Tuesday 1 December 2015

Social-Media Tips to Enhance Your Marketing

Read below to see which tips and strategies worked best for the Buffer Facebook page, and feel free to use our learnings as the basis for tests of your own. social media marketing degree There are tons of strategies out there, and you can find one that works for your page. I’m excited to share which ones worked for us.First things first, if I wanted to know which Facebook strategies might move the needle, I needed to see where the needle was at the beginning. I had to have a baseline of how our Buffer Facebook page was performing so I could compare how well each of the tests worked.Try starting with the Page Likes objective – you’ll build your audience and encourage folks to like your page. More likes make you look popular, which encourages more people to like you in a domino effect – it’s a safer alternative to buying followers on social media. Facebook Offers works similar to the Google Offers Extensions, letting you promote a deal exclusively to Facebook users. Try using an offer to give away an item – maybe an ebook or whitepaper – in exchange for an email address. Or create an offer or discount to be redeemed in your brick and mortar store. It’s recommended that you target your first Facebook Offer to just your fans. If it goes over well, then you can widen your net to larger audiences. With nearly half of Facebook activity being conducted on mobile devices, Facebook is a clever option for mobile app developers looking to promote their creation. Include a call to action in the body text of your Facebook paid ad to encourage FB users to take your desired action.
You can create an ad for a website by selecting the Clicks to Website objective or the Website Conversions objective. social media marketing los angeles Be aware though that Facebook ads not connected with a Facebook page will appear exclusively in the right column, not in the News Feed.When someone interacts with your Facebook page, offer, event, etc. the action triggers Facebook posts, or “stories,” that the user’s friends may then see in their News Feed. These “stories” are generated naturally but are often buried in the News Feed. Opting for sponsored stories basically means you are paying to increase the likelihood that these stories will be seen. You can opt in or out of sponsored stories in the left column of the ad creator tool. When promoting a Facebook page, the automatic setup is for the ad headline to be the same as your page’s title. Instead of leaving it as-is, type out your own customized ad headline to make the ad more enticing. Aside from your social media image selection, the headline is one of the main ways your ad will make an impact (or fail to).Using Facebook for advertising can help you promote a page, app, or even an event! Exercise all your options.You can choose from a number of different bid setups for controlling Facebook advertising costs. You can bid for clicks, impressions, or your desired objective (e.g., Facebook page likes). If you choose the recommended (and selected by default) option of bidding based on your objective, your bid will automatically be set to help you reach your objective, whereas bidding for clicks or impressions allows for more customization.

Send the right message to the right platform

Every social media platform serves a different purpose and draws a distinctive audience. Understanding this can make your marketing efforts go more smoothly. social media marketing strategy template For example, you wouldn't want to promote a law firm on Instagram or Pinterest.Evan LePage, a writer for HootSuite, explains that Twitter users enjoy an image that has been attached, Facebook users like pictures and can’t stand asking for likes and Google+ followers are passionate brand advocates. Test each platform to see how your audience responds. I’ve found that women tend to be on Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook, and men turn to Twitter and Google+ more. Here is additional data from Alex Hillsberg on how men and women use social media. As an advertiser, you can choose to set up a daily budget or a lifetime budget. A daily budget controls how much you will spend on a specific campaign per day. Your ads and sponsored stories stop showing once you hit your daily ad budget, helping your budget Facebook advertising rates based on each daily cycle. Lifetime budget lets you select how much you want to spend over the entire span of time a campaign is scheduled to run. Don’t forget that each campaign has a separate budget, so create a social media marketing plan to keep Facebook advertising prices within your comfort zone. You can edit your campaign’s end date or budget anytime after the campaign has started running. While you can’t change your minimum daily spend limit (it’s set at $50), you can change your daily ad budget, which ultimately is what really controls the cost of Facebook advertising.
Facebook advertising rules dictate that image-based Facebook ads that are set to appear in users’ news feeds won’t get approved if the text takes up more than 20% of the image space. social media marketing resume Facebook has a grid tool to help ensure that your image ad follows the guidelines, but as Jon Loomer has noted, sometimes you can get around this simply by moving your text around slightly.First things first, if I wanted to know which Facebook strategies might move the needle, I needed to see where the needle was at the beginning. I had to have a baseline of how our Buffer Facebook page was performing so I could compare how well each of the tests worked.I was excited to improve these numbers and to put into practice much of the great advice out there on how to share to Facebook. Here is a list of the techniques I tried.Below are the results from the tests. You’ll notice that for each test I’m including the average and the median stats because on occasion the average might have been skewed a bit by a single outlier (a post that got seen by 3,500 people, for instance). Also, our social media strategy focuses a lot on clicks and reach, so those two stats will be highlighted the most. Questions on any of this? Let me know in the comments!Every time someone visits Facebook, they could have on average 1,500 potential stories to see from friends, people they follow, and Pages. A majority of these posts publish during the day with peak times between 8:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. ET.

Don’t just rely on organic strategies

In a perfect world, organic search-engine optimatization efforts would be enough for all your marketing needs. social media marketing campaigns And best of all, it’s free. But the world isn’t perfect. Sometimes you have to pay for a spike in traffic. A pay-per-click strategy is a great way to get immediate results. Use Google Adwords to advertise near specific searches of keywords and you'll only pay if someone clicks on your ad. And all the major social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, offer opportunities to purchase ads. Advertising is available on YouTube and Reddit. Consult Larry Kim's guide on this topic. When you pay for placements, you expand your outreach outside of your current community of contacts in a rapid and effective way. While organic strategies are great, it doesn't hurt to shell out money for ad placements on social media networks. One of the ideas with increasing your posting frequency is that you may be able to increase your total clicks and engagement for the day (without necessarily improving on clicks per post and engagement per post). A greater volume of updates, even if the updates hold steady with engagement, will lead to more total interactions via simple addition. More posts should equate to more everything.Clicks fell ever-so-slightly (two fewer on average). Average reach stayed mostly the same, while media reach fell nearly 20 percent.
At the other end of the frequency spectrum is the advice to post to Facebook less often. In our case, we tested posting only once per day. social media marketing service This advice stems from a pair of studies on Facebook frequency by Social Bakers and Track Social. Both studies conclude that sharing five to 10 times each week is the ideal frequency. Five to 10 times per week works out to about once or twice per day. Nearly a mirror of the above results on frequency. Clicks fell slightly and a bit more so than posting six times per day. Median reach took a big dip (down 25 percent), and average reach held steady.It’s one of the recommended strategies by Post Planner, and anecdotally it makes a lot of sense for getting more comments, likes, and interactions from the community. The thinking goes that as Facebook notices people engaging with your content, future content stands a better chance of reaching more people.For the past several months, our community champion Nicole has posted an open-ended question five times per week on our Facebook page. These have been great for stirring conversations.Asking questions turned out to be the biggest drop of all the Facebook marketing tips we tested. Clicks were down by as much as 50 percent, and reach fell nearly 40 percent. On average, our posts were seen by 250 fewer people.For comparison, a typical open-ended chat question (without a link) sees a slight bump in reach compared to an average post, and the chat questions typically get five to seven comments. The questions with links received zero comments.

No comments:

Post a Comment