Growth Lessons From Top 10 Facebook Influencers

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission to make the world more open and connected.” – Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla’s big, big, big brother. It’s so big, in fact, that Facebook is the internet for a lot of people. It’s an extremely powerful platform, but like everything in marketing, it’s all about targeting the right people. When you launch an ecommerce or SaaS website, getting traffic really isn’t that difficult, but getting the right people on your site is a bit more challenging. Here’s how to get the most out of it.

Advertising works most effectively when it’s in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook  they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing so there’s really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that.

You probably know that word-of-mouth is one of the most valuable forms of marketing out there. It’s been shown to influence 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions. After all, potential customers are much more likely to be receptive to recommendations from a person they respect and trust than to ads or other corporate messaging. In the new world of digital relationships, word of mouth extends well beyond recommendations from friends and family into the realm of influencer marketing.

Social media is the great equalizer where anybody can be quotable because they are wise, or clever, or for no good reason at all.

An influencer is quite simply someone who carries influence over others. A social media influencer is someone who wields that influence through social media. The form of influence can vary and no two influencers are the same. Most influencer campaigns have some sort of social-media component, whereby influencers are expected to spread the word through their personal social channels. Many influencer campaigns also carry a content element in which either you create content for the influencers, or they create the content themselves. Though social-media and content marketing often fit inside influencer campaigns, they are not synonymous with influencer marketing.

The top ten Facebook Influencers were chosen based on their reach and overall social influence. These influencers understand the digital world, and are fond of sharing their trade secrets and insights with their followers. Following them on social media and reading their blog might help us learn something new about social media and marketing.

However in terms of using social media for business I think influencers are the people and the companies that carry weight in your industry, and they should be your highest priority.

Here is the list of top 10 Facebook power influencers and their 10 growth lessons:

1. Mari Smith

Follow: On Facebook

1. Start using Facebook Live:

Facebook Live is growing in leaps and bounds. Companies that want to be on the leading edge would do well to integrate Facebook Live video into their marketing strategies. Not just content marketing, but also looking ahead into the not too distant future for how you can integrate live video into your social customer care.

• Give your audience advance notice of when you’ll be broadcasting live by publishing a post with details of the day and time you’ll go live. This is optional. You may want to be more spontaneous… for now at least.
• Create a short, compelling title. Consider including an emoji or two. The title is the only part people see in their notifications to decide whether to join you or not.
• Focus on quality from the first frame. Once your Live video is a recording on your wall (and/or you boost the post), you want to draw the viewer in within the first three seconds.
• Use good lighting. Simply positioning yourself by a window can work great. Not glaring sunshine, though, as it’s too harsh. And/or, invest in simple lighting. Take a look at the list of inexpensive gear from my friends at Films About Me.
• Use good audio. People will forgive wobbly/grainy video long before they’ll forgive bad audio. If your sound quality isn’t good (e.g. too far away from your phone, too much ambient noise), for sure invest in a simple microphone for your smartphone. I love the gear my buddy Dave Basulto at iOgrapher offers.
• Stabilize your phone. To create a higher quality video shoot, and save you holding your phone the whole time, check out the variety of awesome cases offered by iOgrapher as well as tripods. (I used this one for my iPhone 6PLUS throughout my recent travels in Rome; tourists kept coming up to me asking where I got it!) You might even consider a gimbal for a super smooth video. My good friend Guy Kawasaki uses this one by Ikan.
• Broadcast for a minimum of five minutes, if possible. Shoot for twenty minutes if you can. Facebook recently tweaked the news feed algorithm to favor Live videos whilst they are broadcasting live.
• Engage with your community while broadcasting. A person’s first name is the sweetest sounding word in their entire vocabulary. Plus, everyone loves to be seen, heard and acknowledged. Give your viewers–and especially your commenters–a shoutout on the Live video.
• Encourage your viewers to tap the Subscribe button so they will be notified each time you go live.

2. Create Shareable Content:

If you want people to share your Facebook posts, you need to create highly shareable content. It’s that simple.

“Highly shareable” means the content is relevant to your audience and compels people to share it. Your content should make people stop in their tracks. Facebook calls this “thumb stopping,” since the majority of users view the platform on mobile devices. When your audience stops scrolling and pauses to read your content, they should feel an instant urge to share it with their audience.
The content could be breaking news, educational, hilarious, entertaining, or something that’s not typically seen elsewhere. This is the type of content that will make your audience look good to others when they share it.Create videos, graphics, and posts that are relevant, stand out in the news feed, and make people want to share. The content doesn’t have to be fancy, but it should look good and be of value to your loyal following.

3. Design Video for Viewing With the Sound Off:

To encourage engagement, make your videos understandable with or without audio. Although Facebook is testing autoplay video with sound on, you should still design your video to be viewed with the sound off whenever possible, since users will have control over the mute button.
Remember, autoplay video (with or without sound) is here to stay. Use a tool that easily allows you to add text such as lower thirds and captions to your videos. When your audience can consume your content with the sound off, they’ll be more likely to engage with it.

4. Try Instant Articles:

Instant articles load 10 times faster inside the Facebook mobile app than links on the regular mobile web. If you haven’t configured Facebook Instant Articles, it’s something to consider.
Companies using instant articles include Business Insider, BuzzFeed, the Washington Post, and others. Yes, it does require time and effort to set up instant articles. However, since people get instant gratification when they click an instant article link in the feed, they’re more likely to read it. Then they’ll share and otherwise engage with your post.Perhaps you won’t use instant articles for every article you publish, but test it with some of your flagship content.

5. Respond to fan posts and comments:

Customers are posting twice as many messages that actually require a response from brands, yet five out of six of those messages go unanswered. Responding to posts and comments (ideally including all social activity and your blog), translates to money in the bank. People want to be heard and acknowledged. Depending on the size of your company, it may take a significant investment of resources to provide social customer support but it will pay off with the right training and approach.

6. Change Your Posting Time:

Not getting the engagement you want on your Facebook posts? Try publishing content outside business hours, such as in the evenings and on weekends. Publish when more of your audience is online.
Also, it’s totally okay to repurpose content. Post content that’s already been shared on other networks and periodically republish your most popular Facebook posts. Don’t share a previously published post, though; republish it as a fresh post. Be conscious of the evergreen content you share. If you’re republishing older content, remember to read it first to make sure it’s still relevant. Plus, while you can auto-publish links and blog posts using third-party tools, don’t set and forget it.
Every now and then something may happen in the world or in your business and industry. Just be aware of what you’re posting and when to make sure it’s still relevant and not disruptive during a crisis. If you’re not already doing so, post once a day to your page, which is what most brands do. News organizations post more frequently because they tend to have noteworthy and time-sensitive stories.

7. Budget for Facebook ads:

Let’s face it, we all know that the “good old days” of totally free marketing on Facebook are over. However, that doesn’t mean businesses have to invest a fortune to get solid, measurable results.

Facebook ads is still the most targeted traffic that your advertising dollars can buy. Even with a nominal budget (if you’re a super small business, up to $100 a week can make a huge difference), nowhere else online can you reach such a laser-specific type of audience than on Facebook.

But, it all boils down to properly understanding the tools and features available to you and integrating an effective strategy. Think about it this way, if you could get a 3x ROI every time you spent a dollar advertising on Facebook, wouldn’t it be worth it? Spend $100, get $300 in sales. With proper training and testing, you could see results significantly greater, such as 10x or 100x ROI!

• Set specific, measurable goals that you want to achieve (e.g. x number of website visits, leads, registrations, etc.)
• Allocate weekly ads budget within your means.
• Experiment with your paid posts ideally within the Facebook Ads Manager or even Power Editor.

8. Include a Call to Action:

Just as you want to create shareable content, it’s important to ask people to engage. Include something as simple as an invitation to share the post.
For instance, write, “If you found value, please share with your fans.” Or “If this speaks to you, share it with your audience as well!” You may also want to invite people to comment. Create shareable content that includes a call to action. Also post content that aligns with a trend or holiday related to your business so your audience will want to chime in.

