What Should You Post on Social Media for Your Startup?

The best news about starting-up in today’s digital landscape is that you grow at practically no cost. All you need is the right idea, at the right time and to be at the right place at the right time. Today’s army of social media bloggers and micro-bloggers are constantly looking for exciting things to post, and you can be the subject of their social media conversations. But the first things you should think about are employing a social media management tool and building a smart social media marketing strategy. While building a social media strategy, here are the kinds of questions that you should ask yourself.
Who are you trying to reach?
What are the characteristics of these people? What drives them? What concerns them?
Where do they live?
What gender, economic level, education level do they belong to?
Are they homeowners or renters? Students or working professionals?
Do they play football? Are they bikers? Do they attend music concerts regularly?
Once you know exactly who you’re targeting, you will know exactly what to post. Here are 12 types of content that you should post on social media for your startup.

1. Humorous content

Funny always works. If you can make your audience laugh, they’ll want to know who you are and what you do. It’s natural to be curious about someone who surprises or entertains you. So make your audience laugh. You get extra brownie points for sharing humorous content that’s directly related to your brand, so your audience will both be entertained and made to think about your brand. Here’s an example of that strategy in play on Tinder’s vintage #Tinder post.

The reference to your brand could also be more subtle and playful, like how Birddogs does it. Look at how they’ve showcased their product (men’s shorts) in your face in such a bold yet charming manner.

Another alternative is one where you simply post a “joke of the day” or “meme of the day” by curating content from other sources. Remember to always provide necessary attribution when curating/sharing content.

2. Your product/service updates

What are the latest features on your product? What services have you restructured or added to your business? Both your customers and social media fans eagerly await new and exciting offerings that can make a difference to their lives. And that’s how you must portray your latest updates – as novel solutions to real problems. Your feature/service update in itself could be a powerful social media marketing strategy when designed and timed right. Consider, for instance, Slack’s latest emoji tweaks in the spirit of the FIFA World Cup.

How you present products and features matters. Getting presentation right requires a certain seamless coordination between your product development and social media marketing teams. Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, has stressed the importance of interdepartmental collaboration in his book “Hit Refresh”, supporting the suggestion with his own examples and experiments. In 2015, Satya Nadella was spotted using an iPhone at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, where he introduced his audience to the iPhone Pro – an iPhone that supports all Microsoft applications. This partnership was unexpected by welcome by the press and customers, making Nadella’s bold presentation an instant hit. Try and plan all your business activities with marketing in mind. You’ll see that it will pay off, big time.
No update is too small to share. Even design changes can make for great social media posts if you design them to be so.

3. Success stories

Just landed a well-known client? Get them onboard with your marketing. Request their permission to construct a case-study or success story using their experience with you. More often than not, clients are excited about such an opportunity considering it free press, but they usually have concerns about the safety of their confidential information. Address their worries by disclosing your marketing plan in detail, leaving no room for ambiguity. When designing your client success stories, try and get creative. Do a video case-study or success story. Conduct an interview. Keep in mind what your social media audience would want to see.

Even if you’re not B2B, you can have customer success stories of sorts. Look at clothing retailer ModCloth’s #MarriedinModCloth social media initiative. It features a brilliant collection of photographs of customers who picked ModCloth for their wedding boutique. Few strategies work as well as social proof does on social media. Enable social media fans to envision working with you or using your products.
Success stories could also entail your company’s success stories. Just got featured on a predominant publication? Share your pride and happiness with your social media audience. Just employed new interns? Introduce them to your social media audience. People love seeing the faces and minds behind any brand.

4. Customers’ opinions

People are more likely to trust the words of other people, much like themselves. And trust is an important factor for startups, especially those that are new in the market or selling novel concepts or products. For instance, Tesla, despite the overwhelmingly positive press, has always faced issues in actually selling their vehicles. This amusing review that they retweeted could be influential in convincing other potential buyers.

Sharing the opinions of happy clients emphasizes on the fact that you’re capable of taking care of clients and fulfil their needs. But it’s also equally important to find and respond to negative experiences from clients. Every negative comment that you leave unattended is a sign of your brand’s indifference to customer feedback. The great news is that negative feedback can be an opportunity to build trust with your existing and future customers.

Observe how SizzorS salon has responded to one of their customers. It’s important to be respectful while addressing your customer’s queries in the most detailed and specific way possible.

