My name is Julia Doherty from Green Umbrella Social Media for business, and it’s my job to keep you ahead of the game when it comes to everything to do with social media and online digital marketing.
I wanted to give a big thank you this week to Ed Lucas who has given me some excellent advice from the Podcasting Technology Resource Group on LinkedIn (links to the group in the show notes). I have now removed the dynamic processor from the sound and I am hoping that the quality audio is going to sound so much better. Let me know.
Anyway, this week I wanted to share with you two techniques which I have found to be invaluable for my customers when it comes to enhancing their Facebook likes and building a list on Facebook.
So without further ado, lets check the first one which is the boost post function.
If you have a particular post which is getting lots of interaction and engagement then using the “boost post” feature on Facebook works really well to get more likes. I have been doing this with our clients for the last six months. The golden rule is if we have more than 10 comments on a particular post, then we will pay a small fee to Facebook and give that post a boost. We recently promoted a post on the Green Umbrella page which had a picture of Phil Spencer from Location, Location, Location saying “hot or not?”. It got to 10 comments, we clicked “boost” and it ended up with 66 comments (although some posts were a little bit rude so I had to delete them) and an additional 13 likes on the page. There was also a reach of over 7,000 people which cost me £13.64.
I can hear some of you thinking, what on earth has Phil Spencer from Location, Location, Location, got to do with Social Media, and why on earth would I promote this as a post? Bear with me and I will explain.
We are all human right? My target market is also people from the UK, who are marketeers, or small business owners. (I have set demographics for who I am targeting). If a post is going viral on my own page, then I know that it will get interaction and more likes if I advertise this post to my target market (irrelevant to the content). Quite often I am advertising a video that I have produced, or a special offer that I am promoting, but I guarantee that I get more engagement with my audience if I am promoting topics that people are inclined to get involved with. If you want to learn more about this theory, then please check out my post called “You need more beans on toast”.
The good news is that if you promote or boost your posts in this way then it will appear in the newsfeed of your audience and also on mobile devices. It does not appear as a paid advert on the right hand side. In my opinion, newsfeed posts are much more effective. Ask yourself, how often do you actually click any of the adverts on the right hand side in Facebook? I know that I have probably only clicked on this myself a few times, so why would I expect others to do the same for my adverts?
Before you try promote your posts then you will need to know some hard facts:
- You need to have 400 fans before you can promote a post.
- Promoted posts will last for 3 days.
- Your posts will have “sponsored story” underneath, so people know that you have paid for them to see it.
Now, that is an easy way to boost your likes on Facebook with the press of a button, but if you want to get really clever about it then I suggest you use the application called Facebook Power Editor, which takes the boost post option to a whole new level.
There are links to power editor in the show notes, as well as a link to a PDF that was written by Amy Porterfield, an easy guide to using Power Editor.
So, what is power editor and why use it?
- With the power editor application you can take your boosted post to the next level by adding “precise targeting”. For example, rather than just clicking “boost post” which goes to my fans as well as their friends, if I use the Power editor, then I can be more precise. I can promote this post to my competitors fans of their page (powerful eh?), or I can be more specific with better demographics. For example, say that one of my competitors has a fan base of a few thousand “likes”, then I can run a promoted post that says “Download this free social media eBook and learn the 7 Deadly Sins of Social Media” – and I can target the fans of my competitors page. Clever eh?
- The other choice I have is to not promote to my fan base. If I have good engagement on my page already the chances are that they have already seen my post, so why on earth would I spend extra money promoting it again? I want to attract more people to my page, so I need to tick the box that says “do not promote to my fans”.
If you are a fan of podcasts, and you want to enhance your skills when it comes to Facebook advertising then I would certainly recommend Amy Porterfields podcast. Again there are links to it in the show notes.
Go check it out… that’s power editor (it does so much more than what I have spoken about today).
I hope you are enjoying these regular podcasts, I know that I am enjoying putting them together. If you would like to help spread the word, then please head on over to itunes and give the Online Toolkit Podcast a rating. This will help others find the content, and it will be much appreciated.
If there are any online gadgets or tools that you use to enhance your business then please share with us. Simply leave a voice mail message on the Green Umbrella website (on the podcast tab) and we can perhaps include it in one of the shows.
Please remember to click subscribe if you would like to receive these into your smart phone each week. Also remember to check out the LinkedIn Group – Online Marketing Toolkit, where these types of discussions and tips are happening daily.
See you next week! Bye for now.