So you’ve been told to create a Facebook business page right? Apparently having a page will put your business on the map, you’ll drive loads of leads to your website, blog, offers and make a ton of sales!
Along the way you’ll also build your credibility, reach and influence and perhaps become a celebrity CEO or a well known public figure (if that floats your boat!)

Well, all this is actually true! It can all happen and more, there is a “but” though and it’s a BIG one!

It will come down to the amount of time and effort you put into your page. Unfortunately we can no longer just slap a page up and people come flocking.

Oh no, times have changed on Facebook.

So what are the fundamental things you MUST do to get your first 1,000 fans on Facebook and consequently your leads & profile?

Here’s 10 Steps which, if carried out with gusto and invested in regularly will bring you untold rewards of great engagement and exposure! Ready? Let’s begin.

Step 1. Make your page interesting

I know this sounds obvious, but actually you wouldn’t believe how many boring pages there are on Facebook. This of course is great news for you as it means the market is wide open for fabulously designed interesting Facebook pages!

Here’s what I mean by interesting;


Step 2. Create epic content

This is a toughie. You would have to be some kind of Super Hero if you could create EPIC content with every post you make. But you must strive to deliver the most interesting, relevant and results based content you can for your target market.

One of the ways to do this is to ask yourself – Will this content I am about to publish create CHANGE! How can I invoke action? How can I add the most value?

All great questions to ask as you make a post and I mean any post, from a small status update to a full on promotional campaign. Need some inspiration for content ideas?

In the meantime by content I mean, status updates, videos, images, comments, blog posts, webinars, contest. Pretty much anything you publish publicly!

Step 3. Invite and tell all your friends

Facebook gives us the opportunity to invite our friends in the admin panel above our page.



So make good use of it and go and ask your pals if they’ll come and like your page.

You could also send a message out to some of your nearest and dearest and ask them to share with their community. Please note this will only work if their community is in the same niche as you. So if your target market is arts & crafts, it’s no good sending it your pal who specialises in personal finance!
Also please don’t SPAM! It’s super uncool. So don’t just send this out to a random group of people in your FB address book, hoping someone will do the right thing. You will end up with lots of people leaving your conversation, probably some spam reports and many unlikes!

Something you can do though, that is super powerful is to post about your new page on your personal wall, (include a photo), asking your friends to like it. I’ve done this very regularly and it always gets great results!

You can also set up a Facebook event announcing your new page and invite all your friends to the event and of course you can offer an ethical bribe in the form of a free gift, but people need to head over to your page to retrieve it. Very effective!

Step 4. Get networking

Absolutely necessary and absolutely time consuming! This is probably the most time consuming role you will have on Facebook but without this your business will grow very slowly!

The more you can get out into the Facebook community and comment on others posts, get involved in the conversation, like pages and generally be a social butterfly, the more you will reap the rewards!

One great tool to help you do this is “Interest Lists”. You can create interest lists for all your favorite pages and people, and then save it as your main news feed. This means you’ll only see posts from the pages and people you most want to see content from / network with and filter out all the noise!

Very effective and time saving!


Step 5.  Run contests

Who doesn’t love a good contest eh?? That’s what makes these little gems go viral! People love to win free stuff! Done correctly contests can rocket your fan base and your customer database in a very short space of time.

The key is to create a page tab for a contest and add a like-gate to the tab. That’s basically an image that overlays on top of the contest information and tells visitors they need to ‘like’ the page before they can enter the contest. You need to be creative with this as it can turn some people off, but on the whole, you’ll get a lot more likes and lots of contest entries also! (Remember on the thank you page of your contest you can encourage people to visit your website and all sorts, but I’ll save the benefits of funnel building for another post!)

