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The Power of Facebook

Nowadays Facebook plays a vital role in our social life. While we do not always appreciate how powerful Facebook is as a business resource, it has been recognized as one of the major distribution channels today. Facebook has over 1 billion daily active users and over 1.5 billion monthly active users. That is enough reason to justify that Facebook will be here to stay for more than a decade.

The enormous scope of Facebook makes it an extremely powerful tool for businesses, brands, and bloggers. This is a perfect venue to reach an audience of a billion people, all of which are eager to interact.

Now is the high time to maximize this resource. Facebook is the best tool to use as a bait to lure people to your website. It provides a platform that fosters the relationship between brands with it's potential clients. Not only that, Facebook is arguably the most cost effective way of advertising in the internet today. With a wide array of Facebook services to choose from, you will surely land one that will suit your needs.

Navigating Facebook and optimizing every aspect of it can be a little bit intimidating especially to us not-so-computer-savvy. Now that Facebook is constantly developing its interface and not to mention adding more and more restrictions you may find yourself lost in the Facebook maze.

Luckily, there are foolproof ways to jump-start your Facebook campaign. This course gives you guaranteed ways to make the best use of Facebook for your business.

Maximizing Facebook's Potential

In this section, we'll go over a handful of tips that you can use to maximize your Facebook marketing potential, both for your brand or your business. Without further ado, let's get right into it.

1. Create a Facebook page that will truly represent your brand.

It’s as easy as signing up your personal account! Facebook page is designed to bridge your brand to your customers while giving them the opportunity to share your content with their community. Your Facebook page shall be an extension of your website and/or your brand. By creating a Facebook page, you can now directly interact with billions of users and potential customers.

When creating your Facebook page be sure that it will truly convey the message of your organization, be it for a charitable cause or for marketing promotions. Your page should paint a clear picture of what your following can expect from your brand and how it differs from other competitors. This page should best reflect of who you are, who you want to be and who people perceive you to be.

Use the profile picture and cover photo wisely. Just like a logo, this will serve as a foundation of your brand. These are the two main sections that will catch your visitor’s attention. You want your audience to stay interested, get involved and leaves them wanting for more. Remember, this page will represent you in the Facebook community so make sure to make it unique, fun but relevant.

2. Optimize all parts of your page.

Explore your Facebook page, you will be surprised how many sections you can actually use to your advantage. Just like your personal page, you can edit your profile on your Fan page. Provide a brief overview of your brand or services. Try to link wherever possible such as sections of “Overview”, “Milestones” and “Page Info”. You can also add a button to personalize your page. This can also be the easiest way to direct your visitors to your blog, website, or other offer.

3. Post relevant topics.

To maximize the potential of your page you have to post topics that tell a story. The focus should be on your users and not on your brand. Be it an excerpt from your blog, a brand feature, a simple question and answer or product review, all of which should provide value to the lives of your prospects, customers or community members. This is a great way to give your following an opportunity to like, share and comment on your post. Use this as a way to create interactions and buzz.

In posting any update or status, always keep your customer’s benefit in mind. It’s about how much value you are genuinely adding to a person’s professional or personal life. Just remember to keep it brief but enticing enough to make your readers want more.

4. Visual content outshines the non-visual content.

However creative and witty your status is, people will tend to be respond more to pictures and videos rather than just simple text. Visual content receives more engagement than any other type of post.

Keep your post to 90:10 ratio, 90% visual and 10 % text. You could also embed a video from your blog, this way your audience can get a preview of what your article or offer is about without leaving the Facebook site.

When posting a picture or a video, always aim to trigger the curiosity of your audience. Emotions are a sure way to strike the customers’ attention: happiness, gratitude, or even fear.

Lastly, remember to stay on your branding. Not every post can benefit your brand. You may post an interesting visual but people may find it hard to connect it to your brand. This will only leave them disappointed, disengaged and may possibly result in a decrease in likes or interactions.

5. Fire up your exposure by giving away incentives.

Why not give your audience incentives to keep your following engaged and at the same time increase your exposure in the Facebook community? Features such as: discounts, contests, reward programs and giveaways can be perfect incentives depending on your target market. Providing them a chance to win a prize will definitely drive a ton of clicks that would result in an increase of your overall brand awareness.

