Archives 2014

Wowzers!  Keeping up with Facebook can be a full time job and most of you don’t have time to sift through the web to find everything you need when it comes to Facebook marketing and advertising.

You might just have a quick question about Facebook for your business but aren’t sure where to look – this post will give you all of the info you need. It is also going to be PACKED with TONS of Facebook resources you should know so you can maximize your Facebook marketing strategies for your business.

Make sure you bookmark the resources that are most relevant to the information you need for your business related to Facebook

1.  FACEBOOK FOR BUSINESS

This is hands down the best place to go when looking for a Facebook related question.  Whether you’re just getting started or looking to amplify existing efforts, Facebook for Business can help you understand your options and choose the appropriate strategies.  Facebook for Business is the centralized destination for news and information about marketing with Facebook.  If you’re looking for valuable tips on how to optimize your marketing efforts visit Facebook.com/Business.  You can also like their page here Facebook.com/marketing

2.  FACEBOOK STUDIO EDGE

Facebook Studio Edge offers training to help you brush up on your Facebook marketing skills, learn some new ones, and keep up with all the latest from Facebook. You can also earn recognition for your expertise in Pages and Advertising. To learn more, visit : Facebook-studio.com/education. Facebook Studio Edge also highlights different agencies and marketers’ creativity when it comes to Facebook marketing. Here Facebook  recognizes great campaigns from all corners of the world that could help you get inspired: learn fresh ideas and strategies to help strengthen up your brand online.

3.  FACEBOOK AD PRODUCTS AND SPECIFICATIONS

If you want to learn all the options you have to advertise on Facebook, their requirements, best practices and pricing, visit Facebook.com/help/ads/products.

4.  TEXT OVERLAY GRID TOOL

Upload your photos and ad creatives to see if it passes the 20% rule using this tool. It scans the image to make sure that texts in the image only 20% of the image. Too much text for Facebook, will only make it look like it is spam. This encourages people to use the headline and body of your ad to tell people more about why you’re advertising and what you want them to do. Learn more about this here…

5.  FACEBOOK PAGES

A Business page dedicated to give you more tips on utilizing and optimizing your Facebook Business Page. To like Facebook Pages click here…

6.  DEVELOPERS RESOURCE

For tech geeks, get more information on how to build, install and deploy Facebook Apps and Mobile Apps here – developers.facebook.com. You can also head over to the Facebook Developers Blog to read stories behind new features, products and apps on Facebook.

7.  FACEBOOK + COMMERCE

Facebook + Commerce = Helping Commerce partners use Facebook. Learn about best practices and tools to help you increase registration, conversions, and cart size; drive referral traffic; and deepen user insights on your site. Be part of their Facebook community here: www.facebook.com/commerce.

Mashable has written this blog post that will give you an overview of how it works – The Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Commerce.

8.  FACEBOOK LIVE

Facebook Live connects you with some of the top public figures and information about what they’re working on – on and off Facebook. Go to FacebookLive.com to watch live stream events and stay tuned for announcements and Q&As with your favorite celebrities, athletes, musicians, and entertainers. More importantly, watch videos about Facebook updates and announcements.

9.  CONTACT FACEBOOK

Individuals or companies can report any violations of copyright, intellectual property, use of trademarks, abuse here…

10.  FACEBOOK POLICIES

Keep yourself abreast about Facebook’s official guidelines on Ads, Credit Terms, Pages, Platform, Payment Terms, Promotions, etc. Visit www.facebook.com/policies.

Make sure to bookmark these sites for easy access to Facebook tips and information.

Have more Facebook resources I left off the list?  Post them in the comments below!

Facebook’s Graph Search is an amazing tool and provides tons of information about your ideal audience, competitors fans, and your fans’ interests.

With a little imagination, your research options are endless! This post covers various ways on how you can research, optimize and engage your ideal audience using Graph Search.

Research

Discover more about your fans. With a few keywords, you can get information about your existing fans and friends in order to fully understand what your ideal audience likes.