Here’s my Top Tips to running a successful contest;

• Make your prize great & relevant! Not just an mini iPad. Remember you want to attract a targeted audience.
• Know the objective of your contest. If you’re simply looking to get a lot of likes and optins over a short period of time, make the contest super easy. A simple sweepstake will do, where the visitor enters their email address to enter. If you want to increase engagement, encourage reviews or create some user generated content for your site, then perhaps a picture contest or a video contest. Remember the higher the barrier to entry the less entrants, but possibly a higher quality more targeted audience.
• Make your contest easy to share! You want it to get out to as many people as possible, so add share links and encourage the entrant to share the contest for an increased chance of winning.
• Keep it short. To create excitement, add a bit of scarcity. Make the contest 1 – 2 weeks max and let everyone know as time is running out to enter. You’ll have lots of frantic activity in the last few days and a nice viral effect!
• Use a 3rd party app and ensure you comply with the Facebook promotional guidelines – https://www.facebook.com/page_guidelines.phpHave fun with it!!!

Here’s 15 more Steps for Creating Successful Social Media Giveaway Contests

Step 6. Host webinars

I LOVE webinars! When I first started my Facebook career way back when, I would say that webinars were the biggest draw of fans to my page and customers to my business! The same is true today. With every webinar I market, present and replay I gather a huge new raft of fans and potential customers.

PLUS and here’s the biggie… A webinar means you create INSTANT RAPPORT with your audience. If you invite people to attend a webinar with you and you spend an hour or so giving epic content and chatting with your audience you will find there is really nothing more powerful, except perhaps to be in a room one to one with them.

Again you can create a page tab for your webinar registration form and market the page. As people come to register for the webinar, because you have an interesting page, epic content and loads going on they will of course like your page and engage with your posts. Thereby building your fan base, your engagement rates and your subscriber database.

Step 7. Facebook ads

I couldn’t write an entire post about increasing your fan base without Facebook ads. Well I can’t nowadays anyway. I remember the days when our posts were seen by the majority of our fans!
Unfortunately this is no longer the case. Our posts are only seen by approximately 10 – 15% of our fans so to get our message out into the news feeds of all of our likers, we have to pay! Whilst I would rather get it for free, as someone who has been in marketing for over 20 years I can also see why FB are doing it this way and I have to say, Facebook ads are cheaper and more targeted than any offline marketing techniques I have used over the years.

So as business owners and marketers we really shouldn’t moan too much!


I have to tell you, the ads that get us the BEST results are page post ads. In other words, you post a normal status update, with a very interesting 90 character first line, a fantastic image and a compelling description and then use the Facebook ads platform to target it specifically. These ads show up on the right hand side of the newsfeed like normal ads, but are more descriptive and have the wonderful social element of people liking, commenting, sharing etc.

You can also get these ads into the newsfeed and hence pockets (via mobile) of your target audience by using the power editor. I’m afraid I will have to leave explanation of using the power editor to another post as it really is a subject all on it’s own. It is there and it is very effective.

Step 8. Interesting threads

OK, we’re heading towards the home stretch here! I have seen some great threads over my time surfing the Facebook landscape. But I have to tell you, they’re few and far between. Most of the stuff you’ll see coming down your newsfeed is absolute drivel! Sorry posters, but it’s true.

Much like Point 1, this leaves it wide open for you to get in there and be original and interesting!

An example of an interesting thread is when it’s more focused on the customer than your business. I saw a speed coaching thread recently that made me go and instantly like the page.

The host had posted – in the next 30 minutes I am going to answer all of your questions, post NOW. He had absolutely loads of comments and questions being fired at him and he went through and answered every single one. It was an amazing thread of info. Another idea is having a guest ‘poster’, So getting someone well respected in your niche and having them come to your wall for a couple of hours to answer fan questions.

Something we used to do was at a specific time on a specific day have a themed event, ie., one very successful one we ran was 60 book suggestions in 60 minutes. We had hundreds of comments, book suggestions and discussions that everyone could get a lot out of. Plus of course a whole load of new likes!

Please note to run these type of ‘wall’ events, you need to be consistent. Just doing one won’t cut it. So only start this if you have the resource to keep it going.

Step 9. Add a Facebook “like” box to your blog/website

Super important and super easy! Add a like box to your blog.

Here’s how.

1. Go to https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/
2. Click on “Like Box”
3. Enter the URL of your fan page
4. Copy the code and paste into the sidebar of your blog or wherever you want it to show on your website.

