Strong branding is a must if you want to capitalize on a market that is viewed millions of times daily: social media. Uncover ways to optimize your social media presence.
Essentials of Your Social Media Brand Presence
Essentials of a Successful Facebook Business Page
Facebook Video Content Success Tips
Getting Started with Facebook and Instagram Stories
Facebook Live Video Broadcasts
Essentials of an Engaged Facebook Business Group
Increase Your Facebook Engagement with Watch Parties
Increase Your Facebook Engagement with Contests
How to Optimize Social Media Conversions
Generate More Leads with Messenger Automation
The Most Effective Way to Increase Facebook ROI
Expand Your Reach Through Influencer Marketing
How Social Media Works
Essentials of Your Social Media Brand Presence
Strong branding is a must if you want to capitalize on a market that is viewed millions of times daily. Learn the dos and don’ts of a social media presence.
Objectives
Acquire insights on the dos and don’ts of a social media presence.
Essentials of Your Social Media Brand Presence.
Today almost everyone has a brand, whether you’re an entrepreneur, a businessperson, employee, teacher, et cetera. Our social media presence is now one of the prime resources of opportunities for us. It’s so important that you have a personal account on most all of the popular social networks. Why? Because you never know when your next top client may be looking to reach you.
Does the first impression you make convey the proper message of your brand, or confuse your branding? First impressions include your profile picture, your cover image, your bio, and of course, your posts, the social media content. Double-check your headshot. When was the last time you updated your professional photo? Does it truly bear likeness to you today? Look over your bio. Be very strategic with what you put in your bio.
Are you a speaker? Make sure you put that in. Are you a consultant? What is your expertise? Your values? Make sure your bio reflects who you are, and this goes across all social networks. LinkedIn gives you significantly more leeway to add plenty of keyword-rich content and all your accolades and accomplishments. Both Twitter and Instagram limit the character count, so there’s not as much you can put in there.
Now, should you have a Facebook personal profile? I say absolutely, and you will want to check your privacy settings. It’s very vital that you check your privacy settings across all social networks. You can choose to have it fully locked down, or just partially, or like me, wide open. Make sure you know what is visible and what isn’t, and then, when it comes to publishing content across all of your social networks, here’s the rule. If in doubt, don’t post.
Think about sharing content that’s totally on brand and that’s in alignment with your personal core values. You can also enable the follower option on your Facebook personal profile if you wish, and post content publicly. This is what I do, and I have well over 300,000 followers on my personal profile on Facebook.
Definitely stay away from sensitive topics unless you’re posting to friends only, and then, when it comes to your engagement, always be mindful. Everything that you like and comment and engage with across all social networks is tracked and visible. Everything needs to represent you well and be on brand — your personal brand, that is.
Essentials of a Successful Facebook Business Page
Make your Facebook business page stand out by digging into and adding the features that Facebook offers for business.
Objectives
- Acquire insights on how to make your Facebook business page stand out by digging into and adding the features that Facebook offers for business.
Essentials of a Successful Facebook Business Page.
When it comes to your Facebook business page, ensure your profile picture represents your brand or your business very well. It might be that it’s your logo. It could be a personal picture, and then you have your cover image. That can actually be a video, and I would strongly recommend that you make use of this feature on the Facebook business page.
Your video can include all kinds of wonderful features about your business. Then check the “About” section. Fill out all of those sections. Ensure the information is up-to-date and add plenty of keywords. This is great for SEO—search engine optimization. Double-check all the links on your website work, and that they go to the best landing page for your business from your Facebook business page. You also have what’s called a CTA button, that’s a call-to-action button, on your Facebook business page.
There’s a whole variety of choices. You want to test and experiment to see what works well for you. It could be “Shop Now,” “Call Now,” “Send Message,” “Sign Up,” “Contact Us.” You get to choose one of those buttons and see what works. Now, when it comes to your content, what do you publish? First, ensure that the content you publish is a match for your target audience and it really speaks to their needs and their interests and their challenges.
