Tuesday Tips: Promoting Posts to Facebook Friends of Fans

The next step in advertising, after you promote your page in general to broader audiences, is to promote your page activity/posts.  Do you have a sale coming up? A special? Or perhaps an event that just finished that you're sharing photos of?  Perhaps a news article that was posted about your company? Or perhaps there's something of interest that you're wanting your customers to see - you just remodeled your store or changed the sauce of your pizza and everyone is raving about it.

These are the types of posts you want to promote, aka boost.

The first step is to boost the post to friends of your fans in the hopes that they will see your post, see that your friend has liked the page (and possibly the post) and then like the page or post themselves which then propagates it to their friends.  All of this helps drive marketing to potential new customers or remind old customers that you're still out there and have something new.

Promoting to Friends of Fans is a great way to get local interaction and word of mouth going too.

Like "Hey did you see XYZ Store has a special going on this weekend?" "No...where?" "They posted about it on Facebook."

It works just like that.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Experiment with Facebook Ad Targeting

Advertising with Facebook can be tricky as there are a lot of options on who you can target based on location, interests, keywords, age groups, etc.  This is why it's important to experiment with Facebook Ad Targeting when you're doing Facebook advertising to see what works best for you and your brand.

The default promotion is to people who like your page.  After that you can chose to market to the people who like your page and their friends.  Or you can chose People you chose through targeting.  This option opens up a lot more options, including countries, demographics, interests and more.  It will also show you what a minimal amount of advertising will potentially net you in total reach.

You can save each demographic under a different name and chose from them when targeting different groups.  Then, when an ad is complete, you can compare it to the other ads to see how it did.  We'll talk about that in a future tutorial.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Experiment with Images/Copy in Ads

The most important thing to remember with advertising is an age old saying: if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

Advertising on Facebook is all about the visuals with a little bit of emphasis on the words.  Therefor, today's tip is to experiment with different images and different ad copy when creating ads or sponsored stories.

You may even try different ad copy with the same images to see which generates more responses.  You never know what will work if you don't try several combinations. This brings us back to other advice as well.  If you know of a similar company with a successful Facebook page, see what their posts are like, then emulate them. Note the phrase.  Emulate them.  Don't copy them, but try to do what they're doing in your own style.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Create an Ad About Your Page

There are many ways to advertise with Facebook to get your company and your social media presence out there. The first way to do this is to simply advertise your page. There are many ways to do this and Facebook offers some pre-made ads, complete with wording and an image of your logo, etc. to help make this easier for you.

As always, you can customize the text and image.

It is advised for promoting your page, to promote it to friends of fans, hopefully getting those who are friends of fans see their friends like the page and they in turn like the page to see what the company is about.  After a few weeks of that, change your target beyond friends of fans. Try locations, interests, and broad categories and demographics to help get the word out there and potentially get more likes.

Keep in mind, this advertising is focused on promoting the page itself, not the posts on the page. We'll get to that in a future tip.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Advertising with Facebook

This post isn't necessarily a tip, but rather an explanation about the posts I'll be making in the coming weeks, including Tutorials for Facebook advertising.

The next few weeks topics will be talking about paid advertising with Facebook, the various things you can do, various audiences to target and why to do so. There are mixed feelings from many folks as to whether or not you should pay Facebook for advertising.

Ultimately, Facebook is a free service and you get what you put into it for marketing. Many people thought marketing would be free, but Facebook saw it as a way to monetize their system and, let's be honest, it's a reasonable expectation to pay if you're going to be promoting your company for free outside of your promoted posts via Facebook.

There are many theories behind what happens when you pay for advertising that I don't intend to go into in my posts, but I will share them on Fridays and Saturdays which are reserved for sharing articles from other social media blogs and sites.

Do you have any experience with advertising on Facebook or other social media sites?  Would you be interested in guest blogging?  If so, contact me via Facebook PM here.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Advertise to Current Fans

This advice may sound silly, but with the drastic decrease in the amount of content fans see from your page, if you have a marketing budget, you should promote some of your posts to your current fans.  Doing this will increase your reach (especially if they like or share the posts) and potentially get you more fans from their likes and shares.

According to Facebook, advertising to current fans will increase you reach by 3-to-5 times what your fanbase is. I'm not sure if this stat is still accurate, but it would definitely be interesting to see.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Optimize Ads

If you are going to pay for ads - especially for Facebook - you need to make sure that your ads are going to be doing what you want it to do for you.

However, if you don't tell Facebook what you want, it will go with whatever the last setting you used was or what the default setting is (sorry, I don't recall the default setting.  This is why it's important to know what you're wanting to get out of your ad - and each ad you run may have different goals.

Decide what the goals for your ad are before you purchase it.  If you want to promote the page as a whole, promote the page itself, not an article.

If you're wanting to get more visibility on a post, boost that post.

And, more importantly, know your budget.  Don't overspend or underspend if you're looking to reach specific goals.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.