Disclaimer: I have never animated/managed a Facebook page myself.
This said, I assume that there probably often is some kind of trade-off between posting “useful” stuff that directly promotes the brand (the “buy it!” post) and posting stuff that is fun and engaging, that might make the fans feel closer to the brand, but that does not directly relate to whatever objectives the brand has set for the Facebook page (the “Merry Christmass to everyone! “ post).
Of course you should aim at being both effective and entertaining with your post. But let’s assume that at one point you run out of both fun and useful stuff to say, but you still have little trouble coming up with stuff that is either one thing or the other.
In the traditional advertising world, the question whether you should aim at airing fantastic and memorably funny ads or just ads that tell the customer why she should buy your product gets different answers from different people in different markets.
On Facebook pages the question is even more crucial.
Facebook fans are the friends of the brands, and Facebook pages are the place where the brand must engage into a new, different, two-way conversation with its customers, with the aim of nurturing love, respect and the positive word of mouth that is the most effective promotional mechanism ever invented.
The page’s wall is not a place for promotional messages, it’s the place where you must develop a different communication paradigm with your constituency.
Facebook fan pages are just another media, and must be judged on their bottom line impact just like any other media. They are a channel that enables brands to communicate with an audience that spends less time watching TV. Fan pages are not free, it costs money both to maintain them and to attract fans, and posts do not have the “bandwidth” and the “punch” of traditional TV ads. The two-way conversation story is vaporware – most fans will never post anything anyway, and the minority that posts generally does not post anything worth writing home about.
Facebook pages are all about impressions, and there is no reason to think that the impression that “works” (ie drives sales) on TV should be any different (format aside) from the impression that “works” on Facebook. After all we are speaking with exactly the same Joe and Jane.
Which of these two viewpoints you believe will probably depend on your opinion of social media and what they represent as a cultural phenomenon.
If you believe on the brave new world of social media, you might agree with the first opinion, if you believe that spending time on Facebook is a more or less entertaining loss of time, you might agree with the second.
I would argue that the right answer is, simply, “what works better”. You need to come up with engaging stuff to push up your edgerank and your impressions, but you need to promote your brand and use your Facebook page as a marketing/sales tool, otherwise the whole exercise becomes pointless.
It’s a balance – just have a look at the posts of the most successful Facebook pages.
Of course it is much easier to get this balance right if your brand is a “cool” brand in a “cool” sector. There, “useful” is often also “engaging”.
Brandbook helps brands gather insights to get this balance right. Brandbook allows marketers to tag page posts and fan comments along any meaningful axis and visualize the different impact of the page posts (today in terms of number and type of comments and likes, tomorrow also in terms of number of impressions). It also allows marketers to experiment and compare different editorial approaches across different pages.

Edgerank is Facebook’s equivalent to Google’s Pagerank – the algorithm that decides if your content will be seen on your fans’ news feeds. And “news feed optimization” is the equivalent of Google’s SEO in Facebook’s world.
If a Facebook user sets her news feed to “top news” instead as to “most recent”, Facebook will show the “most relevant” news posted by her friends rather than the most recent posts.
Facebook is the world of “expressions” (comments and likes by fans). However, it is difficult to figure out how to convincingly tie expressions to ROl. Most of the time what really matters from the marketer’s perspective is impressions.
The Edgerank algorithm estimates “relevance” (defined as the probability that you will find a certain post interesting and engaging) based on how interested you have been in the past in the posts of that same user (have you liked them, commented on them, clicked on their link,..) and on the type of posted content (some types of content are more engaging than others – compare video vs text).
What if the vast majority of the fans of a given Facebook page never liked or commented to a post? This is the case of many fan pages.
Edgerankchecker.com recently calculated a .6 correlation between impressions (the “result” of Edgerank) and the number of comments plus likes. My take: (i) the number of comments and likes “explains” (only) 60% of impressions and (ii) there is no proven causality link.
Facebook has other metrics it can (and reasonably does) use – the number of impressions per user and the number of times a user has clicked on the links of the posts. Both arguably measure the level of engagement of a user more precisely than the number of times other users have liked or commented a certain page.
In other words, trying to (more or less) artificially influence the metrics of number of likes and/or number of comments might not have effect on Edgerank. Content and post quality is king.
So where does all this leave brandbook?
Brandbook is a (l believe pretty cool) tool to analyze comments and likes. Thanks to the API, we can analyze comments and likes with a high level of granularity.
Brandbook can help you understand what your fans (or at least the subset of your fans that care to post) think about your posts and about your brand. This understanding should help you improve the effectiveness of your posts and might provide you with other marketing insights.
In order to make brandbook into a news feed optimization tool I think we need to integrate brandbook comment and likes data with Facebook Insight impression data.

Cotton pads are very useful to take off make up.
I have little direct experience, but failing to properly take your make up off every night in time is pretty bad for one’s skin. This notwithstanding, cotton pads are a fairly unglamorous product . The cotton pad market is relatively small, with limited growth rates. Private labels have a relatively large share of the market. Margins are tight. Innovations happen, products improve steadily, but not in a way that would especially excite customers and drive further growth. Media budgets are limited, cotton pad ads are rare. Communication with consumers basically happens “through the packaging”.
On the other hand not all cotton pads are alike (there is a top line offering by Chanel that sell for 20 USD the package, 20 times the private label). Finding a way to take off make-up effectively and with no of fuss is probably an issue for some young women.
Social media is perfect to promote this kinds of products, right? I costs very little, it relays on the experience of consumers, it is extremely targeted to those interested in the issue, it can spread virally.
Wrong. Social media, probably because it is “social”, works (almost exclusively) for cool stuff.
Every brand would like to join the social media bandwagon (or has already tried to join). My opinion is that if you are not a “cool” brand (ie you are an “average” brand), you risk a deception.
Swisspers is the US market leader of cotton pads.
They must have thought that there was a problem (some young women being non aware that imperfect make up removal damages skin) and decided to try to be part of the solution. Instead of shouting that their products were better than the competition they started a campaign to give advice on the subject.
They opened an active Facebook fan page, a Twitter account, posted at least once a day, informing and engaging their fans. The decided not to “buy” fans via facebook, I guess because the numbers did not make sense, and to grow the fan base organically. They also came up with ideas and giveaways, parties and gatherings to push their campaign.
I have no contact with Swisspers, but all this seems to have been done with a good degree of professionalism.
Six months into the campaign, after countless Facebook posts and 533 Tweets, they have about 150 Facebook fans and about 200 Twitter followers. These numbers might improve in the future. Of course this is an example, and there might be lots of counter-examples of “non cool” products for which Facebook is a high ROi investment.
My opinion, however, is that there are very few free lunches, even on Social Media