The Brain Aneurysm Foundation hired Inbound Zombie in June to help create a stronger presence on Facebook. Following is a case study in launching their Facebook Page.

Problems

There were several challenges they had with their current use of Facebook:

• Too Many Places - The Brain Aneurysm Foundation had a Group Page, a Cause Page, and even a Profile. But they didn’t have a Facebook Page. This caused confusion with Facebook users and unnecessary work with BAF staff members.
• Creating A Strong Launch – Because their presence up to that point was unfocused and weak, they wanted to do the opposite with their Page. We weren’t sure exactly how many people would initially become a fan of the Page, but we set a goal of 500 fans in the first 30 days – a goal we thought was attainable.
• Confused By Facebook – Turned out, they needed some training on how to properly manage a Facebook Page.

Solutions

• Set The Table – The first thing Inbound Zombie did was to create a custom Static FBML tab and main image. Pages with custom welcome tabs have a higher fan conversion rate than Pages that don’t.
• Send Out Dinner Invitations – The Brain Aneurysm Foundation leveraged two major assets to promote the Page – NING and their email list. But we didn’t just say “Big news! We’re on Facebook” (yawn). We crafted a simple message that was sincere and compelling.
• Serve Nutritious Food – Once people started joining the Page, we made a point of engaging fans in positive ways that created a lively and welcoming atmosphere. This meant posting valuable stories and thoughtful questions on the Page.
• Train The Chef - A critical factor in a sustainable Facebook Page is proper training. We accomplished this with live training, a set of video tutorials on using Facebook, and a series of model updates on the Page.

Lessons Learned

• First Impressions Are Powerful – Explaining the purpose of the Page to their supporters – with bullet points – set the tone for how the community now behaves. They share with each other, ask good questions and keep coming back.
• How To Create Great Content In Three Minutes – Like most nonprofits, their “social media staff” consists of one person who is also the office administrator, IT manager and receptionist. Asking them to create content from scratch was just asking for failure. Instead, they reposted their best stuff from the NING community (forum posts with the highest number of replies), asked meaningful questions to engage fans, and shared resources from their information library.

Results

For a brand new Page on Facebook, we achieved pretty impressive results:

• Over 730 fans in first 30 days
  
• Consistent Five-Star Post Quality
  
• A Happy Page Admin

Thoughts? What could we have done better?

To a large extent, nonprofits are still using Facebook as a “push medium”. They push out information about events, news and asks on their wall, and occasionally reply to follow-up comments on these posts.

This push mentality isn’t necessarily bad – it’s just doesn’t the full potential of the Facebook status.

At Inbound Zombie, we work on a variety Facebook campaigns. The agreement that we have with our clients is that they grant me (John) permission to freely post updates on their wall during the campaign. This allows us to accomplish a few things:

• It puts another hand on deck during the campaign.
• I get to learn more about their cause through the voices of their supporters on their wall.
• New orgs get to learn how to manage their Facebook Page from the example updates I post.
• I get to “experiment” with new ways that nonprofits can use Facebook.

One of the most promising experiments is the use of Facebook Pages as a question box for fans. Asking the Page community thoughtful and/or provocative questions has consistently lead to an increase in fan growth and engagement.

As a way to expand upon this “research”, I’ve set up a Facebook Page for the sole purpose of answering questions posted by fans. There will be no “push” posts, no custom tabs, no photos or videos. In fact the only two tabs activated are the wall tab and the info tab.

Stop by and say “hi” to The Nonprofit Facebook Guy

Facebook recently launched a “Get Started” wizard in an effort to shorten the learning curve for new Facebook Page admins.

This short video walks you through each step in the wizard:

1. Upload a main image
2. Enter basic info about your nonprofit
3. Post a status update
4. Set up your mobile phone
5. Connect your Page to Twitter (a sign that Facebook wants to play nice with Twitter)
6. How your Page appears to visitors

If your curious how to get rid of the “Get Started” tab, apparently it disappears as you acquire fans and complete your Page.

It’s a good question, isn’t it? I mean, you’ve been posting status updates, links and videos for quite some time now. Are you posting too frequently? Are your connections sharing what you’ve posted? Are you losing fans?

Are you wasting your time?

For the most part, you know what you’re posting is the good stuff. And you know your that your connections will like it and share it. You know this because you’re one of them.

But still, it’s a good idea to take a look at your Facebook Page stats to confirm your gut.

How to confirm what you already know about your fans

Facebook Pages include a variety of reports on fan growth, engagement, subscriber drop-off, preferred content, and user engagement. Below are five ways to tell if your content is effective. Note that they provide meaning only when viewed in context of each other.

