Congratulations for making this far! You now officially know more about Facebook marketing than the vast majority of marketers out there and are poised to start seeing real results from the network.
But before we part ways, there are a few more hints and tricks you should bear in mind that can give you the edge. Here are some of the best that you should have a go with…
Use the Power Editor
Facebook’s Power Editor is a tool that is designed specifically for large advertisers with lots of different ads to make at once and to manage. You use this through Chrome and from here you can make hundreds of ads all at once.
How does this work? Once you’ve gotten it from www.facebook/com/ads/manage/powereditor using your Chrome browser, you’ll next be able to ‘download your accounts’. This will let you ad your accounts to the tool and from there you can look at your campaigns, ad sets and ads as you would do with the managers. You can also search and use filters to ensure you’re bringing up the right stuff – handy when you have huge numbers of campaigns to look through.
You’ll then be able to create, edit, duplicate, ‘undo’, delete, save audiences, export, import, split audience (for split testing again), compare the performance of ads, add tags for finding ads more easily in future and edit the settings of the tool.
A lot of people reading this won’t need the Power Editor. But for those of you looking to invest a lot of time and money, this can save you a lot of trouble!
Use Content Marketing and Promote Your Page
Facebook marketing and Facebook advertising both work much more effectively when you have a good content marketing strategy to back them up. Content marketing is the process of using blog posts, articles and other content to try and build trust with your audience and to get them to see you as an authority in your niche or industry. At the same time, content marketing is effective for generating likes and shares – because if you have a great article on your page, then you can encourage people to like and share it.
One way to combine the two then is to run a blog and post great content there regularly so that you get regular visitors. Do this and include the ShareaholicWordPress plugin so that your visitors can easily share your content to their Facebook pages.
At the same time, make sure you are posting your content to your Facebook as page post links. This way you can get more people to read your content – especially if you give it a good picture and a good title that sounds interesting. Don’t be derivative – try to stand out and this will make your content much more likely to share quickly and easily.
You should also add a link to your Facebook page to your blog and to any other content you create (such as a YouTube channel). Ideally, someone will come to your site
regularly because they find your writing interesting and they will then see that you’ve got a link to your Facebook page at the top.
If you’re getting at least a few hundred visitors to your site a day and you have a visible and prominent link to your Facebook page on there – you’ll find that this gets you at least a couple of new likes a week pretty easily and reliably.
Another tip is to add a mailing list to your content. A brilliant benefit of this is that all the people who sign-up to your mailing list will be directly reachable from then-on, rather than being reachable only through Facebook putting you at the mercy of a third party service.
At the same time, as we’ve already seen, you can actually use your mailing list to create highly targeted adverts and this is a great way to combine two different types of marketing.
Find Amazing Content to Share That You Know Will be Successful
Not everything you post has to be your own. If you have a page, there’s nothing to stop you sharing relevant links and interesting things you’ve found as well as images.
Why would you want to share a link to a site other than your own and pay for the privilege?
Simple: because if someone likes that post, it’s your page that will receive the like. This is pretty smart – you upload ‘Gangnam Style’ just when it’s taking off and by doing so, you get to receive all the likes!
Share a cute dog and you’ll get loads of likes guaranteed!
That said though, you also of course need to think about how what you’re sharing is going to impact on your brand – you need to cater to your target demographic and you need to stay ‘on point’ as much as possible.
The question then, is how do you find amazing content that you can share and that’s relevant to your company?
One tip is just to follow lots of other people. This way you can see what’s working for them and you can even borrow those things to use on your own page.
Another method is to use BuzzSumo. BuzzSumo is a tool that is specifically designed for finding ‘trending’ content and it allows you to see what’s getting lots of shares and likes. Keep an eye on this and you’ll be able to find inspiration to share through your own channels.
Be Everywhere
As mentioned early on in this book, it’s important to think of your Facebook marketing in the broader context of your overall campaign and goals. We’ve already seen how it can work well with content marketing but at the same time, it can also be combined with influencer marketing, with SEO and with Google AdWords. We’ve seen that AdWords and Facebook ads are quite different – so why not use them to target different sections of your audience?
What’s more, you should also work on other social media channels like Twitter, like LinkedIn and like Google Plus. Then, across all of these different platforms, you should make sure you are consistently using the same username and the same logo. Now, every time someone clicks on anything you’ve done, they’ll be greeted with the same consistent imagery and this will help to tie all the strands of your business together and to reinforce your branding.
One old adage in the world of social media is ‘be everywhere’. This is very good advice.
Play to Ego
The last tip we’ll share is one of the single most powerful when it comes to making your ads a hit: and that’s to play to ego.
What is meant by this? Simply that the most successful posts are ones that allow your readers to be a little narcissistic.
In other words, take into account the fact that most people share content on social media because they think it shows themselves in a good light and because they are expressing themselves.
Why would you ‘like’ a post on Facebook? Is it because you want other people to read that post? Or is it because you want other people to see that you’ve liked it. Do you like posts about black holes sometimes so that you look intellectual? Or posts about charities so that you look generous and thoughtful? A lot of people do!
And so, if your objective is to try and promote as many shares and likes for your ads as possible, you need to try and post things that people will want to share and that will
make them look good. Another good way is to target a specific niche – such as people who work from home, or people who work out. That way, people belonging to those groups will likely share the content to demonstrate their continued allegiance to that way of life. Humans are a funny bunch…
While we might seem egocentric though, there is one other common reason that we share content: and that’s as a form of communication. Again, this is why it can be effective to write articles that describe a specific type of person – because that way people will want to share the content with their friends who fit that mold.
When designing any ad and looking for engagement, ask yourself: would you be likely to click share or like if you saw it?