5. Tips & news for your industry

People generally appreciate updates related to their industry, because they want to stay up to date. By providing them with such news, you can become the go-to source for news and tips in the industry. Many startups invest a lot of money in having content marketers create high-quality industry related content so it can help them get search engine and social media traffic. Instead of creating 100% of your content, you can curate top-class content that has already been created. For instance MYXYTY, an internet security solutions company, often shares news and updates related to internet security in a way that appeals to their social media followers.

If you can’t spend enough time manually curating this type of content, you could curate it using a content curation app such as DrumUp. Curate relevant content on DrumUp by setting-up keywords and RSS feeds of your favorite content sources. The content you share can be anything – useful tips, major discoveries, changes in an important law – you know your industry best. Share whatever your audience would like to follow.
When sharing, if you are the first to share and attribute the source using @mentions and #tags, you are likely to benefit from the resulting exposure. DrumUp helps you execute all of this.

6. Data & insights

Data and insights are another great form of social media content to consider sharing. Data and insights are particularly nice when shared in a visual format – as graphs or infographics. They’re not very hard to create either. With the graphics editing apps available in the market today, you can easily turn research and surveys into graphical offerings for your social media audience. Even if you don’t turn it into a graph, you could use the stat to create a compelling headliner connected to your brand.

Check out, for instance, this post that Uber shared in May this year. It gives Uber users in those cities a powerful reason to consider using the service permanently instead of buying a car. Uber’s popular for sharing really interesting stats collected vis Uber rides with their social media fans.
Explore different areas in which you collect data and can turn them into interesting and engaging social media posts. Then, use them wisely.
Alternatively, you could conduct research on areas that interest your target audience and create graphs and insights that can assist them.

7. Brand mentions in media, articles etc.

“Trust is a key enabler for economic value creation,” says Philipp Kristian Diekhoner, a German entrepreneur from Singapore. And to build trust, you need to carefully design social media content that can support those goals. Brand mentions in trusted media and publications are an excellent way to build trust with the cross-section of your target audience and readers of that publication. You may also share interviews that your company’s executives participate in to establish the knowledge and expertise of your leadership and management.

It pays to mention the publication and author when they mention you, just to build relationships with journalists and publications in your industry. When creating your own blog and social media posts, you could feature these journalists and their work in turn. You could also make room for top industry websites, magazines and news agencies in your content to catch their attention.
Finally, you could design and promote PR stunts to get covered by various publications. However, ensure that it’s genuine and in tune with your brand. To celebrate Pride month, Tinder turned their office multicolored to support the Pride movement.

8. Behind the scenes content

With people as the face of your brand, your target audience is likely to connect with you more. Your target groups are also more likely to trust you when you transparently share the process or functioning of your business with them. That’s why it’s important for you to share behind the scenes content with your social media fans. So, what qualifies as behind the scenes content? A photo of you or your team at work, preparation for an event, preprocessing of your product, a photograph of your company at an offsite event are all great examples of behind the scenes content.

Here’s a particularly cute photograph of a company’s latest recruit, Piki, the so called VP of motivation. The best part about behind the scenes content is that it allows you room to share yours and your brand’s personality. So you can share whatever’s on your mind, unless it’s offensive to someone’s sentiments.
The more transparent and free-flowing your content is, the more likely your audience is to connect with it.
Note: This post will be updated to include more types of social media content for you to post for your startup. Please watch this space for more.

Feature image via Freepik.com 



Source

How to Run Social Media Marketing Experiments (with 73 Ideas)

Running social media marketing can be hard when you have no idea where to begin. Social media is vast and the abundance of social media marketing options leaves social media managers undecided on which is the best strategy to follow. Fortunately, there exists a way to identify top performing social media strategies. You can identify top performing strategies with maximum ROI by running social media marketing experiments.

So, how do you run a social media marketing experiment?

Here’s a clean, 6-step process.

1. Set goals
2. Prioritize goals
3. Design the experiment
4. Test ideas
5. Analyze tests & glean insights
6. Automate top-performing ideas

Before we proceed with details on every step, here are a few characteristics of social media that you should consider before designing social media marketing experiments.

1. On social media, there are controllable (content quality, target audience and impact) and uncontrollable factors (organic reach).

2. Every experiment can have different outcomes based on different inputs. For instance, the experiment when boosted by say employee advocacy will show different results when not.