9. Negative Feedback:

If every post is all about you, your business, your products, your service and rarely about anything else, you could be having a detrimental effect. Granted, it may depend on your fanbase and their response, but if every Facebook Page post you publish contains a strong push to sign up, buy, visit your website, etc. you could be pushing some fans away. Be sure to check your “Negative Feedback” on posts. That is, how many hides, hide all, and unlikes you’re getting. You’ll want to experiment to find your own sweet spot, but a suggested ratio is 40:40:20.

• Forty percent value-adding, informational, educational content with little to no promotion.
• Forty percent promotional content with direct calls to action.
• And then twenty percent leeway to test off-topic, questions, polls, humor, etc.

Export your Facebook Page Insights (post data) for the past 90 days. Review column “R” which shows the total negative feedback count per post. (You can also review individual posts within the Insights dashboard to see the breakdown of negative feedback). Study the posts with the highest negative feedback and make adjustments as needed to your posting format, style, copy, frequency and timing.

10. Monitor Other Facebook Pages:

Check out what’s working for other businesses in your industry, as well as those in different industries.
To monitor other pages, go to your Facebook page Insights and search for and set the Pages to Watch. Facebook will send you notifications of what’s popular on other pages. Also check those pages regularly to see what catches your eye. You can use a free third-party tool like SumoRank to check any Facebook page and see their most popular posts. If something engages you, it will likely engage others. Take the lessons you learn from the other business’s top posts and apply those tactics to your own page.

2. Jon Loomer

Follow : On Facebook

1. Creating A Marketing Funnel On Facebook:

You might have heard of something called the marketing funnel. It’s basically an analogy that marketers use to refine an audience based on their engagement with a brand.

• Top of the Funnel
  Content, Facebook posts and advertising to attract people with very broad demo/psychographics. The audience you choose will be based on what Facebook has gleaned through their profile information, likes and engagement, in addition to other data collected from major data mining companies.People who engage with your content here and don’t ignore it proceed to the middle of the funnel.

• Middle of the Funnel
  Refine the audience even further, separating potential buyers from the rest and nurturing those leads.

• Bottom of the Funnel
  Place your call to action ads within your new, refined audience who are more likely to generate leads and become customers.You might be wondering, why not just begin at the bottom of the funnel? While beginning with product-focused ads may work for select businesses (for example, a local pizza restaurant), even those businesses can benefit from retargeting consumers who have visited a website, made a purchase or engaged with ads previously.

2. Provide Value:

This should be obvious, but failure on Facebook can often be tracked back to this simple step.
Are you providing value? Are you making the lives of people better when sharing content? Are you educating or entertaining? Would you want to see your content every day in your News Feed?
If all you do is post content that tries to sell your stuff or act as your brand’s PR, you aren’t providing value. You are spamming.

3. Use a Consistent and Frequent Publishing Schedule:

Now you need to provide that value on a consistent basis. Once or twice a week isn’t going to cut it. Post multiple times per day, spaced out by at least a few hours.
Implement a content plan and use scheduling software (or Facebook’s built in scheduler) to make sure you have content flowing through on a regular basis.

4. Facebook Video Marketing:

Groundbreaking, I know, but video is still huge and Facebook wants it to be huge. They like what people like to engage with and people like to engage with video. They are putting a greater emphasis on it all the time, whether it’s live streaming or otherwise.

5. Find Your Target Audience Using Graph Search and Lookalike Audiences:

Sure, you have committed to finding your ideal audience and attracting them. But how do you go about it?
You could guess by running ads that target precise interests that you think are associated with your target audience. Or you could be more scientific about it.
Whenever I run ads that target non-Fans, I create separate ads that reach each of the following groups:

• People who like similar Pages and interests
• Lookalike Audience (Reach)
• Lookalike Audience (Similarity)
• People who like similar Pages and interests + Lookalike Audience (Reach)
• People who like similar Pages and interests + Lookalike Audience (Similarity)
• First, let me explain how I generate my list of similar Pages and interests.

Come up with two brands that you consider your competitors or would have a very similar audience to your own. Then run a series of Graph Searches.

6. Facebook Ad Targeting:

With constant improvements to Facebook’s Dynamic Ads, there are more ways than ever before to pinpoint niche audiences who are more likely to engage with your advertising and convert to leads.
Forget about placing an ad that targets 24-34yo mums who live in Sydney and work part time. In August last year, Facebook gave us an insight into how they specifically target ads to different people with 98 different data points coming into play.
So if your ideal customer is a trendy, environmentally-conscious mum in a long distance relationship who drives a Prius, watches Orange is the New Black, is a “heavy” buyer of wine and bought a competitor’s product last week, then you can find them!

7. Tracking Social Campaign Performance:

The rise of offline conversion tracking is something that will really help small local businesses with brick-and-mortar stores to track their conversions and economise on their ad spend.
Online tracking with ad clicks and website visits is relatively easy to measure, but what about those customers who have seen your ad online and a week later decide to visit your store/business?

Like Google, Facebook has technology that pretty much knows where you are all the time (or at least where your phone is) and can track which stores and businesses you walk into.
Combining your GPS location with other data, marketers can now see how many of their in-store customers have been converted from seeing or engaging with a certain ad.

8. Focus on the Metrics that Matter:

What determines the success or failure of your Page or advertising efforts? Are you focusing on the metrics that matter?
Far too many marketers get bent out of shape obsessing over things like Reach and Page Likes. Neither of these two things, in and of themselves, mean a whole lot. And if they drive your strategy, you are bound to fail.
How much valuable engagement does your content drive? How much traffic to your website?
Do your ads result in conversions and sales? What is your cost per conversion?
These are the types of things you need to be worried about. Don’t distract yourself with metrics like Reach, CPM, CPC and Click Through Rate.

9. Facebook Marketplace:

While Facebook Marketplace acts like Gumtree or Craigslist in the way that it is technically just for C2C transactions, watch this space. Savvy small business marketers are already using this relatively new platform to increase sales, with the rest of the marketing world waiting with bated breath to see what Facebook has in store in terms of expanding the platform to allow for B2C selling.

10. Use Conversion Tracking:

Every time you run an ad that leads to some sort of conversion (purchase, registration or lead), you need to use Conversion Tracking.
Every. Single. Time.
If you don’t use Conversion Tracking, you won’t know whether your campaign truly was a success or failure. You’ll guess regarding the number of conversions it brought. And you’ll focus on metrics that could be completely independent of a conversion (CPM, CPC, CTR, etc).
If your ad leads to a conversion, the only metrics you need to be aware of are Conversions and Cost Per Conversion. You want the lowest Cost Per Conversion as is possible.

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3. Amy Porterfield

Follow: On Facebook

1. Create posts that are relevant to your brand and tell a story:

Storytelling is always tough for me to express when I’m trying to explain it to a new customer because when you think of a story, you think of something on the longish side, right? Something that takes a while to get through. But when I’m talking about storytelling on Facebook, I mean just little short snapshots of what you want to convey. Sometimes a great little story is a perfect lead into a link that goes to a blog post. In fact, I often use the first paragraph of my blog post as my Facebook post. The purpose here is to ignite a feeling in your audience. Each time you post, question what you want your audience to feel. Do you want them to be happy? Do you want them to feel inspired? Do you want them to feel empathetic or informed or supported or connected to you? Feelings, after all, are what get us to take action.

2. Engagement Matter:

This is where mindset enters the picture. Mindset is what will connect the dots for you between fan engagement (likes, comments, shares, and clicks) and exposure to your business (such as getting your posts into your tribe’s News Feed). The equation is simple: Boost your engagement (likes, comments, shares, views & clicks) and get rewarded. See, the more often your fans engage with you in the ways listed above, the more often your posts will be pushed out into their News Feed.

This is how Facebook helps your business–by noticing that people are interested in what you have to say, and giving them more. Therefore, in each and every status update you post, you’ll want to influence your audience to engage in at least one of the five ways that count: liking, commenting, sharing, watching a video, or clicking a link. This is where your mindset is critical.
When you’re creating a Facebook post, it’s not enough to be clever, or even thoughtful. When you create a Facebook post, you need to come at it this way: “How can I thoughtfully construct this post to ignite the action needed for my fans to engage?” Remember, if there is no engagement, Facebook simply thinks your audience is not interested. And they’re not going to promote something that they think people aren’t interested in. On the other hand, the more people take action on one of your posts, the more your posts will show up in their feed. Not just that one post, but all your posts.