I recommend you do this ratio: around 60% video, 30% photos, and only 10% links. Facebook really favors video and visual content, and actually tends to deprioritize link posts from business pages. Always, always make sure your content is on brand. If you need to test and see if something might work with your audience, I recommend doing that in a small group setting, not on your big public Facebook page.
Of course, stay away from anything divisive or confusing. Focus on storytelling. People love listening and watching stories. For example, you could showcase customer success stories. What problem does your product or service solve? Talk about employees, team members, vendors—anything you can do to humanize your content, and then, when it comes to engagement, I strongly recommend that you train and deploy a high-functioning team of community managers.
This is money in the bank. People always want to be seen and heard and acknowledged, and you can turn prospects into buyers by simply engaging with them. Speaking of which, if you have the “Reviews” feature on your business page and it’s appropriate for you, I recommend that you go ahead and enable that and encourage your happy customers to leave reviews.
There’s so many other great features you can also include on your Facebook business page: offers, services, shop, jobs, events, fundraisers, and more. Don’t be afraid to dig into all that Facebook offers for businesses.
Facebook Video Content Success Tips
If the thought of how challenging creating a video can be, VOD (video on demand) may be just the thing for you.
Objectives
- Acquire insights on how VOD (video on demand) may be just the thing for you, if the thought of creating a video is challenging for you.
Facebook Video Content Success Tips.
Video on Facebook gets far greater reach and engagement than any other type of content. Video is also usually more cost-effective for your paid promotions on both Facebook and Instagram. Facebook has a mission statement, and that is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.
Did you know, Facebook also has a separate mission for video, and that is to create shared experiences and a sense of belonging, through video. Facebook really weaves this social element into the video and all the products they have. Facebook is determined to be the next-generation digital streaming television platform—that’s right—competing with likes of YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu—you name it. Facebook’s putting a lot of money into funded shows.
They have about 25 media shows with all kinds of major networks and anchors. So marketers, businesses, would do very, very well to create a mix of short-form and long-form video content. Your short form is going to be about 5 to 15 seconds, and that’s terrific for video ad breaks. Long form is three minutes or more, and I recommend that you aim for episodic content, going for about 18 to 22 minutes, thinking about the next-generation television ads—as I say, 5- to 15-second segments.
Now, when it comes to creating video, I surveyed my audience and they said their top five biggest challenges with video, in reverse order, gear—lights, camera, microphones; confidence—how to be confident on camera; differentiation—how to stand out in the different feeds and be different; content—what to say; and the number one is time.
People think it really takes a lot of time to create good video content, and it can. However, you can easily create what’s called VOD—video on demand—using a tool like Wave.video to help save you so much time and money. Wave.video gives you access to over 200 million royalty-free assets, and you can create all the different social media formats simultaneously, at the click of a button.
Getting Started with Facebook and Instagram Stories
Despite the fact that stories disappear after 24 hours, it is a popular micro-content feature viewed daily by hundreds of millions across Facebook and Instagram.
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Getting Started with Facebook and Instagram Stories.
“Stories are the future,” says Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. Stories are ephemeral content. That is, it disappears after 24 hours, and I know, if you’re a marketer or a business person you’re thinking, “Why would I create content that disappears?” Hear me out. This feature was made popular by Snapchat, and it’s become wildly popular, copied over on Instagram especially, but also on Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg stated that he envisions a time when all social networks will have some type of stories feature. It’s micro-content. It’s very easy to consume. People feel more comfortable being themselves when they know their content won’t stick around forever, as Mark Zuckerberg said. You can showcase your favorite stories on your Instagram and Facebook account with the archive feature.
So that’s great, because now your stories are not just disappearing, they can be showcased in this archive. Stories are always in vertical format; they’re 9 by 16, and includes images, videos, text, polls, and all kinds of other interactive features. You have a huge, captive, highly engaged audience consuming stories every day. There are hundreds of millions of daily active users across Facebook and Instagram.
So how can you capitalize on the story format? First, go ahead and follow some accounts to get a sense of what others are doing. Next, I do recommend you look into some tools that will help you create and schedule content on Instagram stories, in particular, because Instagram is predominantly mobile, and you don’t want to always be married to your mobile device.