Incentives, when promoted properly, will also increase brand loyalty and customer longevity. Just make sure to make your contest or giveaway mechanics as simple as possible. Making hard-to-follow rules or instructions will do more harm than good as people usually become turned off by complicated mechanics.

6. Share!

Instead of posting directly, try sharing your page first. Brand pages tend to have a limited visibility so try sharing it to your page then re-share it to your personal page. Also, using hashtags is one way to share your Facebook content. These hashtags are not only for your Twitter and Instagram posts. These are also great tools to use in searching for content in Facebook groups, and increasing your visibility.

You can also breed potential sharing opportunities by extending your network. A great example would be sharing other people’s content on your page. This may sound ridiculous but nowadays more and more people are sharing each others content, because after all, social media is all about sharing.

7. Facebook Advertising and Targeting Features.

Facebook ads enable you to reach specific and targeted audiences. First of all, understand that there are many different advertising platforms available for you. You can choose from offer claims, local awareness, event responses, video views, clicks to website, website conversions, page post engagement, page likes, app installs and app engagement. Use Facebook ads to increase your website or brand exposure and drive traffic directly to your site or different offers.

Best of all, using Facebook ads doesn’t have to cost you a fortune, you just have to be creative in choosing. Try to use different advertising platforms and assess what service will best work for you. Monitor your results and always tweak the campaign. 8. Start a forum on your Facebook page.

Remember when I told you to keep your audience interested? Keeping an active forum will surely boost customer engagement. It can also decrease your site’s bounce rate or the single-page visitors. Be sure to offer a helping hand to your members and help them discover other useful resources and informational sites. This will positively reinforce your position in the community and will help you gain more “likes” overall.

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Generate Traffic Using Instagram

Instagram is the golden child of social media. It's not spoken about as often, in a digital marketing sense, as the bigger, more established platforms, but this is just part of the reason why you should be marketing on Instagram.

It should come as no surprise to you when I say that Facebook and Twitter are both saturated with advertisements, and users have learned to tune out to the constant noise businesses are making on these platforms.

On the other hand, Instagram is a relatively new social platform. Only 36% of marketers have actually committed to the platform, resulting in an overall higher brand interaction.

Generally, people have significant doubt that Instagram and other photo sharing social media platforms can be used in a business setting. Whether to increase brand awareness or increase conversions. However, you should consider these facts: Instagram has a per follower engagement rate of 4.21%, which is 58 times higher than Facebook, furthermore users share close to 40 million photos every day. Every second, these photos garner an overall average of 8500 likes, and 1000 comments.

That in itself is proof of massive audience engagement.

Perhaps even more impressive is that if someone follows you on Instagram 100% of your content will make it onto their feed.

Social media marketing is often considered the alternative to SEO. The reason being that in SEO situations it can be difficult to escape the shadows cast by market leaders.

By this, I mean that your links are buried by the flood of content that these leaders are consistently pumping out. Meanwhile, Instagram is the opposite end of the spectrum, and once you get that follower, they will see all of your content. It doesn’t matter if they also happen to be following Nike, Coca Cola, and NASA as well.

The Instagram Demographic

Instagram is the ideal platform if you're targeting users in the 18 to 34 year-old zone, but don't let this fool you at all.

Expanding on that, 68% of its users are female, and more users are reported to live in cities rather than rural areas. Have you ever wondered why Instagram is so popular in the fashion industry? Well, if you're selling younger woman’s clothing, you should already be on the platform.

There are millions of users and it's more than possible to market to other demographics on the platform. Always keep in mind who's using the platform when marketing on Instagram, and you can properly target your audience.

The Secrets To A Successful Post

Now that you understand a bit how you can use Facebook to market your brand or really anything, it's time to look at some of the most common Facebook posting mistakes that marketers make.

One of the fundamentals of digital marketing is that you give away free content, so that in turn, your audience will see your online presence as valuable. On Instagram, you have to view your posts as your content. That's what you have to work with. This post perfectly targets Instagram’s demographic. Look at how it's been structured and try to decipher why it works. What I'm attempting to draw your attention to is that nothing is actually being sold.