Say you’ve been getting lots of “likes” on a particular photo, or had people commenting throughout the week on a status update…and then, later in the month, you post something about a specific promotion you’re doing. All those likes and comments are what will take your promotional post straight to your fans’ News Feed. Simply put, an increase in fan engagement also an increase in the exposure of your promotional posts. Are you beginning to understand the roadmap? As you consistently offer high quality, valuable content that captivates your audience and motivates them to engage, through an indirect process you will increase your sales.

3. Get personal:

A post with no commentary feels like sending a greeting card without writing anything in it. If you’re posting photos, status updates, longer columns, etc. and getting no feedback, it’s probably because it doesn’t feel personal to your fans. And yes, it’s even important to make your business Page feel personal. Your posts need some commentary from you–a note about your feelings, your friendships, your goals, showing a vulnerable or even humorous side. This is what allows people to connect..and connection leads to action.

4. You need an effective Facebook marketing strategy:

You need a blueprint of sorts, to know what you want your prospect to do and how you want them to do it. Know that you are leading folks through a sales funnel, and it’s a process. My favorite way to do this is to guide interested prospects to my email subscriber list. I often do this by offering a free webinar where they can learn in greater detail how to build their businesses effectively. From there the “know, like, and trust” value continues to grow as I communicate with them via email.

5. Make sure you ask questions that are going to ignite a true conversation:

About once a week, I ask questions to my audience about their concerns with growing an online business, the struggles they are facing, and some of the worries they have actually had while building an online business. Recently, I asked my audience what was one of the biggest fears about their business right now. And wow–I was so pleasantly surprised to see how much honesty came through in the comments! Mind you, it wasn’t just any vulnerable-making question.

I picked one that rang true with my own brand, that followed from things I talk about regularly. That’s the key to making these kinds of big questions work for you, instead of against you. Pick something that seems like a random bombshell, and people might feel alienated. Pick something that aligns with who you are and what you offer, and people will begin to open up like you wouldn’t believe. Your openness will give them the much-needed outlet to express some of their concern about whatever it is that they are working on.

Following the response to that big question–“What’s your biggest fear?”–my instinct was to stick around, rather than leave my desk and let the comments flow in. I just didn’t want to leave those people hanging. So for the next 20 to 30 minutes after I posted that question, I stuck around and replied to each of the people that posted and used their first name as well.
I wanted to let them know that they were heard. This means the world to people, in the impersonal realm of the Internet. The fact that you’d not only ask your audience to get vulnerable with you, but stay to hear their answers, is a huge gesture. When people see that you are answering them in real time, they will be more likely to start the conversation again next time with you.

6.Use Short Video Clips:

You already know that Facebook is important for your business. But do you know how crucial Facebook with Video is for your business right now? Here are some stats that prove it:

• It’s been reported that there are over 1 billion videos viewed on Facebook each day.
• The average Facebook user worldwide watched 75% more video this year compared to last year.
• In the US, that increase in views was actually 94%!
• Brands posted 20,000 more videos on Facebook than they did on YouTube in December 2014.

I can vouch for these stats from my own personal experience–I’ve been very impressed with the organic reach with any given video I post on Facebook. I’ve been seeing instant traction when I post a video on my page, much more than a post with a static image. The greatest thing about video is how it takes on a life of its own through sharing.

And no, I’m not talking about highly polished, professionally edited videos. I’m not a video editor and I don’t have a big production budget for these. No, the traction I’m getting is with simple, quick videos made mainly on my smartphone and edited with simple software.

Simplicity and ease are the key to making these videos a practical part of your marketing strategy,if they’re not easy, you won’t do them…and if they’re not simple, people won’t pay attention to them! Studies have shown that short video across all social media platforms get the most views and engagement. Short and simple is good.

7. Don’t be afraid:

Don’t shy away Facebook ads – they can be extremely effective for a moderately low budget. While every social media platform is different, when it comes to paid advertising, there is nothing more powerful than Facebook ads. These ads are extremely effective because of the unique, highly-targeted ad possibilities. You can target your ads to fans of other Facebook pages, build custom audiences, create a look-alike audience, and even target folks who have visited your blog post. By leveraging some paid ads within your marketing campaign, you will gain visibility and stand out from among the noisy crowd. Know more on targeting below.

8. Facebook Ad Targeting:

When you get really good at Facebook ad targeting, there is no doubt you are going to see some major shifts in the impact you have with your audience and a major increase in your revenue streams. That’s why I’ve created a roadmap that will let you know exactly where to focus, along with what needs to be on your radar from the get-go. It’s really simple–just the way I like it–and it’s set up so that you can keep adding to it as you learn exactly who your audience is and how to get in front of them. Basically, it’s the key to unlocking the most valuable resource in your business.

• Target Your Own Audiences
  Say you already have an email list of at least 1,000 people. You can upload that email list to Facebook, Facebook will match your email list with their database and voila! You’ve got a targeting opportunity with your best, fastest-converting leads.

• Targeting Your Own Facebook Fans
  This list is not as warm as your own email list, but it is still a group of engaged people who are going to pay attention to you. Here’s the huge plus: you will almost always pay less with your Facebook ads when you target your own fan base versus a cold audience. If you ever needed a good reason to focus on building your Facebook fan base, I think this is the #1 best reason to do so.

• Target Other Facebook Pages
  This is where I want you to put the most time and energy when it comes to research and experimentation. Targeting other Facebook pages is the strategy that allows you the most opportunities.

• Creating Lookalike Audiences
  A lookalike audience is basically you taking a custom audience that you have and then asking Facebook to find an audience that is really similar to your own audience you have already created.

9. Use Facebook Offers:

Facebook offers are a woefully underused system whereby a business can put up a coupon, a free product, or some other type of business-related offer and promote it as a post. Users can find it and claim those offers. It’s a wonderful system because it has its own mechanics, rather than relying on organic posts for visibility. You can also target them very, very well, just like ads.

10. Dive in with confidence:

No matter where you are on the continuum of online business or entrepreneurial success, mindset plays a huge role in how your business will continue to grow. Know that what you don’t know, you can figure out and everyday you are carving out your path.
More than anything, potential clients want to feel supported and reassured that you have what they need to fill their gap towards success. You may be surprised to learn that of even greater importance than your content is your likeability, authenticity, and presence.

4. Brian Carter

Follow: On Facebook

1. Write Posts that are Cheerleads for Your Prospects and Fans’ Values and Goals:

The biggest problem with Facebook posts is reach. You need to get your audience to like them, and that means you need to know what your audience values and what their goals are. If you can create a post that cheerleads for those values and goals, you’ll get likes and that gives you more reach. Likes, shares and ad clicks are great, but if they don’t turn into sales, you’re wasting your time on Facebook. So keep in mind these 7 tips for Facebook content that converts, and reach your audience by explaining:

• Benefits of being a customer
• Problems you help your audience overcome
• Unique superiority of your offering over alternatives
• Lies and myths about your niche
• Specific results customers have achieved
• Stories about customer achievements
• Testimonials from customers on camera

2. Reach New People For Free With Shareable Posts:

People share posts that are giving (contests), advising (how-to), amusing, inspiring, amazing, or warning (bad weather coming).
People don’t share posts that focus on your company or its employees, are edgy or offensive (except for rare customer groups that are all about those things), are obscure or niche in interest.
When you find that one of your posts is highly likeable and shareable, advertising it will get you a ton more interaction and visibility for a low cost. Our best post ever got us 80,000 likes and 35,000 shares and was seen by 424,000 people for less than a $200 ad spend.

3. You Must Promote Facebook Posts:

Hopefully you’ve gotten over the fact that your Facebook page won’t organically reach all your fans when you post. You’ve accepted that only 1% of your fans go back to your actual page (monthly) and that only 10-15% of your fans see your page’s posts in their News Feeds.