You may want to start with your friends. Go ahead and try these search terms:

• My friends who like [your page]
• Favorite interests of people who like [your page]
• Favorite interests of people who like [your page]
• Groups of people who like [your page]
• Pages liked by people who like [your page]
• Fans of [your page] and [another similar page]
• Places, like Restaurants in [your city] visited by people who like [your page]

Divide your fan base into demographics like men and women:

• Pages liked by women who like [your page]
• Pages liked by men who like [your page]

Use the Facebook Graph Search to visualize your current and target audiences. With more digging, you can uncover the real picture of your audience’ demographics: age, gender, education, and “likes”. Make sure you search as much as you can since this tool is designed for market research.

Optimize

Not only it is important to know more about your current fans, it is also noteworthy to know other business or pages’ interests as well. Make sure you optimize your page by updating it with all of the most important information about your business. The business name, category and other information on your About page is highly important, so that Graph Search can tailor its results using your data. Develop interesting post content. This way, your search results become more relevant to your ideal audience. This also makes your Business Page more appealing to your fans.

Always remember that everything in Facebook: links, photos and News Feed that a user has “liked” becomes searchable content on Facebook Graph Search. In short, getting people to like your page as well as its content are important. The more likes, the more search results you can dig up.

Engage

Once you have learned about your audience and optimized your page, you can now start with connecting to new people. Use the Graph Search to know more about the competition in your area and compare your page to theirs. Be on the lookout for Facebook users who are similarly interested to what your current fans “likes”. In this way, you can select more engaging content to post or develop your ads to reach more targeted audience.

Ever wonder what the red notifications are at the top of your Facebook page?  Or wonder how to change these setting?  This HOW TO post will teach you How To Change Your Facebook Notification Settings.

Red alert notifications appear in the top-right corner of any Facebook page. Upon logging in, you should see a red square notification over the global icon that includes the number of unread notifications you have. There are separate notifications for friends requests and new messages.

When a user clicks on these icons, a drop-down will show you the new items and you can take action from there.

If you’re trying to manage the time you spend on social networks (you know, so you can get “real” work done) then being notified for everything as it happens might be too time consuming.

Did you know that you can actually control what notifications you want to get?

Here are some of the types of notifications you can adjust in your settings:

• Email notifications
• Push notifications on your phone
• App requests and notifications
• Group notifications
• Close friend notifications
• Pop-up notifications
• Event notifications

HERE’S HOW YOU TO DO IT:

A. Turn off notifications of individual posts:

1. Click the globe icon
2. Hover your mouse over the notification you want to stop seeing and click the X that appears
3. Click Turn off

B. Adjust your email notifications:

1. Click at the top right of your homepage and select Setting and click Notifications
2. Go to Email and click Edit
3. Choose if you want to receive all notifications or only notifications about your account, security and privacy

C. To change your notification settings for a group

1. Go to the group and click Notifications in the top right under your group’s photo.
2. You can turn notifications on for All Posts, on for Friends’ Posts or Off.

For more information about changing your Facebook notifications, visit Facebook Help.

Holy Moley…I can’t believe FACEBOOK IS TURNING 10 YEARS OLD TODAY!

I’ve been on the social network since 2006 and man, it’ been quite the journey.

Do you remember your “first time” with Facebook?  I do, like it was yesterday.  I  was sitting on my couch at home and logged on to my computer to set up my account with Facebook.  I stayed up almost ALL NIGHT LONG reading people’s posts, connecting with old high school and college friends and looking at SO MANY PICTURES!  It was freakin’ amazing.  I was hooked instantly.

Now, don’t get me wrong…over the years I’ve had a love/hate kind of relationship with Facebook.  I hate it because I spend way too much time on it which takes away from the work I should be doing and it causes me to be distracted when I should be spending time with my family.

But I mostly LOVE it and am super thankful for Facebook for these 10 reasons:

1.  I have become more CONNECTED than ever before to all of the people that matter most in my life.

2.  I can FOLLOW businesses that I like and learn about specials and promotions that they are having simply by being a fan of their page.

3.  It has become my PHOTO hosting service and I no longer have to use Shutterfly or another service to post my pics for friends and family to see.

4.  It has given me the opportunity to have an incredible CAREER teaching people what I have learned from using Facebook and how YOUR business can see huge returns by leveraging the massive social network.

5.  Talk about VISUAL!  I love the way you can use Facebook to have a visual experience with your friends and fans.  The images, the video, it’s all part of an amazing online visual experience.

