Ways to Convert Potential Fan to Super Fan through your Brand Fan Page on Facebook
In my last post I spoke about “Anatomy of Fans“ (click here to read article on ”Anatomy Of Fans“). However it’s time to understand how to take your potential fan to super fan.

Without taking much of your time I will re-brief you on different level of fans.

1) Potential Fan: This person is a Friend of your Fan, who is witnessing activities done between brand and his fan through his news feeds. However he doesn’t have any direct interaction with the brand yet.

2) Engaged Fan: This is a Fan who has liked your page. For any reason, but yes liked your page. At this stage it is very difficult to identify the potential of your fan unless Fan reach the next level and that’s “Advocate Fan”

3) Advocate Fan: This Fan has done some good work on word-of-mouth for your brand and helped you to go viral. This could be direct or indirect approach. Direct Approach is when he has spoken or shared your posts with his/her friend/friends. Indirect is approach is when he hasn’t spoken to anyone directly; however his frequency of engagement/engagement rate is so high with your brand that his/her friends keep witnessing his activity with your brand through their news feeds.

4) Purchasing Fan: This Fan has given his/her basic information and made purchase from you.

5) Super Fan: This Fan has given his/her basic information and made purchase from you. And not only this, he/she has led another Fan to your brand to make the purchase from you.

Level 1) Potential to Engaged Fan:

To convert Potential Fan into Engaged Fan, use engagement Ads…simpleJ.

Anyone who is not interested in your products or services (similar interests) will not buy your products and services, they are not worth spending time and energy. Instead of targeting weekend warriors, your Ads should target high value fan, and how you can target them based on their interest, demographics, and other targeting data available in Facebook AD Creation module. Now to get your updates in their news feed all your target audience has to do it hover mouse over your ad and click on “LIKE”(ensure the link for your page is added in your ad and its alive and not dead).

To create an effective engagement AD:

Choose your target audience wisely: Make the best use of Target Audience Tool in Facebook AD Creation Module. For example, if I have an ecommerce for selling winter wear online, I would target audience who is already fan of my competitor or someone who have mentioned travel plans to colder places, or someone who is staying where winters are really cold.

Incite Action: Your AD headline, should be such that it Grand your Potential Fans attention. Remember the life of your post is only maximum 15 seconds during the peak hours when most of the users or brands are active on Facebook. Even if your target audience’s friend plays Farmville or post on your target audience’s wall, your post will be pushed down.

Real Content Real Fans: Using logos or company taglines will get you Nowhere on Facebook. Happy, Smiling and Vibrant Faces works well than any other abstract image “so called creativity”. Always remember that your target audience is already bombarded with lots of Ads and Promotional content through their news feed and message inbox. Your headline and image are your one shot to get them to specifically click on yours.

Ensure to closely Measure performance (both your campaign’s and your post’s):  Facebook current insights provide you with plenty of performance based information on the posts that you have done or campaigns you have done. Never ever do mistake of running your campaign on one AD, always use multiple Ads for a single campaign to understand and compare which one works best for you. There is no limit to change you ads for a particular campaign, so monitor their performance closely and change the ad accordingly.

Level 2) Engaged to Advocate Fan:

Word of mouth: This works the best for any kind of marketing, whether Social Media, or Traditional Marketing.  Word-of-mouth advertising is the most cost-effective and powerful way to move engaged fans up the ranks. Unfortunately, you can’t buy it — you have to earn it.

There are only 2 ways to earn it: a) Exceptional customer service or b) contests

Here you are only converting your engaged to advocate, hence no purchase is made yet, so “option a” will not play such an important unless there is any grievance or request for information from your engaged fan. So let’s focus on “options b”.

Contest are really great and authentic way of converting your engaged fan to Advocate, there are other factors also why user advocates your brand which I will discuss in my next article(Types of Social Sharer) so stay tunes

Oops! Again we are losing focus; let’s stay on “Advocates through Contest”.

You definitely have acquired fans through ads and engaged them with your amazing ads (engagement oriented), however your fan’s friend also share similar interest as your fans, so what about them?

Every time your Fan engage or promote your contest, they are reaching your Potential Fans (also termed as pre-qualified leads) by exposing your contest among to their friends, and this is absolutely free for you, which can definitely bring the “Cost Of Acquisition” down which you spent in acquiring your existing fans through sponsored ads. This sounds Glory, however many contest Campaigns fail because they offer wrong incentive to their fans.

Let me go back to example of my ecommerce business of mobiles, lets say I run a contest to give away iPad. You definitely give a reason for your fans to go crazy about this deal of iPad because everyone loves going hi-tech, and you will get very good response in getting more new likes(so called fans). However when the time will come to convert them into sales for winter wear, your conversion rate will drastically fall, infact you wont be able to convert them into “super fan” in Future. Do you know why? Because the audience that you acquired were crazy about iPad and not winter wear. You should have tried running a contest to give away free Winter Wears (jackets, sweat shirts, etc.). Hence, when designing giveaways and contests, choose specific prizes your ideal customer would want, which would definitely work better when it comes to converting them to purchasers/super fansJ in the future. Is it logical? I strongly feel it is. J

Level 3) Advocates to Purchaser Fan:

Always ensure that you grow your lead base as your fan base is growing. When you acquired new fan, you definitely had customized “Welcome Tab”. Ensure that you have separate page for users who have landed on your welcome page but haven’t clicked on like yet. What minimum that you can do get call to action on your welcome tab, promise to give them valuable content once they become your fan (click on like) and against their name and email id.

You have got a lead now. But what next?

I have been talking about use Facebook to engage and not just focus on sales, I am still very much firm on this. However you can still do it with certain logics, limitations, ethics and most importantly lot of art and science. Don’t be a LOUD SALESMAN, you will never succeed.

However the targeted value will work and the best way to do that is through Content. If you are new to this you can try “Small Start”. With “Small Start” I mean guide your fans to your best content page through short Call To Action Phrase like:

“Click Here” — Link to your latest blog post.

“Watch This” — Link to an entertaining video.

“Check This Out” — Post an interesting stat.

Now one thing to keep in consideration, don’t point them to Facebook or other social networking sites, you want them to be your purchaser so get them on your Website. Not necessarily on buying page or ecommerce page, but on interactive content page that will generate Fan’s INTEREST AND TRUST in your brand’s website which definitely leads to great affinity score. You can then wisely progress to more robust Call To Actions that focuses on your Brand’s services or products. J This moves the relationship to your website, where you can convert fans to buyers using your existing sales funnel.

Level 4) Purchaser Fan to Super Fan:

Super Fan s no one else but blend of Advocate and Purchaser. These fans not only keeps on purchasing your products or service but also keeps on advocating your brand to their friends because of many factors like a) Exceptional customer service or b) contests. Here now customer service will play very important and crucial role to keep them as your Super Fan forever, because they have already purchased your products and service, now it’s time for them to test your after sales service or customer service.

If you consistently provide great content, real engagement, value for money, trust factor, customer service you will gradually develop group of “Super Fans”. Hence it is very important to take the first level very seriously (Potential to Engaged Fan), because if you are able to target the right audience and build your relationship with them then you have long way. But my question is how many brands really go for Quality of fans and not just number of Fans flashing on their Fan Page.

Love you All

Mohit Laamba