The Social Warrior

China helped me understand Social Media and I’m okay with that!

When I made the second appointment with Dr.Cowan, my sons’ pediatrician, I did not intend to walk out with the second most useful set of marketing instructions ever given to me.  (For the first set check out The Neurology of Social Media). Then again, dispensing life changing advice seems to come naturally to Dr Cowan who has a way of converting you to his way of thinking through sheer reasonableness.

What I hadn’t realized when Dr Cowan had given me the near impossible task of describing who my boys are as individuals was that he was going to use this assignment to teach me not only the second most valuable parenting lesson I have ever received, but also the second most important marketing lesson I’ve ever received.

When we met at his office Dr Cowan approached my wife and I with the energy of a professor who has been given a national platform to share a life time’s worth of wisdom. “Most doctors have a very general and broad approach to treating their patients. They use a broad set of criteria for diagnosis but ultimately hold a reductionist approach to the results and treatment,” he said. He has a very certain and definitive way of speaking that doesn’t leave much room for questions he plans to answer anyway. That said though my mind instantly began to think of how marketers also approach their brands. We take a general and broad approach. I do it myself. How many times have I talked about the Social Media Conversion Funnel and the journey from Awareness to ROI, and the blend of online and offline marketing channels at our disposal. In other words, no matter who you are you need a blend of PR, Social Media, Display advertising, and blah blah.  How wrong have we been?

I sit back in my chair and keep listening. “There should be a customized approach that takes into consideration learning styles, temperament, and embracing the concept that no two people are the same.”

For as long as marketing has been around so have benchmarking, competitive analysis, and best practices. But why does it all matter when no two brands are the same, no matter how similar they are?  Believe me I am not trying to trick you into reading interesting things I come across under the mask of social media and marketing. This stuff enthralled me because it is spot on but no one I know talks about it.

Whether human or brand there is always a personality. If you remember from the Neurology of Social Media it is ultimately the combination of why the brand exists, what it’s personality is, and what is it capable of doing that a marketing strategy is formed. The personality portion however is most often ignored, except sometimes in social media.

All personality types can be based on 5 variations which are rooted in Chinese philosophy, medecine, and culture.   Hence, China helped me understand Social Media and I’m okay with it.

Before we left his office I asked Dr Cowan which type of season or element he thought I was.  He thought I am Water with a touch of Metal, and my wife agreed.  So, remember I have the gift of depth and detail and you should be listening to me  Oh, and thank you China!!

The Neurology of Social Media

When we are born our brains are not yet fully developed. Essentially, there are three steps in the development of the human brain.

1. The Development of our Reptilian Brain
2. The Development of our Limbic Brain
3. The Development of our Neocortex Brain

(Yes, you are reading a blog post about Social Media, so keep on reading; I’ll be tying it all in.)

The Reptilian Brain is our instinctual brain.  This is the information we are born with: I need to eat, I need to sleep, I need to breathe, I need to poop – essentially a new born baby.  A brand new baby doesn’t have any fear, anger, anxiety, obsessive, or compulsive behaviors.  This stuff all belongs to the development of the limbic brain.

Think of the limbic brain as the dog brain.  There is more to your dog than eating, sleeping, breathing, and pooping.  Your dog’s personality is very much dictated by his limbic brain setting the behaviors that make him who he is.  These are also the characteristics that differentiate a toddler from a new born baby.  Your baby, at this stage, is not just eating, sleeping, and giving you the most disgusting diapers; he now has a personality.

Now, at some point your crawling toddler will learn to walk and when he does he will realize there is less friction when walking than when crawling.  In other words, your little genius figures out that it is more efficient to walk.  And, thankfully for you, he will never crawl again.  This is the development of the Neocortex, the pruning brain.

At this point in the brains’ development your child has gone from forming behavior to forming ability.  Communication is not a behavior, it is an ability – a social skill.  Of course, depending on what is going on with your limbic development (Are you shy? Are you anxious? Are you scared? etc…)  some people are better at communication than others.

Communication is complicated.  It is not about speaking or writing words in a tangible and meaningful sequence.  It is about understanding the softer nuances of physical and facial gestures.  In other words the meta data in communication is just as important, if not more important, than the spoken or written data.

Everything that I have explained so far was told to me by an amazing pediatrician named Dr Stephen Cowan. As he puts it, “It is simply scientific fact”.  The other amazing thing that Dr Cowan said to me was that it is also scientific fact that the brain never stops developing.  In other words we can become better.   This is of key importance with regard to what I am now going to write about.

