Mark Fortune
Welcome everyone to this episode of the marketing guides for small business podcast. My name is Mark fortune, and today we are going to talk about how to get the most out of Facebook as a marketing channel for your business. Given that things change on Facebook pretty frequently, Facebook and social media platforms in general, or a very common topic when we work with clients and all of the social platforms frequently change what they use in their algorithms to determine what to show visitors and your customers and like it or not. Facebook remains the gorilla in the space with, well over 2 billion, monthly users, spending hours, sometimes hours per day on the platform. Think of it this way. This is where your customers are spending time. So it creates an enormous opportunity for you to build awareness and convert folks to customers. But the question is how to get the most out of it. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. And as always, I’m joined by our small business marketing experts. So let’s just dive right in Ken, when it comes to Facebook, is it worth doing organic posts with no ad dollars behind it
Ken Tucker
Yes, absolutely. As a matter of fact, I think it’s more critical right now than it has been in a long time. If you would’ve asked me this back in January of this year, I would have said it’s still worth doing, but you’re not going to get a whole lot of bang for the buck. But right now I think one of the most important things that a business can do since so many businesses are struggling and there’s been such chaotic upheaval in the economy with the pandemic and the related shutdowns and dampening of business hours and things like that, a business needs to show that it’s still operating. And I think Facebook is a great place to do that. It also gives you the ability to get some visibility out there now, organic posts. Aren’t what they used to be by organic posts. Just when you put a post out there on Facebook, whatever type it is, whether it’s a video or a text-based post or picture, whatever.
Ken Tucker
So it’s really important to just keep doing that, realizing that obviously the goal is to try to get, engagement because that engagement is going to help you broaden the reach of any posts that you’re doing. Facebook is becoming slowly but surely a search engine and people, while they’re in Facebook, they may not want to leave Facebook. So they are doing searches for businesses or products or services inside of Facebook. And if they find your Facebook page and you haven’t updated it since March of this year, or even later, or you do one post every six weeks, that’s not a good signal. So it’s a necessary evil in certain respects to just show that you’re a viable, active business in this day.
Mark Fortune
One thing I should have pointed out, and you’re absolutely right about that is I run into this a lot with customers. If a page has say it has 500 likes, that doesn’t mean those 500 people see every post you do. Matter of fact, most of the time, it’s less than 10% of those. So less than 50 people. So continuing to post is one way to help increase that reach. And then you’re right. The next step is certainly engagement
Ken Tucker
Just to add onto that real quick. One thing that I think most people miss is if you do post and somebody likes that post, but they haven’t liked your page. You can actually invite them to like the page. So go in and see who is liking or reacting to your posts. And if they’re not already a fan of your page, invite them to become one.
Mark Fortune
And it’s easy to do in the interface, just click on who’s like the post and there’ll be a button that says invite them, right So we’ve said that organic person is still very important. So Antonio, and when it comes to posting on Facebook, what kind of content or what types of topics should businesses really think about posting on Facebook For me,
Antonio
I think it’s, it’s really original content is, is best as opposed to what a lot of us did many years ago, or still do to some degree of curated content. I think you need to have a balance there, but generally speaking, the original content that is really written for your audience. These may be your blog posts. And though you can still get away with organic. As Ken said, a moment ago, I am a huge proponent of putting a little money behind it, 15, $20 to boost or original content to help that visibility, to help send that signal out. and to, to those who, enjoy your page or those who are in your service area or your businesses area that match your, your demographic. Again, content marketing is a very powerful thing, but it has to be good engaging content. We’re going to, you’re probably going to hear the word engagement a lot during this podcast, but there’s a reason for that Facebook rewards that.
