Posted October 27, 2011 by Klint Rudolph

Challenge:  

We were working with a franchise of Floor Coverings International on their Paid Search campaigns.  In one of our monthly meetings with them, they asked if we had any advice for them to make their Facebook endeavors become more fruitful.  They had built a Business Facebook Page and had been doing daily posts but were having no success in attaining much interaction with an audience.  Outside of their work and personal friends, they had reached a plateau of “Likes” and were getting almost zero response to any of their posts.

Analysis: 

We spent some time taking a look at the high level overview of what Floor Coverings International was doing.  We looked at the type of content they were posting, the frequency of those posts and the Facebook reports (called Facebook Insights) over the last several months.  What we found was that they had 198 Lifetime “Likes” and they had 532 Post views.  They had zero feedback or interaction on any of those post views and they had been running pretty consistent at 40 active monthly users.  {Click on the image to view their Insights report before we implemented any changes}  We spoke to them about the importance of identifying their “target” customer within the Facebook community and the importance of creating content that they would find valuable.  At the time, their posts consisted of links to their monthly specials and posts about their different products with links to their site.  We suggested that the Facebook community, by and large, chooses to be on Facebook interacting with friends, colleagues and businesses and therefore wants to remain within Facebook, not be kicked out by links to other sites.  So, we suggested adding a Facebook Customization that would allow us to add the monthly specials from their website to their Facebook page.  This addition would give us the opportunity to offer an incentive for users to “follow” them.  The other suggestion we made was, that while announcing monthly specials and other similar posts are valuable, if we don’t have anyone seeing them or we aren’t reaching are target customer with those posts, they are virtually useless.  We laid out a plan to run some sort of contest on Facebook (which many large brands are starting to do) that would allow us to spread their message to a wider audience by engaging them with something of value to get them interacting with us.

Implementation:

  We began by building out the custom “Fan-Gate” tab.  This Facebook App is  designed to show users who have never visited the business fan page before to  see something “special” instead of just being delivered to their “Wall”.  Once a  user clicks the “Like” button, they are delivered the “special offer” or coupon      {Click on the images to see before and after in full size}.  The Fan-gate allowed  us to have consistency in their brand by keeping the same look as their website  but also deliver the special within Facebook and not link out.

Once the Fan-gate was created, we built out the Custom Facebook Contest.  Floor Coverings International got together with their suppliers and some of their Vendor partners and were able to create the “Floor Coverings International Facebook Ugly Bathroom Giveaway, which offers a chance to win a $10,000 complete bathroom remodel.  This is a separate Facebook App that is installed to the Business Facebook Page and can be found on the navigation on the left side of the Facebook Page.  The contest allows users to enter the contest by first “Liking” the business and then filling out a basic entry form with their name and email address.  The contest also encourages them upload a picture of their current bathroom.  Once they have entered, they are asked to invite their friends to participate in the contest as well.

Results:

  Within 20 days of the Fan-gate addition and the custom Facebook Contest, they went from 198 “Likes” to 319.  The post views went from 532 up to 10,409, a 544% increase.  Their active monthly users went up from 40 to 408 and they had over an 800% increase in interaction and post feedback.  Needless to say, this was a very successful Facebook endeavor for them.  {Click on the image to see the full insights report after the customization was complete}

If you would like more information on our Social Media Marketing or Facebook Customization, please don’t hesitate to call or use our contact form.  We would gladly strategize with you on how you could improve your Social Media results.