This is a guest post from Aaron Brockhurst at Covenant Solutions, who have been doing great work connecting SilverStripe to Facebook.
Social media marketing is growing at a tremendous rate, as more and more brands embrace Facebook and Twitter as a means to raise their brand presence online, and increase business revenues from these marketing channels.
With over 600 million Facebook accounts it's essential to have a business profile that stands out from the crowd, builds on business brand identity and engages its audience.
This is a relatively new area for those used to building standalone websites for clients using open source software such as SilverStripe. How can they provide value to organisations who want to use Facebook to build brand profile?
The challenge for us at Covenant Solutions is to create Facebook pages that are eye-catching, convert the page visitor into a page "liker", drive traffic back to our clients' websites, and are easy to maintain.
Our clients love SilverStripe's easy to use web content management interface. We love SilverStripe because it's flexible enough that we can do nearly anything with it. Using SilverStripe as the central point for our clients to maintain their website and content on their business Facebook page was the obvious choice. With everything in one place it's easy to integrate website content and Facebook content, delivering a consistent brand identity and message.
We created Custom Facebook Pages using SilverStripe so that our clients can have a custom landing page that will look similar to their own websites. Facebook reveal pages are also available on the landing page so that "Likers" can only see useful content once they have liked the Facebook page, which then drives the conversion rate on the page itself, so that we can ensure that our clients get to engage regularly with their target market. Using elements of the existing website is important for the custom Facebook page as the ultimate goal is to lure users away from Facebook to the client's site.
Next month we’re expecting to release our Social Share SilverStripe module that will give SilverStripe site owners the ability to share their content directly to Facebook, Twitter or both. We'll be announcing details on Facebook and Twitter so make sure you're following us.
