304 Int. J. Technology Marketing, Vol. 8, No.

3, 2013

Attracting and retaining customers on Facebook

business pages: a content analysis of an online
discussion forum

Babak Abedin*
Faculty of Business and Economics,
Macquarie University,
North Ryde, 2109, Sydney, Australia
Fax: +61-2-9850-8467
E-mail: [email protected]
*Corresponding author

Hamed Jafarzadeh
School of Information Systems, Technology and Management,
University of NSW,
Kensignton, 2052, Sydney, Australia
E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: As social networking sites (SNSs), and in particular Facebook,

become more popular among users and as organisations more and more
appreciate benefits of communication with customers on Facebook, it has
become increasingly important for organisations to attract more customers to
their Facebook business pages and to retain them. Yet for many organisations
the question is in what ways they can attract more customers to their Facebook
page and also how they should use this website to effectively interact with
customers. This paper examines the content of business owners’ as well as
SNSs experts and gurus’ online discussions to address this question. The
findings suggest partnership and link exchange, content creation and
management, and design and promotion are three high-level strategies that
organisations can use to attract and retain customers on their Facebook business
pages.

Keywords: social networking sites; SNSs; customer relationship management;

CRM; social media marketing; Facebook.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Abedin, B. and

Jafarzadeh, H. (2013) ‘Attracting and retaining customers on Facebook
business pages: a content analysis of an online discussion forum’, Int. J.
Technology Marketing, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp.304–315.

Biographical notes: Babak Abedin received his PhD degree from the
University of New South Wales and is currently an Information Systems
Lecturer at the Faculty of Business and Economics at Macquarie University,
Australia. He teaches business information systems and e-commerce courses
and his research interests are social media, social computing, and electronic
learning and health. He has published in various journals such as Computer
& Education, Behavior & Information Technology and British Journal of
Educational Technologies.

Copyright © 2013 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

 Attracting and retaining customers on Facebook business pages 305

Hamed Jafarzadeh is currently a Business and System Analyser at Queensland

University. He received his PhD degree from the University of New
South Wales and his research specialties are SEOs, digital marketing, business
enterprise management and social networking websites. He has published in
journals such as Int. J. of Information Systems and Change Management and
Int. J. of Management and Enterprise Development.

1 Introduction and research background

With currently more than 60% of internet users involved in social networking sites
(SNSs) and four SNSs appearing in the world’s top 10 visited websites in 2012 (Alexa,
2012), more organisations use SNSs’ tools for advertisement and communication with
users. SNSs enhance the level of collaboration between users by allowing them
to connect with friends or colleagues, recommend links, and use software
applications (Boulos and Wheeler, 2007; Abedin, 2011). SNSs have been defined as
computer-mediated communication environments serving as new channels for
communication and collaboration by individuals who are eager to share and explore
resources (Kwon and Wen, 2010; Koh and Kim, 2004). SNSs, such as Facebook,
MySpace, and LinkedIn, are slightly different from each other in mechanism but most of
them support their members with various tools and features to enable them to build a
sense of community in an informal and friendly way (Pallis et al., 2011).
The large number of users has made SNSs a great place for businesses to
communicate and to stay in touch with their existing and potential customers. SNSs, such
as Facebook, allow businesses to have a two-way and personal relationship with their
customers, compared to a one-way and impersonal connection in other advertising
methods (Karjaluoto and Leinonen, 2009). These sites provide many ways for
organisations to establish and maintain relationships with customers. According to Kent
and Taylor (1998) and Taylor et al. (2001), organisations should develop relationships
with customers on online communities through three strategies:
• Firstly, organisations should use SNS to describe their history and activities, to link
their profile to their website, and to provide pictures and videos to allow users to
establish a connection with the organisation.
• Organisations should then establish the usefulness of their SNS profiles by posting
news items and visual content about the organisation and its products, services and
causes, and using the message board or discussion forum to communicate with users
and answer their questions.
• Finally, it is important that organisations make their SNS profile an interactive
environment where they develop relationships with their users and create a space
where users feel they are part of a community. For example organisations should
provide a calendar of offline and online events and allow users to get involved in
different ways.
Since many people are already on Facebook and also a lot of competitors have a presence
on this website, customers increasingly expect to be able to directly interact with
organisations through SNSs, which is a key reason many organisations found it necessary
306 B. Abedin and H. Jafarzadeh

