Jul 26, 2017
“One cool feature that Facebook has come out with recently is that you can actually pool people who have engaged with your page or with a post into a custom audience so later, when you go to advertise, you can advertise to the people who have already interacted with you in the past and they can be a really good audience to convert into sales because they already know, like and trust your business.”
Today on the Get Known series we have Krystal Hobbs of Reflective Marketing. Krystal is a social media expert and digital marketing specialist who collaborates with small and medium-sized business owners to illuminate their brand and attract their target market.
In this episode, we are going to talk about Facebook and Facebook ads: how to create a solid business page that constantly attracts new followers, the factors that influence the visibility of your posts, how to get started on Facebook ads and a lot more.
Surely you will learn a lot in this episode, and if you have any questions, just leave a comment below.
I just found that we always got the best results with Facebook. And the functionality has evolved. There's just so much more opportunity with Facebook because you have Facebook live, Facebook video, there's Facebook groups. The advertising is insane because we all spend a lot of time on Facebook, for one. The average user checks in 14x a day. And you can't say that for a lot of social media channels.
First of all, we're spending a lot of time there, and secondly, we put so much of our personal information up there.
A lot of people have talked about with - Twitter, they didn't start accounts asking for personal information so that's why you don't have the same targeting abilities there. But on Facebook, we put our jobs, we put our education, we put who our parents are or who our children are. All of this personal information that we're self-reporting as well as when you're spending time on there, you're reading articles, you're liking posts, you're following pages, you're doing all these things. Facebook uses all of this and this becomes a real gold mine for advertisers.
So really, Facebook just has - I think it's a perfect storm of features and the user base is there and people are engaged.
Engaging content is definitely one of the most important factors. Historically, we've treated Facebook a little bit like a distribution channel. So we throw stuff up there, new blog post, new podcast, new videos as you're producing them without giving much thought to it. But now, we're really challenged to make sure that that content is engaging and that people are interacting with it. So engaging content for sure.
I would say the other thing is advertising. So unless you're paying to get in front of people with your content, it's hard to guarantee that you're going to get in front of the right people, especially if your content isn't getting a whole lot of unpaid reach. So we know that on average, a page is reaching about two to three percent of their fan base or their following with each individual post, which is not a whole lot.
So yes, assuming your content is engaging, you're going to get in front of more of those people but you really need to make sure that you're dedicating a small budget per month to advertising your most important post. The other thing to consider is that in general, Facebook doesn't like promoting. So if you're posting about a sale or some sort of launch, anything that is related to a specific promotion or campaign, if you just post that without any advertising budget, Facebook is going to bury it.
When I start with a new client, what we really focus on for the first one to three months is building up that awareness. So we're trying to reach out to new people and get them to start interacting with us. We also want to reengage people who have done business with us in some way in the past.
Often, what we'll start with is maybe we'll do a video views campaign or we'll do a post engagement where we're just trying to get in front of people and get them to like, comment, share, start a conversation with us, whatever that goal is. And we do that consistently so that's definitely the focus in the first few months is to start to build that up and to convert people from strangers to followers, or people who want to do business with us. But we also then after that period, we should have enough people who are engaging with the post or visiting the website or on our email list, all these different actions that show that they're interested, we can later start to advertise to them with specific promotions.
You really don't want to run ads that are about buying something to people who have never heard from you, because you're really just going to waste your money. So what we try to do is bring in cold people - I say cold meaning they have no relationship with the business - so bring in the cold audiences, engage them so they start to know, trust and remember your business, and then later they become the ideal people to sell to. Because if they're interacting with you on a regular basis, they're obviously interested in what you have to offer.
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Visit Reflective Marketing at http://www.wearereflective.com/