Just the other day a friend of mine asked me to help him design a Facebook marketing strategy for his video marketing consulting program. It is my objective in this post to hold nothing back by sharing with you exactly what I shared with him.
Step #1 – What is going to be the message of your fan page?
The goal of your Facebook fanpage is to create a community around a single topic and message. This message will be present when you’re doing the daily activity that you’ll learn about shortly. Your fans will respect you when they see that you’re only talking about topic.
Step #2 – Daily marketing activity
It’s sad truth that Facebook doesn’t show your updates to every single one of your fans. This change occurred after they created their Edge Rank algorithm. To combat this problem, you want to make sure that you’re keeping your reach up and getting activity on your updates.
Activity is defined as likes, shares, and comments. To keep your reach up, you want to make sure that you’re updating your page with content at least 3 to 5 times a day.
What kinds of content do you want to share?
You have a choice between textual statuses, pictures, videos, and blog posts. Facebook values pictures and uploaded videos more than any of the other options. Did you know that videos uploaded to Facebook stay in the newsfeed 10 times longer than a YouTube link? That buys you more time to get additional likes, comments, and shares on the video.
Step #3 – Getting more likes for your page
There are essentially three ways to go about getting more likes. First, understand that if your content goes viral due to people sharing it, then you’ll scoop up additional likes. Second, you want to create a valuable giveaway. Using an attractive giveaway acts as bait that will entice people to like your page in order to receive it.
Making this happen can be rather tricky, as a lot of things come into play here. You’ll need an auto-responder service to deliver the giveaway, an opt-in form, and a tool to create custom fanpage tabs. There are hundreds of auto-responder services out there and tools to make custom tabs. Do your due diligence and find one that works for you.
To put all this together, you’ll need to create a facebook ad that targets your ideal fan and entices them to like your page in order to receive your valuable offer. To learn more about facebook ads, click here: Â http://ppc.org/category/facebook-ads/
The thing that makes this powerful is that you’re building your email list as well as getting likes for your fan page. Every marketer will tell you that the money is in the list. I’d like to add that it’s in the targeted list. It’s targeted because you’re targeting specific people with specific interests when you are creating your facebook ad. 🙂
Step #4 – Utilizing the power of sponsored stories
The ad process above is for a typical 308 by 308 pixel ad that you see on the right sidebar of your Facebook newsfeed. A sponsored story is different in budget, what you can promote, where they appear, and the display of activity or ‘social proof’. Allow me to demonstrate. I follow Kenneth Pugmire on Facebook and he’s well known for professional branding. Here is a screenshot I took of a sponsored story that he’s currently running:
Sponsored stories show up in the newsfeed and show the amount of activity it’s received (social proof). Sponsored stories give you two budget options. The plain option gives you a choice to promote it for any multiple of 5 in the range of $5 to $50. The second option allows you to promote up to $300 with extra targeting – age and location. (It’s not much really.)
Using sponsored stories will help you scoop additional likes as they are shown to fans and friends of fans. While running sponsored stories, I’ve found that it gets shown to people who don’t really care about the story. You assume that risk and it does happen.
Step #5 – Be consistent and split test
You need to be consistent with daily activity, sponsored stories, and advertisements. Take the weekends off if you want, but be back at it Monday morning. Whenever I take a few days off I watch my reach plummet into low and unacceptable numbers. The more you are consistent, the more you communicate to others that you’re serious about your business. Consequently, you’ll impact more lives.
You’ll need to be split testing the aspects of your ads (pictures, ad copy, and landing pages) to reach the optimal and desired levels of success.
Conclusion
If you’ll be consistent, split test, run sponsored stories, run Facebook ads, do your daily activity, and develop a consistent message for your fan page, then you’ll find success while marketing on Facebook.
What questions do you have for me?
image credit: Shutterstock