So, if you are a social media marketer and you have just inherited the social media marketing function of a brand, you have to first understand the brands reptilian, limbic, and neocortex function.  It’s reptilian brain is basically why it exists and what it needs to do to continue to exist.  Starbucks, for example, exists to sell coffee.

The brands limbic brain is it’s behavioral characteristics.  Does the brand have any fears, anxieties, compulsive practices (good or bad)? Why did the brand develop these characteristics? What happened in the brands development (history) to lead to these?

And, finally, there is the brands’ neocortex.  How quickly does the brand learn? How adaptable is the brand? How much imagination does the brand have?  How good (or bad) are the brands’ social skills? Does the brand understand nuances or the subtleties of dealing with different cultures, socio-economic demographics, and so on?

When Dr Cowan first explained these stages of brain development to me I left our appointment in a state of amazed bewilderment.  I felt as if over the last three years I had been raising my children in a state of darkness, without any knowledge of how my children’s most important organ was developing.  I was reminded of something my father once said to me,

Any idiot can have a child; raising a child well takes a lot of knowledge and work

So, let me put it to you this way: Any idiot can do social media; but developing a socially strong brand takes a lot of knowledge and work.  I hope now that you have read this post about the neurology of communication development you will at least set off on the path of knowledge.

Should your brand run away from Social Media?

It may be hard boycotting a band wagon that everyone else is jumping on, but lately I find a lot of brands are choosing Social Media over what is strategically sensible because everyone else is either doing Social Media or talking about it.

When I was studying Business and Marketing at University I remember one of my marketing teachers saying, “if there is just one thing that I want you to remember today it is this: Before you spend any money make sure you know why you are spending it and how you are measuring it’s return”. At the risk of ageing myself, that was way before the dawn of Digital Media and Web Analytics.

I guess what my old teacher was trying to say was that above all else you must have a measurable objective. I am a firm believer that you can’t effectively manage a process that you can’t measure the results of. And, Social Media, is ultimately nothing more than a process.

Of course, you don’t have to take it from me. Avinash Kaushik, the God of Web Analytics and the author of one of the best blogs on the subject, Occam’s Razor, in the post “Web Analytics 101: Definitions, Goals, Metrics, KPIs, Dimensions, Targets” identified 7 of the most foundational parts of web metrics and analytics: Incase, you are too lazy (or busy) to check it out for yourself, they were:

1. Business Objectives
2. Goals
3. Metrics
4. Key Performance Indicators
5. Targets
6. Dimensions
7. Segments

Now, Avinash may be a web analytics guru but essentially what he has done is to list out the essentials of business management and marketing. From 1 through to 7, chances are if you get these right you are mostly on the way to success.

So, here is an entirely fictional story made up by me just to prove my point. Our brand is called Lolita, a super high-end spa in Marrakech, Morocco. Does Lolita need a Social Media strategy? Will it benefit from a Facebook page or a Twitter handle? How about a YouTube channel and a Foursquare application? (Check out The Social Warrior post: Social Media is Dead. Long Live Social Media for my more general thoughts on how Social Media is evolving beyond these platforms anyway).

Before you read on, just ask your self the above questions again and see if you have a recommendation.

Now, let’s use the first 6 of these fundamentals on Lolita (the 7th is mostly needed for when you are actually creating a report):

1. Business Objectives: High-end spa aimed at providing large doses of luxury to both affluent travellers to and residents of the city of Marrakech

2. Goals: Modern Luxury amidst an ancient setting, providing the most exquisite spa services from around the world as well as services traditionally only found in Morocco

3. Metrics: The number of spa sessions

4. Key Performance Indicators: An increase in the average order size of spa services (as users begin to realize how great the services are they book more sessions every time they book)

5. Targets: 500 spa bookings a month at an average order of $300 per booking

6. Dimensions: Affluent Visitor to Morocco

If Lolita was a real spa and you had just run through this exercise would you not be in a much better position to make a decision about if, when, and how you should develop a social media strategy? So, what do you think? Should Lolita jump on the Social Media band wagon?

I check in with my teams’ clients on an extremely regular basis. As I talk to them the meta-data I am looking for is to know if they are happy with the Social Media service they are receiving from my team. Thankfully for me I have an amazing team and 9.8 times out of 10 my clients are super happy. That said, on the rarest of occasions when there are concerns, as soon as we delve into the concern we find that one or more of these 7 fundamentals have come undone.

