CUSTOMER engagement may sound like the latest marketing buzzword, but it essentially means investing in activities that build a meaningful, long-term relationship with one’s customers. You engage your customers by encouraging them to participate in your promotions, by triggering their minds to think about your products, by getting them to share your new marketing ads, and by soliciting their thoughts on your brand and new products.

Why engage customers in the first place? Any effort to do so helps develop in your customers trust and loyalty to your brand or products and gives the brand a special place in their hearts. When your company succeeds in convincing your customers to invest time on participating in brand activities and communications, you help your customers not only to expand their understanding of your company’s products and services but also facilitate their acquisition of a stake in your brand and the development of a genuine connection between them and your brand.

Facebook has provided a new, popular medium for engaging customers that companies find difficult to ignore. Many individuals are “hooked” to Facebook because it satisfies their human need to “connect, create, consume and control”—the so-called 4Cs of motivation, according to Donna Hoffman and Tom Fodor, researchers on social media at the MIT Sloan UCR Center for Internet Retailing.

With 25 million users in the Philippines, Facebook serves as an important vehicle for providing information to consumers and forming their opinions about your brands. Almost certainly, your current and future customers are actively interacting on Facebook: if the interaction involves your brand, it can determine the reputation of your brand.

The dynamic and interactive nature of Facebook offers attractive benefits: the building of brand awareness, engagement of customers and word-of-mouth marketing in a smart and affordable manner. What’s more, because Facebook gives marketers the opportunity to interact and meet customers online, marketers can obtain “real-time” feedback loop on campaigns and marketing efforts. This is in contrast to traditional advertising whereby marketers need to hire market research firms to track awareness of brands or advertising campaigns.

Last, engaging customers through Facebook offers an attractive financial benefit: cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) via Facebook in the country is estimated to be only P3, a much lower figure than CPM for prime-time TV advertising which goes at about P15.

To illustrate, let’s take a closer look at one notable campaign in Facebook—the Starbucks Philippines page. Through this page, Starbucks Philippines has done a good job of attracting and engaging customers who want to publicly signal their love for the brand.

Starbucks engages customers by inviting them to visit and become a member of its page by “liking” it. In general, people who like the Starbucks Page are those who have tried the company’s products and have loved the experience. After clicking “Like,” members start receiving updates from the page and develop awareness of new product offerings, branch openings or promotions.

In addition, Starbucks asks members to participate in the creation of its handcrafted beverages such as the Frappuccino. From May to June 2011, Starbucks Philippines ran the “Top 10 Frappuccino Creations of the Week” campaign in Facebook, announcing winners of complimentary beverages every Friday, still on Facebook.

As of June this year Starbucks Philippines is the second most popular brand in the social-networking site with 900,000 “likes.” According to SocialBakers, the Facebook statistics portal, only Smart Communications leads Starbucks Philippines in popularity on Facebook as of June.

A “page” on Facebook provides an opportunity to enhance customer relationships through regular communication and interactions. We have observed that Starbucks Philippines makes a clear effort to keep its page rolling through regular postings. For the month ending June 26, for example, Starbucks Philippines posted 26 items in their page, or an average of two posts per day.

An effective post is one that generates many responses from members and page visitors who click on the “like” button, post a comment, or make counter posts. You might be surprised to know that these 26 Starbucks administrator posts generated 9,500 likes and 600 comments from members!

The most popular post of Starbucks Philippines in June was made on the 10th of the month. The simple tag line that read “Be proud of who you are! Just a few more sleeps till our Independence Day” attracted 614 likes and 29 comments.

Additionally, Facebook gives “instant marketing insights” by merely examining the statistics and going through the comments, videos or photos posted by members. If we look at all the posts made by Starbucks, its photos and albums are the most popular, with most “likes” and comments happening between one-and-a-half hours and six hours from the time of the post. Further, members contribute an average of 17 posts per day, with most interactions made on weekdays between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. This suggests that Starbucks should post around 8 a.m. during weekdays in order to generate the most interactions from its members.

About a month ago, Starbucks asked the members of its page which Starbucks VIA Ready Brew, an instant coffee product, was their favorite. As of July 5 by which time some 820 had responded to the survey, Colombia Ready Brew appeared to be the most preferred, with about 57 percent of the respondents choosing it. This information provides Starbucks with the insight to relaunch its VIA Ready Brew.

As interactions grow and become more exciting, more members appear attracted to a page, which phenomenon in turn generates even more attention to it by word-of-mouth. In most cases, customers who are happy with a brand tend to share their positive experiences with others. At the rate the membership of the Starbucks Philippines page has been growing—50,000 per month—we expect this page to reach 1 million “likes” any time soon.

Therefore, to answer the question “Why engage customers through Facebook?” the simple answer is “to build brand commitment.” As we have shown, the highly engaging Facebook page of Starbucks Philippines has generated considerable commitment on the part of customers who like the page. These customers may be expected to willingly commit additional effort to support the brand in the future. In the end, the reward for Starbucks is likely to come in the form of strong sustainable sales, with loyal customers pushing the brand up through repeat purchases. It is no wonder that Starbucks Philippines now enjoys 50 percent of the market share among coffee shops, with its sales likely to increase further in the future. The same observation holds true for other companies that choose to engage their customers, as manifested by their marketing efforts in Facebook. Smart Communications and Hair Experts (Sunsilk) of Unilever, two other popular brands in Facebook, are the market leaders in their respective categories.

Ferdinand Sia and Gem Guiang are connected with a global consulting firm. They are not affiliated with Starbucks or its marketing agencies. Statistics are from SocialBakers, Euromonitor International and Facebook. Feedback the authors at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .