Written by ContentPowered.com
A few names stand above the rest in the world of Facebook marketing. Who doesn’t know names like Jeff Bullas, Jon Loomer, or Amy Porterfield? All of these people have great advice. The problem is finding it, scattered about the web, on their blogs and the blogs they have contributed to over the years. That’s exactly what I set out to do, and I’ve accumulated a bunch of tips and tricks you can use, or at least think about, when it comes time to do your own Facebook marketing.
Ann Handley – Use Holidays to Humanize a Brand
Ann is the chief content officer of Marketing Profs, and her advice is simple; use holidays as marketing opportunities. They’re an excellent way to humanize your brand. Show an inside look at how your employees or your company as a whole celebrates the holiday, regardless of what holiday it is. The insight is also a great time to showcase any charitable activities your company supports or participates in over the holiday.
Melanie Duncan – Be Charitable
Charitable giving is an excellent thing to do, both in terms of raw humanity and in terms of marketing. Generosity as a company is rare, compared to all of the huge brands and entities that seem to exist solely to accumulate more and more wealth for their 1%. In today’s culture, giving to the people makes people more inclined to support you. Melanie’s tip is simple; just give. It doesn’t have to be money, it can be sales, products, charity activities, even just great free content. The more you give, the more you receive.
Shama Hyder – Look for Needs
Shama is the CEO of Marketing Zen, and her advice is to study your clients or customers to identify their needs. The example she provides relates to holidays; at year’s end, businesses are scrambling to meet their final goals. As a B2B company working with them, you can find a way to insert yourself into the program to assist them with their marketing and sales. You don’t have to be entirely selfless, of course; think like your fans and clients, figure out what is occupying their time, and play off that.
Kim Garst – Humanize Yourself
Kim is the CEO of Boom Social, and her tip goes along well with what Melanie had to say. Using Facebook during holidays is a great way to humanize your brand. Showcase pictures or videos of holiday parties and decorations, anything that shows you getting into the spirit of the season. You don’t need to share your personal encounters, but you can certainly share how your company celebrates. Bonus points if you combine this with charitable giving.
Mari Smith – Use Local Awareness
Mari’s tip is directed at brick and mortar stores looking to couple their online and offline marketing. When you run a sale, be it for the holidays or otherwise, use the local awareness feature of Facebook ad targeting. This feature restricts ad targeting to only hyper-local users. They’ll only see your ad if they’re nearby; use the ad space to offer a compelling reason for them to stop in and take a look.
Neal Schaffer – Look Back to Press Forward
In the world of politics, “history repeats itself” is a cautionary warning and the foundation of many tales of the ignorant causing problems that could easily be avoided just by understanding what results have happened from similar actions in the past.
Neal’s tip is to play the same theme on a lighter pitch. By studying the past, you can identify the posts you have made that have worked better than the rest. You can then figure out what they have in common, and apply that to your future posts, to improve the performance and general quality of everything you do. He also recommends using BuzzSumo to do the research, which will also show you the best content competing with yours, so you can make it that much better.
Donna Moritz – Link Out from Visual Content
Donna’s tip is all about optimizing your visual content on any social platform you use. The general idea is to include links to supplemental content in the descriptions – or even the content itself – of your visual content. On Facebook, this means video descriptions and the captions on pictures and albums. The images and videos serve to attract people, while the links and the obviously compelling description you write both help keep those people around. You can do something like make an album out of a slide deck, and each picture slide includes a “further reading” link to a relevant blog post where the reader can get deeper information on the subject. It brings people to your site and gives the more value, which in turn helps encourage them to convert.
Syed Balkhi – Adapt Content
Syed’s tip is about repurposing content. Blog posts are great, and your best blog posts can bring in a lot of additional value. You can convert snippets of those blog posts into graphics and post them on Facebook, with links back to the main post. You can convert those blog posts into videos and post them on YouTube, for additional value. You can combine related articles into robust ebook content, and promote that content through various social channels. Everything is interconnected, and you don’t need to let a blog post be nothing more than just a blog post.
Joe Pulizzi – Always Have a Plan
Joe’s tip revolves around having a defined plan for your social media channel, regardless of what channel that is. He recommends a format something like this:
John Lee Dumas – Be Consistent
The key to using Facebook, or really any online form of marketing up to and including your blog, is to be consistent. Publish content on a regular schedule, but avoid overwhelming your followers with too much of the same kind of content all at once. John’s tip is to use Edgar, a service that helps you organize, schedule, and publish content in the right way. In particular, it allows you to set custom content categories, so you can keep an even distribution of content throughout those different categories without focusing too much on any one.
Ted Rubin – Convert Social to Blog
Ted’s strategy is to take your favorite, most passionate, and most successful social updates and convert them into blog posts. He cautions that you don’t always need to stretch them out to lengthy posts. Seth Godin, the example he uses, tends to blog in short sentences or paragraphs, and yet he’s one of the most successful bloggers of all time.
Another option Ted suggests is to use your blog to format and publish responses to compelling social media posts others have made. You can then use your social media account to comment on their post with your link, for a lengthier response and deeper dialogue.
Holly Homer – Be a Resource
Holly is the co-founder of the successful Kids Activities Blog, and she certainly practices what she preaches. Her secret to success is to become a high quality resource on Facebook. Rather than just posting everything she publishes and marketing herself, she turns her Page into a platform to aggregate and curate relevant content from around the web. By sharing posts that educate, inspire, entertain, or inform her audience, she gains visibility and success, even if she didn’t write all of the posts herself.