Believe me, there are plenty of real word examples of brands that spend tremendous amounts of time and resources chasing a social community. Sometimes they are successful, sometimes uncharacteristically not. Yet, as is any brands’ worst nightmare, a product crisis can seemingly overnight create groups of detractors, haters, and complainers that are teaming with anti-brand excitement, flowing with communication, and boasting energy.

Why does this happen?

The simple answer is business objective, or perhaps in such a case we can just call it objective. No matter how much time, energy, or effort a brand puts into building its Social Media presence, unless there is a clear objective for what it is the brand is trying to achieve in the Social Media space, why it is there in the first place, and why people need to communicate with it, then the brands’ efforts are partly wasted.

Just because you are a globally known household brand name it does not mean people want to communicate with you or about you – they may just want to buy your products and be left alone otherwise. If you want them to communicate with you, give them a reason to – that is your objective. Give them a reason to talk to you and about you. Give them a reason to love you enough to do that. It is complicated. Much more complicated than just being. Let’s look at this notion in a different way. Any anti-brand community that forms organically has a clear objective – their dislike for the brand or something that the brand has done (think BP), and there is passion behind the objective.

So, if you are a brand thinking about doing Social Media and you run through the 7 foundational questions above and realize that either Social Media is not right for you, or that it is not the right time for you to be in Social Media, then just walk away from it. There is no shame in being reasonable. Be proud of having made the right decision.

Social Media is Dead. Long Live Social Media.

In the arc of Social Media’s life time it was barely a moment ago when Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube reigned supreme; but Social Media has evolved and is no longer the province of just three platforms. Social Media 1.0 is dead. Social Media 2.0 is here.

Social Media 2.0 is part Local and part global; part Idea Generation and part Multi-Channel implementation; part Digital PR and part Content Creation and Distribution; part Emerging technologies (not just social technologies) and a huge part Reporting and Analytics.

So, as Social Media 1.0 has it’s last call brands and Social Media enthusiasts should rest assured that Social Media 2.0 is a much better marketing program.

Social Media has in many ways just got harder.  The death of Social Media 1.0 is not the end of the relationships brands have cultivated their communities.  Social Media 2.0 is a much better opportunity to seed and maintain relationships in a more diverse and exciting way.   It is the opportunity to think creatively and come up with great ideas that are then lives across a plethora of possible content distribution platforms rather than worrying about how to keep connecting with your audience 140 characters, a wall post, and a two minute video at a time.

There are almost 50 million tweets a day and YouTube serves over one hundred million videos a day. It is easy to get lost in the white noise and, equally, getting harder and harder by the day to get heard.  But still, there are voices that are being heard loud and clear.  They have embraced the evolution.  Have you?

(I know there are some out there saying social media 3.0 is here but for the intents of social media as a marketing platform, in my opinion, we are just entering 2.0)

Unintended Consequences in Social Media

Going on the accepted belief that people respond to incentives, then it can truly be said that almost everything a brand does in the social media space is, in one way or another, an incentive for people to like the brand. In social media, as with everything in life, there are often unintended consequences. Some incentives backfire while others please one group and displease another. Unintended consequences are not as rare as you think; and avoiding them is not that easy. In fact, avoiding them may be impossible.

So, what can be done?

Accept that there are going to be unintended consequences to most of your actions and then deliberately plan to address these consequences. Each strategy, each campaign, should have embedded in it’s execution a plan for when and if things don’t go according to the original plan.

A deliberate contingency plan has to have the following three components:

1. Highlight specific potential unintended consequences
2. Plan out specific actions in each case of an unintended consequence
3. Decide how to monitor the space for signs of unintended consequences once the incentive program is live
4. Set metrics for success so you know when your efforts to address unintended consequences have been successful

When an unintended consequence occurs a brands’ best asset is information.  Without information responses to unintended consequences will fall into one (or all) of these categories:

• Brand was too late with its’ remedy
• Brand’s remedy was just not enough
• Brand remained optimistic (but unrealistic) in its assumption that this will solve itself

Luckily, the social media space is a plethora of real-time information.  This means that social media strategists are also informacists (let’s be honest – I am not sure if that is actually a word).

Now, as a social media strategist, working day in and day out in creating and implementing strategy, let me be the first to say that adding this layer into an already elaborate plan (one that is already on a tight deadline no doubt) is difficult.  But, it is necessary.

