How to Cover Your Brands Arse if Everyone Starts Deleting Facebook

**Strap yourself in, I’m going to give you the tips needed to get your business through this sh*tstorm intact.**

What sh*tstorm you ask? Hold your horses! If you haven’t yet read my blog The Facebook Sh*tstorm Explained…then you know what to do!

Let’s start with the good news! You’re not in Zuckerberg’s position with the authorities breathing down your neck, the bad news being Facebook is currently very vulnerable and many retailers (including you) may stand to lose a lot.

Now I don’t want to speculate too much, Facebook could quite easily come back from this, get their act together and be expanding into the Chinese market in a matter of months…but it’s best to be prepared.

Earned, Owned and Paid Media

The issue with Facebook is the majority of your media on the platform is earned and paid. You pay for your Facebook Ads and you ‘earn’ your Facebook following all you own is the reputation you have built on the platform. If Facebook explodes all you will be able to pull from the rubble is your earned media, the testimonials, reputation and feedback you have got from the platform. Your followers and the ads you have worked tirelessly on will be no more.

The same goes for Snapchat who are just as vulnerable as Facebook. I mean if a jab from Rihanna or a quick comment by Kylie Jenner can cause you to lose millions in stock value, you’ve got a bit of a problem (I’m just going to stop this tangent now and explore this in another blog!)

We don’t want all of your hard work to go to waste so here are our tips for building your metaphorical storm bunker and surviving the storm.

**3 Things You Can Do to Survive the Facebook Sh*tstorm**

Grow Your List

This should be an ongoing focus for any retailer, especially in times like this. Time after time we find retailers that have a huge social media presence, I’m talking about tens of thousands of followers and yet are making zero effort to convert these followers into email subscribers. Your earned media, your faithful followers, are very valuable to your brand. Your followers are even more valuable when they have been converted into subscribers. Growing your email list through Facebook is a great way to safeguard your following. So how do you do it?

Here’s how to at least start: Make use of your cover photo and pinned post. If you offer an incentive for email sign-ups on your website you should also offer it on Facebook. By doing so you can drive sign-up traffic through Facebook and build your email list.

On the topic of email incentives check out CASE STUDY: How we got 187% Revenue Growth from New Email Subscribers

Or go one better and run a hyper-targeted ad campaign to convert followers into subscribers. We have a client that was able to convert 10% of their over 20,000 Facebook followers into email subscribers. That’s 2000 new email subscribers in 10 days, that would have fallen victim to Facebook’s algorithm and possibly lost touch with the brand. Those new subscribers started converting into sales within 7 days with an AOV of over $100. Boom. Easy, done.

Focus on Your Database

There’s no use moving subscribers across from Facebook if you’re not going to continue to nurture and share news and updates with them. You need to focus on your email database more than ever before. Focus on developing a nurturing and humanised welcome series to make these new subscribers feel right at home.

Create an email welcome series that:

Tells your brand story and emphasises your values
Introduces your product categories
Nurtures your customers through the customer journey to get them to the point of conversion faster than ever before

Increase Your Customer Happiness

Community Managers so a wonderful job with supporting customers on Facebook and build relationships. This won’t change and we all know the channels of communication with customers are increasing. Managing this is difficult, we use tools like Lexer to manage community conversations on mass scales because you can’t be everywhere, but you need to be.

It used to be that Facebook was the place to the go-to place to communicate with consumers and build relationships. That’s where you’d go to tune-in to customer conversations and monitor customer happiness. So in the Dystopian universe where Facebook could no longer exist what is your customer happiness strategy?

Understanding how to foster customer happiness across all platforms and all facets of your marketing strategy is imperative. You can do this by:

Remaining transparent – learn this one from Facebook! Be honest and cut the bullsh*t. If you’re asking people to hand over their data, whether it be phone numbers or email addresses, you better protect it with your life. Never, I mean never, pass this data on to third party websites or spam their email. Not only is this going to reflect badly on your brand, it’s actually against the law.

Keep the relationship open – customer happiness relies heavily on an open, two-way conversation. A relationship wouldn’t blossom if you never replied to someone’s texts or just texted them back ‘You will receive a reply from customer service in 3-5 business days time’ (Give that a try and see how it goes!) The same goes for your audience. If you have a website without your contact details, emails with ‘no-reply’ or an impersonal customer service strategy, the relationship just won’t work and trust me when I say it’s you, not them.

Super note: Avoid having “no reply” emails. it’ll force your customers onto more public channels. Remember transparency is key for the brands of the future.

Humanising your engagement – you’re not above your consumers, they are not kneeling at your feet ready to believe everything you say. They are human and so your brand needs to be human as well.

Conclusion

Once again I’d like to reiterate that you don’t need to go out and delete your Facebook business page…but having a backup plan in place can’t hurt! There is no one platform for audiences these days so spreading your wings and investing time in other areas of digital marketing is so so so important. Believe me!!

As for Facebook, to quote our very own Alita Harvey-Rodriguez.

A spotlight has been put on Facebook and whether or not they can regain the trust of their users will determine the future of the company. I’d love to know what you think about the issue? Are you concerned about your data being shared against your will? Or do you see it as just part and parcel of being a digital media user?

If you follow along on our blog I’m going to sound like a broken record, SORRY! But for the newbies, Alita is hosting her Email Marketing Masterclass at this year’s Retail Global and you won’t want to miss out!

Register for our Email Marketing Masterclass at Retail Global 2018!

In our workshop you will learn to do the following:

Identify the gaps and opportunities in your existing email marketing strategy
Integrate email campaigns into other channels including social media, messenger, ads & search
Understand how to boost your open, click, conversion and revenue rates from your emails

Anf for those who can’t make it to the Gold Coast?…Alita will be live to answer all of your burning questions about content marketing and personalisation in her webinar on Thursday 26th. Click here to for more details and to register, it’s FREE!

Have you ever wondered what Alita really think when she reads her emails?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg-w8BcBUCc