This post is a photo of a well-dressed model. Maybe the audience comes along and likes what she's wearing, and they think it's something they would like to wear. The audience then considers this quality content, so they comment, like, or follow. If you read the text, the audience is being asked to click a link and go to a blog. A lot of them are even tagging their friends, which creates a viral reach effect for traffic.

A great post, but like I said before it isn’t selling a thing. Social media marking is all about being social, and it's important that you measure the success of a post by the overall audience engagement.

If you make content people are talking about, it will end up being shared around and as a result, draw in a larger audience. From there, you can then direct them down your marketing funnel, get them on your list, or do anything else you'd like.

How is this engagement measured?

Starting off, we need to set objectives, or goals. Actions that we would like to see people taking after seeing our content.

In a marketing context, we tend to call these action conversions. A conversion is any action that a lead or visitor takes that you deem beneficial to your business.

For example, your conversions on Instagram are, for the most part, the engagement supported by the platform.

Here some examples of conversions on Instagram:

Receiving a ‘like’

A new follower

A user following a link to your landing page

A user playing a video

It's essential that you place focus on doing the social stuff first, and understand that the sales and monetary pay off will come later.

How To Get People To Do What We Want

How would you normally get someone to do something for you?

Think about that for a second. Generally speaking, you would ask them.

Remember, we are marketing to people, not robots. If you scroll back up and look at American Eagle’s post they are asking people to click on a blog post. Think of it like this: your content is you doing something for them. People love to reciprocate, so if you then ask them to do something, they are more likely to do such.

Asking your audience to do something is commonly known as a ‘call to action’, and you should have a call to action for all of your marketing efforts, when applicable. Your call to action should be easy for the audience to act on. I will touch on this in greater detail shortly, but for now, you need to remember that the vast majority of Instagram users are on their phones.

You need to keep things really simple. If you ask people to go to your blog their need to be a link, and when they arrive, your blog needs to be easy to navigate.

This means it should be mobile friendly to increase conversions.

How To Get Your Instagram Generating Traffic

How would you normally get someone to do something for you? Social media marketing is truly a content game. At the end of the day, if you're taking bad photos with no context, then no one is going to pay any attention to your efforts.

What I would recommend is that you take a long hard look at the biggest players on Instagram and see what they are doing. Look at popular posts as well from accounts that you happen to follow.

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Generating Traffic Using Twitter

I could start by telling you about Twitter, and its 310 million users, but I am not going to because I don’t need to.

On my very first day, sitting in a university classroom, studying online marketing, I remember my professor saying, ‘you need to understand. We are not digital marketing; we are marketing in a digital world.’ Everyone is on social media, and I don’t need to tell you this, because, well, everyone is on it. It is a self-evident, selfperpetuating truth – okay, stay with me.

I aim to teach you how Twitter can generate traffic for your website.

I don’t just want to go over how to make your posts better and build a following. I want to teach you the underlying theories behind digital marketing. In the hope that, once you know them, you will understand not just the what but the why.

In this course you'll have an in depth short but insanely informative and beneficial lesson in exactly how you want to be using Twitter and how you can generate tons of traffic from the super powerful and gigantic platform.

Digital Marketing For Conversions

What is my conversion?

This is the first question you ask when undertaking any form of digital marketing. A conversion is when a reader, customer, member of your audience – whatever you want to call them – performs any action you deem beneficial for your business or enterprise as a whole.

When asked this question most people will respond, ‘well that is easy I want to make sales.’

This is not a bad answer.

The whole point of a profit generating entity is, after all, to generate profit, but social media marketing is not about shoving your products down your audience’s collective throats.

If you treat Twitter as a billboard, people will tune out, unfollow, and you will find yourself in a spam box.

Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google Plus, these are all social platforms. On them you have to be sociable. You need a sociable conversion.

Common Conversions

Retweet

Leave a like

Directed a lead to your website

Comment

You might think this is really obvious. If you do, fantastic, it shows a natural aptitude for this kind of marketing.

The Call To Action

Now that you understand a bit how you can use Facebook to market your brand or really anything, it's time to look at some of the most common Facebook posting mistakes that marketers make.

So now you know what you want your audience to do, the next question is how to get them to do it.

With that question in mind go to this site: https://www.clickonthings.com/ The pictures are pretty enough, and some would even say it is well designed, but this site is a digital marketing failure. You can spend days, clicking on the pictures.