People can now “like” your facebook page from your website.

Step 10. The engagement circle

This is a little diagram I created maybe a year or so ago and I affectionately called it “The Engagement Circle”.


As you grow your Facebook page and your business, you will build a customer database or a ‘list’ as it’s known in the online marketing world. As you create more content and more posts and hold more events etc, you should be emailing your database and inviting them to come over and like and engage with your page. Not everyone who signs up will have liked your page, so you need to ask them to!

Why do I need them to like my page if they’re already in my email database Jo, I hear you cry? The answer is you want to be able to communicate with your prospective audience on a multitude of platforms. Email, Social Media, Skype, Instant Messaging, Evernote, Drive – there are so many more options these days.

The more channels you can disseminate information across, the more chance you have of getting in front of the eyes of your target market. Remember there is a lot of noise out there, it’s your job as a marketer to cut through that noise and directly impact your potential customers with your Epic Content!

I’m sure you’ve heard this before many times, but please remember it’s about quality not quantity. There’s no point in having a page with 100,000 fans if no-one engages, gets involved or turns into a customer! This is a business remember!

But know this, getting to your first 1000 fans is just the first step. Next you need to turn your fans into customers, but that’s another story coming to a blog post near you soon…..

Now don’t just read – go out and take action on one of these steps today! Right NOW!

Have you ran any super successful fan getting campaigns? If so I’d love to hear about them! Let’s chat! Comment or leave feedback below, I will respond to every single post!

Thanks so much for reading! I hope this post has been useful!

Facebook keeps changing the rules.



Some of us will love them, others will tear their hair out and wring their hands. There will be those who complain and scream at the moon.

So what are the new rules, guidelines and policies that Facebook wants you to embrace? In essence you are now allowed to include a “call to action” for promoting that event, book or competition. The old rule of not having anymore than 20% text still applies.

The previous policies that prohibited effective marketing text in the image for brands was always a nonsense. So it’s good to see some commonsense emerge after 12 months!

How are some brands taking advantage of these new rules and breaking what were the old Facebook cover photo guidelines? How can you take advantage and apply them to Facebook’s cover photo and images to increase sales and conversions?

Here are 5 examples that you can use as inspiration to get people to book, buy or subscribe.

1. Mari Smith

Mari hasn’t messed about and has leapt in and is promoting her free webinar. You just gotta love that great smile!



2. Skype

The new rules from Facebook allow you to promote a contest. Here is one of Skype’s efforts with its “presenters” contest.



3. Hubspot

Hubspot has aalways been big on offering free ebooks that offer great value. Here is an example of their Facebook cover image which takes advantage of allowing that call to action in three simple steps.

 

4. Inbound Zombie

John Haydon’s “CTA” couldn’t be much simpler for his Inbound Zombie brand. The “Call to Action” is very clear… text and arrow!



5. ShortStack

It seems that simplicity is a consistent theme with ShortStack making asking for a “like” ….simple, fun and colorful.













































View the Original article

If you’ve been keeping an eye on your Facebook page’s reach metrics, you may have noticed some changes in what you’re seeing and who’s seeing you.



In February, Facebook announced they had killed a bug which had been affecting the way reach had been reported within insights since last September.  Actual reach was never affected, but the way it was reported within “Insights” was, causing massive confusion.   After the bug was killed, and “Insights” was returned to “normal”, Facebook issued a statement which made several vague promises: your reach may not change, but it may improve, but it depends…

Whatever.

Their statement didn’t make much sense. Here’s what we’ve discovered since the bug was killed, and how it may affect you.

What we discovered

Based on data collected from over 4,000 pages of all sizes, as of May 27th, the average page post reaches about 21.4% of the total fans for the page, according to the Agorapulse Barometer. But this fan reach varies tremendously depending on the size of your page, going from 28% of the fans for pages with less than 1,000 fans to 9% for pages with more than 100k fans.

Between February 25th and April 22nd, organic reach remained pretty steady, but viral reach has increased by 200% on average.  Monthly viral reach stats have gone from the equivalent of 100% of fan bases to almost 400%.

