Facebook is more than just a go-to website for all of those status updates from friends and family, funny cat videos, and questionable political posts. Facebook Marketing is also a very powerful tool for businesses of all sizes to use in their marketing strategy–and it doesn’t have to cost thousands of dollars in marketing budget, either. Facebook marketing has become a beast in itself, something different from Google and keyword marketing as well as most other forms of social media marketing. And, it is widely considered a staple for any business, so creating a Facebook strategy is a must. Contrary to popular belief, marketing on Facebook still follows the same rules and tips of any other type of online marketing. The social network of over one billion active users worldwide is the undisputed king of the social networks and luckily for you, buyer personas and demographics still play a big part in Facebook marketing.

Facebook Marketing: Before The Update

Most businesses dive into social media management on Facebook head first without much thought of a campaign or strategy. Unfortunately, that means many strategies will fail and turn off many businesses from the prospects of Facebook marketing, which is why you need to develop a solid plan before that status update is posted. All of the social networks have their major demographics, Facebook is no different. The majority of the demographics are segmented between older adults (your parents, for example) and the younger generation. Though all sorts of people use Facebook, it is good to consider these demographics in your own plan. If you’re aiming for a younger demographic then your Facebook page needs to reflect that. Fortunately, Facebook analytics can provide deep insights into a demographic’s likes, dislikes, location, and much more. In fact, you can use Facebook insights to find out the exact demographics of your audience as well as measure their behavior on a post by post basis. This allows you to target your posts, measure the effectiveness, and optimize your interactions with your audience for maximum effect. Utilize these tools to really understand the audience you want to reach, being able to segment different audiences into specialized demographics to be able to create customized content just for that group. Once that is accomplished, then you’re ready to post.

Content On Facebook

What’s the most popular types of content on Facebook? The most shared types of content happen to be images and video, though written content like news and online articles also have a high engagement and sharing likelihood, too. Facebook marketing relies heavily on social media content, but, it’s going to be different for each brand. Diversifying content is always good, but striking that “perfect” spot with your audience will mean being able to experiment with all sorts of content. Sometimes an audience might engage more with a picture than a video, or share an article more than an infographic. Analyzing that data is easy enough through Facebook, fortunately. Note: you will need at least 30 people to Like your page for such analytics.

Sharing Versus Over Sharing

We all know that one person who just doesn’t know when it stop on Facebook. They update in the morning, in the afternoon, at night, during the weekends–all the time! Over sharing on a personal page on Facebook can be easily avoided, but when a business over shares it can have serious repercussions. But, what is considered too much? How about too little? An automated schedule can help to ensure everything is read and engaged with, but finding out how much is “just right” is up entirely to your audience. Ideally, four or five posts a day is good enough, though. Weekends are said to be great for sharing, but the weekdays are better for engagement and customer relationship management. Just remember not to neglect your Facebook for weeks on end!

The benefits of Facebook groups for building your online business, blog and brand are plentiful. Facebook groups are great place to generate leads, build your email list and ultimately sell your products and services.

You probably have seen some of the massive Facebook groups that are in your marketplace or niche. As an online entrepreneur, blogger or internet marketer, you probably think from time to time, “How can I get access to all of those people that are interested in my products ans services?”

Get Traffic From Other People’s Facebook Groups

Getting traffic from other people’s Facebook Groups is not actually that difficult, but there are a number of rules you have to follow.

The first thing you should do is join the group. Once in, get in touch with the group owner or administer. Be completely open that you are in the same industry or niche as them and you would be open to any kind of mutually advantageous relationship.

Do The Work For Them

You probably already understand that consistent, regular interaction is needed on social media if you are going to be successful building your brand.

When other person’s Facebook group is appealing to you, remember that person may have difficulty engaging his or her audience by publishing regular content. In exchange for a link back to your website, offer to provide a certain number of weekly updates or posts.

