An army of likable objects: The new Facebook marketing strategy

May 6th, 2010 | Justin Kistner

Since the fan Page was introduced in 2007, marketers on Facebook have been clamoring for fans. Campaigns to drive fan acquisition have ranged from contests to virtual gifts, all in the name of gathering an audience to support future marketing efforts.

StepChange, a leading developer of Facebook campaigns, says that once the brands they work have a good fan base, they shift to fan activation campaigns where the name of the game is to get audience participation. A few leading brands were graduating beyond activation into programs designed to monetized their most active fans. Then, Facebook deprecated fans and renamed them likers, which changed everything.

Liking web pages grants publishing permission

If a Facebook user “likes” a web page, the owner of that web page can now make posts to that user’s wall. Did you catch that? When I first heard that, I couldn’t believe what I heard, so I wanted to investigate it further. Fortunately, our VP of Marketing was in the midst of implementing Facebook’s new Social Plugins on his wife’s site, Petit Couture. Here’s what he showed me.

Jascha put Like buttons on the home page and product pages of her site as pictured below:

Jascha put his Facebook ID in the meta tags of this page to tell Facebook he is the admin for these likable objects. So, when he sees the page, he sees an admin link that looks like this:

When Jascha clicks on that link, he goes to an admin page for that likable object that looks like this:

The alert message across the top of the page confirms that he can, in fact, manage his fans and publish stories to his fans’ News Feeds. Petit Couture has several web pages (home page and product pages) with the like button on them, so they are building up fans, err likers, across many pages. Jascha sees them in a list on his Facebook Insights dashboard as pictured below:

Ultimately, Petit Couture is not a very big site (although they have the cutest children’s clothes you’ve ever seen!), so imagine large brand sites with Like buttons seeded throughout their hundreds or thousands of web pages. To marketers, the introduction of the Like button for web pages and the deprecated “Become a Fan” button wasn’t just a name change, it was a game change. Allow me to explain.

Creating a decentralized presence on Facebook

In the previous Facebook environment, the dominant marketing strategy was to establish your fan page as a hub in Facebook and to extend your spoked presence out via the walls of your fans. That may all change now.

You see, now that every object on Facebook has a Page and all Pages can send updates to their Likers, building an audience is broader than developing your single fan page of old. For example, you could have a video on a web page that receives 10,000 likes while your fan Page has only 2,000 likers. Now you have an offer you’d like to present to your audience, which object’s audience would you want to use for remarketing? The 10K one, right?

If the goal previously was to create a centralized presence on Facebook before, the goal certainly seems to be shifting toward a decentralized presence now. Instead of creating an audience around a single object (the fan Page), now marketers must create an army of likable objects.

The New Era of Facebook Marketing

Marketers who have already begun to wrap their minds around the significance of this shift in tactics are already overwhelmed. Imagine having 50 objects with audiences that mostly don’t overlap. How will you hit publish once and send updates to them all? Is that even a smart tactic with pre-segmented audiences? How will you strategize to have the objects work together in a coordinated manner to have a larger group impact? How will you measure them all to optimize your distributed presence?

Prepare for a new wave of CMSs to help you manage a distributed presence. Also, now more than ever analytics solutions will have to be effortless to deploy and will have to tell an aggregated story with strong drill down capabilities.

If you think this is a big change, I’d suggest you’re underestimating the significance. This is a change in discipline as significant to marketing as the emergence of online marketing in the 90s. And, there’s more to it than simply shifting to a decentralized presence. This comes at the same time as one of the most significant changes to marketing in several decades, which is the ability to access and store profile data permanently. I have a blog post in the works to explain more about how accessing profile data works and how it changes online marketing. If you want an early look, check out our recording of a debrief we held for Facebook’s f8 conference.