 
This doesn’t necessarily mean your viral reach will have tripled since February.  These averages span a broad spectrum of over 4,000 pages of all sizes, and the bug was only affecting certain types of impressions (for example, paid impressions in the newsfeed or impressions of shared content).

Your reach will vary greatly depending on your content strategy, posting frequency and the type of engagement you were getting.

Case studies

Below are the results immediately following the bug fix from three pages with normal posting activity from the sample above:

1. One very (very!) active political page with good engagement (600,000 fans)
2. Charity page with very (very!) high engagement (230,000 fans)
3. e-commerce page with low engagement (1 Million fans)

Example #1.

In three weeks, our active political page experienced an increase in organic reach of about 15%, while viral reach increased by more than 739%.



Example #2.

Our charity page remained steady in their organic reach, but their viral reach increased by 1,000%.

Example #3.

Our e-commerce brand page also had no increase in organic reach, but their viral reach increased by 135%.

The Facebook “Bug” is fixed

Based on the data we’ve collected, most pages won’t see an increase in organic reach since the bug was killed. Nearly all pages have experienced an increase in viral reach since February, but the magnitude of the increase will depend highly upon the level of engagement each page was receiving on its posts.

If you spent six months worrying about the crazy fluctuation of your page’s reach, you can lay your concerns to rest. Actual reach was never down.  The way it was being reported in your insights was.  And, if your content strategy is still the same, you should find your reach metrics have gone back to their pre-september level.

If you’d like to see how your reach statistics have been affected by this bug fix, you can check it out on the free Facebook Page Performance Barometer we used to extract this data.








































View the Original article

Do you often update your Facebook business Page with new photos?



Do you have a particular posting strategy or just publish random pictures from time to time?

The fact is that with the latest Facebook policy changes, photo updates are now getting less organic reach than ever before. Nevertheless, the popularity of photo posts remains unshakeable: the majority of content posted on Facebook is pictures.

How can you use photo updates on Facebook to drive more engagement including likes, comments and shares?

Here are seven practices picked from popular Facebook Pages to help your photo posts get higher viral results and make more people learn about your business.

#1. Appeal to Personal Experience

On the whole, Facebook fans are ordinary people with similar tastes and habits. So photos appealing to fans’ personal experience have a good potential to reach large audience on Facebook. Fans more willingly respond to familiar things and situations, when they can say “Look, it’s about me!”.



Caption: AXE makes their fans recollect best school moments. Result: 34.5K likes, 2.1K shares.

There are some general themes everyone can use in this kind of photo update: memories from childhood, hard Mondays and long-awaited Fridays, Internet addiction, well-known movies and games, handheld gadgets, etc.

Perhaps, such a picture won’t tell much about your company or product (unless you try to tie it in). But this helps you to increase engagement around your photo update which will give you better exposure in news feeds and attract others to your page.

#2. Use Humor

Most likely, the products or services your company offers have little to do with humor.

However, is there a way for you to use funny pictures around your product features?



Caption: Firefox shows their page display options in such a funny way. Result: 9K likes, 1.7K shares

There are lots of cool images on the Web to make your fans laugh (or at least draw attention to your post in the news feed).

Put yourself in your fans’ place. Pick a funny picture your fans will understand and try to connect it with your brand or product.



Caption: Intel jokes on the “conception” of computers. Result: 105K likes, 36K shares.

Don’t go too far with black humor or vulgarity; otherwise the message of your update will be lost.
Images that are too provocative may encourage your fans to unsubscribe from your Facebook Page.

#3. Ask for Likes and Shares

Nobody welcomes long complicated comments that accompany photo posts; they’re simply ignored by fans in the news feed. So when you write text to go with an image, keep it short and ask your fans to like or share the update if they agree or feel the same.



Caption: Skype asks fans to like the post if they occurred in the similar situation. Result: 1.7K likes.

You may even invite fans to vote for one thing or another by using Like and Share buttons.



Caption: Walmart launches Facebook voting for the best Monopoly token: “Like” for cat, “Share” for iron. Result: 48K likes, 2.8K shares.

