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So for a very very long time, we’ve been asked repeatedly.

What’s the best way of using our Facebook existence to market and promote?

Most of the online world is full of tips, tricks, articles, case studies, tweets, posts and uhhh….”experts” trying to solicit a certain kind of approach to your social media campaigns.

Although we buy into some of these strategies, a substantial amount of these tactics are fluff perpetuated by self proclaimed “social media gurus.” From time to time, we ourselves may give some hints n tips in our newsletter and blog here on how to do certain things, but we never claim there is a magic formula to this stuff and never believe we should put all our proverbial eggs in one basket in terms of purely focusing all our marketing efforts on just social media.

The problem is, that short of posting content on walls, and throwing up a flyer or video, most people don’t really know how to accurately leverage their Facebook friends/fans in a targeted or behavioural kind of way. Sure they have been instructed on the etiquette on how to be retweeted, gain more followers, have conversations with people, solve problems, provide a friendly voice to the brand and so on. But there has been no “app/program/environment” which can support this.

But behold, a first in online social media marketing has arrived in MyGuestlist and we’ve packed it all under the new “Social” tab that you may have seen in your accounts.

It contains the following:

1) Social database

2) Send Campaigns

3) Multiple cross platform status updates

4) Custom Facebook app (this is an older feature, revamped to support more customisation)

Social Database

The concept here is simple.

You can connect as many Facebook profiles as you wish from people who are associated or affiliated with your business, venue or brand. There is no limit to how many profiles you can connect, however each person must give permission to use their profile for this particular feature. We recommend aiming for staff or partners who have a demographic of friends which is on par with whatever your brand stands for. So this means that if you’re selling tickets to an outdoor summer festival, you probably wouldn’t want to connect your gran’s profile up since she would hardly fit the bill. Or would she?

So, once we have this set up, what we can now do, is filter through either one person’s friends, or all the friends in total.

I could search for all females who have a birthday within the next 30 days and who are between the ages of 18-21 because for whatever reason, this is the criteria that is suitable to me.

The algorithm has found 51 of my friends’ friends that fit my criteria. I can now select those who I am interest in and write something direct to all their walls.

You can include mail merge hash tags to include a person’s first name in there so writing “Hey #patronName#, how are things? What are your plans for your birthday?” is a great way to create a conversation that can continue on in the comments of that post.

If you feel like it needs that extra touch of personalisation, you can always use this feature as a means of generating that list for you so that you can then go off and contact these people on your own.

How awesome is that?

And to add to all this, the available info we can play around with for the moment are name, age, DOB and gender.

Quite soon, you will also be able to filter by likes, interests, occupation, hobbies etc.

All very legal, and very very powerful.

Send Campaigns

Another interesting first with this feature.

A huge problem up to now has been that many brands and businesses have multiple existences on Facebook.

Groups, pages, profiles, more groups, separate interstate groups, separate promoter pages/groups and the list goes

For anyone that can relate to that above line, it really is a nightmare!

So, we decided that we would once and for all solve that problem. We now present to you, multiple posts across pages/groups/profiles at the one time.

What this means, is that once we connect all our Facebook profiles up for the first time, we have an option to select from a bunch of text boxes (see below) which groups, pages and profiles will receive our post all at the same time. The benefit with this, is that in one hit, you update all our Facebook existences at the same time.

If you get clever, what you can also do (as some of our users already have) is find a similar like minded product/service/company and get in touch to be able to cross promote via their group/page. Once you join their group and ask the administrators for their permission, you can now target thousands of people you never had access to for the first time! Very very exciting!

Before you ask, yes, there are precautions put in place so that you don’t become a widespread spammer. Both Facebook and MyGuestlist, will restrict how you use this particular tool to begin with and will only allow you to post to a larger number of groups/pages/profiles once you increase your reputation.

Suffice to say, if you are sensible and clean in what you post and don’t hijack groups/pages you shouldn’t be, you will not have a problem.

This feature and the “Social Database” has already been the cause of a few locally produced viral videos as it exposes your content to thousands of people all at once.

It’s up to you though, to create a video sticky enough to be shareable. But that’s another topic altogether.

Multiple Status updates

Many times, brands are spread out across the country or world. Sometimes, it can be hard to co-ordinate one message to all ambassadors/promoters/marketers/sales team at the same time.

You now have the option of being able to update unlimited multiple Facebook and Twitter statuses all at the same time, and with one click.

Cheers!

Custom Facebook Application

This is a rather old feature of ours. In the beginning, it was used as a means of capturing data from your page or profile but has now evolved to be able to support additional customisation.

Right from within the tab that sits on your page, you can have any of the following:

• A welcome page branded with your themes, colours, logos, fonts
• A guestlist/function enquiries page. Data of patron is captured and all guestlists are synced to the iPad app.
• Sign up/ Become a member / VIP page. Data is captured once again.
• Flyers, posters, videos all linked to your site or elsewhere
• Ability to sell tickets right from within the app
• Run viral competitions where your recipients are asked to nominate their friends for certain things,  in order to win prizes

This app however, is the only part of MyGuestlist that isn’t self serviced. Because of the heavy customisation and modification that can happen, you must submit an application request to us from within MyGuestlist to have this up and running for your profiles and pages.

Final thoughts

As Facebook keeps expanding and introducing new concepts (Facebook places anyone?), MyGuestlist will remain active to wrap around any of these new trends in a way which benefits users.

Rather than waiting to see if certain things “take off”, our innovation and culture is to provide users with the ability to leverage as much as they can from these features and decide on their own, whether something is working, or just a fad.

Stay tuned! This is not the end of our adventures with world firsts in Facebook integration and database marketing.

Related posts:

1. The New Facebook Pages (As of March 2011)
2. How to: Mass invite friends to your Facebook event
3. You Can Now Tag Pages In Facebook Photos
4. Facebook Launches The “Subscribe” Button Whilst Twitter Beefens Up It’s Offer For Brand Pages
5. How To: Convert Your Facebook Profile To A Page