But what is this site’s purpose? What does the site want the audience to do? There is no way of knowing. Click on things is a great resource for what ‘not’ to do.

Imagine those pictures are tweets, one after another, page after page. That is what you are trying to avoid.

Have a look at this graph from Copyblogger.com

Quick Definition: “A ‘retweet’ is simply a repost of another Twitter user's tweet on your own profile to show to your own followers. Like hashtags, retweets are a community-driven phenomenon on Twitter with the aim of making the service better and allowing people to spread discussions easier.” Daniel Nations Now the graph is simple to understand. It shows us the prevalence of the word ‘please’ in retweets.

Why are so many people saying please?

Well we say please when we ask for something, don’t we? And that is exactly what is happening here.

Whether they know it or not, these Twitter users are marketing for conversions. They are asking people to ‘please retweet’

It is called a ‘call to action,’ and you need to consider your call to action ever tweet, upload, picture, or piece of content, you intend for people to see. Your audience needs to be told what to do, unlike Click on Things.

The good news is that Twitter has done most the work for you. Your audience is within easy reach of buttons to comment, follow and retweet, your posts. You just have to ask.

Your call to action can be anything as long as it aligns with a conversion. Questions, eg ‘What do you think of our new winter line?’

Follow this person

Like this if you …

Comment if you …

Download My EBook

Check out my site

Follow me on Facebook

Order your free (blank) product or trial

Twitter’s data shows that tweets that asked for a follow increased responses by 258%. People love to participate. If you show them something they like and ask them to retweet it chances are they will.

Kaitlyn’s battle against cancer is likely to get thousands of retweets. This is a relatable post and, more importantly, there is a clear call to action.

Bordering on clicktivism, “the use of social media and other online methods to promote a cause.” Oxford Dictionary, how could you not retweet this, by doing so you are supporting a battle against cancer.

Value Creation On Instagram

If you’ve ever read a book called ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ the protagonist tries to define quality. It is impossible to put into words exactly what gives content value.

In the book, Phaedrus realises that although it can’t be defined we all have this intuitive understanding of what is and is not good quality. As a marketer, this really made a lot of sense. We normally use the word value instead of quality.

You might not know exactly what every reader wants, but we all know what is good and what is bad. And what is good has value or quality.

Your tweet is content, or a channel to content, and you need to create value in this content. How do you do that?

Think about it like this. The audience needs to get something out of your post. Entertainment, humour, social or intellectual confirmation, the belief that your content can in some way improve their lives.

Thinking about the value of every tweet you post is a step in the right direction. There is no right or wrong way to go about value creation.

In online marketing we aim to become an authority and to do so we give away content, e.g. the tweets. People pay attention to an authority, and if you keep the content wheel turning people will see value.

Consider Kaitlyn’s battle against cancer.

Conversion: Retweet

Call to action: Please retweet

Value: Fighting cancer and cancer awareness

This tweet reaffirms the beliefs of millions of people. It is unique because of its wit. Stir these two ingredients together and you have a viral tweet.

Many businesses will shy away from posting something like this, because it is controversial. I recommend you tackle the controversial. Think about all the reasons why this tweet works, and don’t forget we are marketing to humans. We are a flawed backwards bunch, and you will do well to remember that.

How To Write A Tweet

Twitter is all about engagement. As a platform, it allows you to send short messages very quickly. It is great for building credibility and drawing people to your main hub: a website, blog, or Facebook page.

You want to keep your tweet short a sweet. It needs to intrigue a potential reader. That being said it needs to remain relevant to the post, or you run the risk of coming off a click bait; a sure way to damage your reputation.

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LinkedIn Traffic Generation

If you're seeing this right now, chances are you're already aware that LinkedIn is by far the largest business oriented social platform around. The general objective of the platform is to allow users to create a network of other professionals. It's particularly used for the exchange of ideas, information, and other opportunities.

As a matter of fact, approximately 1.3 million small business owners and professionals just like you are on LinkedIn to gain new prospects, enhance their online presence, generate leads, and build their overall brand awareness. The owners know this, and as much, they provide an ad service that can also assist you with getting new potential customers, starting at a minimum budget of $10.

Above all though, LinkedIn is considered a social media networking site, specifically developed for business professionals and even entrepreneurs. There's a number of things that set LinkedIn apart from say, a Facebook page or another network page.

