Marketing on Facebook
In the past few months, I’ve noticed that more and more retailers are utilizing the page option on Facebook as part of their marketing. As an avid consumer, I have signed up for several email updates from companies such as Chapters and Bench as well as liked their pages on Facebook. Given that many people use and spend a lot of their time on Facebook now, it is an effective way beyond traditional means to reach out to customers – especially for turning one time consumers into advocates or at least loyal customers. At the beginning the retailers often began with a contest that they advertised in order to build a presence first.
Some contests, for example, were just for the brand’s page to reach a certain level of ‘like’s, ie. once 5,000 were reached, everyone who ‘liked’ would get access to a coupon. Other contests required submissions of photos or surveys on their page to really start the community going. Compared to mobile alerts and emails, its seems this might be more effective in engaging customers.
An example: Dynamit's facebook page. Source: http://www.facebook.com/Dynamite?v=app_6009294086
It creates an easy-to-access community for customers to share their experiences. For example, Aldo encourages customers to post pictures of their shoes and often is one of the first to comment positively. When the occasional negative experience is shared, they reply that they will make sure customer service contacts them to make amendments. Despite this, there have been some continuous complaints on the Aldo online purchasing experience that have led to continued postpurchase dissonance. It was quite clear that customer service hadn’t addressed the issue well enough to minimize the dissonance. It would also appear that they hadn’t addressed the core issue to avoid the complaints in the first place. The complaints generally involved damaged shoes that have continually made their way into online orders. Despite having experienced this, some customers have continued to order from Aldo nevertheless. It seems the price and design for them was enough to balance off the risk of receiving damaged shoes.
A printscreen of the Facebook Pages browsing page on Facebook. (http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/browser.php)
http://www.nickburcher.com/2007/09/5-great-examples-of-retailers-using.html
The above link is to another marketing blog post that was posted in September 2007. Even then, it seems big retailers had already noticed the opportunity to reach consumers present in online social platforms. The fifth example is of Wal-mart and how their page on Facebook stood out awkwardly instead of integrating into the Facebook community. Rather than to draw out advocates/loyal/potential customers, it ended up attracting the opposite. Clearly, the strategy didn’t consider the structure of facebook’s community and site well enough.
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Some links:
http://technorati.com/business/article/national-retailers-jumping-on-facebook-bandwagon/
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/06/24/facebook-becoming-even-more-valuable-to-retailers
http://social-media-optimization.com/2010/02/why-online-retailers-must-be-on-facebook/