Two weekends ago, I helped my uncle, who is very new to social media, set up a Facebook Fan Page for his small business. Today, about 10 days after we set it up, I was pleased to see that he already had 78 fans.
As we were setting up the page, I tried to explain how Facebook works from top to bottom: how “friending” works, the difference between a Fan Page and an individual’s page, and how the company page was supposed to help promote his business. Along the way, he asked a few questions that I would have thought would be easy for me to articulate, but actually gave me pause. One of the main things he wanted to know was why companies have Fan Pages. It’s obviously a promotional tool, but does it actually influence the behavior of your customers? What could my uncle reasonably expect from this increased exposure?
Now that Fan Pages have been around for a while, we’re starting to see results from organizations that have been promoting through this channel for a while. Rice University set out to gauge the effects of a Facebook Fan Page on a small coffee shop in Houston. They began by sending out a customer survey to all of the customer’s on the café’s email list. From there, they sent out an invite to the Fan Page- about 5% of the email list joined. Researches updated the Fan Page with photos, links and promotions for about 3 months. By the end of the study they saw that those who were engaged via the Fan Page spent more time and money at the coffee shop.
It’s not yet clear whether or not the difference between the Facebook fans and non-fans means that Facebook actually causes increased brand loyalty, or if the fans (who were self-selected) were already more loyal, but this study is still promising for people like my uncle. Higher education institutions know that engagement is key to retention- the same seems to follow for Facebook pages.
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