I read TechCrunch on a daily basis and they had a great (but long) interview with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Below are some highlights for business owners looking to use Facebook.
Q:How do you see businesses using things like Facebook Pages?
A:Pages are for businesses the same way Profiles are for people. They are exploding. 10 million people fan pages every day. Starbucks has the number one fan page. 4.5 million today. Sprinkles, the cupcake store does a word of the day (get a free cupcake if you know it). People use pages to update, do special permissions. More of what you see is authentic communication. Papa John’s pizza — Papa John himself posts. He came to Facebook, took a picture with Mark. We’re seeing increasingly authentic engagement from people who run businesses.
Q: Lets talk about engagement in posting vs. dialog. Seems like companies just push, don’t talk back.
A: It’s a tool. Some people use better than others. The best use cases are companies that post frequently enough that there’s new info on the page, but not so that it’s too much. And they watch their page to see what people say. Virgin America asking people what their route should be.
Q: Do you think most of the advertisers get this.
A: I think some do. Some are coming along. They get it more than they used to. We were meeting with a CMO of a very important company that does lots of advertising. They asked about best practices. We said you should post frequently — you don’t just spend lots of time upfront. With us, spend half an hour a day, and do it frequently. He said, if we have a 12 day approval process to get something up online, is that a problem. We said it was. When I first took the job I was meting with a head of a movie studio. He said that it used to be, if you have a bad movie, you had that weekend with people seeing it — it wasn’t til the second weekend that they stopped. Now they find out it’s bad the same day, they don’t go to the second showing. I think their processes are changing. We’re working with almost all the top 100 advertisers in the country, and increasingly in the world.
Q: How on Earth do you measure this, to help them figure out what they’re getting?
A: We just announced a partnership with Nielsen — Polls. One example with Sony,a movie they were releasing. We did studies of people who had seen the ad. If they had seen the ad they were 87% more likely to see the movie. It’s important that Nielsen is well respected and a third party.
Source: TechCrunch.