The 6-step process to setting-up, running and measuring a social media marketing experiment

1. Set goals

Social media needn’t be only a marketing tool. Social media can be used to impact every aspect of a business, from its inception to revenue-generation and customer support. In 2018, social media managers are aware of this fact, which is why it’s important to question ourselves how much value we’re getting from the time and resources spent on social media.

Goal-setting is one way to answer this question. In fact, goal-setting may also have a direct impact on an individual’s performance and happiness, according to a Harvard study.

The following is a list of social media goals that you can consider when planning your social media marketing experiments.

13 social media goals you could consider chasing

1. Product/company branding

2. Increasing brand awareness

3. Driving social media traffic

4. Lead generation

5. Revenue generation

6. Increasing brand engagement

7. Building communities

8. Providing customer support

9. Multiplying press mentions

10. Growing co-marketing opportunities

11. Acquiring brand advocates

12. Collecting UGC, reviews and testimonials

13. Launching products

Broad or narrow, these goals provide context to your social media marketing activities and help you measure them accurately. It’s best to create experiments that have no more than one goal, so your efforts are focused and easier to measure.

Consider, for instance, that you have created two social media posts – Post A and Post B. Post A has performed better in terms of social media engagement but Post B has performed better in terms of social media traffic. Which post would you consider a success?

Having goals in place prevents this kind of ambiguity.

2. Prioritize goals

Every business has multiple goals that can be reached via social media marketing. But every business also has to deal with limited resources and budgets. That’s where priorities become important. Priorities help you decide where and what to focus your resources on.

There are tons of systems that you can use to effectively prioritize goals. The trick is prioritizing what will give you most important results. How do you identify those goals?

At DrumUp, we use the Cost-Targeting-Control-Effort system. Here’s how it works.

1. List all of your goals on sheets.

2. Score every goal on Cost-Targeting-Control-Effort on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 implying most and 1 implying least.

3. Calculate an average rounded off score that you can refer to for decision-making.

4. Work on the easiest goals first and make your way up to the harder goals, or prioritize but whatever is most necessary.

This process may eat-up your time in the beginning, but once you get used to it, using this process will save you tons of invaluable time.

3. Design the experiment

Once you have prioritized goals, it’s time to design an experiment. Doing this is simple. You need a bucket of ideas and hypotheses on how those ideas will help you achieve your goal. When connecting the idea-hypothesis-outcome, ask yourself what you’ll do and how it’ll lead to achieving your goal and why that will be the outcome.

For instance, if the goal is to increase brand awareness, you can accomplish this outcome in so many different ways. You can create a social media contest or you can run social media ads. It’s best to conceptualize the experiment in detail at this stage so you can set expectations and predict the outcome accordingly.

Here are different ways in which you can get inspiration to conceptualize experiments –

1. Follow top social media marketers and read their blogs for ideas

2. Identify prevailing social media trends and follow them

3. Conduct competitive research and see what industry leaders are doing

Once you have a concrete idea, decide on what the task will entail and how you’ll measure the results with respect to the goal. If website traffic or conversions are the goal, you’ll need to create custom URLs using URL builders to ensure conversion-tracking.

4. Test the experiment

Now you’re ready to test your social media experiments. When testing social media experiments, you need to bear some basics in mind.

1. Never test more than one thing at a time. If you want to be sure of what’s moving the needle for a particular goal, it’s critical to ensure that you don’t have conflicting readings. For instance, if you want to increase traffic to your website, any social media posts that is clickable can contribute to the effort. That’s why it’s essential to know which posts/theme of posts you want to focus on.

2. Refer to the right metrics to measure posts. Typically, goals decide which metrics you should monitor. For instance, if you want to increase brand awareness on social media you would choose impressions as the key metric instead of choosing clicks or something that’s less representative.

3. Run each experiment for a sufficient period of time. If the experiment is minor, you can run it for shorter time intervals such as a week or two weeks. If the experiment is major, for instance, if it involves a re-haul of your entire social media marketing strategy, then it’s best to run it at least for a month or two months.

4. Use A/B testing on every set of posts. The content you create for your social media experiment should ideally be A/B tested for the best results. That’s because you won’t know the full potential of your social media posts unless they are in their best forms. For A/B testing, you need to be able to track each version of a post, so you’ll need custom URLs.

5. Ensure that the experiments are all closed-loop. You don’t need any loose ends or blind spots in an experiment. If you have any, try and fill them in. For instance, if you want to measure the effect of your content on revenue, you need to be able to see the actual purchase and that might need some development effort on your website. Don’t shy away from collaborating with developers when needed.