Antonio
And if you’re just reposting the same old thing over and over again, without adding value, I think that’s going to ultimately be detrimental. It, it, it certainly helps us see shows the business that you’re active, but you have to mixed in that original content for, I think that’s crucial and that’s, what’s going to get people, which is the ultimate goal. Driving back to your website, we’ve kind of touched on this topic a little bit in the past, and we’ll probably talk about it again, some more in the future, but pushing people from Facebook to your website, through, what it’s hopefully original content for you allows you also to use something called the Facebook pixel, which will help you build a retargeting audience of people who’ve shown interest and engagement in your content. Or then you can go to the next step and send them relevant ads or to a lead magnet or to some kind of offer that you do in the future without necessarily going out to a cold audience. And to me, that’s the value of Facebook is building that retargeting audience, getting my original content out there, bringing people to my website, showing that signal. And so I tend to focus on that. Yes, you can still curate some posts. You can share that meme. Laura knows, I love me a good name, but building your own infographics or blog posts. That to me, is the power in something like that.
Ken Tucker
And I think it’s important also to just realize what types of content you have the best reach naturally within Facebook and Facebook’s algorithm rewards you for posting different types of content and that different kind of kind of content. It really is a video, an image, a text-based post or a link based post. And so, like Antonio said, original content. If it’s a blog post that you published from your website that you put on your Facebook page, that’s going to be a link style post. Unfortunately, those are the ones that Facebook gives the least natural reach to. And that’s why I think it’s really critical that you be prepared to spend a little bit of money to boost that post. And I say boost, I mean, in a generic sense, I’m not a big fan of the Facebook boost function for advertising. I think it’s always better to use Facebook ad manager to do your ads, but that’s an important distinction you’re talking about arrange link based posts typically see maybe 7% in reach of people who like your page.
Ken tucker
Then text-based posts perform a little bit better images, perform a little bit better and video performs a little bit better. So by the time you’re doing video, I think you’re getting maybe 16% reach on average. So videos really fantastic content on Facebook. And just the last point about that, I would not spend money on every post that I did to boost that I would focus on. As Antonio said, driving traffic back to your website, through those blog posts that you share to, to reach a broader audience or to focus on offers or deals or big announcements for your business. And
Mark fortune
I think it’s just so critical to understand it does take a little bit of money to reach the number of people you think you’re going to reach on Facebook. I find a lot of small business owners don’t clearly understand why that reach is so low, just from even a video, right It could be great content. It’s still is not going to reach in the newsfeed a hundred percent of your audience just organically, right But I think a lot of small business owners think it does, or it comes pretty close. Now I tend to run into that issue quite a bit, speaking to towards advertising and getting a little more return out of your investments. Paul, help us understand a little bit more about what Antonio alluded to with the Facebook pixel, kind of what that is and how it works in regards with your website.
Mark Fortune
Well, Facebook pixel, it’s basically, it’s a code from a technical standpoint. It’s a code snippet that you put on your website. There’s different ways to do it. And it tracks visitors. And you can track anything from page views to specific events, such as what an clicks or a shopping cart. Those are called events. You have your basic pixel that you put on your website, basically it tracks page views, and that’s what it does. And then you can track specific events. And what that allows you to do is things such as retargeting. So if you notice, if you set up your audiences within Facebook and you notice that you have a group of people that are going to say the replacement windows, part of your website and ceremony, remodeler, you can re target those people on Facebook with specific, as specific to replacement windows. Then you can segment to say roof replacement or roof repair, and you can deliver ads that talk about roof repair to those people that went to that part of your website.
Mark Fortune
The advantage of the Facebook pixel or Neo tracking pixel is not just Facebook. LinkedIn has them. They all have them is that you can target your advertising. If you’re starting out with a generic advertising campaign and you don’t have these audiences built, you’re kind of just scattering stuff out there. But once you have these audiences built and you start tracking what people are doing on your website, now you can retarget them with more specific ads. And that’s the power of these tracking pixels. And I think that’s so critical. One of the things I always point out with customers when we’re talking is if you want to stay in front of your customers after they’ve visited your website, you need that pixel to then advertise towards them on Facebook and related sites. So I appreciate you helping us out with that. Yeah, just
Ken Tucker
Real quick, most website visitors, the first time they visit your website and the statistics across all industries is that only 4% of those people convert. So if you’re a water restoration company and there’s water damage, and somebody lands on your website, they’re going to call because they have a problem. But if you sell expensive home remodeling services, when I say expensive, I ain’t just, you know, big ticket things people are going to, and they’re not going to convert on the first call very often.
