In our previous post on social media marketing related Facebook myths, we cleared some commonly held notions about marketing on Facebook. Of course, there are more to be dispelled still, but here’s the thing. With the penetration of social media marketing rising by the day, it’s raining self-acclaimed Facebook marketing gurus nowadays, all of them peddling social media marketing success formulas like door-to-door salesmen. A lot of times, the advice is a variation of the same recycled “join Facebook and talk about your business and invite people to like you page and you’re sorted” line that is typical of these Facebook charlatans. However, there’s more to Facebook marketing, or social media marketing in general, than just that; as you’ve no doubt been discovering over the past few posts on social media marketing.
Now, we’d love to go on about these charlatans, but a bunch of Facebook marketing misconceptions don’t clear themselves. So here goes:
More Facebook Myths#1: My ‘Fans’ are going to love my social media marketing contest for writing the best song for my brand
While it is true, that we all love prizes, brand marketers often become too full of themselves in the assumption that consumers would be able to (or even want to) build a creative piece around their brand. In a perfect world, your fans would be so passionate they’d spend their free time taking photos, recording videos, and generating other content around your brand, thus making for the perfect social media marketing campaign. Unfortunately, out in the real world, few brands ever achieve this level of reverence. The rest of us have to get creative with our social media marketing campaigns. Your fans may not have a picture of your product at the Eiffel Tower, but they do have content to share. All you need to do is make it easy for them. Ask for ideas or opinions and make the submission process simple. That’s how you tap into the content engine that is your fan base.
More Facebook Myths#2: Facebook needs to approve your social media marketing campaign
Not long ago, you had to ask Facebook to approve your promotion’s official rules in advance of launch. To ask approval, you had to have an account executive, costing you $10,000 on Facebook ads. After about six months of uneven enforcement, the policy was reversed for the better. To run a social media marketing campaign on Facebook today, all you have to do is obey Facebook’s promotion guidelines. If you feel to meet that precondition, your campaign will be shut down faster than you can say ‘social media marketing’.
More Facebook Myths#3: The rules don’t apply if I run a contest on my wall
Facebook’s promotion guidelines state that you cannot run a contest or sweepstakes using its native functionality. That means you can’t randomly award concert tickets to someone who likes your wall post. And you can’t run a photo contest in your page’s albums. Facebook wants these promotions run on third-party apps. How real is the risk of being tossed? Refer to Myth #2.
We’ll keep updating you on social media marketing trends in the future, so keep watching this space.