You now just want to make sure more people see your posts. Promoting Facebook posts is critical. Most of the brands we work with get from 10X to 50X the reach that they would from organic-only exposure.

4. A Better Ad Copy:

That means copywriting. Copywriting is a fundamental marketing discipline.

It’s very important to understand that different phrases and different words affect people differently. There’s been work in this area for over eighty, almost ninety years. People in marketing have been trying to write things that get bigger and better results from customers.
You need to understand the fundamentals of copywriting. There are many books out there, many courses out there, about copywriting.
Beyond that, there’s even psychological research about what words people respond to the most, what words are positive for people, negative, arousing, stimulating, which ones men like, which words women like. There’s a lot of good research out there too.
There are places like BuzzSumo that analyze blog posts that work and don’t.
There’s a lot of data out there, and then you can create your own data. You absolutely should because your customer group is going to be somewhat unique and is going to respond uniquely to your offer and brand, so ask yourself:

• Which subject lines get them to open your emails?
• Which blog posts get the most attention?
• Which ads get the best results?
• Which posts get the most engagement?
• If you’re smart about it and you’ve learned the basics of copywriting, you have thought about what are the benefits of my product or service, what is my unique selling proposition… there are a whole bunch of fundamental copy things you need to know about your business. If you’ve figured those out, you can test them with Facebook ads and find out what works the best for your customers.You may start with bad or mediocre copy, but you don’t have to stay there.Facebook is a customer laboratory, and testing is the process that saves us from ourselves and our bad ideas and our office politics, and it helps us get better results.

5. Facebook Video Ads:

Facebook video is huge- Facebook reported seeing 100 million hours of daily video watch time near the end of 2015. And with the newer “related videos feature,” where people are automatically served another video after their current one, you can bet video views have grown dramatically from there.

As you might know, I am a big believer in advertising everything you can on Facebook, even if you have a small budget.

Before you run away- let me explain!

What happens when you advertise your videos:

• Reach exactly the right audience (your best buyers, not just anybody, not just friends family employees)
• Reach them right away (not like whenever… maybe… but NOW)
• Reach enough potential customers to discover how they respond to your content- or don’t
• Get more detailed stats and metrics from the ad manager than you do from Facebook Page Insights

The last thing is critical. If you don’t run ads for your videos, you won’t get a lot of analytics or insights about them. And you won’t learn much. The video analytics you get when you don’t run ads are pretty limited.

6. Improve engagement:

Watch your metrics and try different things.

What should you test? Facebook Audience Insights is a good place to start because you can look at either your email list, custom audience, or your competitors to find out what your customers like. That may help you think about your customer in a more three-dimensional way. Who are these people as real human beings? That may give you a better idea of what should be in your posts and ads.

I like to think about themes that the audience might like. What are their values their beliefs or their likes? Themes can be things like freedom, family, gardening, fun, or teamwork. Your ideal customer may be interested in three to five different themes. Start brainstorming what those might be and then think about what kind of images would represent those. What kind of images would make fun of those themes? What kind of images would exaggerate those themes? What kind of situations would happen for those themes?

7. Diving into Graph Search:

We have to think about what our customers like on Facebook- and not just that they’ve liked our FB pages, but that they like other pages and interests.
Your customers will have other likes in common that they don’t have in common with the customers of another company- kind of a revolutionary concept- but before Facebook we never had access to this kind of information. Is your customer more of a Mac or a PC? Are they a CNN or Fox News watcher? Are they more into country music or something else?
You will certainly have variety across your customers- and you don’t want to alienate any of them- but you may find some powerful synergistic likes you can use in Facebook ad targeting and for post ideas.
Facebook lets you search for some really cool things.
They have all this data from what they call the Open Graph. That’s really just a way to visualize how all the people are connected to their friends and what they and their friends like. In a way, we are all in different tribes based on what we like. But we all have overlapping likes. And what’s funny is that often the people we are friends with only share two or three major likes with us. A lot of people like very particular things that they never really share in community with others. Graph search is a cool way to learn about your audience or your target market- you know, the people who you want to pay for what you offer.

8. Do at least $1 per day!

Before the Internet, it was unlikely that the average person would advertise. Many businesses used the Yellow Pages or radio, but not all. Even in the first decade of the 21st century, only a percentage of companies used search advertising. Many found that pay-per-click was too expensive or too complicated for them.

Why Facebook Ads are the biggest marketing opportunity ever

With Facebook ads, we have a totally unique opportunity. There are several things about them never before seen together:

They can reach as many people or more people as radio or TV, and in whatever country.

• They have sophisticated targeting like AdWords, albeit on different criteria.
• The minimum spend is just $1 per day.
• They are the lowest cost per 1,000 impressions ad in history. They average around $0.25 per 1,000, which is only 1% of the cost of TV. Are you kidding me? Nope, it’s for real.
• In other words, Facebook ads are mega-awareness raising, have good targeting, require very little commitment, and are unbelievably affordable.

Here’s the one thing I tell people about Facebook ads that usually gets through:
If you just spend $1 per day on Facebook ads, you will get in front of 4,000 people that wouldn’t have seen you otherwise. If you are doing that and your competitors aren’t, you win the awareness game in your niche.You can’t sell to someone who doesn’t know you exist, and you can’t sell a product or service the consumer has never heard of. If you can’t spare $30 a month, you shouldn’t be in business.

9. Your website has to be really efficient at converting your Facebook ad visitors:

You saw it in the math. If you can double your conversion rate, you cut your costs in half.
That sounds like a bonus. But if your conversion rate is sub-standard, your costs can be through the roof. So you might need to improve your website, or take the more modern approach of using squeeze page platforms that can split-test.
The most vulnerable people to mistakes here are web designers. Anyone who thinks they have a new way to design your website. A more aesthetic way. Lots of ideas about impressive designs.If that gets in the way of usability, you’re done. Sure, your web visitor may think it’s a beautiful website, but it’s so beautiful that they forget to buy. Or can’t figure out how to buy because the navigation elements were too ugly for your web designer. If you’re interviewing web designers, ask them what they do for split-testing and conversion optimization. The ones that trip over the answer? Move on to another. The next evolution is using services like unbounce, clickfunnels, leadpages and optimizely. If you want to run a profitable business, you need to strike a balance between form and function- between branding and conversion optimization.

10. Metrics and Analytics:

Every bit of digital marketing is measurable and trackable. Both visibility and engagement should be tracked for your Facebook pages. Correlate interaction with posts and learn from what you’re doing by using Facebook Insights or PageLever. Go the extra mile and track not only the ROI of Facebook traffic, but also how your Facebook activities affect other marketing channels. Is Facebook increasing the number of searches for your brand? Is it increasing the overall conversion rate for your website? Add URL tagging for your Google Analytics. And can you install multichannel analytics to see where people first heard of you, even if they finally bought via Google.

5. Thomas Hutter

Follow: On Facebook

1. Know the Facebook ecosystem:

The Facebook ecosystem consists of  “build”, “engage” and “strengthen”.

• Build up:In a first step, a Facebook presence must be established with a Facebook page, thus laying the foundation for an entry into the Social / Open Graph . Companies with a fixed location (e.g- store) use this instead of a Facebook page a Facebook Place. Apps and the Graph-API help to personalize and promote the commitment.

• Engage:The creation of touch points to Facebook is the cornerstone for building a fan base and engaging with the customers (engage). Facebook ads are the fastest way to attract fans. Through the publishing process and the associated conversations with the fans deepen the relationship and allow the gaining of valuable insights.

• Reinforcing:Every time one of the fans interacts with the company, this interaction is published in the newsfeed, creating “mouth to mouth” propaganda. These organic messages are very effective and bring more users to engage and participate. This effect can be further enhanced by the use of Facebook ads and Facebook Sponsored Stories. Facebook ads contain the names of friends who are already associated with the corresponding Facebook page. These two tools bring advertising and paid advertising together in a simple manner and produce a lasting effect, current research shows that this type of mouth propaganda is twice as effective as conventional measures.