Mark fortune
And if I can add something to that, that 4%, that’s an average. So that means that people going to your website that know who you are, they’re going to convert at a higher rate. And this is where a lot of times educational content can be really important because someone going to your website that doesn’t know who you are, that conversion rate may be below 1%, because they’ve never heard of you before, but they, something peak their interest, whether it was something on Facebook or a post or something that showed up in Google search results. And they’re trying to get more information, figure out, is this a trustworthy company Why should I do business with them Am I going to give them my money So people go on your website for the first time. You’re probably never going to convert on the first time. And that’s, you have to have the proper content like Antonio alluded to driving people back to your website with Facebook posts, because you have to build that trust and authority, which is something else we’ve talked about in previous podcasts. But you have to remember people visiting your website. They’re still people, they’re not statistics. And they want to know if they can trust you here. No rule
Antonio
I follow is sorry about that, mark. The higher, the ticket sale, the longer the process, the more nurturing and education that needs to come along. And if you are going to start the process or start to engage somebody through one of your marketing funnels, for example, you want to be able to follow up in as many ways as possible, not rely solely on things like email, which also has its major benefits, but also its downsize. And many people either ignore or in the world with Gmail, they get thrown into a different folder or promotions folder, that sort of thing. So for me, I want to make sure I know that people are people and people still enjoy things like Facebook and stuff. So I want to reach them and get my second, the third and fourth, subsequent nurturing messages out to them through as many channels as possible so that they can see it. So those conversion numbers start to go up over time because we are sending people the message where they want to read it, be it Facebook, email, or other websites.
Mark Fortune
That’s kind of getting to the next question I was going to ask anyway for Ken, which is Facebook is one thing for awareness and education, and that’s great, but let’s move a next step further to conversion and actually generating leads from Facebook. So how do you work with your customers to directly generate leads from Facebook And if you would please touch on what Facebook lead
Ken tucker
Ads are. So Facebook lead ads is a specific type of an ad that you can run. It was really designed because so many people, the overwhelming majority of people, as a matter of fact, use Facebook on their mobile devices. Facebook has always been a big fan of keeping people within Facebook. Most platforms generally prefer that. And so Facebook created this lead ad program. That’s a simple form that can pull from the data. Somebody provided Facebook when they created their account so that they don’t have to fill it back in. Because if you’ve tried to fill out a form on your phone, that’s not a great experience. It’s not, but it can be a little cumbersome in general. It’s always great to ask for the minimal amount of information that you really need to get a qualified lead. And so Facebook lead ads are a very simple program that you can run inside of Facebook, keep people inside of Facebook.
Ken tucker
It gives you the entire structure of the offer and the landing page and whatnot. So that you’re basically using that as a way to capture leads. And you talked about it in just a second ago, mark. I mean, you’ve got the awareness consideration conversion. And so when you’re putting together a Facebook ad strategy, you really need to think about that. And I think you can build an ad funnel basically within Facebook where you might run some awareness ads, get people to know who your business is or what your products or services are. And then you can remarket to them. Or as Paul talked about to those people, or just using actions that people took on that first ad to qualify and build a second audience, to run a consideration ad where you’re not asking for the sale quite yet, but you’re taking them down that path.
Ken Tucker
And then the conversion is where you clearly state your offer and you give people a reason to sign up and claim that offer or take that action. And so you don’t have to do all three of those and if you’ve done your targeting, right, you can actually have pretty good success. If it’s very laser focused on generating qualified leads, you don’t have to use Facebook lead ads. You can certainly drive them off of Facebook onto a landing page, but if you’re going to do that design the entire campaign to make it as simple and clear with a strong call to action as possible, otherwise you’re going to be wasting a lot of money on advertising.