The larger the Facebook group, the even bigger the need for suitable content material and engagement. You may be surprised that your competitors are delighted to let you manage some of their workload in return for sending traffic to your site.

Engagement Is the Key

When you join someone else’s Facebook group, engage the audience you find there. Answer questions and provide valuable content. Become a well-known information source in that group. When people in the group know they can depend on you for useful information they will check out your profile. If you have included a link back to your website, they will normally want to take a look.

Provide A Free And Valuable Resource

Contact the Facebook Group admin person and offer to create a valuable resource for the members of the group. In return for this free gift you’re offering the group, ask if you can add a link back to your website. Even if they prefer you not to do this, you can place several hypertext links to your website inside the product you will be giving away to the group.

Many times a competitor gladly agrees to this kind of relationship. It helps their group members out and helps their relationship with the group, while also helping you to drive traffic to your website.

Facebook is really a great platform for promoting a business, brand and connecting with customers. But do you think leveraging the power of Facebook for a business is really simple? Well, actually it is not. Only updating your Facebook wall cannot make people come to your page and respond. It has been observed that many business owners use Facebook without a defined marketing plan. As a result, most of them stop updating their pages when they stop getting the desired results.

So what can be done to get more likes on Facebook? You should work toward getting likes for both your Facebook page and the posts as mere liking of your Facebook page doesn’t guarantee that all of your posts will reach those people who liked your page.

After checking on an individual’s past likes, the entire likes on the post, and the post’s age, Facebook decides what shows up in somebody’s News Feed. Based on my own experience, here are five easy tricks that have improved engagement on my Facebook page:

• If you have a website, create a blog section and maintain it with regular updates. Use Facebook like and share button, and plug-in in your blog posts so that the visitors of your site can share those posts easily after reading.

• Write relevant, unique, engaging, and easy-to-understand contents for social media promotion. Try infographics and video contents too.

• Make the use of relevant and eye-catching images as a regular part of your content strategy to increase engagement and reach on your page and posts. Also, you need to give importance to right timing. If you are posting when a major amount of your target audience is asleep, it is just pointless. So, to know what works best for your target audience, schedule all the posts for a few days at the same time of day or try experimenting with post frequency. After that, it will be easy for you to check via Facebook Insights whether engagement rate on your page has increased or decreased.

• Promote your Facebook page on your other social media accounts, like Twitter, LinkedIn etc.

• Start engaging with other pages. Share your thoughts in response to other people’s posts. Comment as your Facebook page rather than from your personal Facebook profile.

Hope these basic tips can help you go a long way in promoting your page on Facebook.

Do you have any other tips on increasing engagement with your prospects and customers on Facebook? Feel free to share what tactics you have applied. Leave a comment here.

Wal-Mart

o Focus excessively on their marketing message

o Restricted comments and feedback to “Wall Posts” and heavily moderated them

o Stray from its core brand value of deep discounts to give fashion/style/taste advice to Facebook Users

o 2,000 members participated in their quiz

Target

o Open a discussion board and allowed for 2-way conversation.

o Spend time to understand how Facebook users were interacting with each other and turned down the volume of their marketing message

o 7,176 members, 409 photos, 483 pots and hosted 37 discussion groups

As Target was launching a successful marketing campaign on Facebook, Wal-Mart also tested internet marketing on Facebook again but failed to achieve much success.

So why did Wal-Mart fail? One killer mistake was to assume social internet marketing as being similar to offline traditional medium. In offline marketing, the winner is usually the one with the loudest volume on their marketing message. In social marketing however, it is often the better listener that enjoys the greater success.

While Target was engaging users through discussion boards, Wal-Mart decided to restrict dialogue to “Wall Posts” and heavily moderated what was allowed. This backfired immediately as users soon notice the lack of 2-way dialogue and started a torrent of anti Wal-Mart comments. In contrast, Target made students a part of their discussion group and to shape the dialogue around them instead of themselves.

