Five Cheap Facebook Tricks (that audiences sometimes love….)
This post is coming to you courtesy of inspiration from the funniest and most feared (by marketers) page on Facebook – Condescending Corporate Brand Page.
They do a great job of bringing together the most wince-inducing examples of Facebook marketing, proving the old adage that the road to corporate embarrassment is paved with a desperate need for Likes.*
Painful though they may be, most of the posts highlighted are just extreme forms of techniques that many businesses use, to some extent, and some definite themes emerge over time.
So just for you, here is our roundup of the top five Facebook Cheap Trick techniques.
*you’ve not heard that one? Yeah, it’s old as the hills. Honest.
1: The Lowest Common Denominator
This is the Facebook equivalent of those ridiculous phone “quizzes” at the end of TV shows. You know the ones, those with the oh-so-tricky questions to ensure that nobody in possession of a phone is ruled out from picking it up. The “What’s the capital of England, is it A)California, B) London, C) Fish” variety.
Only on Facebook, we have the space to be more creative, and that’s how we end up with posts like this:
Ooooh Walkers, we don’t know. It’s a toughie.
2: The Awkward Piggyback
Desperate for engagement, any engagement, the poor Facebook admin jumps on any subject which they know will get people talking. No matter how irrelevant it is to their brand. The usual example of this involves neatly-scheduled Saturday evening questions about the X Factor.
Sometimes, they get away with it, and sometimes the post falls foul of the slippery slope from irrelevant to actively inappropriate. Controversial current affairs are particularly dangerous territory here – of which more later.
3: The False Dichotomy
This is a concept that we first saw coming out of the US, where unsavoury characters were using it to scare kids into the equivalent of the old email chain letter forward. A scary horror-movie style grisly ghoul image with text along the lines of “share if you’re scared, like if you’re very scared – do nothing and she’s under your bed“. You have two, and only two, choices – you can Like, or you can Share.
Never let it be said that marketers don’t spot the zeitgeist…..
(with bonus points for the use of kittens, obviously). LIKE or COMMENT or SHARE but for the love of God, doing nothing is not an option!
4: Stating the bleedin’ obvious
A variation on the above, where the longsuffering audience is asked to click Like in response to something that pretty much everyone on the planet would agree with.
The go-to here is “Click Like if you’re happy it’s Friday“, but we’ve also seen “Click Like if you believe we should stop killing {insert endangered species here}”.
It’s only a matter of time until “Click Like if you’re a fan of breathing!” comes along.
5: The Current Affairs Hijack
As mentioned above, this is seriously, seriously dangerous territory. It’s a post about that thing that’s dominating the news right now. Yes, it’s topical. Yes, everyone’s talking about it. But unless you have something genuinely witty or insightful to add, maybe just count to ten before hitting that Post button.
Shoehorning (pun intended) your own brand into the mix is particularly risky, as illustrated by the gem below in response to the recent school shooting in the US:
Ouch. Seriously, guys??!
What do we learn from this?
Here’s the thing, though – despite the (hilarious) snarkfest over on CCBP, the numbers on these posts speak for themselves. Often, that brand’s Facebook audience (or at least, some part of it) love that stuff. No matter how banal, ridiculous or even borderline offensive some of these tricks may seem, thousands of customers will happily chat back or click the Like button just as they’ve been told to.
And everytime a punter clicks like, that activity feed tells all their friends, and on we go. This stuff works – for now, and for a certain demographic.
And for all Facebook marketers, there are useful lessons here about the psychology of engagement. Don’t demand too much thought or effort of your audience. Talk about stuff they’re interested in, even if you’re not. Be playful. There are ways that most of the cheap tricks above can be refined into valuable party pieces, if you give them enough thought.
How not to use a QR code
This one doesn't work...although we're fancying it for our business cards now!
This one doesn't work...although we're fancying it for our business cards now!
What’s a QR code again?
Just to recap: QR codes are those square, usually black-and-white, barcode-style graphics you sometimes see on marketing materials these days.
You install a QR code reader app to your smartphone, which is then able to decode the data held within it to perform an action – usually, taking you directly to a specific web links, but it can be to do other things such as loading business card details directly into your phone’s contact list.
QR codes aren’t at all complicated, and you can set them up for free via any number of online services such as http://quikqr.com/ or http://goqr.me/.