You can create stories on desktop apps such as Planoly or Plannthat—and that’s Plann with two N’s, and then, this will help you to really start to dive into this incredibly engaged new audience, where you’ve got your micro-content and people will be engaging with your stories.
Facebook Live Video Broadcasts
Businesses that do not promote video broadcasts miss out on innumerable opportunities to engage and garner prospective followers.
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Facebook Live Video Broadcasts.
This is a landmark time in history. You have your very own platform to create a television show of your own for very, very low cost. Facebook Live gets six times the engagement than regular non-live video. Facebook Live also includes a whole array of interactive features and elements, like polls and gamification. There’re game shows that are becoming very, very popular—something called “Confetti”—whatever it is that will keep people glued to their phones long enough.
That means, so long as people are staring at their phones and highly engaged and coming back for more, Facebook can sell advertising. So, how can you make your videos more engaging? I do recommend considering a show. If you have a show format with your Facebook Live, you can bring guests on and interview them. If you have something more technical to share, you can share your desktop screen.
You can even share your phone if you have an app and show people with you on one side of the screen and your phone on the other. Maybe you take your product demo and showcase what you’re doing simply with your mobile phone. You could do “surprise and delight” for some special customers, Check out Facebook.com/creator.
Facebook is really favoring creators. They want to have a lot more video content on the site. There are many third-party apps that you can check out that will help you to create your own Facebook Live broadcast or ongoing show. Some that I recommend include vMix, Ecamm Live—that’s E-C-A-M-M Live, that’s just for Macs—BeLive.tv, Telestream’s Wirecast, and many more. There’re so many ways to leverage your Facebook Live video investment of time and resources. Always think “repurpose” when it comes to your video content.
You can go ahead and download your Facebook Live videos once you’ve completed them, and then you can take clips of that video and publish them over on YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram Television. You could pull out short clips, up to 15 seconds, for your stories format. How about transcribing your Facebook Live for blogposts or even e-books, and then, audios could go ahead and become a podcast. So many wonderful ideas here for how you can take your content, create Facebook Live broadcasts, and then repurpose even more.
Essentials of an Engaged Facebook Business Group
“Content is king, but engagement is queen, and she rules the house.” For successful engagement, use Facebook’s Groups feature.
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Essentials of an Engaged Facebook Business Group.
One of the best ways to build a highly engaged community is with Facebook’s “Groups” feature. I’ve had this saying for about 12 years now: “Content is king, but engagement is queen, and she rules the house.” Nobody’s going to engage with a blank profile or a blank wall. We’ve got to have that community, and Facebook has amazing features to do that, and Groups is so powerful.
Facebook has actually built out a much more robust feature set to its Groups product over the last couple of years, making it much more appealing for businesses. Business pages on Facebook can actually create and administer groups, and you can join and interact in other groups as your business page. So, why create a group on Facebook for your business? First, you want to really develop that meaningful social interaction.
The Facebook algorithms are really favoring meaningful social interaction. You can also build trust with your prospects and with your customers. You could have a small group of beta testers. Maybe you have a group that gets early access to certain products or feature sets with what you offer. Another idea is, you could have a group of ambassadors, where they get access to certain materials that will help them to evangelize your company, product, or service.
How about a mastermind, and of course, this could also be a paid group. One of the ways that I’ve utilized Facebook groups for many, many years is, when people take a course or maybe they come to an event and the group on Facebook provides this wonderful opportunity for community. Facebook’s been adding new features to groups for some time now, as I mentioned, including social learning units, badges, leader boards, and much-improved admin tools, including insights and even boosted posts and ads.
There’re three different group types when it comes to Facebook groups: secret—totally locked down; closed—where people can see the group exists, but they don’t know who’s in there or what’s being said; and then open—where you could still request to join, and you can see who’s in it and you can see the content. Go ahead and when you set up your Facebook business group, adjust the settings and features to your liking.
