Facebook Project

The Ford Ireland Facebook project involved Rise Social Media visiting individual Ford dealers, helping them to build new Facebook business pages for their dealerships, or working to improve what they already had in place.

Sitting down with key personnel from each dealership, we delivered extensive Facebook training – beginning with the basics of setting up an appealing and user friendly profile page and progressing all the way through to detailed explanations on how dealers could decipher the complex analytics data on individual users/fans of their pages.

The training involved:

• A detailed explanation of Facebook basics and where the network fits into the broader social media world, and the benefits to business.
• Sharing best practices- how businesses can get the most out of Facebook.
• Showing them how to configure and tweak the profile page settings, notifications, basic Info / Company info, and page permissions and privacy controls.
• Adding profile pictures, in some cases designing a eye catching profile image and programming a specialised landing page using Facebook’s programming language FBML (note -  Facebook will soon be using HTML, allowing for more content rich pages in the future).
• Helping the dealers choose the right update content to publish on their pages and to post to their walls.
• Adding photo albums, adding external content from You-tube, uploading videos & pictures.
• Helped them gain some early “Likes” and brainstormed on strategy for acquiring more Facebook Fans / Likes in the future.

In addition, we advised the Ford dealers on the issues surrounding mediation & management of page posts, and how best to address the handling of potential complaints.

This project put forward a unique set of challenges as we were on a tight deadline and working in a wide range of different locations – all the Ford dealers in Ireland were required to be on the same page – so to speak – by the end of the project.  Working with Ford helped us further refine our tried and tested way of meeting complex social networking projects head on – by developing a customized plan designed to meet and exceed the client’s e-commerce goals. I was happy to be able to pass on my knowledge to the friendly people at Ford dealers and giving them the best possible start in utilising the rapidly growing power of social media.  It is highly rewarding showing people how to become valued members of the online community, and helping grow their customer base at the same time!

*project  worked on by (Tom Murphy of Rise Social Media) in conjunction with Nineyards Ltd.