Get The Most Out Of Facebook Ads

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Facebook Paid Ads are a great way to spread the word about your business. They also help drive people to your company’s Facebook page, where you can share content and your messages at no cost. Why wouldn’t you want a captive audience of consumers who actively seek out your message? Well, Mona Elesseily, of Search Engine Land, has five ways to get them by effectively utilizing Facebook Ads.

1. Target your target

Be as specific as possible when using targeting features. Instead of limiting your ads to ‘only men’ or ‘only under 30’, narrow it down further by using education level, specific interests or workplace. The idea is to make a user feel as if your ad is speaking directly to him or her.

2. Use effective goals

While I think using ads to drive users to your fan page is a great idea, you need to set specific goals and track your progress to get the most from your effort. Exactly how many fans do you want to add each month? Exactly what demographic do you want to see improved growth from?

If you’re the type who wants to see their Facebook fans turn into conversions, you can set goals for that too. For every 50 fans on Facebook, how many conversions do you want to see?

Set specific, trackable goals, then be sure to follow up and tweak your strategies to discover what works and what isn’t worth your time and money.

3. Grab users’ attention

Put yourself in a typical Facebook user’s shoes. Your eyes aren’t focused on the sidebar where the ads are located. You are reading your friends status updates and looking at their latest pictures.

In order to steer their eyes away from their timeline, you’ll need bold colors. You can try using a colored border for your ad, but I tend to think this has been done so much, users are starting to tune it out.

Images of celebrities, especially female celebs, still tend to get a few looks, however.

Once you have a user’s attention, be sure to give them a reason to click on your ad. Put an immediacy to your ad with phrases like ‘Act now’ in order to take advantage of a specific, limited-time offer or special.

4. Images plus text

An ideal ad combines a brightly colored, eye-catching image with big, bold font that is easy to read. Again, the message should compell users to act.

5. Don’t get stale

I mentioned users tuneing out, or glossing over ad styles they’ve grown accustomed to, so take that lesson to heart. Change your ads often so users don’t get so used to seeing them that they stop even noticing.

You don’t necessarily have to reinvent your ad on a weekly basis. Instead, change details like color of your logo, font or just a different image.

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Find Out What Your Audience Wants To Know

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I’ve talked a lot about how important it is to try to think like your customers. It’s always important to find out what people are thinking, what questions they are asking, etc., but I didn’t offer any specific ways to accomplish this. But today I have one method of finding out what questions people are asking about topics important to you.

Justin Arnold from The Mighter Pen suggests using Twitter because it offers real time feedback on what people are talking and thinking about relative to keywords.

Of course, this is pretty common knowledge, but what people don’t realize is Twitter has some key features built into its search engine that really benefit the person looking for questions people are asking.

Finding out what questions people are asking is as simple as adding a space and a question mark after a querie. Suppose you are writing about painting. You can search ‘painting’ but you probably will get a lot of extraneous posts not of interest to you. If you search ‘painting ?’ however, Twitter filters your results to only include tweets with questions.

Now, the problem we are faced with is Twitter is used pretty heavily for promotion. Don’t you wish you could filter out any tweet containing links to avoid all of the ads? Well, you can. Just add ‘-filter:links’ to your searches to do away with all of the promotions. What you have now is a list of questions users are asking about a topic in real time.

This is just one way to try to get into the minds of your audience. Trying to gain some perspective is always important when creating content.

 

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Get the Most Out of Twitter and LinkedIn

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Social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn can be overwhelming. There are so many users, all looking for a different experience, that it can be difficult to find who and what you’re searching for. Mallory Woodrow has five ways to network better in her post at Forbes.

1. Connect with those with an opinion you value

Next time you’re reading an article or blog post in your area of expertise, note the author and seek them out on social media. Comment on their articles and tweet at them to build your connection.

2. Write your own content

If you have a business and an are of expertise, you must have something relevant to say and share. Write your own articles. You can share them through social media and connect with others who comment and connect with you.

3.  Use Keywords to sift through Twitter

Twitter is utilized everyday by professionals and non-professionals alike. Even your own timeline may be muddled with a range of personalities. So, to get what you’re looking for, search for keywords. Try to narrow it down as much as possible by getting specific.

Once you’ve found some relevant tweets, get in the conversation with some replies.

4. Join LinkedIn Groups

Similarly, you can search for LinkedIn groups on your specific area of expertise. In some cases, you’ll be able to poke around and make sure a certain group is what you’re looking for before you join.

5. Connect with people interested in you

Be sure to check who is viewing your LinkedIn profile about once per week. If someone who’s shown an interest in you is relevant to you, meaning involved in your field or in a position to help you, reach out to them and build a new professional relationship.