6.  I love that I can easily schedule EVENTS for things that are going on in my job or my personal life.  It’s like having Facebook and Evite all rolled up in one!

7.  I can keep up with what’s TRENDING on Facebook and in the news with Facebook’s new Trending functionality.  It helps me curate content and keep up with what’s going on in the world.

8.  I can join super secret and private GROUPS to stay connected with friends that I’m taking a class with or with colleagues that I’ve joined a business program with.  I love this feature because you can chat back and forth in a private setting.

9.  I know you’re all going to think I’m crazy but I have to say that I do love FACEBOOK ADS!  I’ve been in online advertising using Google AdWords for years and Facebook’s micro-targeting capability with their ad platform is unprecedented.  It simply rocks and can work for your business if set up the right way!

10.  I’ve got to come back full circle and end with the same reason that I started…and that is that I’m thankful for Facebook because of the CONNECTIVITY it’s given me to the world.  I’ve met some amazing people on Facebook.  I’ve hired a brand strategist in the UK, I’ve worked with a writer in Hawaii, and I’ve collaborated through groups with thousands of people just this past year through Facebook.

It’s been an amazing journey and I can’t wait to see what Facebook has in store for us over the next 10 years.

Want to see something AWESOME?!

Facebook created this super cool video feature that allows you to see all of your biggest highlights on Facebook over the past 10 years – or however long you’ve been a Facebook user.

Want to have a look at my video?  Click this Post by Jen Smith Social.

Want to create your own?  It’s super easy and takes about 1 minute to do!  Simply click here.

Hope you’ve enjoyed a look back on why I’m so thankful for Facebook.  Want to learn more tips and tricks about Facebook for your business?  Come check out The Social Sip!

I’d love to hear why YOU are thankful for Facebook…leave me a comment in the comments below and tell me.  I’d love to hear from you!

Facebook Offers let businesses, brands and organizations share discounts with their customers by posting an offer on their Facebook Page. Facebook Offers is an incredible way to direct new people to your business and increase engagement with existing customers. Offers are designed to have a viral effect because whenever someone claims an offer, it will appear in the News Feed.

HOW TO CREATE A FACEBOOK OFFER

1. Creating your offer is SUPER SIMPLE, it’s as easy as posting any other content such as a status update , photo or video.

Here’s how you should start.  Pretend you are going to post a status update on your page…except click on Offer/Event as shown below.

2. Create your coupon – Add your 25-character long title and 90-character long description. Include some strong sense of urgency such as “limited offer only” “while supplies last” or “today only”. This is proven to be the most effective in getting your fans to TAKE ACTION!

3. Upload your ad image with the following image specs: image ratio: 1.91:1 and image size: 1200 x 627 pixels. To learn more about image dimensions, click here.

4. You can opt to limit the number of claims and select an expiration date. You will need to decide on your budget. A $15 budget in theory, is fine for a fan page with 4000 or less fans.

5. Choose your audience.

6. Schedule your offer, set up Online Redemption Link, Terms and Conditions and Click “Create Offer” 

As soon as the coupon goes live and users click on it, the coupon code is sent via email.

Using Offers to Organically Increase Reach
To super-charge the organic reach your page gets, you should make an offer so irresistible that it can’t help but result in massive fan engagement. Giving away something for free or at a huge discount will most likely result in your fans liking and sharing. You might also see improvement in your page’s organic reach, even for other posts not related to the offer and don’t forget – Make sure it’s EASY to redeem the offer.  The easier you make the process, the more engagement you’ll get.

You might have also heard the recent news of Facebook launching Call to Action buttons. These are amazing!!!  The thing to note is that you MUST use these in Power Editor which can be a tricky tool for some businesses.  However, if you’re already using Power Editor or would like to give a try, you can make your offers even more compelling but using these new call to action buttons.

The new Call to Action buttons include:

1. Shop Now
2. Learn More
3. Sign Up
4. Book Now
5. Download

Here’s a quick image that shows you how the Shop Now call to action button would look:

You can learn more about Call to Action buttons here.

There are so many uses for Facebook Offers and the new call to action buttons.  If you haven’t set one up yet, go try it now and let me know how it worked for you!

Happy Offers!