cheat sheet to facebook marketing
TRANSCRIPT
Cheat Sheet to Facebook Marketing
Facebook marketing is a lot more than just running campaigns through Facebook Ads.
Though the ad platform gets the majority of the attention, what you’re posting, sharing,
and building on your Facebook Page is just as—if not more—important.
Marketing on Facebook has quite a few massive benefits including (but definitely not
limited to):
- It’s a free marketing platform (except when running ads)
-It’s a platform that users will actively engage with instead of ignoring
-It averages with high conversion and click-through rates
-You build rapport and loyalty with your audience
Marketing on Facebook can be difficult, especially at first, but if you follow a few easy
steps it’s a lot easier. This cheat sheet to Facebook marketing gives you the steps you
need to follow (and continue to follow in a cyclical manner) in order to find success on
this incredible platform.
To make it easy, we’ve broken down this guide into 6 quick chapters that talk about each
of these steps:
Chapter 1: Connect With Your Audience
Chapter 2: Build Your Brand
Chapter 3: Build Engagement
Chapter 4: Interacting with Users
Chapter 5: Using Facebook to Make Sales
Chapter 6: The Power of Automated Posts
Chapter 1: Connect With Your Audience
There are several ways you can connect with your target audience on Facebook and
continue to do so. The hardest part is easily getting started—inviting your entire friends
list is a good start, but often doesn’t get you exactly the audience you’re looking for.
Some of the best ways to connect with your target audience on Facebook include
promoting your Page (on and off Facebook), using Facebook Ads, and utilizing groups
on Facebook.
Promoting your Page: Your Page is where you can post, and where users can come to
see what you have to say (and to say what they have to say). If you want to market on
Facebook, the first thing you need to do is get people to your Page—that’s where the
marketing happens.
There are a lot of ways to promote your Page, including:
-Promoting your Page off-Facebook: Post links to your Facebook Page
everywhere—on your website, on other social media sites, on your business cards,
everywhere. The more people who see it, the better.
-E-mail campaigns: If clients and potential customers liked you enough to sign
up for your e-mail list, they like you enough to follow your Facebook Page. This
is a great way to connect with an insanely
relevant audience; they’re already familiar
with you and have established some sort of
relationship with you. Make sure you mention
your Page, and always have a link to it in your
signature.
-Tag well-known Pages in your posts: No
matter what industry you’re in, there’s a good
chance there are a few major Pages everyone
follows (our niche, for example, has the
Facebook Auto Post Pro
RyanShaw.me
Social Media Examiner). If you share the content from these pages and tag them
in it, there may be some fans who see this (and are already interested in your
field) and click right back to your Page.
-Use hashtags:
Hashtags turn phrases
or topics into actual
clickable links in your
post, helping others
interested in the topic to
find it. You can use
hashtags to expand your
reach.
These methods are all effective, but they do take time. Don’t be discouraged—keep
working at it. If you’re looking for a quicker boost, it may be time to look at investing in
Facebook Ads.
Facebook Ads: Facebook’s ad platform is so effective with good reason: it works.
When you run Facebook Ads, you can choose from a large variety of options like running
campaigns for conversions, website visits, app installs, or likes or engagement on your
Page.
I rarely run campaigns with the goal of getting likes on a Page—if you run campaigns for
engagement, users are already prompted to like your Page while simultaneously being
encouraged to also interact with the ad.
While Facebook Ads is only one small facet of advertising and marketing on Facebook
(and is definitely not the focus of this guide), the ad system is a highly effective method
to connect with your target audience, partially thanks to Facebook’s targeting system.
Facebook Auto Post Pro
RyanShaw.me
This is easily the most effective way, really, to get your Page and brand in front of an
audience you think will be most receptive to it, whether they know about you yet or not.
Groups: There are a wide variety of groups that discuss every type of niche on
Facebook; groups for industry professionals, groups for people with different hobbies,
even groups of local “things-to-do” in cities and communities.
If you’re a local business, you can offer discounts to locals or group members in a
community group, always with information to your Page. You can network in groups for
industry professionals, and you can advertise to those in groups for a hobby. You can
have a link to your Page (often even better than a link to your website, especially when
you’re working on promoting your Page) and see who shows up.
To be clear: connecting with your audience in groups does not mean to spam the heck out
of the groups. This is a bad idea. It will not make you any friends, and it may even end up
getting you kicked out of the group.