to have an active presence on Facebook. While customer relationship management

(CRM) on Facebook has many advantages for organisations, such as effective advertising
strategies and brand promotion through viral marketing and friends’ recommendations,
Baird and Parasnis (2011) have argued that SNS websites such as Facebook are game
changer tools. According to these authors, while traditional CRM systems were in control
of organisations to manage relationships with customers, with SNSs organisations are no
longer in control of this relationship. Instead, customers have now the power to drive the
conversation. Baird and Parasnis (2011) have suggested that organisations need to use
new strategies to recognise the importance of SNSs by addressing social aspect of CRM
on SNSs.
People’s behaviour on online social networks is different from traditional social
networks (Clemons et al., 2007) and therefore organisations need to improve knowledge
about using SNSs for interacting with users. It appears that the power is now with
individuals, who share information, pictures, and videos related to products with or
without organisations’ permission (Kietzmann et al., 2011). It is therefore up to
organisations whether or not they want to be prepared for challenges and opportunities
SNSs provide for communication and interaction with their users.
Denning (2010) have discussed that as social media have made organisations to be
more open and to be more influenced by customers and employees, organisations need to
be prepared to manage opportunities and threats of this openness. Corporate openness
helps organisations to learn from employees and customers, to ‘dialog’ with them rather
than ‘shouting’ at them, to support them in ‘real time’ when they need it, and to
continuously innovate based on not only ideas from within the organisation but also from
the knowledge that flows from customers. Yet, Denning (2010) also have suggested that
openness is not always better and organisations need to have strategies in place when
they expose themselves to customers’ ideas on social media.
Since the value for organisations comes from how a platform is used than anything
else, Culnan et al. (2010) have argued that organisations need to use platforms for
additional values beyond just distribution of information for users. As Table 1 shows, a
platform such as Facebook should be used to enhance relationship with customers and to
create a virtual customer environment, in which value is created through forming
customer communities on Facebook. Therefore it is important for organisations to attract
customers to platforms such as Facebook and create a large customer community and
enhance the organisation’s popularity.

Table 1 How virtual customer environments create value

Activity supported Source of value

Branding Drive traffic, customer royalty and retention, viral marketing
Sales Revenue
Customer service and support Cost savings, revenue, customer satisfaction
Product development Revenue
Source: Culnan et al. (2010)

While the power of SNSs is clear, many organisations have been unable to develop and
adopt strategies to properly engage with these websites and prepare proper responses for
opportunities and threats presented by users (Berthon et al., 2007). Despite Facebook’s
 Attracting and retaining customers on Facebook business pages 307

opportunities for value creation for organisations, Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) have
argued that organisations have not yet been able to successfully adopt social media and
SNSs. These researchers believe one reason behind unsuccessful adoption of social media
is a lack of understanding of what social media are and what various forms they can take.
Furthermore, organisations are still unsure how they can attract customers to their
Facebook business page and also what strategies should be used to retain customers on
their page.
This paper is therefore trying to address this issue and answer the following
questions:

1 What strategies can organisations use to attract and retain customers on their
Facebook business page? To address this question, this study firstly reviews the
issues SNS managers and experts deal with when they use Facebook to interact with
customers. Then the study goes through a variety of solutions used by SNS experts
and accordingly suggests a set of strategies that SNS experts can use to address these
issues.

2 How these strategies can be prioritised based on their popularity amongst SNS gurus
and experts? While a variety of solutions and strategies have been suggested by SNS
experts for different issues, it is important for organisation to determine which
solutions may work better than others. Based on the number of occurrences in online
discussions, this study prioritises the above suggested strategies for a more effective
communication with customers on organisations’ Facebook page.

Next section outlines the methodology used in this paper and following that the details of
collection of data and the content of online discussions will be explained. Then the
findings from data analysis and interpretations will be discussed and finally research
limitations and future work will be outlined.