For sure, set out some ground rules right out the gate. Facebook even gives you some suggested rules. Then you want to grow your group. You can go ahead and promote this on your business page; add it as the call-to-action button on your business page. You could even do an ad campaign to promote your group, and then, share your group anywhere else that you have an audience, and don’t forget, you really want to appoint some moderators, which you can gather as volunteers from your current community.
So really take on this concept of building an engaged community that will become your raving fans, and they’ll love to buy from you and to recommend you, using Facebook Groups.
Increase Your Facebook Engagement with Watch Parties
Engagement begins with content that relies heavily on visual experiences and interaction, and Facebook’s Watch Party feature delivers on engagement.
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Increase Your Facebook Engagement with Watch Parties.
One of my most popular sayings when it comes to social media marketing is, “Content is king, but engagement is queen, and she rules the house.” Nobody’s going to engage with a blank wall or a feed. It all starts with great content, with a heavy emphasis on visual and video, especially on Facebook. Facebook has numerous fabulous features that really help to spark and encourage ongoing engagement, and one of those features is called a “Watch Party.”
The Watch Party feature started only in groups, but it’s now available on profiles—personal profiles—and business pages. The premise of a Watch Party is to kind of mock up the experience of being live with an audience of concurrent viewers. What you do is create your playlist from any public videos, including video on demand—video that already exists. Live video right now, it could be your own video—it could be anybody else’s.
So, once you’ve got your playlist together, you publish this, let’s say on your Facebook business page, and then you gather your audience. They’ll get a notification that you’re hosting a Facebook Watch Party. This is going to create very specific engagement. Even though others might be watching a live video elsewhere, your audience is watching your playlist with you. Consider peppering your Watch Party with calls to actions—maybe there’s a special offer that you’re putting out there.
It’s okay to put in links in the comment. It’s also okay to pause the video and hop on alive and ask your audience, “What did you all just think of this particular video that we just watched?” Think about how you can take advantage of the Facebook Watch Party feature to really grow your community, to deepen trust, and connection, and engagement, and help your audience to consume specific video content.
Increase Your Facebook Engagement with Contests
Contests are an easy and fast way to build up audience engagement on social media platforms.
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Increase Your Facebook Engagement with Contests.
Depending on your audience and industry, your business may lend itself well to contests. Contests are very easy to administer on Facebook and Instagram and other social networks, too. One of my favorite airlines, Alaska Airlines, often runs great contests across multiple social channels, and they really embody best practices. Go ahead and search on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for Alaska Air and the word “contest” and you’ll see what I mean.
Check them out for some great examples. Contests can work for both B2C and B2B. First, ensure that the prize is on brand and relevant to your audience, and desired by them. Maybe you’re thinking of offering an Apple Watch or a Facebook portal in-home video chat device. Is that fitting for your audience? You also must include the official rules, terms, and any eligibility requirements, as well as a release of Facebook.
If you simply go to Google and you search for “Facebook promotion rules,” right up at the top, you’ll see where you can click through and read up to make sure that you’re running your contest properly on Facebook. On the simple end of running a contest, simply just create a post and ask people to comment to enter. Here’s the thing, though—you cannot ask anyone to share your post in order to enter. That’s the only rule to really abide by.
On the more complex end, you can use a wonderful third-party app that will help collect all kinds of data on your entrants. Some great suggested contest apps to check out include Wishpond, Gleam—that’s G-L-E-A-M—ShortStack, and Agorapulse. So, try out a contest today and see how your audience responds to build up that engagement and that know, like, and trust factor.
How to Optimize Social Media Conversions
With keen audience insight, paid placement across social media, and compelling content, organizations can engage individuals and grow conversion rates.
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How to Optimize Social Media Conversions.
Let’s optimize your social media conversions, and you do that with paid placement across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Start by ensuring that you really know your audience well. You should already have created customer profiles for your top three avatars. You know all their demographics. Plus, focus on their top needs and what terms that they’re most likely to be searching for on likes of Google.
It’s actually the first exercise my team and I conduct when consulting with clients, and we are always amazed at how many businesses don’t have this part done and have their avatars clear. A wonderful tool to really find out more about your avatars and your audience is simply called “Facebook Audience Insights,” and you can use Facebook Audience Insights to drill deeper into your target audience’s likes and interests. Facebook actually shows you what business pages your audience has highest affinity for and that they’re most likely to have liked.
