Facebook Marketing Strategy Seminar on Psychographic Advertising

A Facebook Marketing Strategy Workshop went deep into the business case, best practices and case studies on how brand marketers are leveraging the social media platform to connect with prospects and generate leads online.

This was before the Cambridge Analytica fiasco and political candidates got wise to the potential of wrapping Facebook into their political campaign strategies.

Some of Facebook's top European executives came out to show brand marketers how to use their rapidly expanding social network to drive traffic to and on engagement destination websites.

They also covered how to gain the psychographic profiling insights you need to advise your advertising on Facebook and why we trust the opinions of strangers.

The Big Brand Awareness Insight

Successful marketing on Facebook isn't about how many times to post, how best to share content, how to manage your Facebook page or your target audience.

Facebook marketing strategy is about making your website social by design.

What you see in Facebook news feeds has less to do with the recency of the post that it does with engagement.

Facebook posts that get the most likes, comments and shares are the ones that appear in the top of the newsfeed.

So a sound Facebook marketing strategy has less to do with the types of content you share or the number of Facebook users following your page that it does with engagement.

The only way to get reach and frequency without making your website social by design is through Facebook ads, which is effective, but can be expensive.

Christian Hernandez, who oversees partnerships in Europe shared the business case for getting your arms around Facebook insights — quite convincingly, I might add — and how embedding Facebook Like buttons on your organization's website lifts engagement, audience share and propels your content marketing efforts.

I included much of what I learned about using Facebook social plugins and the Graph APIs to expand your presence on free online Facebook Marketing Course.

Facebook Marketing Boot Camp Topics

1. Extending the functionality of the Facebook social media platform to destination websites.
2. Useful traffic, engagement and psychographic insights available to brand marketers.
3. And best practices for implementing Facebook's social plugins and graph API. 

Christian also presented a number of Facebook marketing cases studies which stood as concrete examples of practical applications.

Facebook Marketing Strategy Case Studies

• Activity Plugin: How CNN uses the Facebook Activity Plugin to show visitors what their friends have been looking at on their site. It also includes recommended Facebook content for the user based on their history, their likes, and what people, in general, have been sharing from your site.
• Live Stream Plugin: Sky News uses the Live Stream plugin to bring realtime conversation to your site. The Facebook Live Stream Social Plugin is best used to promote live shared events — news, sport, entertainment TV — and can increase the time users spend on your site during these events. Every action gets posted back to Facebook, which brings more people back to your site to share in the collective experience.
• Graph API: Spotify got their advantage by designing a product that was truly social from the start. Not only can you share music really easily back to Facebook, but you can see what your Facebook friends are listening to, their playlists, and their favorite artists and tracks, which took the CDDB/Gracenote approach to another level and transformed the way we find and share music. There's too much music to browse by category or genre. Spotify leveraged the Facebook Platform to bring a social filter to a world of seemingly infinite selection.

The Facebook marketing Strategy workshop featured equally impressive sessions with Xavier Leclerc, a Facebook Account Executive on advertising and Simon Cross, a Facebook partner engineer on social plugin best practices. 

I recorded the audio for all three Facebook Marketing Strategy sessions and released them separately as Facebook Marketing Podcasts if you want listen.

Facebook also shared their presentation Building Your Presence Across the Web: Social Plugins and APIs online.