5. Analyze tests & glean insights

After an experiment is run, you’ll need to analyze results and learn from what you’ve done. While you’ll want to know if the experiment worked, you’ll also want to know to what extent it worked and what exactly made it work. It’s also useful to know what didn’t work and why, so you can apply those learnings to future social media campaigns.

Social media experiment tracking is an exact science, with numbers. When running experiments it’s important to process the statistical significance of the results. You’ll want to ensure that the results aren’t because of chance factors and don’t include false positives and exclude false negatives.

One way to ensure that your data is clean and that your experiments are actually worth investing in, you could repeat the experiment a couple of times and see if the results stay consistent. You can also repeat experiments by changing factors and understanding how you can future amplify results.

6. Automate top-performing ideas

Once you have consistent results stemming from particular experiments, you can make the most of those ideas by automating them. For instance, if you know that your blog posts bring a ton of traffic to your website and convert new users, you can set-up your blog on an RSS feed and set it on an auto-posting schedule.

When automating top-performing ideas, you’ll need the help of automation tools. Even if you can’t automate entire processes, you can definitely automate large portions of the process. Once the process is automated, you can save a ton of time and be more productive.

Here are different ways in which you can automate your social media marketing –

1. Save social media posts of different campaigns in different libraries on a social media management tool such as DrumUp, from where you can set-up an extensive publishing schedule.

2. Add RSS feeds of your blog and top news agencies or blogs and set them up on an automatic publishing schedule, so you never have to publish a post manually.

3. Follow influencers on Twitter and add them to Twitter lists, from where you can follow their work and retweet/engage with posts when required.

73 social media marketing experiments to try today

• Use Twitter’s advanced search to find potential clients
• Try social media ads and native content promotion
• Try employee advocacy for social media
• Activate social media follow and social media share plugins on your webpages
• Test different positions for social media plugins (consider mobile placement)
• Publish content when your followers are online and active
• Publish content when your followers and offline and inactive
• Publish content during lunch break, on the weekends, during commute times and on public holidays
• Publish content late nights and early mornings
• Publish more frequently
• Publish less frequently
• Craft short and punchy post content
• Craft long and descriptive post content
• Use popular hashtags
• Use less popular or similar to popular hashtags
• Include testimonials or social proof in social media posts
• Add emojis to social posts
• Create the same post for all social media platforms (cross-post)
• Create custom posts for each social media platform
• Post questions and quizzes
• Run contests
• Conduct QnAs and AMAs
• Create interview sessions on text and video
• Publish and curate infographics
• Share GIFs and short videos

  

• Post behind the scenes content
• Work with disappearing content (statuses and stories)
• Run promotional campaigns (discount campaigns)
• Host live giveaways clubbed with planned rant sessions
• Create Twitter Moments and Instagram Stories
• Share SlideShares via social media posts
• Post audio clippings and podcasts
• Livestream events
• Experiments with music on videos and podcasts
• Leverage social media analytics dashboards to gain insights
• Create short and long social media videos
• Use photographs of your team, clients and partners
• Conduct events to collect UGC

 

• Co-host live events
• Run co-marketing activities on social media
• Try Twitter chats
• Join and work within LinkedIn and Facebook groups
• Build a presence in LinkedIn communities
• Get C-suite executives involved on social media
• Run campaigns for brand advocacy on social media
• Pin important posts
• Comment on active social media posts and conversations
• Use Facebook for remarketing
• Build a Facebook Messenger bot
• Use LinkedIn inMail for marketing
• Follow top customers’ Life Events
• Add CTAs to all links and content you share
• Add Click-to-tweets within blog posts
• Experiment with graphic design to pull attention to parts of posts
• Use social media tools to find the right times to share content
• Work with evergreen content to get more social media referrals
• A/B test types of social media content
• Play around with colors and typography
• Test images with people vs objects
• Optimize landing pages to convert social media referrals
• Build an email list with gated social media contests
• Use humorous social media content
• Create a band persona/character to endear customers
• Connect with customers on social media and activate them to be advocates
• Experiment with tone
• Try different types of copy
• Target different groups of people
• Work with different time zones

Wrap

There are infinite possibilities in social media marketing if you consider all the variables in content, publishing and advertising. To develop the best formula for your brand, you need to run social media experiments. Remember social media trends are always changing and it’s always a good idea to test new ideas every year or so. Keep an eye on your social media analytics and be open to making changes when required, this mindset will help you make the most of your social media efforts.