So, when you know your audience really well, it’s much easier to choose the right targeting parameters in the Facebook Ads Manager. Remember, it’s going to take multiple touches to get your audience to convert—it could be from 7 to 17—and you really want to include what’s called retargeting, or remarketing, in all your campaigns. You do that by installing the Facebook Pixel on your website—90% of businesses get this piece wrong; they don’t install the Pixel, and ad campaigns are nowhere near as effective without that Pixel.
Now, go into Ads Manager on Facebook and you can start with some of the more basic ad-targeting criteria, such as location, age, gender, interests. Make sure, of course, you have compelling creative for your ads, ideally video ads. It’s really the least expensive way to gather up an audience. You could get video views about 10 cents a view, even as low as a tenth a penny a view. Test out 5- to 15-second videos. Test out some story ads; those are the vertical videos.
Your call to action could be to visit a dedicated landing page with the Facebook Pixel installed for retargeting, or one of my favorite ways, especially if you’re just beginning with your ad targeting and doing ads on Facebook and Instagram, is to check out the Click-to-Messenger ads and simply get people to message you, and now you can begin a dialogue, and hopefully convert them into leads or customers.
Generate More Leads with Messenger Automation
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Email open rates might be around 18% on average, maybe even lower, whereas Facebook Messenger open rates are as high as 80%, maybe even higher, within the first hour of sending out a Messenger broadcast from your business page. Businesses can set out what’s called a “chatbot” using a third-party tool. You can get started for free with one of my favorites, it’s called MobileMonkey.
You can check that out at mari.chat. It’s an excellent conversation strategy where you can have people message you and the chatbot will begin to prequalify your prospects. What can a Messenger chatbot do for you? The easiest thing is to answer frequently asked questions. So that would be providing directions, what are your open hours, information about pricing or refund policy. It could also be for setting appointments if you’re the kind of business where you set appointments regularly.
Certainly, offering instant customer support, providing important updates, generating leads, nurturing relationships with important updates regularly. Building trust. One powerful strategy is to create Click-to-Messenger ads where the call-to-action button is to message your Facebook business page. Then, you can add the Messenger call-to-action button to your videos, particularly where you’re prompting your viewers to post a specific question that your chatbot then answers.
This triggers your chatbot and begins to prequalify that prospect automatically. Many industries that are embracing chatbots include real estate, banking, mortgage, so I encourage you to dive in and add a chatbot to your Facebook business page and see all the great ways that you can enhance your customer service and your lead qualification process.
The Most Effective Way to Increase Facebook ROI
With custom audiences like Facebook Lookalike Audiences, social media ad ROI can climb to unimaginable heights.
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The Most Effective Way to Increase Facebook ROI.
The most effective way to increase your Facebook and Instagram ad ROI—that’s return on investment—is making use of custom audiences. Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, if you’re placing ads on any of those three platforms, you can make use of custom audiences, and these are groups of people that you put together and combine into your ad targeting.
The main categories include your own email list, and people ask me all the time, “Why? Why would I place ads targeting people who are already on my email list?” And I answer them, “I get 100% email open rate.” Said nobody ever. You’re going to get roughly 18% or lower email open rate, so it’s perfectly okay to retarget or remarket people on your email list. Another category of custom audience is your own website visitors, and you get those folks with the Facebook Pixel.
The conversion rate to leads and customers might only be about 2 to 4% on your website, but when you create that custom audience of people that have landed on this page but not that page, you’ll increase your conversion. Another category of custom audience is anyone who’s engaged with your Facebook page or your Instagram business profile, including videos they’ve viewed, or that they’ve sent you a message, or engaged with an event. For local businesses, you could have a list of phone numbers or any kind of offline activity, and you upload that to Facebook.