Another big mistake that Wal-Mart made was to stray away from its core identity as a supermarket that offer deep discounts. Wal-Mart tried to engage users by offering fashion and style advice which didn’t jive well with Facebook users. Instead of focusing on their core value proposition of deep discount through offering good discount of back-to-school supplies and thinking of ways to disarm critics they choose to do otherwise.

Wal-Mart has always been a lightening rod due to their corporate reputation and labor practices. They ought to know that the moment they go social, negative comments and criticism would be part and parcel of the campaign that they will have to manage. But instead of going open and engage users, they tried to restrict dialogue and focused on a 1-way communication plan.

The different in tactics resulted in very different outcomes. Wal-Mart received at least 2,000 members who participated in their roommate quiz and other activities. Target on the other side had attracted over 7,176 members who post more than 410 photos and 483 posts. Target also hosted a total of 37 discussion groups over their entire campaign period.

Owyang, an analyst at Forrester explained that the issue had to do with strategy. “Wal-Mart’s strategy appears to be more of an interactive Website design, which is evident because it isn’t using the discussion forum. Target is involving students to shape and be part of the group.”

Adopting a Website design in a social environment is like driving a nail through your own leg. Limiting conversation in a social environment and positioning themselves as something they were not meant to be killed Wal-Mart social internet marketing campaign from the moment it was conceived.

Have you ever been poked on Facebook and wondered exactly what it meant? Well, in this article, we will take a look at the meaning of a Facebook poke. It might just mean much more than you think.

Whenever I go on Facebook, I see a little portion of the screen saying that people have poked me. Facebook claims that a poke can be used “to say hello” to your friends. Thus, I see this poke feature on Facebook as a way that my friends are saying, “Hello, I am thinking about you and I miss you.”

Thus, I think a poke feels pretty good.

After you receive a poke, you then have the option of poking back. This could be translated as a way of saying, “Thanks for thinking of me. I feel the same way.”

However, this is just the surface meaning of a poke on Facebook, but if we dig deeper, we may find that a Facebook poke means much more.

Such was the case with my friend Bob.

Bob recently asked me, “Richard, what does a Facebook poke mean to you?”

I said, “It’s an acknowledgment, a friend saying hello.”

He claimed that sometimes it can mean much more and proceeded to tell me a story.

Long ago, Bob had been good friends with a girl named Alexandra. Alexandra and Bob often took their relationship passed the friendship level but it never changed into a full blown relationship. Thus, after some time, Alexandra met someone and ended up marrying this man and invited Bob to the wedding.

As it happens when people lead different lives, Bob and Alexandra stopped communicating with each other on a regular basis pretty quickly and then not at all. In fact, they went five years without really talking to one another at all.

And then, Bob received a Facebook poke from Alexandra out of the blue. After not communicating for five years, Alexandra suddenly initiated communication.

Bob wondered about this sudden Facebook poke. Was this just an acknowledgment or was there something more to the story?

Well, it turns out, after Bob checked Alexandra’s Facebook profile, she was single again. Bob decided to poke her back and see where things led.

In the end, Bob and Alexandra began dating and now they have plans to marry each other.

Thus, while a Facebook poke is often just an acknowledgment, it can sometimes say a whole lot more!

Google and Facebook reach millions of users, and both offer small businesses a chance to reach new customers through target advertising. An ad campaign can let you reach thousands or even millions depending on whom you target and how much you are willing to spend.

But are there times when Google is a better choice than Facebook for an ad campaign? The two platforms work slightly differently so lets compare the two and why you might choose one over the other.

Understanding Google AdWords

Google advertising works through bidding on keywords. You choose certain keywords you want to focus on based on your target audience, and when a user searches that term she’ll see your ad. The key to a successful campaign is understanding what words or phrases your customers are likely to use when searching.

The second part of a successful Google campaign is making sure that the copy you use on your landing page closely matches the language used by your customers. This leads to a higher conversion rate when potential customers click on your ad. Also avoiding AdWord mistakes can have a positive effect on the performance of your campaign.