Source

Facebook Management Tips for Small Businesses: Everything You Need to Know

Over 50 million small businesses use Facebook pages for marketing. But 96% of the people who discuss brands online, don’t follow the Facebook pages of those brands. That’s a massive disconnect between small businesses and their target audience. A massive disconnect that many Facebook management agencies tend to discredit. It’s no wonder that such agencies and small businesses, who simply rely on posting “creative content” on Facebook, never see an ROI.

To reach and influence target groups, you need the right Facebook marketing strategy and a social media management tool (like DrumUp) that can help you execute it.

Common challenges that social media agencies and small businesses face when managing Facebook pages

HubSpot recently conducted a study and identified common challenges that marketers today are facing. Here’s a summary of what they found.

1. 63% marketers identified traffic and lead generation as top challenges. Before the internet boom, businesses had limited marketing options. Today they have millions, and the ones the choose have got to count (produce referrals and leads).

2. 40% marketers said proving the ROI of marketing activities was their top challenge. If you’re a social media agency with small businesses as clients, you have probably faced this problem. Unless you can prove the effectiveness of your work, you can’t expect to keep clients loyal.

3. 28% marketers struggle to secure enough budget to manage their marketing activities. With limited budget, marketers are forced to choose between many potential marketing channels and give assurance of an ROI for their investments.

When marketing on Facebook, it’s commonplace for social media agencies and small businesses to face the same issues. Here’s how you can deal with them.

21 Facebook management tips for small businesses and social media agencies

Everyone who reads this blog post has probably made some effort to market a business using Facebook. This guide is meant to summarize as many ideas as possible that such social media marketers and small business owners can try in addition to what they’re already doing.

#1 Explore Facebook marketing tools that can make your life easier

Why’s this #1? Because marketing automation tools can save you time and money, irrespective of whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise. In fact, over the last few years, more small businesses have begun to adopt marketing software – and this trend is growing.

So, what are the different kinds of Facebook management tools that you can use? Well, they’re a dime a dozen (forgive the cliche), but what you should focus on is functionality. The most common types of tools enable Facebook scheduling (such as DrumUp), Facebook monitoring(such as Trackur) and graphic design (such as Canva).

With DrumUp, you can automate your Facebook marketing completely, without compromising on content quality or engagement, by spending 15 minutes a week or an hour a month.

#2 Hire the right talent and provide access to necessary resources

Step #2 is obviously to decide who your designated Facebook page manager will be. Small businesses typically choose to either outsource the job to an agency or hire an in-house multi-functional resource person who will manage Facebook using automation tools.

Irrespective of which category you fall into, it’s critical to ensure that your Facebook manager knows his/her stuff and has enough resources. What resources? Well, the basics include access to your Facebook page and management tools, but you can do more. Set-up a communication channel or a project management space (such as Trello) to track and communicate details. Give your Facebook page manager ideas, insights and an understanding of your brand.

Here’s a post about how you can manage Facebook Page roles and optimize Page settings.

Here’s a post about the skills that social media managers need – skills that you should consider when hiring your social media management team.

#3 Keep tabs on audience personas and behaviors

For effective Facebook marketing, you need to know your audience. And not just know them in an abstract way. You need to have audience demographics, interests and browsing habits – real data. Random Facebook posting can leave you with inactive Facebook pages and zero engagement.

If you want to size-up your audience post-publishing, you can simply visit your Facebook Insights > Posts to see which ones have interested your audience members most. You can also view Insights > People to get basic information of the gender, age, location and language of your Facebook followers.

Ideally, what you should pay most attention to is conversion-based content. On Facebook, your conversion-based content can be shares of blog posts, web pages (for contests/webinars/eBook downloads), or direct promotions and purchase links. Instead of tracking engagement on such posts, you can track clicks and conversions as they’re more relevant to business goals.

DrumUp has an inbuilt URL shortener that you can activate to automatically tag and track all the posts you schedule from the tool. These clicks can be invaluable indicators of audience interests and purchase behavior.

#4 Outline and document a formal Facebook content strategy

How often are you going to post on Facebook? At what times of the day will you schedule content for publishing? What types of content will you share? The answer to all of these questions form your Facebook marketing strategy.

