Facebook Marketing

From the title of this headline you are probably thinking that I’ve lost it… Facebook as content curation tool? It really works, though. Often while helping clients with their social strategy I find that they are not using Facebook in this way to help them come up with relevant content for sharing.

What I’m talking about is using Facebook as your page, and then liking lots of other, relevant pages. By liking these other pages, you can easily see what they post in your page’s newsfeed, and then share those posts with your audience.

Here’s an example: XYZ Hotel. What types of pages should/could they like? People that travel to their hotel are probably coming to the area for a reason, so the hotel should like the pages of those attractions and events that bring people to the area. Some examples could include the local Chamber of Commerce, local convention and visitors bureau, other similar economic development organizations, attractions like state parks, amusement parks, museums and more. Other ideas would include pages that the employees of the business support through donations and volunteer work. This is a great process for every business to go through. Sometimes a short brainstorming session will create a diverse list of pages to follow.

After liking all these pages, you’ll want to check the “Home” feed for your page to see what content these pages are sharing, so that you can sort out what is relevant. Remember that with Facebook it’s not always about creating new content. A mix of new content with relevant content from other pages will keep things fun and interesting. See the screenshots below to better understand what I mean by checking the “Home” feed for your page.

First, select the page you wish to use:

Then you see Facebook switched from my personal profile to my business page profile. Now when I click the Home area it will take me to the newsfeed for my page instead of the newsfeed for my personal profile.

Here’s a screenshot of the newsfeed for my page. Only pages that my page likes will be seen in this newsfeed. This is why it’s important to like pages that are relevant to your business. That will give you more of a chance for finding relevant content for sharing.

This next shot is an example of a post that I might share to my business page. It’s content is relevant, so I select Share, then add my thoughts to the post and share it to my page. A quick and easy way to come up with content for posting on a business page!

Do you go through this process for pages that you manage? How often do you check the home feed for the pages you manage? How often do you find content worth sharing through this process.

I think most are getting used to the idea of advertising online. Many digital marketers are seeing great results with Facebook ads and promoted Tweets.

However, just when we get used to everything, BOOM. Something changes.

There have been a lot of social advertising updates and announcements lately, so I thought it only appropriate to catch everyone up on what is happening in the world of social advertising. Here we go:

1. Instagram is expanding its advertising.

According to a post on the Instagram blog,

As with our initial roll-out, we are committed to learning as much as we can while building Instagram as a sustainable business. Later this year, we’ll start by introducing ads on Instagram in three countries—Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In the future we’ll also look to introduce ads on Instagram to additional countries across the world.

With this and future expansions of our advertising platform, we remain dedicated to building Instagram into the best possible experience for our entire global community. Thanks for continuing to inspire us each and every day.

Even though Instagram ads are not available to small businesses (or really anyone outside of their selected brands), they are realizing that they will have to expand this to continue to be successful. So far the ads that have run had results above the industry average per the same blog post.

2. Pinterest to launch “Do-it-Yourself-Promoted-Pins”.

Pinterest is slowly rolling out its advertising (see my previous article on it HERE). Following that announcement came this one,

We’re continuing our paid tests of Promoted Pins in search and category feeds. Now, we’ve added a do-it-yourself Promoted Pins tool so businesses of any size can promote their Pins to reach more people and get visits back to their website. These Promoted Pins will be available on a cost-per-click basis through ads.pinterest.com.

You can sign up at ads.pinterest.com to get on the wait-list for the DIY option.

3. Facebook is changing its ad terminology…again.

This time “page post” is being removed from ads types. According to AllFacebook,

Facebook’s efforts to simplify its advertising offerings appear to have been extended to terminology, as sources told sister blog Inside Facebook that the term “page post” is being removed from the names of its ad units, although the units themselves are not changing.

According to Inside Facebook:

• Page post photo ads will be known as photo ads.

• Page post video ads will become video ads.

• Page post link ads will be referred to as link ads or multiproduct ads.

• Page post text ads and page post status ads will become simple text ads.

• Page post-offer ads will be known as offer ads.

• Domain ads will become link ads.”

This will not affect anyone, but we need to be aware of the terms so we know what we are looking at and what our options are.

4. Facebook is adding videos to their advertising options.

According to Facebook,

For advertisers who specifically want to drive video views, “video views” will be a new objective to choose from when they create a campaign in our ads create tool, Power Editor and the API. Facebook will automatically optimize these ads to be shown to the people most likely to view videos on Facebook, across devices and across target audiences.

Advertisers will also be able to encourage people who have viewed their videos to view additional content with two new solutions.

It’s bad enough that auto-play videos were eating up my data on my iPhone, now I have to worry about sponsored videos showing up? Like all things Facebook, they will be rolling this out the only way they know how, very slowly and randomly.

I commend the platforms for providing business owners with more options, even though we are playing the waiting game. I know I can’t wait to try the Promoted Pins. How about? When you gain access to any of the above, will you try out?

Whether you like it or not, Facebook is a powerful marketing tool (especially if you pay to use their ads). Almost every business is on Facebook in some capacity and many use it to connect with their audience regularly. While Facebook currently provides some good tools to manage our analytics, things are about to get a lot more detailed!

Facebook recently announced their newest tool: Facebook Audience Insights. This tool is designed specifically to tell you all about your target audience, their tendencies, how they interact on Facebook, and so much more. And it’s not just your current audience! While this information will be available for those who currently interact with your page, you can also monitor metrics on your custom audiences (if you use the ads tools), and the whole Facebook audience in general. Wowzas! That’s a lot valuable information!

Facebook Audience Insights will dig deeper and into much more detail than the current Page Insights. While Page Insights now provide details about your current audience, Audience Insights will compile trends and information about Facebook audiences (including those not interacting with your page) in general.

Here’s what you can expect to find out about your audience with the new Facebook Audience Insights:

• Relationship status of an audience
• Educational levels of an audience
• Likely career industries (based on publicized job titles) of the audience
• Favorite pages and categories that an audience “likes” on Facebook
• Frequency of an audience’s engagement (likes, comments, shares, ads clicked, etc.) on Facebook
• Spending activities of an audience (based on household size, house market value, and current census information)
• Lifestyles (including: Dynamic Duos, Country Comfort, Career Centered Singles, Solid Single Parents, and more)
• Where the audience lives and which language(s) they speak

That is some serious insight into your audience!

All of this information could be very valuable to businesses and marketers. Being able to understand current and potential audience trends on Facebook (and possibly even outside of Facebook) will allow marketers to customize Facebook content and shares to target the right people. And while this won’t directly increase our organic reach on Facebook, the more opportunities we have to give people what they want, the better chances we have of producing the engagement we desire on Facebook.

Of course, as consumers and users (not marketers), there is concern about privacy and how our information is being shared with these businesses. Facebook insists that all information gathered comes from publicly shared data within Facebook and data collected from trusted third-party partners. All of the information is compared with others in the group and the information is generalized as a trend. There are no specific details about any individual users available through the Facebook Audience Insights.

This new tool is currently available within Ads Manager to all US marketers and will be rolled out globally over the coming months. If you want to see if you have access or learn more about the new Facebook Audience Insights tool, go to their business page for more information.