LinkedIn allows you to design a customized business oriented profile that highlights things such as work experience, skills, endorsements, education, curated posts, and in basically your entire professional presence. On the profile page, a summarized view is displayed to viewers. You can establish connections with other people by using the “InMail” messaging service to expand upon opportunities and network. The platform is an acknowledged approach to advertise your presence online. As such, if you're searching the web to discover new professionals, LinkedIn results will be given priority in the results.

This course will assume you already have an understanding of LinkedIn and how it works, so we'll skip over that. Instead, we're going to focus on how you can use LinkedIn for both traffic generation and also as a useful marketing tool as well.

Setting Up Your LinkedIn Account To Generate The Most Traffic

In this section, we'll look over various tricks and tips for using your LinkedIn account to generate more traffic, regardless of your brand or business.

Create A Company Page

I'm sure you're aware of how to use LinkedIn as an individual, because after all, that's what LinkedIn is most known for: establishing yourself as a professional. But have you created a company page for your brand or business? If not, you should consider doing that for a number of reasons. For starters, it allows people to learn more about your business. You can curate your content on here and centralize everything for sharing updates and other information.

To drive people to your company page, just ask each of your employees or even followers of your brand (such as subscribers of your list) to connect with your company page from their own personal profile. You'd be surprised how many people out there are actively using LinkedIn on a daily basis.

Company pages can also feature job postings as well as other information about your products or services. As an additional bonus, company pages rank very well for branded organic searches.

Optimize Your Profile Page

For starters, you should make sure you have a good profile picture, a complete summary that introduces yourself or your company, and a concise history of achievements and experiences. Don't overlook the importance of these fundamentals with your profile page.

Here's just a few ways to optimize your profile:

Write a summary that clearly explains what you do or what you’d like to do.

Make it easy for people to contact you via email or LinkedIn.

Be honest, be specific, and use numbers when possible.

Read your profile out loud to look for typos.

Now that you're familiar with the optimization of your profile page. Let's discuss how you're going to drive traffic.

With your LinkedIn page, you can link to blog posts, e-books, and even other digital media within your profile. Once you get traffic to your page, this is exactly how they're going to click-through to your site.

Add a link to one of your best posts. Keep in mind that people who end up here are likely learning about you and your company for the first time. Share content that will inspire them to click-through and read.

Your media will appear in your Summary, which is one of the first things people see when viewing your profile. It’s really important to add media in the Summary section. LinkedIn might ask you to add Publications or Projects. You can create external links with those features, but they appear at the bottom of your profile. Stick to the Summary for maximum exposure.

Focus On Your Summary

Nowhere should your profile be more differentiated than in the “Summary” section of your Linkedin profile. This is your opportunity to describe yourself in the context that you want to use the network.

For instance, a person conducting an open job search might explicitly write that in the summary. Or a person seeking to establish thought leadership within their field might highlight their accomplishments and how they demonstrate their expertise. Louise Fletcher of Blue Sky describes her ideal “template” for this section as five paragraphs, while Laura Smith-Proulx of Job Hunt suggests focusing on the readability of this section above everything else.

The summary communicates everything, really. It’s the first substantive thing that people will read on your profile and should communicate why you’re using the network (or in the case of incognito job searches, intimate as much).

Customize Your URL

This many seem like a trite thing, but the impression that the link “linkedin.com/in/jimdougherty” makes as opposed to “linkedin.com/in/A5620E9” is both subtle and substantive.

The former looks better and intimates familiarity with the network, while the latter makes it appear that your not familiar enough with LinkedIn to make a very easy customization.

A non-personalized URL communicates lack of familiarity with the LinkedIn network. A custom URL may make it easier to remember your profile and to navigate back. Also remember that when you create this type of business plan, you should use estimates and projections that aren't overly optimistic. Make sure that your plan will work in a 'worst case scenario' and don't put unnecessary stress upon yourself. This way you can only be pleased by the results that you end up achieving.

Using LinkedIn As A Marketing Tool

Think of your LinkedIn profile as an interactive resume – on steroids. In addition, to information about your work experience and education, LinkedIn allows you to enhance your profile with the following Web 2.0 capabilities to showcase your expertise: