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Stories Building Brands10 content best practices for your brand on Facebook

v06.2014 | Global

But first, 3 important reminders

The News Feed is your brand's most important placement. People spend more than half of their time on Facebook on their News Feed.

Mobile made Facebook the most personal and engaging canvas ever created.The feed is full of real stories, from real people. Consider them your competition.

Good creative on Facebook is just good creative.Everything competes with everything – fight the indifference with great ideas.

Stop being the vanilla ice cream – you don't have to please everybody. Stop having a positioning, start taking a stand. That way your brand will be recognized even if people don't see your name or logo.

Make choices, define a strong point of view, have a clear voice, think of specific audiences. If they are all true to your brand ideals, that will resonate with people clearly. That's what big brands do.

1. A brand isa point of view

For years Dove is on a mission: reinforce women's self-confidence so they can fell happy with whom they are.

That's why their images never show supermodels in glamorous situations, preferring real people that are, truly, beautiful.

Tell stories that only your brand can tell. Authenticity is the name of the game.

Our brains remember stories much better than numbers and facts. When we were kids our parents used fables to teach us life lessons, stories that seemed disconnected from real life but that in the end showed us, among other things, to never talk to strangers. Even if they live in a house made of candies.

2. More stories, less facts.

Red Bull Stratos was more than a parachuting stunt, it was a story factory in a scale never seen before.

More than one year after Felix Baumgartner landed, we are still talking about his adventure: "Remember that dude that jumped off space?"

Are you here to get likes or to generate business results?

Escape from the "works on social" jail and from using memes "because everybody is using it". If a story or a special date is important for your brand make that into a campaign and not just a post that follows a trend.

3. Cats: use only if you sell cat food.

Why people choose your

brand

Quality engagement that generates business results

Why people share on Facebook

Instead of following popular memes Dos Equis created their own, through repetition and creativity: The World's Most Interesting Man.

With statements like "Every time he goes for a swim dolphins appear" the character became a meme of his own, with fans making up their own list of facts.

To the point that on Father's Day 2013 the brand post was originally written by a fan in the mother's day post: "He gave his father 'the talk'".

They way your brand is perceived is build with time, one story at a time. Each post must stand on its own, but when one sees them as a bigger story they become even more interesting.

In other words, your brand should be more like Friends and less like Game of Thrones: people must be happy with just one episode and those who follow the whole season will have an even better understanding of your story.

Build long lasting stories and internal jokes. When you set the example your lovers (yes, they exist!) will understand, spread and join the fun.

4. Consistency, consistency, consistency.

Newcastle Brown Ale's posts tell only one story: they are the "No Bollocks" beer. Nothing else matters.

This consistency is not confined to Facebook: the brand's character lives on TV, out of home and even on bar's coasters.

Markets have demographics like "women 35+".Real people have moms. All these people are on Facebook, telling real stories with their real identities. !More than 1 billion people are on Facebook every month, but that doesn't mean you have to make one single message to all of them. Craft something that give people reached the feeling that this story was created specifically for them and use the targeting tools to amplify this message. People don't mind advertising on Facebook, as long as it's relevant to their lives. That's the kind of story that will generate big business results.

5. The right stories forthe right people

Ask Americans what they think “America is Beautiful” means and you will get several different answers.

Coca-Cola turned a mass-media story into personal stories by telling 18 different points of view for their “America is Beautiful” Superbowl spot

Don't let your content become just a static banner. Our brains have been trained by years of web surfing to ignore blinking squares.

Besides being worth a thousand words, an image fires different feelings on different people.

Images help brands become as interesting as the coolest people on the feed, igniting emotions that, in turn, lead to changes in brand perception.

6. Explore thepower of images.

Ben & Jerry’s posts follow a simple and consistent visual rule: the ice-cream must always be at arm's length, giving the impression that you can grab the product and start eating right away.

If people, on average, use 16 words to tell their stories, why does your brand need more?

The fewer words you use, the more room you leave for people's imagination to fill the 'negative space’.

7. Text? Short.

This is Facebook's most liked post ever. With just 3 words it was capable to convey the individual emotions of every person that supported Barack Obama when he announced his reelection. Instead of facts, this post opened infinite possibilites on people's minds.

This picture was shot during the campaign, but it brought so much emotion that Obama's team decided to save it for the victory post.

More and more people use a mobile device as their primary Facebook interface, so the thumb is the new remote control.

This makes a visually appealing content crucial to capture people's attentions. Can your campaign be enjoyed by people standing up on the subway?

8. Mobile ready? Mobile best.

For a series of videos about "playing with food" Oreo created square-shaped videos, a format made popular by Instagram, to subtly tell people that its videos were short, funny and could be enjoyed with no sound.

Creativity can also be key in your internal structure to produce and find stories that your brand will tell.

Not every single story must be created by your agency or internal team: content partners, celebrities, brand-lovers and specially your fans can help you on this challenge. Whenever possible show your love for them and the content they make about you.

9. Look around and find your story

Every GoPro owner is a content creator by nature.

The brand team created the ‘Photo of the Day’ series, and everyday they search, edit and publish the best content they find from consumers all over the world.

There's no recipe for success, there's only your recipe for success. The software you run on your computer, including Facebook, doesn't come in annual boxes anymore. Instead it's constantly updated, sometimes more than once a day.

Every single post must test an hypothesis: right or wrong, you learned something about the stories people want to hear from you.

That's how startups do: build, measure, learn — and be prepared to be wrong. When something works, amplify.

10. Art + science

Before talking about their Made in America music festival Budweiser used Facebook's insights about their target to choose which artists from the festival's line up would tell the best stories to millennials. That allowed them to focus on specific rising stars, generating better results than by using only one mega popstar.

The campaign insights proved powerful: 8 out of the 15 artists picked for the campaign won Grammy Awards months later.