At our offices in New York we have 3 fire escapes.  We also have numerous fire extinguishers which the office of New York Fire & Safety inspects regularly; as well as a fire drill.  Why? When we plug in a new computer or add a new microwave in the kitchen we don’t intend to start a fire.  But, fires happen and when they do we will need the fire escapes and fire extinguishers for safety.  A fire would definitely be an unintended consequence of plugging in a new appliance, but fires happen and they must be put out.  With out a deliberate contingency plan our office would burn down and our people would be harmed.    Thinking about it this way, doesn’t it seem quite illogical to assume unintended consequences will not happen?

So, to re-cap:

• Unintended consequences will occur
• Think about what they could in advance and have a deliberate plan for if they happen
• Once your campaign is live monitor the space for early signs of unintended consequences – be an information seeker

Hope this helps!

Is your brand managing its Awareness Marketing?

Social Media strategists are always talking about Social Networks, Blogs, and a wide array of emerging platforms, and how these can be used for engagement and communication with brand’s community. Fair enough but what about Awareness Marketing?

Awareness Marketing is one of the biggest segments of Social Media – sometimes even the biggest. It is exactly what its title suggests: Marketing Brand Awareness. In the Social Media space the obvious ways of doing this are Blogger Outreach and Social Media Press Releases.

Blogger Outreach is of course a great way to build a direct relationship with the blogger community and should bloggers write about your brand then a considerable amount of traffic may be generated to your site, especially via deep links, which can have a positive value on your brands Natural Search Rankings.

Social Media Press Releases are great as well because a number of editors and bloggers receive them directly through RSS, but additionally any deep links in the body of the press release can impact traffic and positively impact SEO.

But, in the social media space Awareness Marketing is so much more than Outreach and Social Media Press Releases. What about the value of Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Del.icio.us? Too often these are overlooked as active channels.

Digg is a great platform for further exposure of Press or Blog coverage that a brand receives. Content on Digg is indexed quickly and can have a vast impact on traffic.

StumbleUpon is a great platform for bringing your brand to a diverse range of people.

Reddit: Subreddits which are niche communities can be hard t win but if their trust is won there is much traffic to be gained, and from an SEO perspective the front page of Reddit can lead to back-links and pick-ups.

Del.ici.ous: A bookmarked page on del.ic.ious is basically a direct link-back to brand site – that means SEO value.

So, as you can tell by now, to a social media strategist Awareness Marketing is not just about exposure. Social media is different than PR. The other two key elements are: Traffic and SEO.

Awareness Marketing has to be able to generate traffic back to the brand’s official site from which the brand’s new found audience can learn more about the brand, but also discover additional brand assets and platforms; and if necessary to an e-commerce page.

Also, as any social media strategist worth their mettle would tell you content that is read and discovered online often leads to a search query. This is the power of Social Media to positively impact the search results page for a brand – thus making Social Media and SEO virtual siblings.

Customizing a brand’s Facebook page for its global audience

Global brands are taking to Facebook.  Some are even starting to pay more attention to their Facebook pages than their websites.  The number one question most of these brands have on their mind is how to best set themselves up on Facebook to the benefit of their global audience who speak different languages, have varying cultural preferences, and require different content without breaking the community into multiple localized Facebook pages, or providing content that is useful to some but often useless (and annoying to others).

Facebook offers Language based targeting but that is more for targeting (obviously) rather than global customization of one single community page.  In this post I want to focus on this deeper level of customization.

As it stands, all Facebook users have assigned themselves a language preference which is the basis of this customization  By pulling a reading from the language setting of a fan brands can populate a customized tab with content designed for those users.  Additionally, these tabs can also be set up with customized management that allows local brand manager to control their custom content without (if needed) the ability to access portions of the Facebook page not assigned to them.

The beauty of this level of customization is that when a brands’ fan from say Italy visits the brands Facebook page they will automatically be taken to a tab dedicated to the Italian speaking community; or if a French fan visits the brands’ Facebook page they will be taken to a tab dedicated to the French speaking community.  These language specific “Appearing” and “Disappearing” tabs are part of the mega customizations that are possible on Facebook and allow for the creation of highly targeted and customized content.

There are some limitations to this.  The main drawback to this system is really with the Spanish language.  As it stands brands can populate Spanish content based on either Spain or Spanish rest of the world but not break it down further to such micro levels as Spanish (Chile) etc…  Like most things there is a work around for this but that would require the user to look under the drop down tab and select the very specific content they need (say Chilean Spanish).

I should add however that unless you are a a Facebook developer you will need one to help you with this level of development but the benefits should always outweigh the costs.