Understanding Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads are an excellent way to boost your brand by advertising to people who match a certain criteria. Facebook offers a sophisticated platform that lets you target people based on geography, demographics, their interests, and connections such as the groups they belong to. Facebook video ads are gaining popularity and could eventually challenge YouTube for the massive online video marketing budget.

The advantage of Facebook advertising is that you can reach people who aren’t necessarily searching for what you offer and may not even be aware of the product or service you are selling. This is a very different approach than with Google, where you are only reaching people specifically searching for your keywords.

Choosing between Google and Facebook

While Facebook advertising campaigns tend to be somewhat cheaper to run than Google AdWords campaigns, it’s important to look at relative success rates. Advertising on specific keywords through Google tends to have a higher conversion rate because the customers you are reaching are already in the mindset to purchase the item they were searching for.

A Facebook campaign may let you broaden your reach for a lower cost, but you may not gain as much new click-through business. As we stated above, the value of a Facebook campaign is getting out the word, spreading your message to new customers so you can make them aware of your brand.

Ideally your business should take advantage of both resources. One approach is to split your online marketing budget between the two platforms, or you may want to weigh spending more heavily on one platform depending on your current goals.

Do you have a new product that you are trying to promote? In that case it makes sense to invest in Facebook ads geared towards your target audience. On the other hand, if you have an established product and ROI is your most important concern, you’ll probably want to put more of your spending in Google AdWords.

Both platforms offer excellent analytics to let you monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns. The best approach is to experiment with both types of advertising and see what gets you your best results.

In the last few years, Facebook became the main social media platform in the world and we became completely dependent on it. From information that affects our buying habits, through links to news and events in the country and beyond, to debates about political and social issues – everything can be found in one place and people became digitally lazy.

Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook’s CEO announced major changes to the Facebook’s News Feed a month ago. He said that its 2 billion users will see less public content from brands, businesses and media. The goal is to bring people together through meaningful posts from friends and family. This is a second major update that Facebook is making since last year when they have been working on reducing the fake news and clickbait.

In 2018, Facebook will prioritize three features:

• News that community rates as trustworthy

• News that people find informative

• Local news that are relevant to where people live.

However, what does this mean for brand and businesses and what are the impacts?

With these updates, brand and businesses will notice that the reach, video watch time and referral traffic on their pages will decrease. The impact will vary from page to page, depending on the type of content they produce and how people will interact with it. Pages with the biggest decrease will be those who publish posts on which people don’t react to or comment on.

Businesses are no longer considering the “organic reach” because fewer people are seeing their content. They have already sponsored their posts for bigger visibility and reach. The advertising will become more expensive despite the fact that an ad algorithm will remain the same. You will have to focus more on quality vs quantity of the posts, on campaigns instead of daily communication and on paid rather than organic reach. Now is the time to focus on Google and your website, as well to activate other channels of communication. We especially emphasize Instagram as social media platform that is constantly growing and behaving as Facebook behaved in the golden age. Let’s not forget that Instagram is owned by Facebook and it’s not known how it will take place in the future.

According to Facebook, the groups will have bigger role due to the possibility of encouraging debates and discussions. But through groups you will not be able to generate visits to your website. It still needs to be seen how things will take place in these regards.

Our opinion is that brands and businesses will adapt this update very quickly, while the media will go through a process of turbulence because they are much more dependent on Facebook. It is easier for brands because they can develop a strategy that will include other channels of communication, despite Facebook. The situation is different with media. Facebook published new filtering systems where users will determine which media is relevant.

For some people, Facebook is a great social media tool for business and, for others, not so much. In fact, growing a pool of fans and followers on Facebook can be quite challenging at times. However, it is well-worth putting forth the effort because the payoff can be great for your business. Fans and followers are important because they help boost your credibility and reputation.