2 Research methodology

This section outlines the methods used in the following two sections for the collection,
analysis, and interpretation of textual online discussions. Online discussion forums are
rich sources of textual material for researchers to gain a good understanding of people’s
opinions about a phenomenon or a concept. Content analysis has been extensively used
for analysing textual discussions on computer mediated environments and online
marketing forums for variety of purposes such as understanding the type and nature of
messages exchanged between communicators (Marra, 2006; Abedin et al., 2012),
determining factors and derivers of a robust relation between buyers and sellers in digital
markets (Pavlou and Dimoka, 2006; Gefen and Carmel, 2010), and understanding
organisations’ use of Facebook for advancing their missions and strategies (Waters
et al., 2009).
Content analysis transforms the meaning of textual data into objective data using
systematic procedures to guarantee the objectivity, reliability and reproducibility of the
data analysis (Pavlou and Dimoka, 2006). Krippendorff (1980) has suggested that every
content analysis should answer six questions:
308 B. Abedin and H. Jafarzadeh

1 Which data are analysed? In this study, discussions occurred on an online SNS
forum will be considered for analysis.
2 How are they defined? All textual discussions happened under ‘Facebook’ category,
from October 2006 till March 2012, on this online forum have been considered for
this study.
3 What is the population from which they are drawn? SNS and Facebook experts and
gurus as well as social media marketing experts and managers are the population
who has been involved in these online discussions.
4 What is the context relative to which the data are analysed? The context is an online
discussion forum, where discussions are mainly focused on the experience and
information exchange about interaction with users on Facebook business pages.
5 What are the boundaries of the analysis? Discussions about organisations’
experience and questions about interactions with customers have been considered for
analysis. Any advertisement or marketing content and also other unrelated
discussions such as personal discussion and non-Facebook related messages have not
been considered for investigation.
6 What is the target of the inferences? The objective of the inferences is to understand
what challenges organisations have when they interact with customers on Facebook
and what strategies they use for attracting users to their business page.
To conduct a content analysis, a thematic analysis technique has been used to capture the
existence and frequency of concepts presented in the text either explicitly (as a word or a
phrase) or implicitly (Boyatzis, 1998; Allard et al., 2005). Themes are patterns across
data sets, and in this paper words or concepts related to interaction with customers on
SNSs and Facebook have been considered as themes. To conduct thematic analysis, as
suggested by Braun and Clarke (2006), six steps have been used:
1 Familiarisation with data: the online Facebook forum has been carefully examined to
get familiarised with the different types of messages posted to this forum.
2 Generating initial codes; any content in relation to organisations’ interactions with
customers on their Facebook page have been considered a relevant content for
coding and unrelated content has been removed from the analysis. The content of all
discussions was copied into Nvivo software as a raw file. Message threads were then
carefully read and information in relation to customer relationship strategies or
solutions to any issues was identified with different colours.
3 Searching for themes among codes; the coloured codes were assessed and the similar
ones were aggregated as a specific theme. For each theme a node was created in the
Nvivo software program and relevant content to that theme were copied into that
node.
4 Reviewing themes; these themes were then reviewed and those with a similar
meaning were consolidated and their corresponding nodes and content were merged.
 Attracting and retaining customers on Facebook business pages 309

5 Defining and naming themes; the final achieved themes were considered as strategies
for communicating with customers on organisations’ Facebook page. These
strategies were then named based on the meaning they reflected.
6 Producing the final report: a list of final strategies have then been emerged and
developed.

3 Data collection from forums.digitalpoint.com

The forum used in this research was hosted on DigitalPoint.Com. DigitalPoint is a

popular website containing discussion forums related to search engines (including
optimisation, marketing, tools and technical aspects), e-commerce, online marketing,
social networks, website design and development, and etc. It helps new and professional
web users to ask questions, take reviews, exchange experience, and participate in
discussions on a variety of topics related to the digital world. Users need to register to
DigitalPoint to be able to contribute to the forums. Registration and participation in this
website is free for everyone. To maintain the quality of the website, DigitalPoint has
strict rules and policies that all members need to follow, otherwise their account will be
limited or banned by website admin.
The content of the Facebook discussion forum on DigitalPoint.com has been
considered for this study. Facebook discussion forum participants are business owners,
social media managers, online marketers, and SNS gurus from different countries and
industries. At the time of analysis, early March 2012, approximately 2600 topics
(threads) were available on this discussion forum, with the first thread created on October
7th 2006. While some threads have received a larger response level from the members,
some others have been left unattended. Table 1 shows an overview on the number of
threads and responses (posts) on this forum from October 2006 till March 2012.