1. Daily Active Users

User activity in response to your content tells you how much they like it. According to Facebook, a user is active when they view or engage with your application or your application’s content. This includes:

• Users that visit your Page
• Users that view an application tab on a Page
• Users that published to news feed (stream) from your Page
• Users that “Liked” a stream story form your Page
• Users that commented on a stream story from your Page

2. Total Fan Growth

If your total number of fans on your Page is growing, obviously you’re doing something right. Facebook Insights can show you total fan growth based on people liking your Page directly, or though a likebox.

3. Removed Fans

Like your parents told you when you were a child, not everyone will be your fan. That’s ok. Don’t take it personally. Try and correlate a spike in removed fans with content that was posted on or slightly before that day. If the content posted on those days has a high Daily Story Feedback score (next), the reason may not be your content.

4. Daily Story Feedback

The Daily Story Feedback graph shows you the prevalence of likes, comments and unsubscribes per day. The likes generally mean people like what you’ve posted. Comments can also mean they like what you’ve posted (but not always). And unsubscribes mean that your Page isn’t worth keeping in their news feed.

5. Comments

Duh, huh? Comments will show you how people feel about your content or the topic of what you posted. Sometimes comments are completely unrelated to the post. Sometimes comments related to a story is posted as a separate update by the fan.

Focus On The Spikes

If you’re like me, you try and avoid getting too deep into the numbers. Save yourself an aneurysm by focusing only on the peaks and valleys in the data. In fact, limit yourself to three peaks and three valleys for every two-week period. This will give you enough data to provide insights about your content.

And finally, if you haven’t already, please download “The Complete Facebook Guide For Small Nonprofits”

How do you measure the impact of your content?

Last year, Facebook revamped Facebook Pages to look very much like Profiles. The simple reason for this was to allow brands and organizations to make it easier for users to interact with their Page.

But even though a Page looks like a Profile, brands haven’t caught up with the idea that users want to connect with brands on a more personal level too – not unlike how they connect with their friends.

Status update versus stuff update

Marketing folks generally don’t understand how users perceive Facebook status updates. Mostly, they treat that little window on their Page as the place to post “stuff”. The Facebook admins get directives from marketing to post “stuff” based on a predetermined “stuff” schedule.

But you and I don’t just post stuff to our status update. And we certainly don’t follow a schedule!

• We update our friends about personal news
• We share frustrations and victories
• We comment on events that everyone is watching. Like the World Cup.
• We tell jokes and cause trouble
• We play the “let’s see how many people comment on this update” game
• We tag our friends in updates
• We may even tag the occasional Page
• Oh, and we share videos and photos

The status update field is no one’s property

You and I also post updates on each other’s wall. I don’t think of my wall as my “property”, and you don’t think the same of your wall.

You post on my wall and I post on yours. It’s all good, as they say.

Brands generally don’t think of their Page as a space for their fans to call their home.

But their status update window is technically always up for grabs.

Or didn’t they get the memo?

When you create a Facebook Page, you obviously have no connections.

You want to quickly get at least 25 new connections so that you can create a custom URL for your Facebook Page (which will come in handy).

There many ways to promote your new Facebook Page, but the easiest way to get new connections is to use your email list l – an asset you’ve spent time growing over the years.

There are two ways to promote it to your email list: One people will care about and one people won’t.

Facebook users and WIFM

Facebook users want to share useful information with their friends and will “like” Pages that will help them achieve that goal. If they get an email that says “We’re now on Facebook – please like our Page”, they’ll probably delete it unless they are your hard-core 1% raving fan.

They asked “What’s in it for me?” and didn’t get an answer.

How to effectively promote your Facebook Page by email

I have a client who just launched a new Facebook Page. They achieved a 10% conversion rate in new fans with one email:

—————-

The [organization] now has a more powerful way for you to connect with us on Facebook.

We’ve created a new Facebook Page designed to better serve the population of those affected by [disease they focus on]. The address is http://facebook.com/[customURL].

What can you expect by connecting with us on Facebook?

• You’ll find information related to [disease] support

• You’ll find information related to [disease] awareness and research

• You’ll be able to start and join discussions on a variety of topics

• You’ll be the first to hear about events in your geographic area

• And finally, you’ll join a community who share commons experiences with [disease]

So please join us at our new page and invite your friends to join -> http://facebook.com/[customURL]

And thanks!

—————-

There are four reasons why this worked so well:

1. The focus was on the value to the recipient, not the organization
2. The benefits was clearly presented in list form
3. They saw useful information they could share with their friends
4. It was clear they were joining a community, not just another Page

What’s worked for you when you had a new Page?

