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Tag: Facebook

  • 6 Tips to Improve your Facebook Adverts

    How to Improve your Facebook Adverts

    So we know and accept that, all things being equal, your Facebook Page reach has dropped (sometimes significantly) over the last year or two. I think that’s fair enough and, if you want to “pay to play”, then here are 6 tips to improve your Facebook adverts.

    1. Include a face in your ad.
    2. Be very specific about who you are targeting.
    3. Try out more than one image for the same ad.
    4. Red grabs attention.
    5. Positive emotions work best.
    6. Follow the AIDA Model.
    improve your Facebook adverts
    Advertising is an essential part of your Facebook strategy

    A face :

    As humans (and consumers), we like to look at other people’s faces. Employing a nice, smiley face in your ad will help grab attention on the cluttered FB feed.

    Targeting :

    FB offers incredibly powerful targeting options. Use them to narrow the focus of your ad to the target market that really matters to you and your business.

    Vary images :

    For one single ad content, you have the option of trying out up to six different images. play around and discover which image works best, then concentrate your effort on that version of the ad.

    Colour :

    Different colours signify different things and bring out different emotions in readers. Scroll down to the end of this earlier post for more on colours in branding. Red and yellow grab attention, but while the latter does not work on computer screens, the former most definitely does.

    Positive emotions :

    If I feel nice when reading your Facebook adverts, I’m more likely to click on them to prolong the pleasant feeling.

    AIDA :

    Standing for “Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action”, the AIDA Model helps us focus in on the purpose of our ad. If we can locate ourselves and our business on the steps of this model, then we can better decide what we are trying to achieve with any given advert. Knowing what exactly its purpose is helps us devise a better ad.

    Improve your Facebook Adverts

    Advertising is now an essential part of the Facebook game we all play. I generally recommend that even the smallest micro-enterprise with a real audience on the platform should dedicate Euro 300 pa to Facebook adverts (plus VAT). Use these 6 tips to improve your Facebook adverts and see what positive results you are able to achieve.

  • Video on Facebook Pages – Get into It

    Updated March 2019

    Now we all agree that posting text only on our Facebook Page is a total no-no, right?

    Photo posts work much better, gaining greater reach and, critically, more engagement. However, you might be missing out on an even more powerful way to engage your audience. Video on Facebook Pages is, in fact, the way to go.

    I decided to do some basic research into this and found, unsurprisingly, that the figures do indeed back up this notion. It really is ever more about video.

    Source : Buffer.com

    So what I did was check back over the last eight months of posting on six Facebook Pages to which I have access. These Pages are all from different, but consumer-oriented (B2C) sectors. Each Page is marketing to consumers, rather than business-to-business (B2B).

    Now, knowing that organic reach on Facebook has been declining over the past year or two, I looked for a post on each Page that had a reach of approximately 1-in-6 (the oft-quoted figure for organic reach) of its fan base.

    I allocated this random post a reach of 1.0 and proceeded to compare all the following posts’ reach to that figure. In other words, if a subsequent post reached twice as many people, it scored 2.0 and so on. Note that all boosted posts were ignored – I was only interested in the performance of organic posts. Then, I averaged out the performances of the 6 Pages, as if they were, in fact, just one single Page. Still with me on this?

    Video on Facebook Pages
    Get into the habit of posting video on your Facebook Page

    Here’s how it panned out.

    Baseline photo-only post :     score of 1.0

    Average photo-only posts :    score of 1.3

    Average post with video :      score of 3.6

    Essentially, having taken some 500 posts into consideration, video posts can be seen to have reached almost 3 times as many people as photo-only posts. Shouldn’t you be posting more videos?

     Video on Facebook Pages – How To

    With your smartphone, simply shoot video on it and upload it directly, without recourse to a laptop.

    Indeed, these days you can even cut off the start and finish within your Gallery function, without needing an app. In this way, you can place the phone on a stand, hit the record button, walk to your desired location, do your thing, then walk back, turn the camera off and simply chop out all the tooing and froing afterwards.

    However, if you’d like to brand the video, through a title, captions and credits, add music and backgrounds, cut and splice, etc, then upload your video to your laptop and create a proper end product, I’d recommend Wondershare Filmora*. It will absolutely satisfy the needs of most micro-enterprises.

    And YouTube is full of video tutorials on how to use this wonderful tool.

    By the way, one last thing.

    Your audiences want to see you on screen, so bite your cheek and get used to being in front of the camera. Yes, you heard me!

    *Last time I checked, a once-off lifetime license cost US$60.

  • 5 Facebook Page Performance Stats

    Given the ever-increasing kerfuffle about dwindling organic reach of Facebook Page posts, I decided to take a look at four Pages I have access to and check some numbers. Here are 5 Facebook Page performance stats I’ve produced, based on the 40 most recent posts from each of these Pages, averaged out *.

     

    Facebook page performance
    Facebook

    1. Reach

    The average reach of the last 40 posts from each of the 4 Pages (i.e. 160 posts in total) was 36% (of the Page’s ‘likes’).

    2. Boosts

    When boosted posts were discounted, the average reach fell to 27%.

    3. Shared

    When posts by these Pages were not shared, the reach fell further, to 19%.

    4. Links

    For posts that contained a link leading away from Facebook, the number decreased to 12%.