Mark Fortune
I think you make a really good point. And I think what we encourage business owners to do a lot is put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Right Think about your own experience on Facebook or on a website, if it’s hard for you to get, find the information or enter your information or ask for more information, put that onto your business, right. Is it just as hard in your business The more you can simplify things, especially given what you said so much of the traffic is on a mobile device, far better results that you’ll get. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So we’re doing a whole lot talking about Facebook advertising and content and all of that, but how often should we do this So we still, in the days of post 10 times a day, or how often does a small business really need to think about posting to Facebook And is there any insight as to what time of day or does it really make a difference
Antonio
Every hour on the hour 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you should never stop thinking about Facebook. Okay. Martin Zuckerberg wants you to think, well, I mean, that’s kind of the truth. Simply put, it’s going to vary to me. It depends on audience size, but, and really your business. But I think, again, are you sharing original content I mean, obviously you want to share that as often as possible, the more you share, the more chances you have of getting that engagement that we’re all seeking, but only if it’s valuable content, right I am a proponent and I’d love to hear what some of you guys believe, but for me, it’s, it’s quality over quantity. I remember one of the rules when I was growing up in marketing was posts three times a day. A lot of that was like the brief cutesy little picture or somebody else’s content.
Antonio
And there was a whole strategy behind that, but that’s when organic reach was a much more valuable thing with organic reach being down. I’d rather put out quality content so that when people do see my company in the newsfeed, and they’re going to see something of interest, not just constant fluff, which eventually gets ignored, which eventually loses that engagement. Then my saying, wait, three months in between posts. No, but if you can post at least once a week, and it’s something of some kind of value to me, that’s much more important than posting three times
Ken Tucker
A day. I’ll jump in here too. It certainly depends on the type of business that you have. I think if you’re a brick and mortar business, a restaurant or a boutique or a shop, a hair salon, things like that, I think you should definitely try to post once, if not multiple times a day, just because I think there’s a lot of natural activity. And honestly, every customer interaction is a piece of content that you honestly could share through Facebook. So certainly think about that. But then another thing too is we build social media campaigns for 12 months at a time for most blog posts. Every time we do a blog post for a client to keep driving traffic back to that. Now, if it’s a seasonal related blog post, we’re not going to do that. But if it’s an evergreen post where it’s providing good value and information to the reader that is going to last for a period of time, we build out those campaigns as a result of that, you might wind up having multiple posts a day, even if your strategy isn’t to post multiple times a day, just because we schedule those out. As we create those blog posts.
Mark Fortune
One thing I’d point out to our listeners is there’s lots of great content and studies out there about time of day and day of week sort of stuff. And I just refer to those because we get asked and you can slice things, a million different ways to try to figure out is 5:30 PM on a Thursday, better than 8:00 AM on a Tuesday, I’d go with the experts. One. I usually refer to as a site called sprout social involved with a guy we all follow called Neil Neil Patel. And they do a best times to post on all the social networks every year, annual update. If you use those guides, that kind of solves that question without having to slice things up too much. So, Paul, what are your best tips or methods for growing a business’s audience and their following on Facebook I mean, how do we get more likes and, and grow that audience, ask people that’s the skinny on it, share your content, ask people on your posts on your website.
Mark Fortune
You should have the share buttons. You should have the footy or website. You know, your Facebook ask people to like your page, ask people to share your content. One thing people don’t think about is you share your page and your personal newsfeed, but join relevant groups, join groups that are relevant to your business and your industry. And a lot of times, those people will like and share your page and your content advertising definitely will help with that and engage with people. If people share your content and they engage with your content and you need to respond to them, you can’t just ignore it because social platforms are all about that. It’s social. And if you engage with your audience, they’re going to reciprocate that. And I think that’s the biggest thing that a lot of times it doesn’t happen. People get busy, life happens, but if you engage with people that are engaging with you and sharing your content, that’s going to help build that audience and build that following.
Mark Fortune
Totally agree with that. It still takes a little bit of legwork to get it done. And a lot of times, especially to kind of Ken’s point earlier, if a brick and mortar, local retail shop, get your team involved to ask for that engagement. When you’re in front of the customer, a lot of times that’ll work really well. Another tip, I just thought of this, that a client of mine does. And I wish I could say I came up with this idea, but I didn’t is they have a check-in for charity kind of contest or promotion every month that they pick a different local charity. And every time somebody checks in at their location, they donate 50 cents to that charity when the charity changes every month. But that grows their following tremendously because when I post, oh, I’m at am-ness rehab today for my chiropractic appointment and I checked in and it gets shared a lot more that way. So that’s another great tip that they came up with that I absolutely used with other clients based on their idea. Yeah. Some promotions are good willing to do that.
