Lessons From An Ex Facebook Virgin

I lost my Facebook virginity at the start of this year when I finally started using Facebook every day.

It only took a couple of weeks of regular facebook use for me to realize the power of “the” Facebook.

And many of these tools are of great use to us marketers.

So for the last month I have peered through every aspect of the Facebook platform, its Javascript API and the Open Graph Protocol. I have seen the light. (…and thats an understatement…)

In this post I share a few of the things I learned that will help me bank more from Facebook.

I dont give everything away – gotta leave something for you to figure out.

Opting in with Facebook

In their wisdom to rule the web and beat google, Facebook provide the Registration and Facebook Login plugins to help you integrate your sites with Facebook.

What you might not know is that with these plugins you can also grab your visitors Facebook data (ie email).

The most familiar use of this for affiliates will be to use Facebook Login as part of your Squeeze Pages.

Once they connect, you will get access to the users full name, gender and locality. With some extra flags (extended permissions) you can get access to a whole host of other data. Most importantly, their email address.

I ran a number of tests looking at whether optins reduced if I asked to access more of their data. For the majority it didn’t. Whether I requested access to their  birthday, interests, relationship status, or  current location, optin rates stayed consistent.

Only when I requested access to read their mailbox, or requested the ability to publish to their stream, did optin’s reduce by about 45%.

Warning – open loop So what ive done is developed a Facebook App and a WordPress plugin that allows you to implement the form you see above on your landing pages. Once the users opts in by clicking the button, their details will be loaded into your iContact, Mailchimp or Awerber account

I will release this plugin soon – probably as part of my blog upgrade – in the next couple of weeks. So subscribe to the rss feed and make sure you regularly check out my blog.

Is your prospect on Facebook ?

Imagine running a CPV campaign targeting a dating offer. The facebook app install versions of these offers (SmartDate, Flirt, Cupid etc) are all the rage at the moment.

But you dont really want to present a Facebook app to a non facebook user, right?

With the Javascript API you can test whether a user is logged into facebook or not. The uses of this are many.

For the above example, and with a bit more Javascript logic added in, you can send your visitors to different versions of the same offer depending on whether they are logged into facebook or not.

Or, you can adjust your landing page design and show something like “Free iPad For Selected Facebook Users”.

Real social proof

Social proof and testimonials are essential components to any successful marketing campaign, on or offline.

Imagine the impact of social proof if it is your actual friends who are using the same product?

The impact on conversions will be exponential.

Facebook apps, pages, adverts and even some of the social plugins will always show if your friends are using the same app or liked the same page.

So next time you start a campaign on Facebook – think about this:

• Sell the “Like” to the user first, before they click through to your offer.
• Embed the ‘Facepile‘ plugin on your landing pages.
• If ‘owning’ your comments is not critical to you – Use Facebook comments
• And if you are running some form of Launch or Event – Check out Livestream

All of these will provide huge social proof and raise your credibility.

Use Facebook Pages for Your Campaigns

I dont know why more people dont do this.

Rather then using an external landing page for your Facebook campaign, embed your Lander in a Facebook Page.

Now that full iFrame support has been introduced (and static FBML discontinued), there is nothing you cant do within Facebook….(As long as you stay witin the 520px width).

And you dont even need to know Facebook iFrames or Javascript. Create your page, and add your PageTab with TabEdit.

(note: this is one of my apps – it would be awesome if you could recommend this to your fellow affiliates, like it, or suggest improvements).

The other benefits of using a facebook page?

Your domain will not be shown in your ad!! And your prospects stay within facebook which no doubt helps with the overall user experience.

And…

You might just get 254 likes before you have even started promoting the page!!

Facebook Search your demographics and find hot trends

With more then 500 million people on facebook, and most of them logging in every day, its also a great indicator of new hot trends and associated demographics.

Now you could use the Graph api for this and code your own tools to mine the data. Maybe this is something for another post one day.

For now lets just use the tools that already exist and the best way to explain this is with a little example.

Start with Facebook’s trends of 2010 (a bit like Google Zeitgeist):

“As with last year’s list, big movies were much talked about. “Toy Story 3,” “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse,” “Inception,” “Alice in Wonderland” and “Iron Man 2″ were the five most discussed (in that order).”

So lets say you decide that for your campaign, Inception is the right angle.

Check Openbook and search for Inception – you will see that its primarily men who refer to inception in their status updates, Its still hot (full page of results all within a day), and people are mainly confused about it (you knew this already).

Next tool is the Facebook API search by Zesty. Again, it allows you to drill down and explore public data of all facebook objects (users, pages, posts).

Lets search for all recent posts which referred to inception: http://zesty.ca/facebook/#/search?q=inception&type=post

And scan through the posts until you find something with decent amount of likes:  http://zesty.ca/facebook/#/771968114_158235987567399

(tip – change the limit=25 value in the URL to something like limit=100 to see more posts on a single page)

Then click on the ID of the user that created that post, and start skipping through their public data. For example – you could check out the links they like to share:  http://zesty.ca/facebook/#/771968114/links

Check out their comments, what they liked didnt like, and see whether there are any polls. Basically fill your notebook and build up an ‘avatar’ of the real die hard Inception fan.

Here are the tools again that I use to explore facebook data:

• http://youropenbook.org/
• http://zesty.ca/facebook/

My dream tool…

You all no doubt know about Google Insights. A great tool for market research.

Wouldnt it be great to have a similar tool for Facebook. Here are some of the things I would want it to do:

• Scrape interests from the Facebook ads interface
• Get the top pages/groups from facebook by fans / likes for each of the keywords
• Get the 10 most popular posts from these pages
• Analyse the users that like & comment – find the 10 most engaging users
• Analyse their profiles – are they male/female, frequent keywords in their status updates, favorite pages, etc etc
• End with a summary profile and targeting criteria for my ad campaigns

What tool would you want that uses Facebook data to help you make more money online?

Tagged as: facebook api, facebook apps, facebook php api, facebook php sdk, fbml