When we go and meet our customers most of the times we discuss some new campaign/contest idea on Facebook, which we want to do to engage users. Customers want the fan base to grow ( the campaign idea to achieve its business goal). Discussion boils down to two points:
1. What is the contest design?
2. How will it be discovered and hence become popular ?
While the first question we are able to answer after some brainstorming but for the second question when our customers do not want to spend money on advertising the campaign we are left with limited choices. How will the users discover the application if we are not advertising it.
The reason I am writing this post is to put my thoughts around how we as an agency/business see Facebook and how a user sees the platform. So, it is an attempt to understand how to do organic promotion
Our Illusion: A brand page is the place where the user comes and interacts with the content and we try to make nice cover pictures and place applications to engage users apart from posting.
User’s view: A timeline where content from friends and pages is passing like traffic on a busy road.
So, in this context when we build an application for running a contest, while we do all our effort to build it and make it visible under the cover picture. Will an average fan notice it? No, they are not visiting our page instead our content reaches out to them (that too only with a limited percentage of the fan base)
Let’s take a real world analogy to understand the content flow.
So, the analogy here is like if a locality (say locality represents Facebook) and where each of the house in locality is like a brand page/profile and the chai shop at the gate of the colony represents a typical Facebook user. The chai shop owner might notice people passing by when her attention is on the street traffic or if person comes to have a chai (here people represents Facebook posts). In most cases the chai shop owner would only notice how the passerby look (their dress, interaction etc) and might not notice how their houses look (read: our office looks or what change we do in office on a daily basis, as we also have a chai shop nearby)
Her only window to our office is the people who either pass by her shop or visit her shop (because she never comes to our office, our office folks only go to her) . This analogy pretty much gives me the essence of content flow on Facebook. So, if we have to be noticed by the chai shop owner we have to look nice and pass by/visit her shop when we know she will be free on shop noticing who is passing by.
Which means we can do the following to popularize the campaign using posts alone:
1. By making visual posts about the campaign idea, having the application link:
2. By making more frequent posts about the contest around the time when engagement is high.
Cheers
-Sachin, MixORG Team
