Building Your Audience On Facebook.
While the previous tutorial was about engaging with your current audience and perhaps a few new audience members, what about seriously building your audience in the beginning? Let’s look at a few tips on how to accomplish this.
Email Acquisition with ActionSprout.
Most people understand that the real battleground on Facebook is not the Facebook page, but the news feeds. In fact, very few users will actually visit the page; rather, they interact with the page updates that are in their news feeds. The problem with most page apps for Facebook is that they require a user to visit the page. For example, a photo contest will require that the user visits a custom tab on the Facebook page of the company to upload their photo and submit their contest entry. Therefore, they have to leave their news feed, which is their home away from home, in order to participate in the contest. ActionSprout will remove this barrier by allowing you to put the acquisition action in their news feeds. For example, a customer can sign a petition, support projects, or demand challenges in their news feeds. When they click the action in their update, they’re directed to a single page where they complete the action. This isn’t meant to replace the custom tabs, but it’s best used as a powerful addition to your custom tabs.
Boost New Product Announcements.
Boost posts on Facebook are still very effective, especially for the smaller businesses. Even though most experts will advise not to use the feature, small businesses can greatly benefit from boost posts announcing new products. Just because many who are teaching social media tell you not to boost posts, that doesn’t mean they don’t work or are not effective. Question everything, and test the tactics and techniques for yourself.
Website Custom Audiences.
Facebook is moving into what’s known as a pay-to-play model, so marketers are going to need to find better ways they can reach their fans. While you can ads targeting specific fans, one of the best tips for marketing on Facebook is to use Website Custom Audiences instead. When you use Website Custom Audiences, you can run Facebook ads through the Power Editor. This allows you to target those who have visited your website or a certain page on your website when they are back on Facebook.
This is useful for many different reasons.
Let’s say someone is reading a guide on your website. If you’re running Website Custom Audiences, when they go back over to Facebook, instead of seeing their normal page posts, they will see a template to download pertaining to your guide. If someone is reading an article about how to use one of your products, they can be targeted on Facebook with a link to a video on how to use that product on their Facebook news feed. While these are just a few ways you can use this tool to improve your marketing on Facebook, there are numerous others out there. The key takeaway is to get creative with how you target your audience. You can generate more leads and better customers with your Facebook marketing efforts if you move beyond the norm.
Increase PR Efforts.
With everything that Facebook offers for their marketers, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that it is a tool that supports your brand’s PR efforts. The truth is that reporters rely on Facebook so as to source stories and Facebook endorses the platform as a Rolodex with a billion contacts for the reporters. Where your company might have relied on a press release previously, now you can share your story on Facebook. It’ provides a low-friction option for reporting the facts in the case of breaking news or providing comments on emerging issues that are going to help you get your story to the media and the public quicker. You can research members of the media using Facebook Graph Search. This tool allows you to quickly figure out who works where, what websites and publications your fans might read, or follow those who have a journalism- 0related public title. When you search for a journalist and the name of the media outlet, you can find potential contacts. In addition, actively monitoring Facebook pages of your target media can be a good way to position your company or brand as a source for stories. Many media channels will petition sources through their social media accounts. You can make a notice list of your chief pages in one spot to observe them on a continuous basis.
Split Testing Facebook Ads.
Facebook advertising has become critical for marketing efforts of companies, and using it effectively without wasting money means you have to find the perfect keywords. The way you can do this is to split test audiences. Split testing is taking a percentage of the advertising budget and running ads while changing only a single item at a time and comparing the results to see which ad performed better. The structure of the Facebook ad campaigns has changed a little, and you can turn on and off the ads automatically at the Ad Set level. Structure your campaigns to run one ad below every ad set so that you can easily turn them on and off at their set times. Many people want to know how large their target audience should be, but this will depend on many factors, so there isn’t one right answer to this question. There are many people who benefit from targeting narrow audiences, while others do better targeting wider audiences. Split testing will be the only way to determine the answer for your brand. Determine how well the ad performs by looking at the one that gets the cheapest clicks for whatever the goal of your ad is. If your ad is driving people to your website, the best ad is going to receive the cheapest website clicks. If you’re able, make a conversion pixel to observe which ad converts best on the website. Split testing doesn’t have to be expensive or hard, and it’s going to save you a lot of money in the future. If you can test five to ten different audiences at twenty-five to fifty dollars for each ad, then you’ll have two to three perfect target audiences for future ads.
Here's a video that explain How To Build Your Audience On Facebook.