How to convert your Facebook Page to Referral Channel
Facebook page has always been a good way for companies to engage their customer and build a community around their product. Lot of companies put teaser content on their Facebook page to entice first time visitors to like the same. Also, Facebook ‘Likes’ have become a prominent engagement cum reach index for the websites.Ashish, who runs stalkninja.com, had a thought on similar lines. He bumped in to this article on The Next Web, where the author compared the Facebook likes of two very popular websites to ascertain their popularity and decided to put his idea to shape.
Even for a techie, Facebook apps and pages are pretty much a nightmare. The problem at hand was determining how to show select live data from the website on the company Facebook page. Below are the steps Ashish followed to implement it.
1. An Iframe Facebook app needs to be created and added into the Facebook page as a tab. This tutorial is the most comprehensive & relevant tutorial to get started.
2. Facebook Iframe app is like a regular app whose source code needs to be on a server outside Facebook. In Facebook app configuration, the path to the server needs to be defined. Off late Facebook has mandated that the server should have SSL support. Heroku is a feasible option as you can put your scripts on Heroku for free and the server has SSL support.Right now, they show latest 5 projects, top 5 Ninjas with their Facebook profile links and a link to post project on their page.
To add to the teaser data, Ashish decided to include a referral cum discount feature on the page. One of the intentions was to reward the Facebook likes, while the other and more prominent was to increase virality.
This is how the model works:
1. Any visitor can like the Facebook page & log into the app to get his 4 letter promotion code. He can post the code to his wall or send to select friends via Facebook message. The promotion code if used by any of his/her friend for posting or picking a project, would get the visitor 5% project money as referral.
2. If a project poster uses a code from a friend, he would get 5% discount on project budget.
Within a week of putting the Facebook page, their like count has increased from 350 to 450. Also around 100 guys have got their code and 5 have used them successfully in 2 weeks of time to post a project. You can visit the Facebook app here.
For YourStory readers, Stalk Ninja has offered a special promotion code 'YRSY' which would get you 10% discount on project posting on stalkninja.com.