Facebook Brand Pages vs. Social Media Landing Pages

As Director of Social Media Marketing, a pivotal part of my role at Morpheus Media is to evaluate the social media needs of our clients and to explain to them in the simplest way possible what they need, why they need it, and how to implement it.

Fortunately, most of my clients are energized about social media and devoted to taking the necessary advice. And, for many of them a Social Media Landing Page makes strategic sense.

A Social Media Landing Page is a social media hub which acts as a landing point for brand enthusiasts to access assets that can generate addition brand enthusiasm and social syndication.

A Social Media Landing Page often contains at least the following:

• News & Press
• Videos
• Photos
• Contact Info
• Links to Social Presences
• RSS Feeds

Both Experience Parisienne by Yves Saint Laurent and the Social Media Landing Page for ideeli are great examples of landing pages done well by brands in the fashion and retail industry (at Morpheus Media we represent a great number of these brands).

There are, of course, a number of brands with amazing Social Media Landing Pages. If you are interested I would recommend the following:

Shop Talk/Net-A-Porter.com

AT&T/Continue the conversation

Best Buy/IdeaX Community

Microsoft Social

Whole Foods/The Official Blog

Sears/My Sears Communit

Typically, I recommend looking at WordPress as the platform to build Social Media Landing Pages on because of its flexibility, level of acceptance within the blogger sphere, and the plethora of plug-ins available. Of course there are multiple other possibilities out there but rarely are they as cost effective, time efficient, and already Search Engine Optimized/Social Media Enabled as the Wordpress platform.

This all said, a number of brands quite rightly ask why it is that their Facebook pages can’t simply be their Social Media hubs also. I typically recommend against this practice because

• Facebook pages do not have the same SEO value and flexibility to optimize for SEO as wordpress platform

• Facebook pages do not allow installation of analytics and the page for tracking user experience (Though the new relationship between Facebook and Omniture should improve this)

• In order to accomplish a customized experience on Facebook (which is becoming more important as Facebook removed iframes) a brand will still need to spend money on both development costs and, potentially, media spend with Facebook. Note: A Social Media Landing Page built using wordpress should not reasonably cost more than $3k-$6k and take longer than 2 -4 weeks

Brand managers can reasonably be a little cautious of Social Media Landing Pages which are essentially another platform they have to build which represents their brand, just moments after they stood behind your idea to build a Facebook brand page.

Understanding how the core value proposition of Facebook Brand Pages and Social Media Landing pages are essentially different is the basis by which a brand manager entertains the opportunity that comes with a Social Media Landing Page. And, as Director of Social Media my role in this is pivotal.

Facebook is an amazing communication platform between a brand and its community, but that communication platform is just one social media asset. The Social Media Landing page is the home for all the brands social media assets. It is the hub from which all brand generated social media content radiates out and it is the home for all community created social media content to live in.

The diagram below depicts this relationship well. A Social Media Landing Page is central to a social media strategy that is rooted in digital omnipresence – and, as always let’s not forget, that all brand content lives and breathes within the content that search engines index. Your brand is only as visible as Google says it is – a Social Media Landing Page which is not adding SEO value is simply not doing it’s job.

Protect your twitter account

Spammers, like the flu virus, never die – instead they evolve.  So, understandably spamming on twitter is in style right now and while most brands are pouring their energy into communicating with their audience (hopefully) and few brands and individuals stagnantly remain on the path to self-aggrandizement, a large number of twitter users are fashionably falling prey to malware (malicious software) used by spammers – and as brand guardians online, we the “specialists” are waking up to “Urgent Help Needed” emails from our clients.

As always technology remains a powerful tool that can inflate your brand but also play havoc with your reputation – which is what is going on with twitter now.  What can possibly be worse than a luxury brand twitter account sending a porn tweet to all its followers.

So in the face of this plague a few modest steps to protect your account can help you and your brand survive this latest spam fashion.  This week, at Morpheus Media, we officially released to all our social media clients, even ones not actively engaged on Twitter, “Steps to protect you twitter account”.

I want to share the gist of this document with you:

You may receive many Direct Messages (DMs) from compromised accounts.

It is important that you do not click on any of these links even if it is from a friend.

If you’ve been hacked:

• Immediately go to your list of connections http://twitter.com/account/connections and click “revoke access” to any application you don’t remember allowing

• Then reset your password

If your account remains infected  go to your Browser Settings to clear your cache and delete your saved passwords.