4 Data analysis and interpretation

As Table 2 shows, about half of all threads on this discussion forum have not been
popular since they have received zero to 4 responses. Thus, these threads were
disregarded. All the 300 threads with more than 20 responses plus 30% of threads with 5
to 19 responses were considered for analysis. The content and titles of these threads were
then examined and those threads that were irrelevant to the objectives and research
questions of this study were removed. Examples of such irrelevant topics are “how many
friends do you have in Facebook?”, “what are your favourite games in Facebook?”, and
“Do you like new Facebook look?”
In total, about half of the threads under investigation were found unrelated to this
study and were removed, and therefore about 300 useful threads were remained for the
analysis. As explained earlier, NVivo software has been used to partially automate the
analysis of discussions. The software has been also used to organise the content of online
discussions and to code the segments of the text that would represent a specific strategy.
310 B. Abedin and H. Jafarzadeh

Table 2 Number of threads and responses on the Facebook discussion forum

Number of responses Number of threads (approximate) Sum (approximate)

Above 100 16 300
50–100 37
30–50 105
20–30 142
10–19 450 1,050
5–10 600
1–4 800 1,250
0 450
Total 2,600 2,600

Table 3 Extracted themes from Facebook forum on forums.DigitalPoint.com

Themes Score Sample of quotes

Provide interesting, 156 • Update status with the useful info that has close relation
informative and with your Fanpage niche
quality content
• If u share status good videos and good pic then u will get
defiantly more
Use tools and website 150 • You can always purchase Facebook likes
that provide fans for
free • I found a link which provides you with fans on your page
absolutely free of cost. I hope it would be helpful to you.
Click here
Invite people (e.g., 119 • Ask your friends, your family members first. Invite people
your friends, from your friend list.
employees) to like and
share your page • Tell all your friends and share it on similar pages.

Exchange fans 73 • I would like to suggest you do joined likes group and
exchanges likes, it really helps you to increase your likes
fan page.
• Exchange website hits if you want and some of the surfers
may be interested in your fan page
Contribute to other 61 • Post your page link on those pages who have thousands of
similar fan pages like’s you will get results.
specially high profile
pages and groups • Agree with the other, post your link on other popular
relevant pages
Regularly and 59 • You need to do regular activity on page so that people don’t
frequently update loose interest
content
• Do not forget to update your facebook page daily or at least
2 times a week
Be patient and 41 • Most of the people said that you can acquire clients through
committed Facebook, but you have to spend 5 to 6 hours daily on
Facebook.
• No one will like it if they don’t know about it. And there’s
no sugar coating it, it’s a lot of work, and it’ll require you
time and/or money.
 Attracting and retaining customers on Facebook business pages 311

Table 3 Extracted themes from Facebook forum on forums.DigitalPoint.com (continued)