What was is not the same anymore

If you are just starting to build your web presence or you have recently started to add new pages to what you already have, you may be experiencing some issues with increasing your number of fans. One key to having success with Facebook is to plan your strategy carefully and then execute that strategy until you start to see the results that you are hoping for.

One thing that is certain is that your Facebook fans are critical to your success. That is exactly why your pool of fans is so important to your business. As you are considering what to do in order to successfully grow your group of fans, there are several logical steps that you will want to take, which will help you to get where you want to be.

• Determine exactly who is your target market: Before you can do anything else, you must have a clear understanding of exactly where your brand focus should be. That will affect everything that you do with regard to branding and strategy. Of course, once you have identified your target market (which consists of your target audience members), you will need to wrap your mind around the likes and dislikes, needs, wants, etc., of those members so that you can strategize appropriately for them. After all, if you are not able (or not willing) to give them what they want and need, they will not stay with you.
• Speak their language: After you determine exactly who your target audience members are and you have successfully gotten inside their heads, the next thing that you will need to do is to speak their language. If the tone of your materials is not appropriate and clear for them, they will lose patience and walk away. The appropriate tone will go a long way to building trust between you and you will also appear more credible in their eyes. Both trust and credibility are critical to your success.
• Engage them in ways that work for them: Because all human beings are different, they don’t all necessarily respond the same to a particular type of engagement. They react differently. The only way to come up with a winning engagement approach is to try it with each person and then determine if it works with him or her. The types of engagement that you may want to try are posing a thought-provoking question, sharing an interesting graphic, running a contest, conducting a survey, or making a provocative comment. One (or more) of those should work for every person with whom you want to be involved.
• Make the commitment: Just like anything else that is worth having, social media engagement requires a commitment and a clear message that you are in it for the long haul. Facebook is certainly no different. If you are to succeed with Facebook, you will have to spend the time, make the effort, and nurture the relationships that you have built with other people. It will not necessarily (in fact, probably not) require that you spend a great deal of money. However, it will serve you well to remember that nothing in life is free.
• Be a human being: The main reason that your relationship with other people is so successful is that you are human, just like the other person. That means that you connect on an emotional level and you react emotionally to each other. It is very important for you to remember that relationships take time to build. Trust takes time to establish and credibility doesn’t happen overnight. You will need to be patient and to keep at it until you have reached a point with the other person that really works for both of you.
• Be consistent with your postings: It is very important that you maintain consistency when it comes to your content. People need to have something good to look forward to and they need to see something from you that you know they can rely on. That means that you post on the same days of the week and at the same times on those days. Of course, if you see that what you are doing isn’t working, you will need to revisit when you are posting. You will hopefully (sooner rather than later) come up with a formula that works for you and for your target audience members.
• Pay attention to analytics: Analytics are critical to your professional success. You can’t just walk around in the dark, not having any understanding if what you are doing is working for your business. If something isn’t working, you need to make an adjustment until you find something that does work. The fact is that not all businesses use the same approach. In fact, the same approach will not work for all businesses. Only you can determine which approach works for your particular business.

Conclusion

Facebook is an important social media tool for business. However, it is important to remember that you can’t do anything on Facebook (or any other social media channel) without fans and followers. It is also important to remember that you want your fans to be engaged, not just random. Although you are loyal to the fans that you have already, it is still a good idea to increase your Facebook fan pool so that you are able to bring your business to the next level. Constant growth is a must.

The inception of social network have changed the very fabric of internet and online interactions. Billions of people use social networks like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter to stay in touch with their friends and followers every day. So, by virtue of the massive amount of daily page views these networks boost of, advertising professionals have realized the burgeoning potential they hold for ads.

However, no platform makes online advertising as facile and controllable as Facebook, the biggest social network on the planet. Since it launched its targeted advertising feature in 2012, it has become a go-to platform for many online advertisers because of the tremendous reach and flexibility it holds. Consequently, nearly 50% of Facebook’s revenue now come from ad sales.