Deciding on a strategy is critical because it can help you manage your budget better. Formalizing a strategy is even more important when setting expectations between a small business and a marketing agency. Split your budget optimally across items that will cost you, such as running contests, boosting posts, retargeting, sidebar ads, main feed ads, original content creation (posts & videos), branding and social media management tool subscriptions.

How you split your budget depends on what works best for your business. You could set aside small budgets for Facebook marketing experiments before you decide to invest heavily in any one strategy. Either way, it’s best to set a strategy in stone before beginning.

#5 Leverage your Page Layout & its special features

The first thing that your Facebook Page visitors see is your cover photo. And you can use that space to really make an impression on them. Apart from your cover photo, there are several special features such as your Facebook shop and even the “Pages liked by this Page” section that you can exploit to create a positive experience.

Did you know that your Facebook Page can be customized? Yes, you can reorder your tabs – photos, videos, posts, about and likes. You can reposition your Shop and Services tab to appear right at the top. You can even work with different Page templates to redesign the structure of your Facebook Page. When designing your Page structure, choose your featured visuals and the visuals that appear in your timeline boxes carefully.

A complete Facebook Page has all fields filled, even the less-used ones such as Partner Apps and Services and the Write Something box. Here’s a detailed post about optimizing your Facebook Page.

#6 Create a CTA driven Facebook shop to drive sales

Your Facebook Page can be a rich source of referrals, and when properly designed, a rich source of revenue. However, to drive referral traffic and generate revenue, you need to have a functioning CTA button leading to a conversion-optimized landing page.

Depending on what your business does and how your customer life cycle is, you can choose the text for your CTA button. It could be “Shop now”, or “Call now”, “Learn more” or “Make a reservation”. What action do you want your Facebook Page visitors to take? If your company’s product is an app, you can even build an accessory app into Facebook Messenger to show visitors what it can do.

When creating your Facebook Shop, spend some time thinking about how you can engage your visitors and turn them into paying customers. And ensure that all URLs connected to your CTAs have tags, so they can be tracked.

#7 Organize your content efficiently to maximize ROI

How do you currently account for the money you invest in content and social media marketing? Here’s how Hootsuite has suggested that it be done – Profit / total investment (people hours, ad budget, etc.) X 100 = social media ROI (as a percentage).

Based on this formula, most of the content you create is probably not worth the investment. Unless, you increase the referral traffic and subsequent business that you get through your content. Several factors affect how much referral traffic you generate from content, content quality, time of posting and frequency of posting being some of them. Most content marketers spend hours creating content only to share it once and forget about it.

On DrumUp, you can save evergreen posts in libraries and set them up on an automatic and long-term publishing schedule.

#8 Visually highlight your product with powerful storytelling

The popularity of social media apps such as Instagram and Snapchat are a clear indication of how visuals are preferred over text based content in today’s world. Visuals, particularly those that have powerful stories behind them, perform better on social media. Visual stories are an upgrade on still images and can transform the way you connect with customers.

Facebook Stories is a great way to apply visual storytelling. Stories not only pushes you to communicate via visuals, but it also gives you premium space in people’s feeds. Facebook Stories appear on the top of mobile screens and on the right of desktop screens, spots which commands a lot of attention. As Stories are temporary and disappear within 24 hours, you can use them to run timely promotions and contests.

Facebook Stories isn’t the only place where you can apply visual storytelling. You can also work on visual storytelling in your regular Facebook posts and updates, by using different forms of visual content.

#9 Get creative with Facebook ad strategies

Facebook ads are now mainstream. Large business and small, every type of business uses Facebook ads to increase brand exposure, drive referrals and even attract business. However, not everyone is successful with Facebook ads. Businesses are always in between agencies, desperately trying to get their ads to work.

The key to running successful Facebook ads is understanding your conversion funnel and how it connects to the different formats of Facebook ads. Every company needs different messages and ad strategies for different stages of their conversion funnel. If you sell Saas products, for instance, you would do better creating your own custom audiences than you would do using Facebook’s parameters for targeting.

Several companies run Facebook ads using their own email lists and leads. This type of ad usually performs better, as it consists of people who are already aware of your product and how it works.

Now that we’ve discussed the major concepts in detail, we can move on to smaller concepts that you can apply to your Facebook marketing to get better results.

#10 Use negative comments to build an amiable brand presence

Never leave negative comments unaddressed on social media. Such comments can affect the way your current and potential customers perceive your brand. Instead, hunt for negative comments and use them as opportunities to exhibit your brand’s personality and quality of customer experience.