Speaker 3
That combines two really important elements. One is community and the other is charity, and you want to create engagement, worthy content. And I can’t think of two better things to do then with charity and community. Talk about what’s going on in your community. That’s going to resonate with a lot of people, get involved and support local charities or help promote the local charities events that they’re having, even if you’re not able to participate or contribute sharing that information still is, is going to be beneficial.
Speaker 2:
All right. So as we, kind of get to the end of this episode, let’s go around the table with a final question. And let’s start with Ken. If you had to give one tip to a small business owner to get the most out of Facebook right now, what would it be and why I don’t
Ken Tucker
Know that it’s, the tip to get the most out of it. But I think it’s an opportunity that is certainly exploding quite a bit for many businesses. It may not be for every business, but most businesses should be able to take advantage of this. And that is to take advantage of Facebook shops, which are now free for both your Facebook and Instagram page, as well as using Facebook’s marketplace. I’ve heard of a lot of businesses, brick and mortar businesses, where people stop coming in for a period of time that have massive back loads of inventory. And they’re either creating Facebook shops so that they have an online store on their Facebook page, or they’re selling those, those products through Facebook marketplace. And it’s not just a product and you can certainly do that with services. If you offer training classes, if you offer consulting services, or even if you’re a home services contractor like a roofer, you could probably put out there, you have a free estimate process or something like that, or certainly, you know, create some discounts based on the services that somebody might buy. That’s
Mark Fortune
Great. That’s a really good idea. I need to look through that for some of my clients, Antonio, how about you You
Antonio
Said it earlier and I think it’s, it’s, it’s worth repeating as kind of my number one tip is making sure you’re using that Facebook pixel with your original content or with anything you’re driving people back to your website. I think the ability to remarket is so valuable and so under utilize it to me, that’s the best recommendation. I don’t think we mentioned it earlier, but when it comes to remarketing to that, advertising is so much cheaper than it is for to cold ads. So I think every business should be in some way, shape or form taking advantage of that re-targeting audiences and some of the benefits there, and we even get into lookalike audiences and some of the other variations we can do off of that. So I’m going to, I’m going to stick with that for now that our mark and, and double down on it, in fact, cause I think it’s so powerful. Yeah. We probably have a whole
Mark Fortune
Separate episode on Facebook advertising and custom audiences and really getting the most out of that platform. That’s for sure. Paul, what’s your one tip for small business owners when it comes to Facebook I think can Antonio sum it up pretty good. I would just say that in the current environment, one thing is you build your audience and build your following. You can post on the face. If you have updates or you have any kind of specials going on, you put that on Facebook. And I think it also goes back to staying engaged in any social platform, Facebook included. Isn’t like a post and forget it kind of thing. And engaging with your audience, I think is yes, it takes a little bit of work. You might have to have someone in the office do that. Maybe not necessarily something that business owner is going to do, but engaging with your audience is probably one of the biggest things that can be done.
Mark Fortune
And it’s, it’s not done because it does take some effort and some time and somebody has to do it. That’s really good advice for everybody as we wrap up, I’m not sure a breaking news tab or at least it was breaking news to me. Evidently Facebook has done away with the 20% text rule and ads. I was very good about that this morning. So previously you weren’t allowed, there was a Facebook would reject your ad that the image had more than 20% of the image space covered in text. And evidently that’s no longer true. Now I don’t think that go do nothing but text in all of your ad images. Good creative still matters. It’s usually less text is better to get a point across fast, but I think that goes under the heading of things, change frequently with this platform all the time and it, and it really helps to pay attention to what’s going on or involve somebody like us, a professional that spends a lot of time in this world to try to figure out how to get the most out of your investments in social media. We’ll appreciate everybody tuning in and listening. Certainly check out more of our episodes and we’ll wrap up today’s episode. Thanks everybody.
Voiceover
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