Here are some of the reasons Facebook is considered to be a next-gen advertising platform:

Unprecedented Popularity

No website on Earth, apart from the Google Search Engine, can boast of the amount of daily page views that Facebook receives. It has close to a whopping 1.28 billion active users. Thus allowing you to target a wide spectrum of your niche. Not to mention the enviable number of impressions your ads are going to get on a daily basis.

Cost Effective

With Facebook Ads, you only pay for the amount of clicks you receive. Setting up a viable Facebook page and getting your ads online costs $0. Also, you can create a budget for your ad and fix the amount of finances Facebook has access to. With such features, getting more viewers or customers costs only a fraction of what it would if you opt for other online marketing strategies.

Targeting Control

Facebook offers an unparalleled control over who you want your audience to be. You can fine tune your ad campaign to a very refined target viewership. For example, you can place an ad for a Spanish Language School in New York with the target audience being 14-19 year-olds who have demonstrated a penchant for learning Spanish, either by liking pages of rival schools or by enrolling there. Such level of precision allows you to get meaningful results out of your advertisements.

Facebook Blueprint

Facebook Blueprint, launched earlier this year, is an academy for anyone looking to advertise through Facebook, including marketing professionals, vendors and advertising agencies. It offers free courses on a variety of modules pertaining to Facebook advertising. These include the likes of Managing Your Ads, Purchasing Ads, Reporting and Measurement, Campaign Optimization, etc. However, it can be argued that Blueprint’s content is a little too thin for many professionals with most courses taking close to 15 minutes to complete. But it warrants mentioning that no other advertising platform offers the sort of corporate e-learning regime that Facebook does.

Third Party Tools

The popularity of Facebook Ads has resulted in the emergence of countless third-party platforms that aim to make the experience of advertising on Facebook even more rewarding. Websites like Ad Espresso, offer optimization and designing services that allow you to get the most out of your ad campaigns.

In conclusion, Facebook Ads are the future of advertising and it is being reflected in the rate of adoption. According to Social Bakers, 92% of social marketers have already turned to Facebook as their main advertising platform. The numbers would only go up from here.

The question of the effectiveness of Facebook advertising is something online marketers have pondered on since the social media giant opened its doors to advertisers in 2010. Facebook had at that stage already attracted over 400 million users, who could join for free, so the next logical step was to offer advertising space, a decision that turned Facebook into one of the most profitable online businesses. The problem for Facebook was how they could compete with Google’s tried and tested advertising platform, which had an established and loyal user-base. We look at the features and benefits of Facebook’s advertising platform and whether it’s a worthwhile offering for marketers.

Whilst Facebook executives are adamant that their advertising platform does work, they do insist that you need to look beyond the actual clicks and stats to see the real value of the ads. This doesn’t sound like a great position to start from if you are trying to sell this service, but it has led to marketers finding their own ways of evaluating the effectiveness of Facebook ads. Facebook enlisted a group of marketing experts to rate the retention of the premium engagement ads that large companies run on Facebook home pages. Through this analysis, three crucial factors were identified that play a role in helping people to remember an ad, namely: the focal point, brand link and the tone of the ads.

It would seem that to fully understand the value of Facebook advertising, we need to factor in how these ads influence all other online activities, like organic search for example. Due to the nature of Facebook’s display ads, marketers have found that there was a significant increase in branded searches. Facebook users would not necessarily be tempted by an advert initially, but the subsequent spike in interest for a brand shows the real value of this advertising. The cost for each acquisition will be lowered because you will be paying less on your branded search terms. Facebook ads can be precisely segmented by relevancy and targeted demographics which results in lower CPC (cost per click) rates.

So it seems that there is inherent value in using Facebook for advertising, even if the statistical comparison to Google AdWords shows otherwise. Advertisers should use Facebook ads to focus on their brand visibility and to pique interest from consumers. Facebook advertising might not necessarily work for you or the industry you are in, but it is a worthwhile option to test. As with any investment, the safest option is to diversify and spread your risk.