You won’t get valid stats using such a polling method, but inviting social sharing can increase the virality of such posts.

#4. Capitalize on Current Events

Use news or sensational topics as a way to remind fans about your brand. This could include political happenings, business or tech news, sporting events, upcoming holidays, etc. Just be sure you pick a tie-in that isn’t obscure; you want to find one that the masses will understand.


Caption: Lay’s plays around the election topic. Result: 6.3K likes, 3.3K comments.

Or you could just post a funny picture to provoke a discussion.



Caption: Freemake asks fans to share their opinion about Apple Maps. Result: 1.1K likes, 492 shares.

#5. Post Coupons and Giveaways

Though Facebook has a paid app called “Offers”, most businesses continue to post discount coupons and giveaways in the form of photo updates. Quite simply, photos are widely seen in the news feed and you don’t have to pay money to reach your customers globally or locally.

Such posts also have potential to attract new customers when seen by your fans’ friends.



Caption: Community Coffee grants 20% discount to all fans who manage to see the promo code.
Result: 2.2K likes, 347 shares.

#6. Provide an Inside Look at Your Company

People are curious by nature. That’s why to learn more about a person, we’d rather look through their photos than their bio. That said, try to put faces to your business.

Facebook fans will definitely love to see photos of your employees, especially if the pictures are done in an original way.

Show your employees as they assemble products, meet customers, or even ask a celeb to participate.



Caption: Dropbox employees meet Bono and The Edge (who actually invested into project). Result: 2.4 likes, 297 shares.

Photos that show what happens behind the scenes are a good way to enhance brand credibility.

#7. Push Fans to Comment

Comments are an important component of photo virality, so put thought into what you post. People comment when they have something to say in response. So why not publish content that will urge your fans to comment?

A simple question posted as a status update may easily be ignored in the news feed, while a question presented as a photo update will attract more attention and push fans to answer it.

Try to ask your fans something general about your product or their everyday life, so that everyone could answer your question.



Caption: A simple yes/no question got 3.6K comments from Microsoft fans.

You don’t have to stick to questions, though. You may post a quiz or a funny experiment; anything that pushes fans to share their opinions in comments.



Caption: A funny Freemake’s experiment with cell phone name brought 2.2K comments (vs. 269 likes and 289 shares).

What do you think? What other image posting tips have you had success with on Facebook? Share your thoughts in the comments below.











































View the Original article

Social media marketing is simple in one sense. Create content that adds value and then pop it out to as many people’s eyeballs as possible.

That’s reach.

If you do it well then the crowd shares and it travels around the world at the speed of a click. Get lucky and it goes viral and those thousands turn into millions.

So, have you been spending time on social media and are looking for ways to expand your social media reach?

If you’ve been an avid user of social media networks, I’m sure you’ve heard all about the benefits and what it can do for your business. So I won’t be going down that road and “lecture” it to you.

Instead of doing that, I want to go straight ahead and share some tips and tricks that have helped build my social media reach.

1. Share useful content

Probably the simplest and most basic step – but definitely one that you can’t escape – is the need to share useful content. If you want to expand your social media reach you have to be writing and sharing great articles, blog posts, tips and tricks that add value to your community constantly.

When people find that you are helping to them solve a problem that they’ve been having or adding value to their everyday lives, they are more likely to not only subscribe to your blog and follow you, but they might also share it with their followers and fans and even talk about you in their blog.  Social profiles or blogs that are successful have one common similarity, which is each and every last one of them share valuable content for their readers.

Another tip to remember when posting content is that you must be consistent. You can’t be writing or sharing one day and disappear for the next month or two. You have to be consistent so that people would remember you and remember to visit your social media platforms to get their updated content.

2. Organize a social media contest

A social media contest is a great way to reward loyal followers, fans, or readers who have been following you for a while. It can be used to extend your social media reach too.

Social media contests can be used as a motivation for new audience to share or connect their social media profile and emails. Social media contest platforms like Binkd not only comes with an email-capture function where people would need to fill in before joining a contest, but it also comes with a share or tweet button to get people to share the contest.



