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Facebook Opens New Marketing Opportunities
03/28/08
In Bob Jansen's opinion, Facebook is the most powerful marketing tool he has encountered in his 30 years in the college store industry. "I was doing business one way and now my thinking has totally shifted," said Jansen, manager, Middlebury College Bookstore, Middlebury, VT, in his CAMEX session, Using Facebook to Market Your Store.
Jansen said he got excited about Facebook after learning that most of Middlebury's 2,600 students had a personal profile on the social networking site. "I thought, Here's my way to reach out to students," he said. "If 93% of my students are there, maybe I need to be there, too." He also found the college had a network on Facebook's site and hundreds of alumni were keeping in touch through it.
Now, the bookstore has its own business page on Facebook. That page, which costs the store nothing, is plugged into the college's network and allows visitors to sign up to receive special messages from the store. In the page's Notes section, Jansen has posted detailed messages explaining textbook pricing, how buyback values are determined, and plans for a book-recycling campaign.
The profile also includes photos of the store, humorous videos on textbook shopping tips and the store's successful 60-Second Shopping Spree promotion, an area for friends to post messages, links to charitable causes, and links to Middlebury College news.
In April 2007, the bookstore attempted its first major marketing promotion through Facebook. The store distributed fliers encouraging students to sign up on the page as the store's friends in order to qualify for the Facebook Friends Only day at the store. Friends were offered a 30% discount on purchases plus giveaways, drawings, cookies, and musical entertainment.
The store's Facebook friends increased threefold in the week of the promotion, with 354 friends registering to attend the event and about 275 actually showing up. Jansen said sales of clothing and gifts rose 327% over the same period the previous year and profits were up more than 200% even with the discount. More importantly, the sales event combined with the use of Facebook changed students' perceptions of the store.
"They probably came for the discount," Jansen said, "but our relationship with the students was different."
Since then, the store has conducted a number of promotions through Facebook. Among the most popular are the birthday greetings sent by "Bob the Bookstore Manager" to the store's friends, extending a 20% discount any time during the month of their birthday. The store also holds drawings for a semester's worth of free textbooks for its Facebook friends.
Jansen said the store uses more traditional marketing media, such as campus e-mail and printed signs, to drive students to its Facebook profile and register as friends, or "fans" as Facebook now calls them on business pages. Although Facebook originally was intended just for individuals, in recent months the company has welcomed businesses with an array of new services and tools.
He spends up to an hour a day maintaining the store's profile and accepting new fans. Initially, Facebook consumed more time as Jansen learned how to use the site, but some stores might be able to hand off this responsibility to a student worker, with supervision.
Among Jansen's recommendations for getting started with Facebook are:
- Set up a personal profile on Facebook. This will allow you to look around the site and become familiar with how students are using it. All you need is an e-mail address (one with an .edu account is preferred). But "be truthful," Jansen advised. He first set up a personal profile in the name of Book Store, until an annoyed student mobilized others to force him to take it down. He learned his lesson and now has a simple profile in his own name.
- Find out if your college has a network on Facebook. Many schools are doing this to connect with their own students and alumni and to recruit applicants. To locate your school's network, log into your profile, click on Networks, Browse All Networks, and choose Colleges, State, and then your college or university.
- Explore Facebook's business services at www.facebook.com/business. Start with Facebook Pages, the free pages available to businesses. Facebook provides a step-by-step process for creating a page.
- Once your page is up, you can start asking students to sign up as a fan. Jansen used a targeted Social Ad, one of Facebook's inexpensive advertising services, to invite signups. "I managed to get a lot of fans and friends that way," he said. By signing up, fans agree to accept messages from the store.
To visit Middlebury College Bookstore's Facebook page, go to: www.facebook.com/pages/Middlebury-VT/Middlebury-College-Bookstore/7096557396.
—Cindy Ruckman
Sound Off!
Kenny Beck (kennybeck@gmail.com) 4/3/2008 8:03:43 PM
I couldn't agree with you more. Facebook is absolutely brilliant!It's potential for business and businesses is unparalleled!
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