Lynette Young – Manage Your time
Lynette’s tip has less to do with Facebook and more to do with marketing, and life, in general. She recommends that you do everything you can to manage your time effectively, and the method she suggests is the RescueTime tool. Whichever tool you use, what you need to do is track how much time you’re spending on various tasks, and how much time you’re wasting by doing things in ineffective ways. The better you manage your time, the more time you have to succeed.
Jeff Korhan – Focus on One Platform
Jeff recognizes what a lot of small and medium businesses miss; despite there being a bunch of different social media platforms, you don’t necessarily need to use all of them. Do a study to see how many people are fans of your brand on each particular platform, and compare that with the pros and cons of using that platform. Pick the most ideal platform in terms of balance between those factors, and invest most heavily in running it. You don’t need to branch out to other social profiles until you have the first one down pat.
Rich Brooks – Automate Curated Content
Rich agrees with Holly that you should use curated content to become an authority and resource in your niche, but he also recognizes that it doesn’t need to take up a lot of time or attention. His suggested tool is HootSuite, but you can also use Buffer or other content management tools as you please. The point is to use your curated content to round out your content stream, to keep up activity levels and fill holes where your own content drops out.
Ian Cleary – Use Social Ads to Retarget Visitors
Ian recognizes that it’s difficult enough to attract users to your website, and it’s not always possible to get them to do what you want them to do on the first visit. He recommends using social tracking to create a custom audience made up of the people who visit your site, and run ads on Facebook that target just those people. The ads should specifically be engineered to get them to at least follow your Facebook page, so they can be continually exposed to more ads and more trips to your website.
Tim Schmoyer – Focus Socially
Tim recommends that you focus your social media efforts on building a community, rather than trying to be flashy with your design or trying to be a superstar celebrity. Social media is all about the connections and communication you set up between yourself and your followers. Emphasize dedication, and reward the most dedicated members of your community, so you make brand advocates out of them.
Christian Karasiewicz – Batch Productivity
This tip combines time management and post scheduling for one very effective strategy. It’s not uncommon for inspiration to wax and wane as time goes on. Some days it seems as though you can sit down and write a blog post and a bunch of social media posts in an hour, and be ready for more. Other days it takes hours to come up with a title.
The trick is to utilize those inspired days to pump out days or weeks worth of content, and then schedule that content out to last through your creative droughts.
Mark points out that there is a real, tangible difference between types of social engagement. On Facebook, that means that a share and a like are quite different. A like does very little to promote your content. It’s just a wave of acknowledgement. A share, meanwhile, is much better, because it broadens the reach of your content.
Mark’s suggestion is to more or less ignore likes and focus entirely on shares. Figure out who is sharing and why. What makes them compelled to share your content? Focus on hooking more people with that, and you grow much faster.
Dennis Yu – Promote Praise
Self-promotion on Facebook is demoted fairly heavily if you’re excessive about it. You can’t get away with overt advertising unless you’re paying for it. There’s a good loophole, though; instead of promoting yourself, promote other people’s posts that are promoting you! Amplify the message about how great you are, but do it without adding your own voice.
Scott Ayres – Boost Product Announcements
Scott is a believe in the Boost Post button on Facebook, despite popular wisdom. He believes, and has shown success with, boosting posts to fans and friends of fans. It works best for local businesses, though, businesses with tangible products. You don’t need a high budget or a great ad, just a good post, decent targeting, and a product to sell.
Maggie Patterson – Facebook PR
Maggie reminds everyone that Facebook has more to it than just the usual marketing and B2C communications we’re all familiar with. She recommends networking specifically with a list of reporters and influential bloggers in your niche. That way, when you have something important to say or announce, you have a ready-made audience of people who will promote your announcement because it’s their job. Think of it like marketing with a press release, just on Facebook and without the shady PR shenanigans that happened a few years back.
Andrea Vahl – Remember to Split Test
Andrea would like to remind all of us that split testing ad keywords via Facebook is very important. She takes it one step further, though, and splits campaigns up with different audiences. One campaign, three different ad sets, each ad set targeting a different audience; which works better? Insights will tell you. Remember to focus on metrics that really matter; not click volume, for instance, but cost per click.
Daniel Sundin – Stay On Topic
When someone follows your Facebook page, they know who you are and they know what your business does. They understand your niche. Furthermore, they expect your content to be related to what your business is. Petco – for whom Daniel is a community manager – is a pet-focused business, and thus should be posting about pets, pet supplies, relevant recalls, events, and anything else related to the care and raising of animals. Remember, sometimes all it takes is one off-topic post to earn an unlike.
Amy Porterfield – Use Facebook Offers
Facebook offers are a woefully underused system whereby a business can put up a coupon, a free product, or some other type of business-related offer and promote it as a post. Users can find it and claim those offers. It’s a wonderful system because it has its own mechanics, rather than relying on organic posts for visibility. You can also target them very, very well, just like ads.
Jon Loomer – Advertise to Fans
Jon is the number one Facebook marketer out there, at least as far as I’m concerned. His blog constantly out-shines many others. His number one tip? Direct your ads at your followers. Even friends of followers aren’t that valuable in comparison. If you’re trying to sell, sell to the people you’ve already hooked. Any ad directed at any other audience should be aimed at getting them to follow you, not at selling to them.
