17 Tips for Highly Profitable Facebook Marketing
1) Determine your goals and strategy
Getting more fans, assembling a list of prospects and customers, developing relationships, more brand exposure, more authority, and increasing revenues.
2) Know your audience
Defining personas can help you deliver stronger content because you are writing to targeted groups of people. The better you know your audience, the more effectively you can engage them.
3) Keep a consistent look and feel
Your brand, website, Facebook image, and your social media profiles should all have a similar look and feel from a design perspective.
4) Create a custom welcome tab
This helps people who are not yet fans and provides a call to action to get them to “like” your page.
5) Know that size matters
The number of “likes” does actually matter. This is your list of people to engage. Without a database of clients, what is your company, after all? Email lists and Facebook “likes” are an incredibly valuable tool. Don’t buy “likes” or you will mess up your EdgeRank, which is Facebook’s way of valuing your page.
6) Keep an eye on EdgeRank
Understand the constant changes in how the Facebook system works and adopt a realistic attitude that this is just one tactic. It is in Facebook’s economic best interests to make sure that few brands’ fans see all advertisers’ posts. For a brand to reach beyond the fraction of core fans who see every post, an advertiser must pay to run campaigns such as promoted posts, which last longer in users’ news feeds and are therefore seen by more people. Some people, like “Shark Tank” star and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, are taking all their fans and leaving, accusing Facebook of driving away brands. Many are in an uproar while others are paying to play and getting great results.
Whatever your take on this is, you need to be aware of the giant upheavals going on. One user comment on the Business Insider blog says:
When a service completely centered on letting people choose to follow friends and companies so that they can see their posts starts not doing that, then the service is broken and someone else will take their place.
If Facebook were to blow up tomorrow, would you be prepared to make up for the traffic in another way?
7) Budget for promoted posts and ads to get “likes”
You won’t get enough likes just from having a Facebook icon on your site or possibly even from sharing cool content. Sometimes you just have to ante up some cash and drive people in your direction with a shiny Like button waiting for them when they get there. If your ads are targeted to the right demographics and your page has real value, likes will follow.
8) Use both profiles and company pages
A Facebook Profile is your one and only personal persona while a Facebook Page is for business. Use both Profiles and company Pages to get double the exposure. (The CEO can have a personal profile, and the company has a Facebook Page.)
9) Create a branded Timeline photo
Your timeline cover image can’t be overtly promotional. Facebook’s rules specify that you can’t have a call to action, prices, contact info, or reference to likes or shares in the cover photo. But you can include a message in your cover photograph and switch it up often to get more attention. You can have a product/service box right under the main image with a call to action such as “check out our latest training program at yoursite.com/training.”
10) Create custom Facebook apps
Facebook apps from Facebook itself include Photos, Videos, Links, Events, and Notes. Any other app you install will be made by someone else. By now there are many thousands of Facebook apps. In fact, there’s an app for almost anything. There are apps like Polldaddy to make polls happen right on your Facebook page. The YouTube Involver app provides a feed of your most recent or preferred video clips to show off. The Facebook Causes app allows non-profits and supporters to set up campaigns. It is well worth exploring apps to spruce up the user experience.
11) Include a “subscribe” button on your Facebook Page
With “subscribe,” users can receive News Feed updates from a page without indicating that they like it. They can also add your page to interest lists to get a separate feed of posts on a particular topic.
12) Keep people engaged
Make sure you respond to people who comment or you will appear like an aloof cat and alienate people. Remember, social media is all about being social and engaging in conversations. Improve engagement with Facebook’s cool features. Pin a post so it can stay at the top of your Facebook page. Highlighted posts stretch across the page and stay there, taking up lots of space. Schedule your posts on Facebook for greater engagement. Use “Promoted” posts to get more people to see your news.
13) Create brand cheerleaders
By creating relationships with fans and nurturing them, they will in turn create more relationships by marketing for you by sharing your posts or images on their own pages.
14) Post images
Post tons of images as they get a lot of likes and shares. Remember, the web is a visual medium.
15) Experiment with length and timing
Longer posts (450 characters) tend to have more shares. Try posting after work and on weekends as people tend to be more personally engaged with Facebook at those times.
16) Get personal
Use “I” and “me” in your posts as these tend to get more likes.
17) Measure your results
Facebook Insights lets you see what is working and what is not. Google Analytics can help you track what happens when people come from Facebook to your website. HubSpot has great conversion assist and attribution tracking to see what clicks first came from Facebook, didn’t buy then, but bought months later even if they appeared to only come from another source.
What do you do on Facebook?
photo credit: mkhmarketing via photopin cc
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