One of my favorite books of all time is a book called “Good to Great”, written by Jim Collins. It’s a best-seller and it talks about characteristics of companies who go from being good to being great. One of the concepts he talks about in the book is the Flywheel.
"Good to Great", copyright Jim Collins
The Flywheel Concept applies to companies when they break out and really start to hit accelerated growth. I think the Flywheel Concept can be applied to a brand’s Facebook presence, taking it from good to great. Hitting the synergy between earned media—in this case shared fan engagements and endorsements about your brand—combined with paid media can create a breakout success. I like to think of it as the “Facebook Flywheel”.
A few weeks ago there was a great article in “Ad Age” about a Nielsen study on social context in ads. It revealed a 16% greater recall of an ad if your friends are surfaced to “like” the product, cause or brand, especially if noticed through your news feed. And a greater recall of homepage ads when appearing alongside mentions of friends who are brand fans.
As Nielsen also cited, 90% of products and services are influenced by friend and/or peer recommendations. And we’ve noted for some time now the effectiveness of messaging directly in the news feed, generating up to 110x greater interaction as opposed to other locations, like a Facebook tab. Clients that utilize our Social Relationship Manager platform—which allows brands to deliver engagements like polls, coupons, etc., directly in a user’s news feed—have wielded staggering results. Combine effective engagements directly in a user’s news feed (organic earned media), with Facebook ads that ties to your peers “likes,” and your brand is on its way from good to great.
Bottom line: You’ve got to tie-in the ads that you buy on Facebook with messaging that shows up in the news feed to double your impact.
Fundamentally this means the more fans you have on your Page, when you run ads on Facebook, the more relevant those ads become. If my friend “likes” a brand in an ad, I’m much more likely to click on or recall that ad. If your friend, family or peer “likes” a brand, you are much more willing to follow their lead. Birds of a feather – well, you know – they tend to flock together. This is especially true on Facebook.
Marketers need to focus on winning Facebook fans over the long haul if they want to improve their odds of success when advertising, as well as with shared engagement. The higher click through on organic impressions is another indication of the power of earned media on Facebook.
This is why the Social Page Evaluator is so critical to measure and understand where you stand and how your page is valued today and then how you track that over time.
We saw a great void in the market as we know marketers are clamoring for data to determine ROI for their social media efforts, and we wanted to help push this conversation and thinking forward. We clearly struck a cord, as in less than a week since the product has launched, we have seen nearly 30,000 evaluations run from 121 countries.
Cultivating and growing your fans over time is where Vitrue products like the Social Relationship Manager (an arsenal for publishing to Facebook) and the Fan Management System (tab management) come into play.
These tools empower you to communicate and engage your fans so you actually get more growth in your fan page. But then you also get more engagement and sharing effects when you add content that is relevant for your consumers.
Combine all this together with effective ads and you are on the Facebook Flywheel. And ready to go from good to great.
We are excited to release our second annual ranking of the most social brands, The Vitrue 100. 2009 certainly marked the tipping point for social media with Facebook crossing 350 million month active users worldwide (100 million US users) according to “Inside Facebook”, December 2009.