Themes Score Sample of quotes

Use innovative 33 • Set up a competition or a contest and ask your readers to
strategies to encourage ‘like’ the contest announcement status or the fan page itself.
people to like your Then offer some kind of reward, based on your services or
page products, to a randomly selected winner. People love free
stuff and love being recognised for winning, especially if
they don’t have to put forth much effort to get that
recognition.
• Offer to donate an amount of money to a well-known
charity for every X number of ‘likes’. People like to give
back, especially if it doesn’t cost them anything.
Embed Facebook 31 • I have a facebook widget on my website, and the facebook
widgets on your page links to my website. I want to get people involved at
website/blog both, and the widget on the website is an easy way to get
new likes on the facebook page.
• Embed widgets on your website
Design appealing page 29 • It pays if the copy and layout published in Facebook is
appealing to the demographic.
• I found FB iframe to be an effective way for traffic
generation. FB iframe simply means incorporating the mini
version of your website into your FB Fan Page.
Be thoughtful and 23 • First, one thing you might want to consider is to figure out
have a plan who exactly is your target audience, what makes them
excited, why do they come on your site. Give them
something to be excited about.
• Key factor: planning
Be active and create a 21 • Increase engagement with the fans. This way you can create
community (increase a community around your fan page who would visit the
interaction with your page frequently. Even if they are small in sise, treat them
fans) well and make sure they are happy. They will make sure
you get more fans through word of mouth marketing.
Use Facebook paid 20 • Place Facebook Ads
advertising
• You can use a paid ad. Facebook offers PPC advertising.
Connect to other types 16 • Connecting to your other social networking site accounts
of SNSs
• Link to Twitter
Advertise your 15 • From time to time you can insert promo content, but avoid
products/services in doing so before you get to enough organic growth and
Facebook page engagement
Promote your page by 11 • Promote, Promote, Promote! I’ve always stressed this to all
improving your internet marketers, get backlinks for your page so it ranks
ranking in search higher on Google
engines
• Just Google, you get a lot result

Firstly, any information about discussants’ identification was removed. Then the contents
of these threads were then copied into Nvivo program. The content was carefully
examined and to identify statements or factors that discussants found important in making
312 B. Abedin and H. Jafarzadeh

effective relationships and communication with the customers or users on Facebook

(Allard et al., 2005; Boyatzis, 1998). A sentence was the unit of the analysis and relevant
sentences were allocated to a factor. Next, these factors were grouped based on their
similarities which then resulted in 16 themes. These themes were then named based on
their meaning. The number of sentences within each theme was considered as the theme’s
score. Table 3 shows the extracted themes with their scores and a sample of quotes for
each theme.
In a two round discussion with three other academics with SNS expertise and
experience, the themes in Table 3 then were grouped in three high-level strategies based
on each theme’s meaning and content. The score of each strategy is a summation of
corresponding themes’ scores. These scores are just an indication of each factor’s
popularity, which have not been aimed to have any statistical implications:
• Partnership and link exchange: with a score of 419, this strategy has received the
highest support from Facebook experts and gurus and includes five themes:
1 use tools and website that provide fans for free
2 invite people (e.g., your friends, employees) to like your page and share it
3 exchange fans
4 contribute to other similar fan pages specially high profile pages and groups
5 connect to other types of SNSs (integrate your social network marketing).
This strategy indicates that organisations should link their Facebook page to other
relevant Facebook pages and online communities that are active in a similar industry.
When organisations get involved in discussions in relevant online communities,
customers’ awareness about the organisation increases which may lead to more
customers join the organisation’s Facebook page. This strategy also encourages
organisations to use tools and websites which help them to promote their Facebook
page and attract new users, exchange fans and link their page to other SNSs such as
Twitter and LinkedIn. Example of such tools is www.socialyup.com which posts
information to many people’s Facebook page and encourages them to join
organisations’ Facebook page. While these types of tools have the advantage of
attracting many new Facebook users, their focus is more on the ‘quantity’ rather than
‘quality’ of these new connections.
• Content creation and management: this strategy has a score of 333 and is the second
most popular strategy amongst discussants in this research. It includes six themes
1 provide interesting, informative and quality content
2 regularly and frequently update content
3 be committed and patient
4 use innovative strategies to encourage people to like your page
5 be thoughtful and have a plan
6 be active and create a community (increase interaction with your fans).
The main focus of this strategy is to create appealing and attractive content and to
properly manage and update them. Analysis of the content of online discussions
showed that many organisations are encouraged to use innovative strategies for
content creation. For example, organisations are encouraged to associate pictures or
 Attracting and retaining customers on Facebook business pages 313

