Tuesday 1 December 2015

Facebook Updates That are Great for Businesses

Exciting things are happening in Facebook world.If something exciting is happening in Facebook world, that means something exciting is happening in marketers’ worlds too!For a long social marketing media time marketers have wished they could do more organically with their Facebook posts. Especially after Facebook’s latest announcement that they were lowering priority for promotional organic posts, we were left wondering, once again, “what now?”I’m starting to learn that when Facebook takes a little they also give a little!So what’s Facebook giving marketers this time? A lot! In fact, these six updates all have big potential for businesses. For the last year I’ve been able to use my Graph Search bar to search things like “Posts by “ShortStack” that contain the word “contests.” I had no idea, until recently, that I was part of the beta testing of this feature by Facebook.This was a feature I loved and now the ability to search posts is coming to all users. If you’ve ever wanted to reference an older post that you’ve posted on your page, or that has appeared on another brand’s page, this is going to be the easiest way to do it. Personally, I use this feature a lot. How? To find a particular post I made on the ShortStack Facebook Page that I know was successful, or to find images and videos we’ve posted. Some other ways you might use this feature is to see what certain people are posting about your business. For example, you can search “Posts by Mari Smith about ShortStack” and it will pull up any post that Mari Smith has made where she’s mentioned ShortStack.
The possibilities are almost endless with this new feature, so we’ll be writing a blog post that further elaborates what can be done. social media for marketing Remember that you can only use this feature when you’re using Facebook as yourself, i.e., from your personal profile. However, you can search any post that has been shared or shown to you through the News Feed. That means you can search any Page you’re a fan of or follow or your friends’ profiles. This feature is going to be available via desktop and mobile! Aviation isn’t particularly easy. You have to take classes – quite a few, actually – before you can even get in the cockpit. And mistakes, as you might expect, are often costly. That’s why savvy pilots stay current on industry news, flight techniques, and developments in aviation technology. Boldmethod caters to this crowd. On Facebook, it takes part in what can only be described as inbound marketing – educating its fans about all kinds of things in the aviation industry, without actually selling any of its products. Facebook is a great platform for establishing thought leadership in niche communities, because it brings otherwise small and hard-to-reach groups together to interact with your brand. Boldmethod does this well.As in life, timing matters on Facebook. Posts that relate to current events – even if it’s just a holiday – are known to perform very well. Those events are top-of-mind; your fans are simply more likely to notice them in their feeds, and they’re more likely to interact with them too.

Target Organic Posts by Interests

According to Facebook, “To help you reach precisely the right people, we now offer the ability to target posts to a subset of the people that like your Page. social media marketing course For example, a publisher can use Interest Targeting to post a story about a sports game that will only be shown to people that like the teams playing.”One thing to keep in mind about this feature is that you can only target other pages that your existing fans like. With that said, the possibilities with interest targeting will vary based on your business type and your audience. The first thing you can do to benefit from this is to learn the main interests of your target audience. You can do this through your audience insights or by using Graph Search and searching “Pages liked by people who like.Once you know the main interests of your audience you can start building posting strategies that will target those interests. For example, when I use Graph Search to see the other Pages our fans Like among the list are Mari Smith, Mashable and Social Media Today. If we have some exciting social media best practices we want to post about, we could benefit from targeting that post to these interests so that it reaches a more relevant audience. Ideally engagement would be up since we’re targeting people who are interested in the topic.We’re still testing the possibilities with this feature, so check back over the next several weeks for when we publish our findings.
This feature has not rolled out to all Pages so it’s hard to say exactly how it will work. From the little we know, b2b social media marketing it appears that businesses who have an active website that receives a lot of backlinks will benefit. It appears that Facebook will look at the stories that are being linked to the most from a website and will predict/assume that the story will be of interest to the publisher’s audience and will generate a post and display that content to the brand’s audience automatically. Business’s will not see this in their own News Feed. You can see if you have this option by heading to Page Settings Publisher Tools Smart Publishing.According to Facebook, “We’ve added a new Top URLs section, which displays URL-level reporting and shows when other Pages and influencers share a post you’ve made to Facebook. For example, if a celebrity shares one of your URLs, you’ll know why that URL may have reached more people than other URLs. We also made the interface more intuitive and provide a way to segment data for specific time ranges, including hourly.We never have complaints when Facebook enhances Insights. With the latest upgrades, businesses will be able to know exactly who is sending traffic to their Facebook Page. We recommend using this information to find influencers and referrals to partner with. We don’t have the new insights yet, but the image below is from Facebook’s blog and gives an idea of what the new features will look like.

Set an End Date on Organic Posts

According to Facebook, “Post End Date allows Page admins to specify a day and time to stop showing a post in News Feed. social media marketing plans This tool prevents people from seeing out-of-date posts in News Feed, but posts will continue to appear on your Page. For instance, a publisher can use this to remove yesterday’s weather report from News Feed.” This update is pretty straight forward and I believe it will be beneficial for businesses who are using Facebook to promote current events/offers or promotions. Let’s say you’re running a “12 Days of Giveaways” promotion for the holidays. Your promotion is clearly going to end around Christmas time, so what happens to all of those posts after Christmas? Up until now, they would still be active on your Page and people could click the links (often leading to an error Page since the promotion has ended) and they could comment.The “End Post” feature is a great way to only have posts show on your Timeline during the timeframe that they’re active. You can also use this feature if you want to do a flash offer or giveaway on your Page, if you have a one time event you want to promote, if you want to do a live Q&A on your Timeline, or if you want to follow a current event with posts.According to Facebook, “Until now, it has been challenging for large publishers to predict which stories will resonate with their audience. Smart Publishing is a new, optional tool that identifies and publishes stories that are popular with people on Facebook. Once you enable the setting, frequently shared links to your website can appear in News Feed for people who like your Page.
For each page, you’ll see the average monthly organic reach, viral reach, and engagement, and how each metric compares with the average for pages of the same size. social media marketing podcastEngagement is based on the number of people engaged / the number of people reached. To see how your Facebook page compares against this average and have it added to the list, you just sync your page with the Facebook page Barometer. It’s free and only takes 30 seconds. Those posts will not appear on your Page, but you’ll have access a new dashboard in Insights to see analytics, moderate comments, and choose which you want to post to your Page.Animals Australia is a charity; it survives on donor contributions. But, you would be hard-pressed to find any hard soliciting on its Facebook page. Instead, you’ll see humorous pictures and videos of animals, tips for raising your pets, and even an inspirational story or two – like koalas being rescued from a wildfire.They’re a Christian lifestyle brand. Their Facebook page, unsurprisingly, is full of posts recommending films for Christian audiences. But, they also post the occasional Bible verse or televangelist quote, usually in picture format.On Facebook, celebrity pages are not a sales platform. They’re a marketing one. More specifically, they’re about establishing a personal relationship between the celebrity and his/her fans. A relationship that, in turn, will drive sales.The Argenis Carruyo Official page gets this right. It doesn’t pitch album sales. Instead, it posts videos of rare concerts, wishes fans happy holidays, puts pictures of Argenis and his family up, and generally makes him seem like somebody who could live down the street from you.

No comments:

Post a Comment