2. The Video Trend:

With more than 4 billion video copies per day and the versatile possibilities of targeting together with advertisements, Facebook offers interesting opportunities for marketing and communication with the help of moving pictures. It is to be assumed, that videos on Facebook continue to gain in importance, but recently founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, on the subject: “In five years, most of Facebook will be video”.

Tips for successful video on Facebook:

• Always upload videos directly to Facebook
• Autoplay launches without sound
• Exciting introduction of attention
• Choose a meaningful preview image
• Keep videos as short as possible
• Add Call to Action

3. Link Twitter with your:

Twitter and Facebook site are very similar to the usage, according to the target group, the range and the update frequency. It is of course optimal if you link Facebook and Twitter together, and any news you publish on both networks at the same time to your friends / fans / followers – it is perfect if the same people follow you on both channels. System messages on Twitter “I have uploaded a new album to Facebook” or the countless daily status updates, especially if Twitter is synchronized with the status on Facebook, allows friends to not miss a message, 100% sure You via Twitter the hint “I uploaded a new album on Facebook” postet, Which underneath the picture uploads once again in the Facebook newsfeed by syncing with Twitter. The Hash tags set in Twitter look great in Facebook and testify to your broad knowledge! What is the best way to do this?

4. Create a strategy that is socially:

Everything you do should be social, not just at the end of the campaign, or only marginally. Facebook should be fully involved in marketing and be a part of achieving the business objectives. We need to set it correct with all the new things being into place and accordingly with the new process.

5. Create an authentic brand voice:

Facebook users are clear and open , businesses should publish and publish uncomplicated information. Facebook is an ideal place to give a brand personality through an authentic and consistent voice.

6. Make it interactive Facebook:

Users spend their time communicating and sharing information with others, getting into a two-way communication. Consider this aspect in relation to your brand and create inherently social content that can be enthusiastically shared by Facebook users.

7. Take Care of Relationships:

As in the real world, building relationships with your fans takes time and is a long-term investment. Keep your content up-to-date and easy to consume, also use ads to stay connected. Reward fans with offers and promotions for loyalty.

8. Use Facebook Advertising:

Advertise with Advertising on Facebook! Take advantage of the versatile selection possibilities of Facebook ads and reach your target group almost without scatter loss. On the basis of demographic criteria, interests, connections and many other selection possibilities you reach the desired target groups.
Increase the visibility of your brand or business with Facebook advertisements, increase traffic, sales, and conversions on your website. Tell your target group about your Facebook page . Promote your events, lead the desired audience to your Facebook application, or increase the visitor frequency in your business.

9. Use Dynamic Ads:

With the use of dynamic ads with increased reach, basically more different campaigns will run in parallel. To ensure correct tracking and meaningful attribution, hardcoded URL tracking should be disabled and, alternatively, tracking directly with the Power Editor. The product catalog should also be checked for possible errors. Dynamic ads are used for prospecting or acquisition. The dynamic ads are thus distributed to people who are potentially interested in products from the product catalog. Whom the advertising advertisements are played, the algorithm of Facebook, based on actions of the people, decides. Facebook as an example in the help “Example Sally surfs Sally on different websites and looks for new tennis shoes, Sally has geluk on Facebook sides of Sport Schuhmarken and clicks on ads, which show shoes. Facebook can now look for people who like Sally are interested in similar products as the products, which are stored in the product catalog. To reach these people, a target group is defined based on age, sex and place. Facebook takes over the further targeting automatically.

10. Learn more:

The commitment in Facebook allows for feedback in real-time.
Use reporting tools to learn about the behavior and interests of your fans.

6. Isabelle Mathieu

Follow: On Facebook

1. Be Active:

If you want your content to positively impact the results of your Facebook strategy, you need to publish regularly. In this way, you will learn which themes resonate most with your audience, what are the consultation habits of your community and you will remain present in the minds of people who love your page. Remember that the ideal companion to your editorial line is the calendar, where you create and organize your content on a weekly or monthly basis for example. You can then schedule your publications but then book times when you are available live on your page and respond quickly to feedback when you receive notification via the Facebook page manager.

2. Choose an attractive editorial line:

Your editorial line is one of your best assets on the web. And Facebook does not deviate from the rule. The more your content interests your audience, the more likely it is to receive interactions (I like, shares, comments, clicks). When you publish content that generates engagement, the Facebook algorithm increases its distribution in the news stream so that it reaches more people.
In terms of editorial line, here are my 2 main recommendations:

• Publish your best content. To identify it, you can consult the most popular articles of your blog (via Google Analytics for example) and the rate of commitment of your tweets (via the statistics of your Twitter account) over a period precise. Choose content that is still topical. As for the first option, feel free to test another type / publication format and a different description than you had originally published.
• Set a relevant ratio such as 80/20 . Here, the idea is to absolutely avoid 100% promotional content to judiciously balance your editorial line with informative and educational and   entertaining content (80) and performance-oriented content (20).
• To conclude, your editorial line must meet two objectives:

a.Create commitment to improve your reach.
b. Become a Facebook page “authoritative” in its field . So that if some users do not see your updates in their news feed, they will manually search your page for your latest news.

3. Selectively distribute your publications:

Just because you have fans, that does not mean they are interested in all your publications. Indeed, I will take the example of a shop that sells shoes for men and women. In most cases, there is a good chance that publications concerning the arrival of new pumps do not interest men. Avoid generating a lack of commitment or even negative feedback (e.g, hide publication) by targeting your updates through the publishing tool.
Facebook allows you to selectively distribute your publications according to the following criteria: interests, age, gender, location, language, love situation and level of education.

4. Publish at the right time:

Determining when to publish on Facebook is a real challenge! Do you know what days and hours you can get the best visibility? Should you publish when your fans are online or outside the busy periods? Is it wise to broadcast updates on the weekend? These are all questions you will have to answer.

To help you in this task, I invite you to:

• Know your community’s connection patterns
• Study the statistics of your Facebook page
• Study your competitors’ publishing habits and results
• Use third-party tools that determine the best times to publish

5. Use native videos and Facebook Live:

Video is not only a strong trend today. It is a medium that will permanently change the editorial lines of companies over the next few years. On Facebook, the type of format that often generates the most range is native video, that is, video uploaded directly to Facebook , conversely , for example, a YouTube video classified by the algorithm as a link. One of the interesting features of Facebook videos is that they automatically start (“autoplay”) in the news feed and are thus likely to attract more easily the eye. According to Facebook, users spend 3 times more time watching an average Facebook video than any other type of video . While yesterday the images reigned on the platform and today the video is in the honor, we are witnessing the rise of a new type of format: live broadcast .
Let the marks not be deceived. Facebook has invested heavily in this product and has just released a “killer app”, which competes with its direct competitor Periscope of Twitter (himself, winner against Meerkat), YouTube and Youtube Connect (to come) as well as the television. There are many ways to use live video for business: topics in the news, question and answer sessions, current events, interviews, behind-the-scenes scenes, live shows and demos.

6. Attractive and powerful advertising offer:

Facebook allows companies to create campaigns based on 11 advertising goals ranging from increasing awareness (e.g, putting your publications forward, reaching people close to your company) to performance (e.g encouraging people to use your offer , Increase conversions on your website).

Beyond a rich offer, brands have targeting options that allow the distribution of ads to a qualified audience such as customers who have spent so many euros in the last 12 months or Users who have visited the checkout page on their website but have not yet bought.

The innovative advertising at Facebook in particular through the creative formats available. I think of the carousel , presenting 2 to 5 images or videos in the same unit, or canvas , with its immersive mobile experience full screen with an instant display.

Finally, remember that Facebook is the social network that collects the most data about its users and that each member must use its true identity in addition to having a single account .

7. Customer service and Messenger:

A consumer should be able to contact a brand on the channel of his choice. Facebook offers an environment favourable to the establishment of a one-to-one relationship between a brand and its customers through the exchange of private messages via the Contact button (located on the Pages) or Messenger.

