At a marketing event this past week, Facebook talked about a new “Offers” offering for brands.
Offers let businesses and organizations share discounts with customers by posting offers to their Facebook Pages. Facebook describes them as coupons you don’t have to pay anything to create. When a customer claims an offer, they’ll get an email to show at the physical location for the brand to get a discount.
Facebook has a help center with guidelines for using Facebook Offers (hat tip to AllFacebook).
Under the “best practices” section, Facebook says it encourages businesses to experiment with offers to find out what customers respond to best, but suggests the following to have a better chance of success:
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Make discounts substantial. Discounts should be at least 20% off regular prices. Additionally, offering things for free performs better than discounts even if the percentage off is the same implied value of the free item.
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Keep it simple. Describe your terms and conditions as simply as possible, and don’t require customers to perform unusual activities.
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Use an engaging image. Photos of people using your product typically perform better than photos of your product by itself. Photos of your product perform better than your business’s logo.
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Keep language natural and direct. Make sure your headline leads with the value of the offer instead of marketing slogans. Avoid using unconventional capitalization or punctuation.
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Set a reasonable expiry date. Give people at least a few days to see and claim an offer. Take advantage of word-of-mouth promotion by allowing time for your offer to spread by word of mouth in people’s News Feeds.
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Promote your offer. Run sponsored stories and pin your offer to the top of your Page so new visitors notice it. We recommend sharing an existing offer instead of creating the same offer twice so it’s easier to track how many people are claiming it.
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Train your staff. Make sure your employees know the terms of your offer and how to help people redeem it. Some people will print out the offer while others might show the offer on their phones.
For now, Offers are only available to Facebook’s managed advertising clients. If this applies to you, you can go to your Page, and click “Offer” from the sharing tool at the top of you timeline.
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