Photo by Bryan Veloso

One critical feature of your nonprofit Facebook Page is giving your connections easy ways to donate one to your cause.

It’s easy to post a link to your donation Page in your status update, but it’s not a permanent solution. After all, status updates get buried within a day or two, maybe even hours if you have an active fan base.

There are at least three ways to link your Facebook Page to a fundraising application.

1. Include a link within your info tab. Pro: Very easy. Con: No one visits info tabs.
2. Use a Facebook Fundraising App. Pro: Integrates with Facebook. Con: Running two donation platforms.
3. Create a custom tab. Pro: Uses your existing donation platform. Con: Requires custom work.

Creating a custom donation tab: Easy and Hard

• Easy – Use the STATIC FBML application with a linked image that points directly to your donation Page. The image should include a call to action to donate and share the donation app.
• Hard – Create a sweet-looking tab by hiring a Facebook Page designer, like Inbound Zombie.

Custom Facebook fundraising tabs are relatively easy to create – check out the Facebook Landing Tab Wiki by Debra Askanase for tips, resources and examples.

What else would work? Comment below

One obvious requirement for nonprofit marketing on Facebook is regularly posting interesting content on your Facebook Page.

Don’t be scared by the word “content” – it’s definition includes a lot more than blog posts and videos. Status updates count.

Become A Status Update Ninja

I recently conducted a few informal experiments with some Facebook Pages and my own Facebook Profile. I wanted  to see how people engage with status updates alone (no links, videos, photos) versus shared URLs, videos and photos (with no status update). I found that folks were three or four times more likely to engage with a pithy status update over a shared URL, photo or video.

I wasn’t surprised at the results. Status updates are the language of Facebook users. It’s what they engage with most of the time.

Eight Simple Ways To Engage Your Facebook Fans

1. Don’t Be All Work And No Play – It’s ok to ask people what plans they have for the weekend, or if they saw Toy Story 3. Facebook users love sharing the human details of their lives. You’re human too – right?
2. Ask Simple Questions – Ask your connections how they’ve been personally effected by your org’s cause. For example, the Brain Aneurysm Foundation (an Inbound Zombie client) might ask “How has a Brain Aneurysm personally impacted your life?”
3. Play Tag With Like-Minded Pages - This is a way to create awareness about your Page on another Facebook Page. The best way to avoid coming across as spam is to 100% promote the other Page on your Page. For example, I noticed Mari Smith asking what people to share their goals for the second half of 2010. I simply shared her post on my Page in an effort to send her new fans.
4. Tell Them You Love Them - Your Page connections (fans) make you who you are. They give you their money, tell others how great you are, and keep coming back. Say thanks once in a while. And mean it when you thank them. They deserve it.
5. Shine The Spotlight – Facebook users love to look cool. They love to be recognized in front of their peers. Post a status update that expresses appreciation for one of your die-hard supporters. The other fans won’t feel left out.
6. Comment Back To The Clusters – When your Page gets a lot of updates from fans, like during an event, don’t worry about responding to every single person. Ask yourself where your organizational voice is needed most. For example, focus on the posts that have the highest number of comments.
7. Get Some Insight - Use your Page insights to quickly find the posts with the highest engagement. Focus your blood and sweat on those fans.
8. Ask Simple Choice Questions – Try asking your fans simple preference questions. For example, Centerville Pie (another Inbound Zombie client) can ask “Which do you like better – Blueberry Pie or Apple Pie?”

Put On Your Lab Coat

As with anything related to Facebook marketing, result will vary. Season to taste. No two Facebook Page communities are alike. See what works for yours -and measure, measure, measure.

What’s worked for your Facebook Page?

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ve probably been able to learn a lot about using Facebook Pages (You might have also downloaded The Complete Facebook Guide For Small Nonprofits, which was published last week).

One thing that sets Facebook Pages apart from Profiles, Groups and Community Pages is the ability to create custom tabs using an application called FBML.

How to Customize Your Facebook Page Using Static FBML

There’s an excellent post over at Social Media Examiner about using FBML that includes detailed steps (and example code you can copy) on two specific tactics:

How to Add a Clickable Image in Static FBML

How could this be used? Create an eye-catching image with a call to action that links directly to your donation Page.

Upload your image to your Photobucket or Flickr account. Copy the image path into your FBML box. Next, you want to use this code:

How to Embed a YouTube Video in Static FBML

This allows you to put a YouTube video anywhere within a custom tab, instead of being limited to the YouTube Box layout.

You’ll find a lot more details about these two customization tactics in the post.

Plus, you can get your questions answered about FBML today at 1:00PM (EST) on the Social Media Examiner’s Facebook Page.

Happy Facebooking!