It won’t comes as a surprise if Facebook marketing becomes the marketers’ favourite. Be it evaluation of ROI, analysis of conversations, engagement of audiences, integration of electronic media campaigns or independently running a campaign on facebook, its versatility has proved handy for marketers.

Pitch Presents the Top 5 facebook marketing strategies used by brands in the year 2013 based on the opinions of Agnello Dias, Chairman and Co-Founder of Taproot India, Dalveer Singh – Head – Experiential Marketing, Asia. Pacific, Dialogue Factory, Pitch’s Editorial Team and rated by Madhavan Narayanan, Tech Columnist and Senior Editor.

1. ICICI Bank
Facebook is responsible for giving ICICI a new lease of life and changing it from a traditional brand that bored people to one that could successfully engage customers. Icici Bank focused on two aspects : Content and creativity. By making content buckets such as currency trivia, participative customer education and finance in everyday life; and enhancing posts with great images, they set out to engage the Indian youth on Facebook. In addition to this, it made the Facebook experience truly worth it through innovations like launching the world’s first Facebook banking application. It created excitement for an audience that didn’t care about fixed deposits or interest rates. The numbers generated by ICICI’s campaign amounted to 2 million fans on Facebook.

2. Hockey India League
This is a story of how a forgotten sport with a shoestring budget took on a giant with unlimited budgets. It is about the launch of Hero Hockey India League (HHIL) on social media and how it beat a league 20 times its size making it the most engaging sports league in the world. Since their destination was Facebook, the activity was best measured by FB’s engagement metrics. The global standards for the same are Facebook engagement rate (ER) and People Talking About This (PTAT). The technical calculation reveals that HIL has become the most engaged sports league in the world.
22.3% PAT + 5.2 ER= THE MOST ENGAGED SPORTS LEAGUE IN THE WORLD

3. Coca- Cola
They launched Coke Studio Season 3, and used Facebook in order to get the word out . On one single day, they reached over 17 million people, which is a much wider reach than achieved through other conventional platforms. They had 1.4 million video views . Their goal was to raise awareness around the signature property launch, and the success of the programme shows the impact of the advertising.

4. Reebok
Reebok India launched its first-ever brand campaign for the studio collection/category with actress, fitness enthusiast and its women’s fitness ambassador Nargis Fakhri. Key elements of the Studio campaign included the Best Fitness Friend (BFF) digital campaign. As a part of this engagement platform, every consumer who registered online received a daily morning wakeup call from Nargis, who then helped them plan their daily workout, diets and much more – promising her support every step of the way.

5. Amazon & Coke
Sachin Tendulkar, who is Happiness Ambassador for Coca-Cola and official Campaign Ambassador for Support My School – an initiative to provide basic amenities for schools in rural and semi-urban India – had partnered with Coca-Cola to promote the Sachin 100 Coke Can Set. As a special gesture, Sachin Tendulkar reached out to his fans through his Facebook Page about this fundraising drive and also personally signed a Certificate of Authenticity for the Sachin 100 Coke Can Limited Edition Set.

By Ankur Gaurav