The good news is that once you’ve gotten started connecting with your audience,
even though you’ll always have to make an effort to continue to increase those likes,
you’ve got momentum going; it’s likely that their engagement with your page, no matter
how they found you, will be seen by their friends (whether these just see a like on the
Page or the users recommend it directly), some of whom will likely share the interest.
It’s important to keep this momentum going. While continuing to make efforts to
promote your Page and connect with your audience is part of it, so is building your brand,
building engagement, and interacting with users.
Chapter 2: Build Your Brand
Facebook marketing offers you one of the best opportunities to build your brand, not just
on Facebook, but as a whole. You get to continually edit and put out content that you
want to represent you and your business
Facebook Auto Post Pro
RyanShaw.me
Profile and Cover Picture: This will be the first impression users get of your Page, and
in some cases, your entire business. Your profile and cover pictures matter a lot more
than you may think; they can of course help capture interest, but they also represent your
brand.
Having your logo, pictures of your product, your store, or something related to what you
do is important, especially since it needs to match what you want your brand to really be.
About me Section: In the About Me section, you actually get to describe your business
exactly the way you envision it; this is a rare opportunity. Instead of being a “sandwich
place,” as customers may label you, you can be “an eclectic sandwicheria and tea house
inspired by Asian cuisine.” This is a great place to spell out exactly what you want your
brand to be, and to reinforce it.
Transparency: Marketing on Facebook offers something really unique and special to the
marketing world: transparency, or at least the impression of it. Users feel like they’re
getting to see “the real you” and the inside look behind the scenes. It’s easy to reinforce
this by talking about things other than promoting your product, even if you never really
get too personal.
Posting pictures of your employees working on planning an event or making your
product (without giving too much away) can give that behind the scenes look.
Facebook Auto Post Pro
RyanShaw.me
This transparency is a great way to build rapport and loyalty with customers, new and old
alike. Nurture it.
Great, Unique Content: This goes
without saying, but it’s so important that it
still needs to actually be said. The content
you post becomes the single most
important part of building your brand on
Facebook, as well as your Facebook
marketing. It needs to interesting, original,
and just truly great—this is what makes
your Page worth visiting, and your
business worth knowing. It makes your
brand yours.
More than having strong content that also happens to be unique, it needs to be frequent
and consistent. Pick a voice for your brand and stick to it, and make sure you’re posting
frequently. If you’re not, people forget to check in or lose interest entirely.
Every single thing you post and add to your Facebook Page contributes to your
brand; even what users post can come to reflect on it. It’s important to keep this in
mind, especially since what you post stays online forever—someone can take a screen
shot faster than you can delete a mistake, and the screen shot is permanent. Every time
you’re about to update a post, don’t just check for grammar—check to make sure it aligns
with your brand and what you want it to be.
Facebook Auto Post Pro
RyanShaw.me
Chapter 3: Build Engagement
Here’s something a lot of marketers ignore when they focus purely on conversions and
short-term results: building engagement is crucial, because building engagement builds
loyalty.
No, it’s maybe not as immediately profitable to get a comment on your latest post as it is
to get a sale on your site, but long term it does matter—a great deal, actually.
On another major note, not only does increasing engagement mean a more loyal
audience, it also means a better reach. The more an audience engages with your content,
the more people will see it in their Newsfeeds, and the more you can connect with the
people who want to connect with you. This is a huge part of Facebook marketing, and it
should never be ignored.
Building engagement can be a struggle; it’s definitely something most Pages have a hard
time accomplishing. Fortunately, there’s some easy ways you can start to do this:
Ask Questions: A time-honored tip. Asking questions almost dares someone to answer
them, and people love giving their opinions. Whether it’s business-related (“What new
products would you want to see us bring in stock ?”) or not (“What are you doing this
Christmas?”), people love to answer.
Don’t Make it All About Business:
While we’re on the subject of talking
about non-business related topics, a
good rule to follow is the 80/20 rule.
This means that only 20% of your posts
on Facebook should be directly about
your products or promotions, and that
80% should be social (though this can
and often should still be industry or audience related).
Facebook Auto Post Pro
RyanShaw.me
As we'll discuss in the few next chapters, Facebook isn’t about the hard sell; people will
stop liking your Page if it feels like a sales pitch. Make it fun to be on your Page and
offer value, and people will keep coming back.