If you receive a malware DM:

• Send the person a message to let them know you received a virus DM from them and that they should change their twitter password and revoke access to bad apps.such as: I just received a virus DM from you. Changing your twitter password & revoking access to bad apps may fix it. More info:http://bello.ws/18

Best Preventative Practices:

• Please change your password regularly (at least once a month).

• Please use strong secure passwords.  Stay away from obvious passwords that contain your brand name or obvious references to your brand

• Check your sent messages http://twitter.com/sent daily and check that you have actually sent all the messages that have been sent from your account, or…

• Set yourself up with an RSS feed reader for your Twitter profile – that way you will automatically receive notification every time your account sends a tweet.

Hope this helps and please don’t be modest about it if it happens to you.  Quite the opposite, be vocal and public about it so your followers know what happened and spread these instructions to help them protect themselves also.

I suspect that somewhere in a basement there is a loser with a small penis creating all this malware.  I am probably wrong and there is a vast international network.  Shame on them (or him – you know who you are you little dick). In this instance, as far as twitter goes, have no doubt about it, you can protect your twitter handle and that of your friends and followers.

In the words of Kennedy, “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining”.

How much should you spend on Facebook Self-Serve Ads?

I am instinctively a cynic.  As one, within moments of one of my clients or one of my team members asking me how much is a good amount of money to spend on Facebook self-serve ads and how many fans they should expect in return, warning bells go off and I begin to see the impending doom of non-strategic failure.

But I don’t believe I am the only one who thinks this way – only recently while in a meeting with a very senior person from Facebook I asked the same question just to see if my contact knew anything that I didn’t.  In return he looked at me helplessly and said, “That’s just not the point, it’s about engagement”.  This, coming from a sales person at Facebook, is a challenging yet revealing response.

So, if you are still wondering how many dollars I think you should spend on Facebook Self-serve Ads and how many fans I think you could expect then, I guess, read on.  Just recently one of my teams faced a similar question from one of our clients.

Most brands today desperately want to have at least as many, and hopefully more, Facebook friends than their competitors.

Our duty as social media strategists is to ultimately make the wishes and desires of our clients come true, but we have to be sensible, pragmatic, and strategic.  Would a brand ask how many dollars they should spend on Display Advertising or how many products they can expect to sell afterwards? A brand is likely, however, to tell their agency what creative assets they have, what their budget is, and what their branding/ROI goals are, then allow the agency to plan a media strategy which they will approve before it is executed.  A social media spend should be just as thought out.

We’ve seen Self-serve Ads come in as much as $3 or $4 dollars per fan and as little as $0.30 per fan.  We have seen one creative work and we have seen six creative refreshes be the optimal number after having tested close to twenty creatives. And, in all instanced we have seen the success rate increase when there has been a well thought out content strategy including:

• Promotional initiatives
• Coupons
• Giveaway fan incentive
• Launch of additional Facebook or mobile apps
• Etc…

Taking everything said into account, the point I am trying to make is that there is no formula and that there are many variables that impact the results of a Self-serve Ad campaign.  There are, however, some principles to consider:

• Set an estimated goal (number of new fans) you or your brand are trying to reach within a given time period and consider the budget you have available.  Roughly speaking you can pivot your spend around $1/per fan.

• Spread your budget across the alloted period of time for reaching your goal but be ready and willing to adjust this budget based on additional initiatives you will be running during the course of the campaign as well as insights you gain through constant optimization to back out as close as possible to pivot.  At the end of each optimization period you can roll unspent budget into the next period.

• Optimize your budget on a weekly or bi-weekly basis

• Test 6 to 8 creatives and run at least 4 creatives with unique copy implemented at any given time, making sure to adjust them specifically around any key initiatives, events, etc…

Sounds simple? Well, yes it is, but then again all the best plans are the simplest ones, aren’t they?

Then there is the question of what to do with your new fans.  Without a proper engagement strategy, they are of no help to your brand, and your brand is of no interest to the new fans.  It therefore goes without saying that you must, in addition to this spend, continue:

• Messaging to fans
• Creating new assets
• Continue with outreach initiatives

We recommend these steps because they increase the levels of meaningful engagement with a brand’s audience, which in turn, drive organic fan growth.  This is where even our Facebook self-serve Ads go back our Social Media Formula:

Awareness>Engagement>Influence>Earned Media>ROI

Spending is easy on Facebook and the self-serve platform is beautifully nimble; so much so that anyone can use it.  But, it is a powerful tool and should not be deployed without the support of a proper plan; and as with every other dollar spent online don’t forget about accountability.

Remember: The principles of business and economics hold true in the age of social media.  First, have a plan.