Companies have the following features:
Automatically greet users on their Facebook page with a personalised message-

• Create an automatic reply when users send a message to their page
• Create a message to let you know that the message is sent out of business hours
• Set status to “Absent” outside opening hours
• Define the usual response time (e.g “a few minutes”, “in the hour” etc.)
• View Sender Profile Information
• Add labels to track and find conversations
• Write notes to follow conversations

Trademarks with a response rate of 90% and an average response time of 15 minutes automatically get a ” Very responsive ” badge that publicly identifies Pages that reply quickly and regularly to private messages. I think this badge can motivate some brands to decrease their response time and that its display is likely to generate more messages.

8. Put strategies in place to achieve your company’s overall marketing goals:

Learn how to use Facebook to redirect traffic to your website, increase the number of subscribers to your newsletter, increase the number of your sales, generate leads etc.

9. Boost your important publications:

When you want your important messages to reach as many people as possible, increase their reach through an advertisement. You can quickly boost your update by clicking on the “Highlight” button at the bottom of your publication. Alternatively, use the ad builder or the Power Editor with more options.

10. Analyze your statistics:

Study the statistics on your Facebook page to learn which content best meets the needs of your community and how to optimize your publications to increase your reach and commitment. For each update, note the commitment actions, scope and negative returns. Not to mention the demographics of the people involved.

7. Michelle Pescosolido

Follow: On Facebook

1. Create A Solid Foundation For Your Business:

If you want to attract new customers with Facebook the first step is to set up a solid foundation for your business. This means mapping out a plan on the type of customers you want to attract.To begin with you’ll want to identify your customer avatar.If you haven’t created your Customer Avatar yet or you don’t even know what a Customer Avatar is then…
Start by asking yourself a few questions:

• What is your product?
• Who would buy your product?
• Are they male or female?
• What is their age?
• Do they work?
• What magazines, blogs, books do they read?
• What TV shows do they watch?
• Who do they follow to get advice, inspiration or motivation?
• Once you’ve determined who your customer avatar is you’ll know who you should attract on Facebook.

2. Build A Facebook Fan Page:

The second step to attract new customers with Facebook is to create a Facebook Fan page.You will use your new Facebook Fan Page to build your audience and spread your message.
Your Facebook Fan page will be your “hub” on Facebook. This is where you’ll connect with your audience so you can…
Provide inspiration or motivation

• Answer their questions
• Share your knowledge and expertise on your product or niche
• Help to solve their problems through the use of your product or service

Your focus should be to become the “go to” person within your marketing niche.When you establish yourself as the “go to” person you’re establishing yourself as an authority on that particular topic. As the authority you’ll be able to provide value and help your audience with their pains or struggles. Which leads us to our next step which is about how to build an audience using Facebook.

3. Get Facebook Fans:

Now that you’ve created your Facebook Fan Page it’s now time to get fans! While there are several different ways to get fans, one of the fastest ways is to create a Facebook Likes campaign by using your Facebook Ads account. Depending on your niche you can get a targeted Facebook like for $.03 – $.75 a fan. This of course is provided you’re targeting the right audience. Let’s say you want to get 20 fans a day to your page. If it costs you $.50 a fan then you will need to spend $10.00 a day on your Facebook Likes campaign to get 20 fans a day.
The more targeted you are with your ad and the higher your click through rate of your ad the lower the cost you will pay per like.

4. Engage With Your Fans:

Now that you’re getting fans it’s time to start to engaging with those fans. The more engagement you have on your page, the more likely Facebook will show your posts organically in your audience’s newsfeed. However, the less engaged your page is….the less likely Facebook will show your posts organically in the news feed. Think of it this way… the news feed on Facebook is very competitive.
Instead of relying on Facebook to show your posts organically, you should consider boosting your posts that are receiving a lot of engagement. Your Fan Page is your community and it’s up to you to keep them informed and engaged. You want to draw them into the conversation that is taking place on your Fan page.
There are several ways to this…

• Post articles within your niche that will help your audience
• Provide inspiration to your audience
• Motivate your audience to take action
• Ask thought provoking questions
• Don’t do the post and run strategy
• Actually take time each day to respond to your audience’s comments and messages on your Fan Page.

5. Advertise To Expand Your Reach:

Often times, business owners will rely upon organic reach too much and then wonder why they’re not getting as many new customers as they’d hoped.

If your goal is to create offer awareness and attract new customers with Facebook you need to incorporate paid advertising into your strategy.
Get your business moving towards profitability and set a realistic advertising budget.
We run three ads continually in our business…

• Likes Campaign – to get more Likes (fans) to our Fan page
• Engagement Ad – to increase the engagement on certain posts
• Clicks to Website Ad – used for lead generation

Ideally, you’ll want to spread your budget evenly across all three campaigns.

For example, if you have $60/day ad budget, run each campaign at $20/day. Additionally, all three types of ad are equally important for the growth of your business.
Don’t make the mistake of allocating your entire budget to one type of ad campaign and neglect the others. Balancing the budget out over the 3 different types of campaign will ensure you’re leveraging Facebook as effectively as possible.

6. Optimize Your Ads:

Getting your ad campaigns up and running is only the first step when running ads on Facebook.You also need to analyze your ads once they’ve been running for a few days and optimize them accordingly. Take time to analyze what’s working and what’s not working with your audience and with your Facebook ads. It makes no sense to continuously spend your ad budget on an audience that isn’t engaging, clicking, or buying. When you analyze your ads to determine who is engaging, clicking, or buying you’ll not only maximize your results you’ll also prevent wasting your ad budget on ineffective advertising.
When looking to optimize your ads the following demographics should be considered…

• Are they male or female?
• What is their age range?
• What country do they live in?
• What are their interests?

These are just a few of the possible demographics or interests for which you should optimize your ads. The best strategy is to analyze what’s working with your ads on a regular basis and tweak accordingly.

7. Retarget Your Audience To Increase Conversions:

Retargeting your audience is your opportunity to put paid offers in front of people who’ve visited your site. When you place a pixel on every website you have you’re now able to retarget your visitors and/or buyers with appropriate offers. Chances are you won’t make a sale from a person whose seeing you for the first time on Facebook.
By placing a pixel on a blog post and retargeting the visitors who read your post with a Facebook ad you’ll increase your chance of a sale.
Ask yourself this….
Would you prefer to buy from someone you’re familiar with or from someone you don’t know?
Most people feel more comfortable buying from someone they’re already familiar with.
In marketing, this is what we call the Know, Like, & Trust factor.
The same rule applies here.
By retargeting people who are already familiar with you’ll increase your ability to attract new customers with Facebook.

8. Use Facebook Messenger Ads:

By getting your audience to interact with you on the Facebook Messenger app you can have a 1-on-1 conversation with them and find out specifically what their needs are.
Think of the Facebook Messenger Ad as similar to when someone opts into a lead capture page and leaves you their phone number.
In that instance, you’d probably follow up with the lead and have a “discovery call” with them to determine their needs.
Well just like a discovery call with a lead, the Facebook Messenger ad allows you to have a “discovery chat” over FB messenger.Facebook Messenger ads are useful for you whether you’re a…

• “Solopreneur”
• Small business owner
• Larger company with a sales force

Instead of chasing people down you’ll now have people reaching out to you. Imagine how your business will be different when your target audience is proactively messaging you to see how you can help them! Additionally, it’s a great way to provide value to a specific audience you’ve chosen to target.

9. Growing your email list using Facebook:

Social Media has completely changed the game when it comes to internet marketing.
In fact, it’s easier than ever to connect with your customers using Social Media platforms such as Facebook. One of the many benefits of using Facebook to market your business, is the ability to grow your email list. In fact Facebook as of writing this post has over 1 billion users on it’s platform. Therefore, it should always be a part of your business marketing strategy.
Before you can start growing your email list using Facebook you need to have a marketing campaign in place.
We recommend you start with an autoresponder. An autoresponder is simply a tool you will use to collect leads and manage your email list. The best place to start is with a program called, AWEBER. Once you have an email marketing platform in place you can now start to grow your email list using Facebook.

10. Give value away:

Create a checklist, pdf, how to video, something of value that you can give away to your audience to help them achieve a result. If you understand your audience’s wants, desires and needs you can fill those gaps with solutions. For example we have several different lead magnets that we have put together to help people achieve success in a particular area, such as Facebook. I love using Lead Pages or Click Funnels to create simple offer such as the example below to get more engagement on Facebook.