And since your goal would be to get as many new contacts as possible, Binkd has made it so that, for Facebook contests, participants will be motivated to refer some of their friends and family as they would be able to get another entry when someone they refer decides to enter your contest. This means that when more referred people joins your contest, the more entries they earn.

For Twitter contests, fans would need to tweet to validate their entry helping your contest go viral and increase subscribers.

3. Guest Post

Guest posts (like this one) is an excellent way to expand your reach, it helps you to reach readers that you weren’t able to reach beforehand by tapping into an unfamiliar community.

My metaphor for guest-posting is like being invited to speak at a fully packed conference. Prior to the conference, not many people might know who you are or what you do but after your talk, people will know about you and will most likely want to know more about you and your business.

Buffer is a great example of a startup who have used guest-posts to increase their reach, customers and sales. Guest-posts alone had helped them increase their customer base to over 100,000 people in a year.

4. Learn how to maximize your marketing

Every social network has their little ways to maximize your marketing. Each social network have their strengths and functionality, and one of the mistakes most people do is post the same exact set of messages to EVERY social network.

Why is this a huge mistake? Because every social network is optimized differently. For example, on Twitter people use hashtags to increase reach, but nobody uses hashtags when posting on Facebook.

On Facebook, pictures work well to attract attention and expand reach. But people tend to overlook this and decide that it’s alright to post tweets with hashtags and link it to their Facebook status. Not only does it not work, the problem is they are posting the least effective type of content on Facebook.

Join Twitter chats

A Twitter chat is like a group discussion multiplied by 100! It’s a “chat” held during a particular time and day where Twitter users would get together to discuss a particular topic and share their own ideas, tips, and thoughts using a particular hashtag.

It’s also a great way to expand your social media reach and get noticed when not many people know who you are.

Following those who are on Twitter chats help you to follow relevant people in your market too.
There are many Twitter chats available out there. Here is HUGE list of twitter chats

6.  Use infographics

Here is a little secret that I learned on a webinar by Kissmetrics, it is no other than infographics! If you follow this blog closely, you’ll notice Kissmetrics uses infographics in their posts. They have used infographics to grow their blog and it has brought them over 2 million visitors.



Here are is a tip shared by Neil Patel in the webinar.

The topic of the infographic has to be unique and relatable. It shouldn’t be too basic as it won’t benefit the reader. Stats, facts and data is extremely important. How color affects purchases is an example of a great infographic. This infographic alone has over 10,000 social shares!

Building your social media reach takes time and a lot of commitment. You have to put in the hard work before you are able to reap the results but it is a small price to pay to be able to grow an amazing community behind you.















































View the Original article

The look and feel of Facebook's News Feed is getting a major overhaul. The social networking giant said the new design will emphasize content from your friends and the brands you've liked with larger and more vibrant photos, articles, videos, events and maps.

Additional updates include a left-hand navigation menu and new feeds. The feeds will allow users to view specific types of content that is most important to them. These include feeds from all friends, music, photos, games and specific lists of people or brands a user follows.


The new look will be consistent across Facebook whether you access it through a mobile device or the web. The redesign is only visual, Facebook said, meaning the algorithm that determines the content that people see and when they see it will not be changed.

As a business owner, these News Feed changes represent an opportunity to more visually represent your brand on Facebook. Here is how you can take advantage of the new News Feed look:

1. Be more visual.

Facebook users tend to respond better to visual content in the News Feed. You can now increase engagement with your brand by posting more visually appealing content that will be larger and more vibrant.

2. Make sure your ads are in News Feeds.

If you're advertising on Facebook, ensure your ads are getting into the News Feed. They too will be more rich, vibrant and engaging.

3. Get discovered. 

Another new feature is the "Following" feed, which collects and displays all content from friends you're connected to and brands you've liked in chronological order. This means that your fans now have a place where they can see all of the content you publish.

4. Have an eye-catching cover photo. 

Whenever you add a new friend or like a new restaurant, for example, you'll see the cover photo for that person or that business's page appear in the News Feed. According to Facebook, this change is designed to provide more context about your Page, so make sure the photo is eye-catching and visually representative of your Page.























View the Original article