A Lot More to “Like” About Facebook: A New Best Practice Guide

A Lot More to “Like” About Facebook: A New Best Practice Guide

Thursday, 11 August 2011 @ 12:22, by Chad Warren

For being such a simple concept, the Facebook’s “Like” button has the potential to be a very big deal. By bottling up a personal recommendation and placing it into a simple little button, Facebook has given an incredible tool to businesses to drive referrals. And, not just any referral: a referral with a personal recommendation from a friend.

If you’re not convinced, talk to Levi’s who turned Like buttons on their site into 40 percent of their overall referral volume (Yes. I said, “40 percent.”). Or take American Eagle Outfitters who found that Facebook-referred visitors spent an average of 57 percent more than those by other sources. And, believe it or not, that’s just the beginning.

However, before you can unlock the power of the Like button, you need to measure it properly. Unfortunately, from what we hear from our customers, most marketers do not have their Like buttons set-up to be optimized based on the available insights. That’s why Adobe has teamed with Facebook to produce an inaugural, joint Best Practice Guide, “Best Practices for Measuring and Optimizing the Business Impact of the Facebook Like Button: A Hands-On Guide for Leveraging Solutions From Facebook and Adobe,” available for free download today.

A few key insights

Currently, the number of Likes your content receives is ultimately a shallow and outdated metric offering no insight into the business value of your investment. When Adobe Online Marketing Suite customers apply these best practices for the Facebook Like button, they can actually understand how much traffic resulted from the Like button. More importantly, they can know how many of those converted to sales which is the true evidence of Facebook’s potential as a revenue generator for the business. The aforementioned whitepaper offers step-by-step, practical instruction on how you can transform the effectiveness of your Like button in an hour or so using Facebook’s tools as well as those within the Adobe Online Marketing Suite.
Before starting this project, I figured I would learn a couple of new things about what insights are available from tracking the Like button. But, now I’d argue you could build a mini-practice area around the depth you can reach with this simple effort. The guide outlines all the things you can do with an optimized Like button integration. For example, I didn’t know that when a conversion event (like a sale) takes place, the Online Marketing Suite can trace that event back to the original person who made the recommendation via the Like button click – even if it’s 20-or-more clicks downstream.

Moreover, I had no idea about the segmentation and targeting you could perform based upon Like button data. For example, I’ve been a tech nerd all the way back to the MS-DOS days (maybe it was my lack of friends in junior high school). Subsequently, one of my roles among family and friends has become “purchase approver” for consumer electronics. That usually involves an urgent phone call from the local Best Buy asking for my review, opinion and blessing for whatever gadget or technology they’re looking at purchasing.

It’s not lost on me that I’m somewhat of a “holy grail” for the consumer-tech marketer. And, by implementing the Like button using the best practices found in this guide, you can identify, segment and target people like me – your brand champions, people who are influencing purchasing decisions. When these people click “Like”, others pay attention. This is something search engines can’t deliver; they deliver millions of results based on relevancy, but they don’t offer trusted recommendations like our friends and family do. The new data and insights you’ll gain will help you make smarter choices about where you invest to drive consumers to your site. Maybe that means spending less in areas like search (heaven forbid), and more on efforts to cultivate brand champions.

If you are using the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, I think you’ll really ‘Like’ this whitepaper (couldn’t help myself). Please add your comments to tell me if and how this Best Practice Guide helped you, and what topics you’d like us to address in future guides.