It’s all encrypted and hashed and perfectly safe. Next, the secret sauce. Facebook offers a feature called “Lookalike Audiences.” So, imagine you have a list of your highest lifetime-value customers and you say to Facebook, “Make me a vastly expanded list of these exact types of people.” This technique alone I’ve seen help companies take their revenue from a million to 10 million in 18 months, with the use of Lookalike Audiences. So, definitely check them out.
Expand Your Reach Through Influencer Marketing
Peer recommendations wield great influence in purchase decisions than do brand ads. To grow your reach and conversion, it often makes better sense to partner with influencers.
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Expand Your Reach Through Influencer Marketing.
You can really expand your reach and conversion through influencer marketing. There’s been a really big rise in influencer marketing for many years now. There’re beauty influencers, business influencers, tech influencers, among others, that can really help businesses to reach what can be otherwise a difficult demographic to reach.
From celebrities to subject matter experts, they have a following of your ideal audience that might be challenging for you to reach. You can find them online. There’re micro-influencers—they don’t have to be big celebrities. They could have a very loyal following of people who are perfect for you. It could also be your own employees. Influencers can co-create content with you, and for you, and publish to their audience.
Forward-thinking brands understand that consumers want honesty and transparency, and it can be extremely effective and affordable, as there’s already pre-existing trust and affinity between the influencer and their followers. People actually trust recommendations from their peers versus brand ads. In fact, studies show that 70% of millennial consumers are influenced by the recommendations of their peers in buying decisions over brands.
You could find great influencers already in your community. They might have a small but highly engaged audience, very loyal following. It could make a big impact on your brand success. Your top customers could even become some of your first influencers, or brand ambassadors. Try reaching out to them to interview them. Find out what did they struggle with before they bought your product or service. Ask them, “How is life better with your company, product, service or brand?”
Influencer marketing is actually one of my personal favorite things to do, and it’s extremely effective because of this relationship that the influencer has with their audience, and I love to educate my audience on terrific brands, products, and services. I hope you do, too.
How Social Media Works
To use social media effectively, you need to understand the theory and philosophy of why social media works. Social media mirrors and mimics the way we connect with each other. Social media speeds up the process by which we connect with one another socially. Because you can achieve validation at a much greater rate, this allows you to move through the marketplace quicker.
In order to effectively use social media, you’ve got to understand the theory and philosophy of why social media works. Social media mirrors and mimics the way we connect with each other. Socially, we’re permission-based characters. Do I like you? Do you like me? Do you accept my friendship? Do I accept your friendship? Who are our mutual friends? Who do we like? So, years ago, when you networked and you attempted to develop a relationship, you would meet someone at a social event, at a gathering, at this networking, and then it would take them a period of time to figure out who knew you. And they would have to validate your deal, and all this.
So, when you look at social media, it provides velocity and speeds up that process, which allows you to move through the marketplace quicker because you can achieve validation at a much greater rate. Understanding those principles that are a part of or inherent with social media is critical in how you use it, that it’s still permission-based and you still have to have the trust of those people as you build a community. So, the next part is that you’re building a community. You’re building a community of like-minded people that engage in things that they believe and understand and agree upon in order to be able to have influence with them. Because we still operate on a referral basis. There’s still the most powerful medium for marketing and advertising is a referral from a friend.
So now we’ve gathered all these people and we’re all like-minded and we’re all entertained and engaged and we’re open to each other’s suggestions because we trust these people and we’re a trusted source. These people care about me. They get me. They’ve got my back. So, obviously, they’re recommendations are going to make sense. So, what I see people doing when I look at social media that’s failing, the typical failure is that there’s a lot of offers going out. There’s a lot of offers that are going out through paid search or paid ads and things, attempting to get people’s attention that you really haven’t made the connection with. And you don’t actually have their permission to serve them that information. You’re not a trusted source.
So effective social media, in my opinion, is when you take the time to gather that community organically, and you’ve built that relationship, and now they’re open to what you’re offering, which takes a little more time in some cases, but it tends to hold more be a more sustainable plan than some of them that I see. You throw a lot of money at it and then you wonder why, you know, I’m not getting the results. Well, it’s because we’ve disrupted the initial philosophy and theory that makes social media work in the first place.