    5. Questions & Opinions

    Among posts that were not shared, those posing questions or seeking opinions did not perform significantly better than simple image or video postings, at 23% v 19%.

    The Pages analysed were chosen because they would be typical of small businesses, often with no more than 2 employees, where posting is rarely more often than once a day, but equally unlikely to be less frequent than 4 times per week.

    These Pages would all have between 800 and 2,000 ‘likes’. While I haven’t gone into the frequency of likes and comments, it can be taken that most posts would have a number of comments or likes, but would be unlikely to generate tens of either terribly often.

    * Notes on Facebook Page Performance

    1. This research does not claim to be a thorough representation of what’s going on with Facebook Pages generally.
    2. All 160 posts contained at least one image or video – none was text-only.
    3. No post was guilty of “click baiting“.
    4. I haven’t taken into account the time of posting.

    Facebook Page Performance Resources

    The internet is jammed with resources on how to optimise your Facebook Page performance and listing some is almost pointless. Nevertheless, here are just 3 I frequently check in on.

    Jon Loomer

    Mari Smith

    Social Media Examiner

     

  • Social Media Training – Goals, Strategy, Actions

    Too often, social media training consists of simply what actions one can take on Facebook or other platforms.

    This is to miss the point and to overstate the importance of social media, as if it were the one and only issue facing a business. Social media training needs to include the all-important question of “Why ?”, not just “How ?”. This is about one’s goals, target markets and the strategies to be employed to build an audience and, ultimately, market products to the target markets identified.

    Social media training should, therefore, be first and foremost about ‘what to do’ goals, strategy and, only then, ‘how to do’ actions.

    The social media goals of a business might include :

    • to build a brand
    • to increase customer satisfaction and buy-in
    • to drive recommendations
    • to achieve PR
    • to generate leads
    • to develop new product / service ideas
    • to develop traffic to one’s main website
    • to make sales
    • etc.

    The strategy to achieve these goals includes the “Seven Cs” :

    • Categorising audiences
    • Comprehending them
    • Conversing with them
    • Contributing to them
    • building a Community
    • introducing Calls to action
    • Converting

    Only after working through these areas and the understanding of one’s target markets and on which social media platforms they ‘hang out’ should social media training get in to the nitty-gritty of how to use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, You Tube, etc.

    Training can then discuss behaviour on social media platforms, like being interactive, inviting opinion, comment and sharing ideas. The importance of some humour and light-heartedness can be discussed, alongside posing questions, sharing video and photo content, etc.

    Visitors to social media sites are looking for connection, information, entertainment and they seek authenticity from Pages. Social media training looks at how to behave, the question of etiquette and what fab content to provide to bring those viewers back, ultimately making of them an army of advocates.

    Please do get in touch, if you feel your business could benefit from social media training that puts these promotional tools into their strategic context and helps you with real-world actions to achieve your digital and over-arching business goals.

  • Facebook Adverts – Anatomy of a Performance

    People often ask me about their Facebook advert performance. It’s a little like asking how a retail shop should perform, but, of course, we know what they mean.

    Facebook adverts
    Facebook

    What people generally mean when they pose this question is this. How many clicks should I expect to get for my Euro 50 / 100 / 500 investment – whatever their spend figure might be. We’ll get to whether or not that’s the right question to be asking in a minute. But for now, let’s just take it on board. A browse of the internet will find blogger experts generally stating that a ‘successful’ Facebook advert can hope to generate around 0.1% CTR (click-through-rate). That equates to 1 click for every 1,000 times the advert was displayed (so-called ‘impressions’). More commonly, I would suggest, that figure is lower – often towards 0.02 – 0.05%.

    CTR depends on many factors, but what is nice about Facebook advertising is that it allows you to provide good information on who you are targetting with your ad. So it’s there you should begin. Inform FB about age, gender, geography, etc. By doing so, you’re increasing your chances of a more ‘successful’ campaign, as only ‘relevant’ people will even see the advert.

    However, CTR is not an end in itself. Counting CTR is like counting the number of people who cross the threshold into your shop. Clearly, it’s good that they’re there, but it doesn’t mean they make a purchase. The real rate that matters is the number of enquiries and the number of conversions – actual real-world, paid-for sales !

    Here’s an example of a recent, well-targetted Facebook Adverts campaign I’m aware of. The investment was modest, at Euro 50 over 14 days.

    Impressions – 445,000

    Clicks – 225

    CTR – 0.05% (i.e. 5 clicks for every 10,000 times the advert was shown)

    Verdict ? Pretty good on CTR. A decent number of folks went ahead and “visited the shop”, so to speak.

    Enquiries – 8 (i.e. number of those 225 people who clicked through the advert that went on to pick up the phone, or send an email)

    Sales – 0 (So, of the 225 people who walked into the shop, just 8 asked a question of the sales assistant. Of those, none made a purchase)

    Verdict ? Not great.

    So be sure to ask yourself the right question. Remember that FB is only the vehicle for placing your advert in front of the correct audience. Just because it’s online and more ‘hip’ than your traditional ad in the local paper, does not mean the question is any different. The metric that matters remains the same. How many sales did you make ?

    [Clearly, this assumes you’re trying to sell something through your Facebook adverts]