QR code fails
It’s quite common to see examples of marketers Missing The Point with QR codes on a massive scale. The Point being, that you’re essentially just saving the user from doing something longhand – typing in a URL, or your phone number.
This is only really helpful if you’re going from an offline to an online environment - otherwise, the user could often just click a simple link to achieve the same thing.
So a QR code on a paper flyer might be useful; a QR code embedded in a website, which just links to a YouTube video, is not. A QR code on a For Sale sign which, when scanned, takes the user directly to the online details for that house, is very useful; the same QR code embedded in an email, less so. You get the idea.
How you definitely don’t want to use a QR code
There are times, though, when ONLY missing the point would’ve been a blessing.
Here’s a collection of QR code uses so spectacularly misguided that they verge (literally, in the case of example two) on the homicidal. We love these so much that they just had to get their own blog post here – click below and enjoy!
If this sounds familiar, you might need to hire a new agency!
We’ve long been huge fans of Perfect Curve, the fictitious PR and digital agency featuring in BBC2′s fantastic spoof Olympics documentary Twenty Twelve.
From the narcissistic hipster renderings of their logo on every wall of the office, to the jargon-crammed and often incomprehensible chatter of Perfect Curve supremo Siobhan, the writers have been absolutely on the nail in lampooning the scarier reaches of digital agency behaviour. We’ve not laughed so much since Nathan Barley, if anyone else caught that.
So when we discovered this online special of Siobhan discussing the Olympics’ digital strategy, it just had to go on to the blog. Enjoy!
Now, we’re off to think about incorporating regressive media into all our campaigns….
Pinterest success for service companies: an experiment
A couple of weeks back, we wrote about Pinterest and how to decide if it’s right for your business. One of the issues we mentioned was that Pinterest is a very visual medium, and if your business doesn’t naturally lend itself to visuals, it needs a little more creative thought if you want to get a piece of the action.
In the course of exploring this idea for a client, we thought we’d have a little fun with it for our own brand. Our social media services aren’t a natural source of eye-catching material; most of what we do is verbal and text-heavy.
Hence our 30-minute lunchtime challenge: to create something that was shareable on Pinterest, but still relevant to our company values and the messages we want to get across.
Here’s the result…
Why that?
We know people love to share things that make them smile. We also realised, from an analysis of what was coming up as popular on our Pinterest home feed, that you don’t absolutely have to exclude words – in fact a good proportion of the popular stuff is pithy, often slightly edgy, quotations.
Finally, one of the messages we want to get across to prospective customers is that we pride ourselves on quality and attention to detail, so this quote works perfectly to support that.
Did it work?
We saw an immediate impact from this approach, yes. The image was shared more than anything else we’d previously posted, we picked up some new followers, and most importantly we saw Pinterest.com show up in the referral stats (Google Analytics) for our website for the first time ever. So, people were curious enough about what we do to come over to the website and find out more.
Applying it to your business
A few thoughts about what we learned from the experiment:
You don’t *have* to have stunning visuals to make an impact. We probably could have increased the impact more with some illustration – if we’d had a bit longer, something along the lines of one of those retro cowboy drawings, and a quick google for “surprised horse” might have been fun. But you CAN do without it – if you don’t have graphic design skills or budget to buy them in, you can manage without.
Be appropriate for the site. There are a small (and hopefully dwindling) number of people out there who might consider this wildly inappropriate for a business communication, or even be offended by it. Would we have posted it on LinkedIn? Probably not. But it’s in keeping with the tone of humour on Pinterest; frankly a large number of users there would very likely be “offended” by standard marketing. If that doesn’t sit comfortably with your brand then it’s best to skip this kind of site altogether.
Think a bit out of the box…. or whatever non-Apprentice speak you prefer for “trying a different approach”!
Don’t lose sight of your brand. It’s tempting to chase the crowd here by just posting up anything you think might be popular – and to an extent, that approach may work. A few eyeballs might end up on your site as a byproduct of idle curiousity. But it’s so much more powerful if you can keep a link to your marketing messages AND create some popular content.
If you’re on Pinterest, come and find us here. If you’re not and would like to be, leave a comment asking for an invite and we’ll send you one (we’ll get your email address to send the invite to, but it won’t be published or used for any other purpose!)
Should I use Twitter?
We know it can be tricky to decide whether Twitter is a good place to invest your business’s time and energy.
Well, you could sit down and do a little thinking about your marketing strategy and where social media fits in, or alternatively you could consult this handy infographic from Flowtown!