Utilize Pictures and Videos: Graphics capture the attention of users, even if it’s just
because they take up more room on a Newsfeed. Pictures wherever possible are great, but
even more than that, video views have increased dramatically on Facebook; a large
percentage of people will watch videos that show up in their Newsfeeds. If possible,
posting a video will likely get a lot of views, and it is more likely to get engagement, too.
Creating Content Users Really Want to See: Yes, this fits under building your brand,
too, so we won’t talk much about it here. But this is so important to building engagement.
Sharing content from other pages and sites, creating content you know your audience will
love, and finding content that also offers something unique are all important parts of
getting and keeping your audience engaged. This can be really difficult, consistently
posting great content, but we talk more about how to make that easier in Chapter 6.
Finally, one of the most important ways to build engagement is to respond when
users engage with your Page. But that’s important enough it has a chapter all of it’s
own.
Chapter 4: Interacting with Users
This is the point of a social media site, after all—to be social. In a regular sales call, you
don’t just talk at the potential client, you talk to them. There’s a conversation. When
users take the time to leave comments or ask questions on your Page, make sure you
respond to them, whether they are positive or negative—either way, they took time out of
their day to express their thoughts and concerns. A response back will mean a great deal
to them.
Particularly or negative comments or concerns, it’s ideal to respond within one hour. This
is not always possible, however; so long as you respond within 24 hours, you’re still in
the golden window.
Facebook Auto Post Pro
RyanShaw.me
Even if someone only comments on a post, it’s good to respond to as many of these
comments as you can. It shows that you are engaged with your users and take note of
what they say—even if you’re responding on autopilot.
Your website is the place to list information, post pictures of products, and say whatever
you want with a tiny “Contact Us!” at the bottom of the page. Your Facebook Fan Page is
where you have a conversation with the users that visit and engage with it.
In order to foster an environment where you can have these conversations, again, use the
tips from previous chapters to build engagement and excitement on your Page.
Interacting with users reinforces the loyalty and rapport you’ve started building the
second they choose to interact with you—it makes it stronger and seals those ties.
Being lazy and not following through is one of the biggest mistakes you’ll make, and can
really hurt your Facebook marketing. This is the last thing you want, since after you build
that loyalty, you can start to use Facebook to make real sales and real money.
Chapter 5: Use Facebook to Increase Sales (without Ads)
Before we get started, there’s one important fact you should always consider: with the
exception of Facebook Ads (and even sometimes including Facebook Ads), Facebook is
never about the aggressive hard sell.
Users come onto Facebook to interact with friends, click around, and enjoy leisure time.
They do not come on Facebook to have things sold to them like they’ve signed up to be
friends with an especially persistent car salesman. Making your Page all about selling
your product will get you unliked and potentially even penalized by Facebook faster than
you can blink.
That being said, it is more than possible to use Facebook marketing to increase sales,
even without Facebook Ads (though Ads is the quickest and often most efficient way to
make sales on Facebook). Using slow sell methods and building rapport over a long
Facebook Auto Post Pro
RyanShaw.me
period of time, Facebook marketing is more about a nudge and a follow-up than a sales
pitch; the idea is to remind users you and your product are there if they ever need
anything.
Fortunately, there are some tried and true ways of doing this. All of them require a
delicate hand (and again, no harsh selling), but all have been proven to work really well.
Post Sales: Sales are all about the customer’s benefit, right? And after all, you as
someone who cares about your customers would hate for them to miss the sale—it’s for
their benefit that they save the money. A fast reminder (“Hey everyone, don’t forget
about our 24 hour sale starting tonight!” with a link to the sales page) is all it takes to
prompt users to check it out. After all, who doesn’t love to save, even if it means
spending a little to do it?
Offer Discounts: You can offer special discounts for Facebook-only users, or only to
users who have left a review on your Page, for example. You can do this with Facebook
Offers (part of Facebook Ads), or you can just tell users off-Facebook (and on it) that you
offer special Facebook-only discounts. Using this discounts keep users checking your
Page frequently, as well as giving them the feeling of being included. This builds rapport,
and can help lead to sales.
Post Pictures of New
Products: Posting pictures of
your products is a great way to
remind users how much they
love and want your product.