videos with any textual updates. Other innovative strategies are to invite high profile
people (e.g., music or movie celebrities) and to conduct interviews on the
organisation’s Facebook page, to run competitions, or to offer giveaway discounts
and prizes. These methods have been found to be very successful in attracting new
Facebook users and get the current users involved in positively reacting and
contributing to the organisation’s posts and updates.
• Design and promotion: with a score of 106, this strategy was also found important to
attract and retain users on organisations’ Facebook page. Design and promotion
includes five themes:
1 use Facebook paid advertising
2 advertise your products/services in your Facebook page
3 promote your page by improving your ranking in search engines
4 design appealing page
5 embed Facebook widgets on your website/blog.
Analysis of online discussions showed that it pays off if organisations design
appealing pages and use Facebook tools (such as iFrame) to innovatively design their
page. Yet, some organisations only use the default Facebook template for their
business page without having it customised for their business. In particular, it was
found that an interesting design for the ‘welcome page’ is very important to attract
new users, as it gives the first impression to the users and encourages them to join or
to leave the page. Furthermore, the results showed that Facebook paid advertising is
a cost effective strategy to attract new users, especially when it properly targets
potential users and uses attractive designs and content. Organisations have also been
encouraged to promote their Facebook page on both online and offline sales fronts.
The above strategies are generally in line with and complement the previous
recommendations made by Kent and Taylor (1998) and Taylor et al. (2001), which were
earlier discussed in the first section of this current paper. While Kent and Taylor (1998)
and Taylor et al. (2001) have suggested general recommendations for communicating
with users on online communities, the findings of this study have identified three
strategies particularly for social network communities. Furthermore, unlike Kent and
Taylor (1998) and Taylor et al. (2001), this paper has suggested a set of specific actions
for each strategy and also has prioritised these strategies based on their popularities
amongst SNS gurus and experts.

5 Research limitations and future work

One limitation of this study was unavailability of discussants’ demographic data, which
in turn constrained the ability to distinguish opinions from different people with different
job positions, gender, or geographical locations. Also, results in this study have been
solely based on discussions occurred on forums.digitalpoint.com and future research is
needed to analyse other similar online discussions for comparative purposes and also to
use other sources of data to confirm the recommended strategies and further investigate
the factors discovered in this study.
314 B. Abedin and H. Jafarzadeh

While this study has explored three strategies and several themes that organisations
may use in communicating with customers on Facebook, future studies can further
investigate the empirical effectiveness of these strategies for organisations and the extent
to which these tools have been used by different organisations. Also, more research
should to be pursued to measure and demonstrate challenges organisations may have in
utilising these strategies and how these challenges can be addressed.

6 Conclusions

The growing popularity of SNSs has encouraged many organisations to embark on

establishing a presence on SNSs and, in particular, on Facebook. Despite the ease of
creating a business page on Facebook and use of Facebook content generation tools and
capabilities, many organisations are still unaware or not well informed about
opportunities for retaining customers and attracting new users to their Facebook page.
According to Kaplan and Haenlein (2010), one reason organisations have not yet been
successful in adoption of SNSs is that they have a lack of understanding of what these
websites are and what organisations need to consider when they communicate with users
on these websites. The findings of this study support Kaplan and Haenlein’s (2010) point,
as analysis of forum discussions showed many questions and concerns were repeatedly
asked and raised, which maybe an indication of many organisations’ lack of familiarity
with Facebook tools for communicating with customers.
This study examined the content of discussions on a Facebook forum on
DigitalPoint.com and sought strategies that may help organisations to enhance
relationship with current customers and users and also to attract new users on their SNS
business page. Analysis of Facebook experts, users, and gurus’ extensive and on going
discussions showed that while many organisations are trying to begin or enhance their
presence on Facebook, they are still unsure of issues and opportunities they may face on
these websites. Overall, assessment of online discussions revealed 16 themes that formed
three strategies: Partnership and Link Exchange, Content Creation and Management, and
Design and Promotion. To leverage and maximise relationship with new and current
customers on Facebook, a proper combination of these three strategies is required where
organisations need to regularly contribute in relevant online and social communities and
exchange links and information, to constantly produce and update interactive and
appropriate content, and finally to design appealing Facebook pages and integrate
Facebook advertising with other online and traditional advertising campaigns.

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