8. Andrea Vahl

Follow: On Facebook

1. Post great content that gets shared:

This is truly the Grand-Poobah of your strategy and really should be #1 on this list. I don’t even really know what Grand-Poobah means but it’s big.
Great content is more than just sharing articles from other sites. It’s a combination of personality, education, service to your community, inspiration, and fun. People are on Facebook to be social. Boring business sales messages aren’t enough. Ask yourself “would I share this with my friends?” to give yourself a litmus test of how interesting your post is.
Now of course, not everything will be shared. But shoot for a high percentage of your posts to be shareable content. You can share posts from other Pages but strive for a lot of original content where you are uploading images directly to your page (mind the copyright laws), posting good articles, or making videos.

2. Invite Your Warm Audience on Facebook to Like Your Page:

Some people say, “Oh my friends aren’t interested in my business” or “those people will never be my customers”. But your friends can be your biggest cheerleader and a source for referrals! I just got a great referral from a friend of mine who will never be my client. If your friends don’t remember what you do, how can they recommend you?
I had a friend who was an interior designer and was talking to a mom friend of hers (their kids went to the same school and they talked often). The woman was telling my interior designer friend that they were re-doing their whole house and spending about $70,000 on the work. My interior designer friend said “Why didn’t you ask me to give you a bid? I do interior design.” The other woman said that she was so sorry but she had no idea that’s what she did and would have surely used her had she known!

3. Use Reviews:

Social proof and recommendations can benefit your business in a major way, so use the Reviews capability on Facebook for your local business. Reviews show up prominently on mobile phones especially. To enable reviews, make sure you set Local Business as your category and have a physical address. You also need to check the Show Map box on the About tab. Be sure to respond to all reviews (good and bad). If you have negative reviews, try to correct the issue. You may even want to consider giving your best customers a little incentive to leave a (hopefully positive) review about your product or service.

4. Run a Facebook contest:

Everyone loves a contest and a chance to win. If you need a little excitement on your Facebook page, a contest will spur your community to action. Hopefully you will also get the benefit of people sharing your contest with their friends.There are several different types of contests you can run: a photo contest, a video contest or a sweepstakes where people just enter their name and email to win. To run a Facebook Contest, you’ll need to use a third-party app such as Wildfire, Strutta, North Social, Easypromos or Shortstack. You can also create your own iFrame app to accept the entries, but that will require programming. Facebook has many rules about how a contest or promotion can be run that you should read here: http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php.

The main thing to consider is that you cannot automatically enter people who Like your page or post a comment on your wall.
Your prize does not have to be expensive to garner a lot of entries and good buzz. Social Media Examiner’s Michael Stelzner ran a very successful contest using the Strutta application and gave away a business launch package including one-on-one coaching. He received 80 photo entries, took his fan base to over 1,500 Likes and got fantastic publicity for his new book, Launch. If you give away something your audience is interested in, you will create great buzz for you and your Facebook page.

5. If You Automate, Use Built-In Facebook Scheduler:

Facebook doesn’t like third party tools that much so don’t risk losing engagement or newsfeed traction by using a platform to schedule outside of Facebook. There is a scheduler built into your brand page so use it!

6. Don’t forget about Facebook Groups:

A great reason to keep using your personal profile is to leverage Facebook Groups in your niche where you can make a great impression as a participant and ultimately drive traffic to your brand presence.

7. Use Video Ads to Build Audiences:

Video on Facebook. So hot right now. Facebook is making a play for YouTube and giving preferential treatment to videos. So that’s one huge benefit to using videos in ads.
That said, the higher engagement video ads can create doesn’t always lead to the best cost per website click. So be sure you do your own tests to get the best results for you.
Using video also works well with one of the newest features of Facebook marketing—the ability to target people who have already engaged with your content. This feature is just rolling out and is available to all marketers.

8. Start with Split Testing Your Facebook Ads:

Split testing is basically the practice of varying one thing in a series of ads and measuring to see which change received the best results. So when you are going to split test a set of ads, you’ll test which different keywords, images, text, or types of ads performed the best for you. Split testing is the key to getting cheaper cost per clicks and cheaper conversions.
When you split test Facebook Ads, start with testing different targets and demographics. It’s hard to only vary one keyword or one exact change, but if you can, you’ll know exactly which keyword performed best. Keep the ad itself the same and then only change the different target audiences so you will know which target works best.

9. Use Facebook Conversion Pixels:

If you are sending Facebook ad traffic to a website, use conversion pixels to track whether the website visitor completes the desired action (purchasing product, opting in to your email list, etc.). Now you will be able to optimize your Facebook ad to get more conversions.
The conversion pixel is basically a piece of code that you install on a web page. When you create a Facebook Ad, you “tie” the pixel to the ad so that if someone comes from the Facebook ad and arrives on the web page that has the conversion pixel, Facebook then tracks a “conversion” to that ad.

10. Know How to Dive Deeper into Reports:

Once you’ve set up conversion pixels and a split testing plan, make sure you know how to reach the Facebook Ad reports. Typically the default data they show you isn’t enough to make informed decisions on how an ad is performing. The best way to view your Facebook Ad results is in the Reports area of your Ads Manager.

Once you’re in the Reports area, select the appropriate Date Range for the ads you’ve been running. (The default is 7 days, so you may not see all the data you need.) Change the Level to “Ad Set”, or “Ad” if you have multiple Ad Sets, and Ads under your Campaigns. Then select Customize Columns to select the data you want to see such as Website Clicks or Website Actions (which are related to the Conversion Pixels) since the default data shown in the report isn’t always relevant to making the right decisions about ad performance.

Now when you have the Reports showing you the right data, you can easily see which ad had the best performance based on how many conversions there were for the ad. You’ll also be able to see which ad is converting at the lowest cost and turn off the ads that are underperforming.

9. Sherri-Lee Woycik

Follow: On Facebook

1. Ask Questions:

Show your fans you care about them. Ask them questions that they can respond to quickly in their day. Use questions that require a “yes” or “no” answer to get the most engagement. A question like: “What’s your opinion on … ” might be super interesting, but most people won’t
stop to write a paragraph as an answer. But if you asked “Are you celebrating Canada Day?” you will get more engagement because that’s easy to respond to with a YES or NO. As you get to know your fans better you can try out more complicated questions, like: “HOW are you celebrating Canada Day?” As they get to know you more and see that you care about their responses, your fans will be more likely to respond to questions that take more time, simply because you’ve built a relationship with them and this is now more like friends chatting.

2. Post at the right time of day:

Try a variety of different times of the day to see when you get the best engagement. You can see the results in your insights panel and know which posts people are responding to, when they are responding and go from there. The ones that work, you want to post more of and the ones that don’t, you stop posting. It’s all trial and error and remember that 90% of your marketing efforts won’t work and that goes for your Facebook posts as well. Don’t get discouraged when a post doesn’t work, look at it as market research and then try again. You can use a service like www.likealyzer.com to see how your Facebook page is performing and get some great tips to increase its performance as well.

3. Post the right content:

Along with getting the right time of day you have to post the right content as well. So if you posted something at 3 pm that didn’t get huge engagement it might be WHAT you posted not WHEN you posted. If that post was just a text only post and it had poor engagement, try posting an image at 3 pm and see how that works, if the results are still lacking, then you have more information that 3 pm might not be the time to engage your fans and you have to try another time. Knowing when your fans are on to engage with is very important to your success. How can you find out what the right content is? Use this as an opportunity to poll your fans with an easy to answer question.

4. Encourage your fans to ask questions:

Encourage your fans to ask questions on your page. Let them know you are there to be of service to them and that you want to help. Host “Ask me anything” days for example or post that you are available for the next hour for any question they want to ask. Do these at consistent times of the day and week so that people can predict when you’ll be available and they will come to expect and look forward to this event on your page.

5. Turn on replies on your page:

This is such a simple thing but can make your conversations on your page more… well… conversational. So go to your page’s settings and then to General, then Replies, then Edit. Once you’ve clicked this, make sure the box that says “allow replies on your page” is checked, save it and you are good to go.