This is especially true if it’s
particularly relevant to what’s
going on, such as seasonal
events. Clothing stores can
post pictures of a woman in
Facebook Auto Post Pro
RyanShaw.me
one of their raincoats in the rainy months, for example. Restaurants can post pictures of
their most appetizing dishes (this has an embarrassingly high conversion rate on people
like myself). You can do this in a fun, friendly way—it tends to work a lot better than a
sales pitch, too.
Don’t be Overly Aggressive: Again, we already touched on this in the beginning of the
chapter, but not only will being aggressive about sales lose you likes on your Page, it can
also get you penalized by Facebook and have your reach reduced. It is still ok to talk
about your business, your brand, your products, and even sales, but it’s not ok to have
posts telling customers to make a purchase or download instead of simply informing
them that it is there. Overly promotional posts that are created purely to sell something—
often identified relatively easily by an intrusive, assertive sales pitch with a call to action
—are what’s being punished here. You can see more about this here. As you'll see with
automated posts (like those from Facebook Auto Post Pro), there are better ways to post
monetized content without hard selling.
Facebook marketing wouldn’t be so popular if there wasn’t any potential to make
money from it. More than that, it wouldn’t be so popular if there wasn’t so much
potential to make really good money. And it is more than possible; again, it takes time
and effort, but Facebook marketing is a great way to increase your sales and your client
list. Fortunately, there is new software starting to emerge that helps make the process
both easier and faster: software that enables automated posts.
Chapter 6: The Power of Automated Posts
Multiple times throughout this guide we’ve mentioned how time consuming Facebook
marketing is. That’s true—it’s slow going, and it’s easily the most frustrating and
Facebook Auto Post Pro
RyanShaw.me
challenging part of the process, to continually find great content again and again and be
posting constantly for so long.
Fortunately, some really talented marketers have started coming up with ways around this
problem; some have even started creating software to make the process much faster and
easier for marketers, software that is designed to automate posts. An example of this
software is FB Auto Post Pro, which is launching April 6th.
What Are Automated Posts?
Automated posts are exactly what they sound like; you can set up a series of campaigns
through software to run (and repeat, if you choose) at a designated time for a designated
Facebook Page. You can set up these posts all at one time (say, setting up a week’s worth
on one day), and run them on schedule, so you can focus on other things.
The best news: software like FB Auto Post Pro actually provides you with resources to
pull relevant, monetized content in from various sources. You don’t even have to create
the content yourself, you just have to search for it, find it, and create a campaign around it
to distribute it to your fan pages.
How They Help You
The simple answer: they save you time and often money, make the process much easier,
and have the ability to make you a lot of money in the process.
Software like FB Auto Post Pro automates something you may be paying someone close
to (or more than) $1,000 a month to do by helping you find relevant, unique content
instead of having someone create it for you.
Even if you’re creating the content yourself, it’s still saving you a lot of time and money
by allowing you to focus your energy on the part of your business you probably love a lot
more than posting on Facebook.
Facebook Auto Post Pro
RyanShaw.me
Let’s even take away the fact that you don’t need to even create the content (content that
may end up not converting); even without that, the benefits of automated posting
software for Facebook are huge.
Part of the reason Facebook marketing is so challenging is because reach is so low;
automated software allows you to run a post or campaign multiple times without having
to keep track of what you posted when. This allows more people to see it, and hopefully
this means more people purchase.
You also have the benefit of a computer’s precision—an accuracy that is void of human
error. Nothing falls between the cracks with automated software: you don’t have to worry
about forgetting a post, or forgetting anything; everything happens through one program,
and happens on autopilot.
Especially when it comes to affiliate marketing, FB Auto Post Pro’s software can open
the possibility for a lot of moneymaking opportunities. You can run multiple fan pages
with every little effort, capitalizing on each one and increasing your ROI.
Conclusion
Facebook marketing is all about the slow and soft sell, not about hammering Newsfeeds
with pictures of your products and underhanded, self-indulging compliments about why
you’re better than the competition. It’s also extremely effective when done correctly,
even if it is time consuming, and well worth the time and effort put into it.
As discussed in the last chapter, however, it doesn’t have to be quite as time consuming
and exhausting when you have the right tools. FB Auto Post Pro, as mentioned, is a great
tool that will cut down on time spent on Facebook marketing tenfold, often while
delivering even stronger results in the long run. To find out more about FB Auto Post Pro
and how it can revolutionize your business and marketing on Facebook you can see more
here and sign up before it launches April 6th.
Facebook Auto Post Pro
RyanShaw.me