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Facebook Success Measured Differently Than Marketing Success

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I’ve read a number of articles suggesting that Facebook is not an ideal marketing platform because your business will see a small click through rate from your Facebook page to your website and, perhaps, an even smaller conversion rate. And you know what? That opinion is dead on.

Those aren’t the proper metrics to measure Facebook success, however. In baseball, you don’t figure batting average by how many times the hitter successfully contacts the ball. He has to actually get a hit. Well, in terms of Facebook, your business gets a hit when a user ‘Likes’ your page, not when a user buys something from you. I know, that’s pretty contradictory when you consider the basics of marketing. But, it’s time to embrace the idea that sometimes brand awareness is the goal.

Avinsash Kaushik wrote a tremendous, but lengthy, blog post recently on this and many other topics that I urge you to read. He touches on advertising on Facebook, as well. Again, this is not a way for you to drive traffic to your site. You advertise on Facebook to get Facebook users to your Facebook page. It’s all very Facebook-centric.

Obviously, Facebook is not the only weapon you need in your marketing arsenal. Having a large, interested, captive audience on Facebook is a great thing. You can deliver as many messages to fans of your page as you want and they don’t cost you anything. But, while those fans might buy your product when a need arises and they might tell others about your product, you need other, more traditional marketing methods to truly impact your bottom line.

The most interesting part of marketing on Facebook seems to be that you can’t be marketing to users on Facebook. That is, those that attempt to use Facebook in the wrong way, which is marketing directly to consumers rather than attempting to build an audience with their page, fail with Facebook. But, if you have great content and create an entertaining forum for fans to gather with your Facebook page and don’t alienate them by bombarding users with ads and attempts to turn them into conversions, you’ll succeed with Facebook. Soon, those fans of your page will turn into conversions on their own and may even breed more conversions.

So, whether you’re struggling to gain ground or are just starting out with Facebook for your business, remember to measure success the right way and always consider your audience.

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Facebook Mobile Ads Are a Huge Hit

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Facebook recently gave advertisers the option of where to place their ads. The options, including desktop newsfeed and sidebar, desktop newsfeed only or mobile newsfeed, create many possibilities, but the best value has quickly become evident. For the highest click-through-rate and second highest conversion rate, John Constine, of TechCrunch, reports using those dollars on mobile ads is the way to go.

CEO of BLiNQ Media, Dave Williams, says their numbers suggest “that mobile beats desktop placement by a 3 to 1 ratio.”

The one drawback is a positive for users. Facebook limits the number of ads for mobile users in order to keep their experience enjoyable. This means advertisers won’t be able to overload any group with their ads. So, those advertisers will have to be more clever in how they gameplan.

Also, companies are finding that mobile users that ‘Like’ their page are “worth” less than their desktop counterparts. This is because the mobile users are less likely to view photos and videos and also because desktop users are generally more active on a company’s page since they may have to do more work to seek them out.

Though fans of a business’s page only see about 16-percent of their posts on average, Facebook certainly seems to be worth the effort. Once a company has gained that ‘Like’, they are essentially marketing to interested consumers for free.

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Facebook Introduces ‘Promoted Posts’ to U.S.

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It’s no secret that Facebook is searching for new ways to monetize their site and improve their IPO. In doing so, they are bound to take some missteps. Perhaps, like their latest venture, ‘Promoted Posts’.

As Adi Gaskell reports for Technorati, users now have the opportunity to pay for a better chance for their friends to see their posts. ‘Promoted Posts’ was already available in 20 countries, but it wasn’t until last week that American users were included.

To use the new feature, users simply update their status as usual, then click a button to promote it. That luxury will cost about $7 for now. That post will then appear with a ‘Sponsored’ tag, which allows the user to keep tabs on how helpful promoting has been.

For you next community event, party or insightful political post, maybe ‘Promoted Posts’ will be worth the money.

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How Aligning SEO Strategy and Social Media Builds Backlinks

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It is way too common for people in SEO to forget to align their SEO strategy with social media activity. Often, the two teams work completely disconnected from the other. This is in no way a comprehensive, efficient marketing plan.

SEO must be integrated into social media activity. Here are some suggestions for specific strategies you can take to bump up the effect your social media activites have on SEO performance.

1) Using Social Media for Link Development – Since search engines have begun incorporating social signals into their ranking algorithm, it has become essential for SEOs to pay attention to social media. Now Google+ has become a part of Google search, and Bing uses Facebook data to personalize what people see in their search results.

