Developing a coherent Facebook and social media strategy

Yesterday, 77Agency in collaboration with Buongiorno Marketing Services, held their 3rd social media event in the month of October dedicated to marketing professionals in Europe. The event was held last night at the private member club, the Soho House London, where we then had the opportunity to network informally with our exclusive guests including the NHS, Virgin games, Cowshed, Comcast International Media group, IPC Media, Elemis, Paramount, Mobile Squared and Bauer Media, over some drinks and light refreshments.

This time the guestspeaker of the night was the online business network Viadeo, with its 8 million user base and 700,000 participating companies. In representation, Viadeo’s Europe COO, Peter Crosby, discussed about the use of business social networks for marketing as well as the practical and measurable methods to get the best out of social media for your business. But before he went into the details of things, Crosby ran a Live twitter feed and poll via mobile to assess the current attitudes and usage of social media by the seminar guests!

In addition, Adhish Kulkarni, MD Buongiorno Marketing Services UK, also took the floor and spoke about the 65million users who are accessing Facebook from their mobile across the globe. One curious fact, these users are typically 50% more active than non-mobile Facebook users. He mentioned how mobile is redefining the concept of targeting, in other words, it’s becoming the ultimate anytime/anywhere communication channel.

To close, our MD Marco Corsaro, talked about developing a coherent social media strategy for brands, making use of the viral effect of Facebook to drive brand awareness, sales and build a brand community. He commented that 30% of our active time is spent online, yet online advertising typically accounts for only 7% of advertising spend. Moreover, in Europe, users spend an average of 25.7 minutes a day using Facebook, visiting 2.6 times a day and 50% of users login everyday.

He then outlined some of the advantages the Facebook advertising platform offers marketers and these are:

* Highly targeted advertising  based on standard demographics but also on hobbies and interests such as music, books, tv shows or even birth dates!
* Engagements ads introduce viral into the mix
* Video ads, ‘become a fan’ ads, events, polling and even search is now possible, all of which are helping brands to interact with consumers and build solid brand communities

Also, Facebook have a number of tracking tools which are constantly being developed to improve targeting and help the advertiser make the right decisions when it comes to defining a social media campaign through Facebook.

For more information on 77Agency Seminars & Events, stay tuned on www.77agency.com/seminars/

Many thanks to Adhish Kulkarni, Peter Crosby and Marco Corsaro for sharing their insights!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 6:16 pm and is filed under 77News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.