Brisbane retailer Xennox Diamond World is so keen to encourage Facebook likes that it’s giving away a diamond ring worth $6,000.
It is running a competition called ‘Win Some Bling’ asking people to detail their best retail experience in 30 words or less. They are also being asked what item of jewellery they would most like for Christmas, which will help it group fans and offer different promotions.
Created by Simon Dell of communications firm Two Cents Group, success is being measured by the number of entries and other Facebook Insights measurements. It is also running Facebook ads linking directly to the competition, where people can enter without having to like the page.
“We’ve found from experience where we ‘force’ people to like a page, we don’t get a great response. People don’t like being blackmailed in to liking a page – or people like and unlike, quite quickly. Our aim is to develop the quality of followers, rather than the quantity,” Dell says.
But what does a ‘like’ amount to, anyway?
From a marketing sense, ‘likes’ is the new email marketing but with lower costs and more effective targeting, adds creative technologist at digital media firm MRM, Ash Pegram.
“The larger the Facebook ‘likes’ the bigger the subscriber base, effectively. Brands now have a better and in-depth understanding of their customers through social media right down to a granular level – seeing how they talk about and interact with your brand online in an unfiltered way,” Pegram says.
“They can cross-segment their social data in many different ways (gender, age, location, interests, likes, etc). And for brands that have mastered the art of social media marketing, it provides a truly valuable ROI to generate sales and conversion to their brand.”
According to media buying agency chief strategy officer James Hier, Facebook ‘likes’ offers the nirvana of ‘earned’ media, which refers to content that brands get in front of consumers without having to pay for the privilege.
“There are obviously the costs of attracting and retaining this community, but that’s another story,” Hier says.
But rather than measuring the number of likes, businesses should measure impact on behaviour, vanderVoort says.
“First decide what behaviour you’re trying to influence through your Facebook strategy, then look at how you’re going to measure it. There are many free tools… and no one size fits all, so each business must find the tools that suit their own objectives,” vanderVoort says.
“And don’t forget the traditional methods of tracking, like using unique landing pages on your website, using a specific phone number, or asking where your customers found out about your product or service.”
But things can go wrong if you’re not careful. Online retailer Bing Lee was criticised when it offered to donate $1 for every ‘like’ to the victims of the Queensland floods.
Spencer says the promotion was seen as crass by many, particularly at a time when many were donating without applying conditions. “It was a bad idea compounded by bad crisis management,” he says.
Woolworths also created an issue when it asked a simple question: ‘this weekend, I can’t wait to…?’
“If you ask people to do something through social media, be aware that some will be more literal than others!”
And according to social media expert Ash Pegram, there has been a rise of Facebook apps that require a user to ‘like’ a brand page before they can interact with it, and the increase of this mechanism has started to dilute the value of the ‘like’ for brands.
“It’s common to see a brand’s ‘like’ count rise while promoting a specific promotion or competition through a Facebook app. It is, after all, literally one click to ‘like’ a brand. But it’s safe to assume a lot of these users have no personal connection to the brand – they just want to win something or get something for cheap.”
Source: Michael Simonetti, founder and managing director, digital agency AndMine
