Facebook and your experiences with using Facebook and other forms of social media marketing as a marketing tool?

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Tagged as: #fbss10, Facebook apps, Facebook events, Facebook plugins, Facebook Success Summit, graph API

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