While all of that is practically common knowledge, Ray Comstock at Search Engine Watch believes “link development is the most important benefit that social media can bring to the SEO table.” Google’s Panda and Penguin updates has made using social media to foster relevant link connectivity has become as important as they could be. The most effective way to market content online is through social media.

It is critical for SEO professionals take advantage of the activities of their social media team to gain relevant links through marketing quality content.

2) Aligning You Blog for SEO and Social Media – If you can create consistently quality content, blogging is easily one of the more efficient ways to build links and authority. It attracts links within your industry, but it also becomes keyword focused content that tends to rank highly in the long-term. Most often, bloggers forget to create relating internal links from a company’s blog to their main website content. Blog posts are an opportunity to direct people to other relevant content, especially your own.

3) Aligning Your Blogging Team for SEO & Social Media – Blogging is an important part of an SEO strategy, so you want to make sure your blogging team is trained on the best SEO policies and practices, as well as giving them the most important keywords and landing pages on your site. If you do that, your team will be more likely to create content based around those keywords, and creating internal links within the blog assists with your SEO goals. Plus, it is always nice for visitors to be able to find more content on your site.

Bloggers should also be interacting with the authoritative blogs in your area of expertise by contributing in intelligent and thoughtful ways which will build relationships with other experts in your field. It builds your reputation as well as making valuable connections that can lead to guest blogging.

By making sure your SEO and social media efforts are alligned, you both streamline the process in an effective way, as well as boosting SEO performance from a link building perspective.

 

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Facebook Basics For Your Business

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Last week, I gave you my fundamentals for success on social media. Mark Thompson also has some fundamentals specific to your business’s Facebook page at Business2Community.

1. Facebook isn’t for sales

As I’ve discussed in this space before, Facebook doesn’t really translate directly into sales. But, it raises the awareness of your business and helps you build relationships with relevant consumers.

Users don’t log on to Facebook to shop for products, so a sales pitch isn’t going to make your page popular.

2. Build your audience

Instead of sales, focus on gaining ‘Likes’ and fans. There’s no risk involved when a user ‘Likes’ your page and its a one-step, one-button process.

Most of these users ‘Like’ your page in hopes of finding deals and special offers. Give them what they want.

Create an active community that includes you sharing entertaining and useful content and a forum for fans to gather and discuss. Unlike email, you can post multiple times a day to your Facebook page without wearing out yoour welcome with consumers.

3. Make Facebook work for you

With your content and fans in place, you now have to get something for your effort. Without being overbearing, streamline your purchase process so users can take the fewest steps possible to go from Facebook to checking out on your website.

The basic goal of marketing is getting your message seen by as many people as possible. Facebook is a great tool to accomplish just that, as long as you are using it wisely.


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Kids Today: Students Prefer Online Interaction

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The affect of social media and mobile phones on society, especially the nation’s youths, has become discussed at length. The claims being that social interaction online and through texting isn’t the same as real-world interaction. Who better to tackle this issue than a current student? Dakota Castets-Didier, a student at Boise State, published an article for The Arbiter agreeing that “social media is killing intimacy.”

One cannot walk across a college campus without seeing the affect that smartphones have had. However, instead of observing how today’s darn kids don’t know how to interact with each other in a traditional way, observe how interacting with each other has evolved.

For the college aged, it’s no longer socially acceptable to call friends to plan an activity. Texting is viewed as simpler and less invasive. It’s even more acceptable to ask for a first date via text than it is over the phone. Some even argue that breaking up over text is perfectly acceptable.

Students are embracing the relative anonymity of online interaction. So much so, that they’ve become increasingly more nervous when addressing crowds of peers in person. Some studies have even pointed to the immediacy of texting and social media to explain shorter attention spans in today’s youths.

While the ability to interact with friends and family anytime, anywhere, is a powerful and useful tool, it comes with a price. We have sacraficed the intimacy and comfort of face to face interaction.

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Sincerity of Facebook ‘Likes’ is Serious Business

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The existence of fake or bought Facebook ‘Likes’ has been pretty well documented, but now, Facebook is actually stepping up their efforts to stop the practice. As Doug Gross reports for CNN, last month, the social media site announced plans to improve its “”site integrity system”. Those plans include cutting out fake ‘Likes’ and eliminating spam accounts.

There are many ways a page can gain ill-gotten ‘Likes’, but Facebook claims their new system catches all of them. The selling of ‘Likes’ is a strictly forbidden practice and some pages have already seen a large number of their ‘Likes’ disappear.

A blog post detailing the new site improvements stated it best, “a Like that doesn’t come from someone truly interested in connecting with a Page benefits no one”. 

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