Now that you know HOW to turn on replies, let’s talk about WHY. This makes comments from other people to your posts more conversational. So, for example, you post something on your page, someone comments to your post, you can now reply to that individual comment specifically, not in general.

6. Reply to people when they comment or post on your page:

Now that you’ve turned on the reply feature you have to use it. So when you ask a question and someone answers, be there to reply to them. Does this mean you have to sit at your computer, on Facebook 24/7? Of course not, people understand you are doing other things,
but be timely in your reply, within 24 hours is acceptable. So make sure, if you’ve set a question to go out at a certain time that you are monitoring it for any “conversation” that might come up as a reply to it.

7. Use the Facebook Page Manager app on your phone:

This is a free, easy to install app, separate from the Facebook app you use to access your newsfeed. While it’s not as robust as using a computer, it will allow you to access your page with all your settings intact. So if you are set to use your page as your page that is how it
will show up on the app. You can now monitor any activity on your page, any replies to your questions while you are attending to other matters. Set your notifications on your phone to include the app and you won’t have to worry about missing any replies or comments. The Facebook Page Manager app is available for Apple and Android products just do a quick google search for it to install.

8. Host live Q and A’s on your page:

Every Tuesday is “Ask Me Anything Tuesday” on my Facebook page. Anything about Facebook that is. I post the same image each week on Tuesday at the same time, I invite people to ask me their burning Facebook question and then I am available to answer those questions. This is a great way to let people know when I will be online and that they will get their questions answered in a timely fashion. As I do this consistently every week, the engagement on this post increases with new people participating every week.

9. Host page share days:

“Facebook Fridays” are extremely successful right now. To create this event with your fans, simply create an image to use for it and then post every Friday at the same time with a call to action for your fans to follow. Ask them to share their page and say a bit about themselves. Encourage them to like the other pages being shared and be available to participate yourself. It’s a great way to use your position as a leader in your field to help others grow their pages. Don’t forget to ask people to share your post with their network to get the ball rolling and spread the word.

10. Run a simple contest or promotion on your timeline:

There are many different ways to run contests on Facebook and for a long time if you wanted to run a contest, you had to use a 3rd party application to make sure you were compliant with Facebook rules. But last year, Facebook changed this and you can now host a contest on your timeline directly without breaking Facebook rules. This is a great way to increase your exposure and build your engagement as well as build your community. Simply put you just have to post an image and ask people to “Like” and “Comment” to that post with some information you require to be entered to win your item. Don’t “require” people share your post as part of the entry, this is in violation of Facebook rules and could get you shut down, but you can ask them to share just because. Again, consistency is your friend here, do this on a regular basis on the same day and time each week and you will grow a huge following from it. Make sure the item you are giving away is something relevant to your business and something your fans want for even better success.

10. Dave Kerpen

Follow: On Facebook

1. Define Your Goals:

I know you have 101 other things to do with your business endeavors, but content is like your salesforce. Each piece that is created with a deep level of insight and value will be recognized and appreciated by your readers, thus establishing your place of authority in their eyes.
Here’s a path I take in creating content for social media channels.
First, I create the content for my blog. After posting on my site, the next step is to create the marketing message that will be shared out on associated social media channels. Understanding and defining your goals prior to creating the content empowers your ability to stay laser-targeted to the entire process of content creation.

2. Identify Your Target Audience:

Who do you want to reach?
I know, the world! After all, that is what the Internet is all about, right?

Unfortunately, that is kin to throwing Jell-O at the ceiling and hoping it sticks. This is no way to treat your online business endeavors.
Know your audience.
What they do.

• Who they are.
• What they wear.
• What they think.

The more you can understand your audience and what motivates them to be involved with your niche, the greater the likelihood that you will be able to create content around their needs, desires, and dreams.

One of the best ways to become familiar with who your audience is would be to get active with them. Comment on their posts outside of your social profiles. Ask them questions.

Listen.Learn to hear the heartbeat of your followers, then develop content around what interests them. This strategy will cause them to know, love and trust you.

3. Start using Facebook Live:

2016 has been the year of live streaming, catapulting to the top of the marketing toolkit with the launch of Facebook Live. With Facebook heavily focused on promoting Live, many brands have jumped on the bandwagon; some better than others. Facebook Live has proven to be effective in increasing both brand awareness and consumer engagement. Here are three strategies that are common among three very different early adopter brands, all of whom have successfully used Facebook live in their marketing efforts.

• Making the Audience Part of an Event
• The Right Balance of Content and Promotion
• Consistent Scheduling & Cross Promotion

Live streaming and Facebook Live in particular is an ongoing, evolving medium that is changing how consumers interact with brands.

4. Have Support on Standby:

When your page is live, you cannot post responses to comments from the brand, you can only speak to the comment in the broadcast itself or “like” the comment from the page (sorry, community managers!). What greatly helped me was asking my team and friends to watch and offer support from their personal pages. Their comments boosted engagement during slower moments of the stream and seeing their names helped me feel supported as we broadcasted.

5. Ads Linking to Messenger:

As AI continues to advance, Facebook has worked to keep up with this cutting-edge technology. Marketers are able to create chat bots that users can interact with through Facebook Messenger. Additionally, Facebook recently gave advertisers the ability to link to their messenger through ads. While this feature may not be relevant to most brands, especially those that do not have the resources to create chat bots, I do think that brands who want to develop closer interactive relationships with users can utilize these ads without having their own bot in place.

6. Engagement Audiences:

Who hasn’t viewed a product online only to receive ads about that same product in their Facebook newsfeed? Retargeting is considered one of most direct tactics for influencing buyers who are already deep in your funnel. Facebook has made this possible through the Facebook pixel, but also has other remarketing tactics available.
Retargeting custom audiences who have engaged with your video, lead ad, or Facebook Canvas creates boundless opportunities for marketers. This can be used for moving audiences from awareness down the funnel, sequential storytelling, or creating lookalikes based on audiences that have worked in the past.
In fact, advertisers on Twitter have the ability to target people who have engaged on any type of content — not just video, lead ads, and Canvas. I predict that Facebook may add more capabilities like this in the future.

7. Target Within a Mile Radius for Ads:

Facebook’s geo-targeting can get remarkably specific. Most times, advertisers aren’t going to want to get any more targeted than a 10 mile radius. However, for the rare times that you want to target a smaller radius, be aware that is possible. You can’t target a one mile radius around a town or city, but if you find a street or address, you’re able to target within a mile radius of that point on a map.

8. Analyze the Competition:

Social media is a huge laboratory of marketing tests. If you are willing to mine your competitions performance, you will have some initial idea of what works and what does not. This step should be completed before you craft a social media content strategy.

9. Hashtag Etiquette:

Facebook creates a unique URL for hashtags. Similar to Twitter, the use of hashtags in posts allows you to track conversations around that topic.
Unlike Twitter, however, Facebook hashtags have no significant impact on reach. Due to Facebook’s algorithms and users’ custom preferences, Facebook generally won’t display your content to users unless specified. The following are ways to get the most out of hashtags on Facebook:

• Don’t overload – Like Twitter, limit hashtag use to one or two relevant tags per post.
• Curate – Hashtags on Facebook are useful mostly for curation and gathering data for your business’ marketing strategy.
• Connect – Respond to people who are using the same hashtags as your business (when appropriate). Think of this as online networking.

10. Don’t Be Afraid to Take Risks:

This is a biggie and a tough one to break through. As marketers, we are trusted with a massive responsibility, and are often reminded of the impact we can have on a company’s bottom line. With that level of pressure, it’s easy to understand why many are vigilantly protective of their brand’s image and reputation.
If you stay true to your brand’s voice, thought, social should be viewed as one of the safest places to play. Don’t let a great real time opportunity pass or sink a would-be-great idea by overthinking it. Try to have fun with your content and remember, it’s Facebook (or Twitter, or Snapchat). This is the place to loosen the reigns a bit and have some fun!

This post is a part of a blog series on Marketing Success by ReportGarden, an ad agency client reports & dashboards automation software.