One of the things you should do anyway is to engage with everyone who leaves a comment on your page.

#11 Experiment with Facebook Local Search abilities

Local businesses can attract a lot of local customers by leveraging Local Search. Facebook’s Check-in and Location features allow you opportunity to be placed before potential local customers. How do you make use of this? Design a selfie corner in your store so visitors can click and upload visuals which will then appear on their connections’ feeds.

You could also run a campaign for check-ins. Here’s one that Arby’s ran.

#12 Use custom URLs to track conversions from Facebook traffic

It’s advisable to use custom URLs (with unique tags) for every social media post, if you intend to track it. You could use Google’s URL builder to convert regular URLs into customer trackable URLs each time you post OR simply turn on the URL shortener in your DrumUp dashboard.

#13 Invest in CRMs that leverage Facebook profiles and data

If you want to connect Facebook marketing to business goals, you need to make your marketing and sales efforts meet at a point. CRMs are the perfect place to make such a collaboration happen. Some CRMs such as FreshSales allow users to connect Facebook profiles of leads to the software, so you can leverage a prospect’s Facebook profile data when making sales calls.

Tools such as Socedo (social media lead generation) and LeadWorks (website lead generation) are also work considering.

#14 Encourage content re-sharing via employee advocates & other brand advocates

Facebook has drastically reduced organic reach for Pages. As a result, it’s difficult for commercial Pages on Facebook to get organic social media engagement. One way to workaround this issue is by getting employee and brand advocates to share your content. If you can’t do this manually (an doing it manually is hard), you can consider using an employee advocacy platform (like ours).

Here’s a guide to how you can run an employee advocacy program.

#15 Collaborate with brands – guest cuate & guest post content

Another way to get past the reduced organic reach hurdle, is by working with other well-established brands on Facebook. The easiest way to work another brand is to guest-curate content for them, in exchange for a mention or a feature. It goes without saying that you’ll get featured on a brand’s social media page if you have written for their blog.

#16 Run Facebook contests, quizzes and QnAs geared for virality

Contests, quizzes and QnAs are super-interactive ways in which you can interact with your Facebook fans. The easier a contest is to participate in, the more likely you are to get engagement. Even if you don’t directly get business from running a contest, you can get publicity from well-designed contests, quizzes and QnAs. You can even design them to grow your Facebook following or collect leads (ask for emails in exchange for the opportunity to participate).

#17 Custom-build your audience

What’s the point in having millions of followers if they rarely engage with you? The more selective you are about your fans, the better and more valuable your Facebook engagement is likely to be. You can custom-build your audience by inviting people on your email list to follow you and then following their connections (people tend to follow back) when you have followed them.

#18 Optimize your landing pages to receive Facebook fans

Invest in designing the best possible landing pages optimized for conversions – email sign-ups, purchases or downloads – based on what your goals are. Bear in mind where your referrals are coming from – Facebook – and use that information to build pages that can engage such an audience.

#19 Leverage video & Facebook Live

Video is slowly becoming the most consumed form of content on social media. By sharing video content on Facebook and live-streaming via Facebook Live, you can engage Facebook fans real-time. When using Facebook Live, remember to promote before broadcast, time it right and offer context for your video constantly, because you never know when someone might join.

Here’s an example of what you can do with Facebook Live, inspired by Tastemade UK.

As for creating Facebook videos, you can use 3rd party tools to make the task easier. I’m currently testing a few tools myself, and will write about my findings soon.

#20 Don’t ignore behind-the-scenes content and Facebook Stories

If you don’t have a lot of time or resources to create Facebook content, you can always use behind-the-scenes content to share with your audience. Behind-the-scenes content isn’t only easy to create but it’s also great for audience engagement. People connect more with other people than they do with faceless brands.

#21 Respond to people who engage with your page

When running a Facebook Page, you’re very likely to run into prospect customers. And when a prospect customer makes a genuine comment on your wall, it’s essential that you respond. Posts on your Page may be informative and representative of your brand, but to give your brand a personality you have to personally interact with fans.

Wrap

There’s a large disconnect between small businesses on Facebook and their target audience. To engage the right people on Facebook, social media managers need an understanding of how Facebook works and what strategies can yield the most engagement. The ideas listed in this post are worth trying.

Feature image – Raw Pixel via Unsplash.com 

Source