Facebook’s secret world of marketing resources

Guest post by Joanna Lord
SEOmoz

Afew years ago, many of us were skeptical about how Facebook was going to get marketers to spend a significant amount of time and money on their platform, which is clearly not the case these days. One thing I’m sure of now is that Facebook advertising is here to stay.

According to the State of Inbound report that HubSpot put out this year, “42% of marketers say Facebook is critical or important to their business.” That percentage has gone up 75% from where it was just a few years ago. Talk about up and to the right!

With all that pickup, one would expect Facebook to have some resources out there to help us market our companies more effectively on Facebook. Never fear, for these resources exist! Unfortunately, they are somewhat hidden. Here are five resources worth exploring if you are looking to drive traffic and sales through Facebook.

Facebook marketing page

1Say what? Yup. Believe it or not, Facebook runs a marketing page (with over 2.3 million likes) that they manage actively to help marketers use Facebook more effectively. They often post about webinars they are holding for marketers, answer specific questions posted to their wall, and spotlight valuable statistics that could help you make the case in-house to dedicate more resources to Facebook.

Facebook advertising page

2For those of you looking to try your hand at Facebook ads, you might find there aren’t a ton of resources out there to help you get set up and running smoothly. Luckily for us, Facebook has been investing in their help documentation. In this section, they outline how things work, show off some success stories, and answer top questions. You can also find some contact information for those nagging questions you can’t quite figure out.

Facebook business page

3This might be one of the least known resources that Facebook has put together. Instead of just focusing on how you can set up an ad and spend money with Facebook, they have worked to put together information on how you can get the most out of Facebook as a business. The page covers the basics like building a page and conversation etiquette, but it also gives tips on how to engage your audience and influence friends.

Facebook Studio

4This is by far my favorite of all the resources Facebook has put together for marketers. At Facebook Studio you’ll find a gallery of creative Facebook campaigns, explore award-winning campaigns, a directory agencies experience in Facebook marketing campaigns, and more.

Facebook Studio Edge

5This is a new resource for those looking to take Facebook campaign creation in house. Recently released, Facebook Studio Edge is an online course that walks a user through critical knowledge pieces like measurement, research, resources, and tools to help with Facebook marketing. You can request beta entry and get started today. I’m super excited to see them operationalize this learning curve a bit with the Facebook Studio Edge series.

Whoa, that’s a ton of good stuff!

As more of our time and budget shifts to Facebook, be sure to lean on the resources above to help steer you in the right direction. Perhaps one of the best advantages of investing in Facebook is that they are home to a community of others trying to do the same thing. Connect with other community members on the pages above, and see how you can help each other succeed. Best of luck to you all!

If I missed any other Facebook marketing resources (they don’t have to be hosted on Facebook like the list above), feel free to leave them in the comments below!

The post 5 Facebook marketing resources you didn’t know about appeared first on Inside Social Media.

A word of warning to brands looking to expand their Facebook footprint: There are no shortcuts

Editor’s note: A lot of social media marketers discuss how to create a Facebook presence or manage walls and Pages. But few go into details about strategic use of advertising on Facebook. In this series, industry expert Dennis Yu outlines the mix of strategy and analytics that’s required. Also see:
• Part 1: How to run an effective Facebook campaign for $5

Guest post by Dennis Yu
CEO, BlitzLocal

Should you “buy” Facebook fans from vendors that sell on a cost-per-fan basis? We have gotten this question a lot over the last couple of years, so let this article be your guide.

The short answer is: If it sounds too good to be true, then listen to your instincts. Whatever you decide, make sure the ads are being run in your own account, no matter what excuse they give you.

You’ve probably come across services that promise to deliver fans for just pennies each. (Or even cheaper!) That’s like saying you can buy a brand new iPod for a dollar. What’s the catch? Most of them can’t deliver, and most of the ones that do are offering you what’s effectively poison. Some reputable social advertising agencies like Epic Social can deliver you quality, but they are rare.

The top varieties of Facebook flim-flam

Here are the main flavors of snake oil, why they’re dangerous, and how to spot them:

Get 10,000 fans!

If you see any variation of this, run. Often they have only a couple of hundred fans themselves. It’s no different than SEO vendors that promise links and yet have no Google PageRank or inbound links to show for themselves. Notice that you don’t see any customer testimonials — at least not real ones. And their fan page looks like something pulled out of an infomercial selling dietary supplements. They probably just switched the images out on that landing page to sell whatever is hot.

Fans for pennies!

If you see a self-checkout right on the page where you can send a PayPal payment or order fans in bulk, run. You’re getting bot traffic, international traffic, traffic rings and other so-called fans that will never result in engagement or sales of any kind. Now if you just want to be able to say you have 100,000 fans but don’t care beyond a single boasting metric, then go for it.

Link exchanges!

The idea here is: If you fan me, I’ll fan you. Often there’s a credit system in place where it’s not a one-to-one trade, as you find on Twitter. Some of these trades are automated fan exchanges. Not only is this against the Facebook Terms of Service, but these firms require you to give them administrative access to your page. Might as well give them your social security number while you’re at it.

Our ‘proprietary’ system!

These charlatans will try to sell you an ebook or software, promising the “secrets” to making millions. If you believe that, I’d like to sell you some oceanfront property in Colorado. Do they have real examples to share, or must you pay to see them?

The alternative: A marketing strategy for fan acquisition and valuation

In the end, there’s just no substitute for a clear marketing strategy for fan acquisition and valuation. On Facebook, three things are key when appealing to customers: Decide what your best customers look like, write ads that appeal to them, and send them to a landing page that makes good on that compelling value proposition. Then test like crazy to fine-tune your targeting, ad copy, and landing pages. Know what your fan costs and what a fan is worth — hopefully, the former is greater than the latter.

The hucksters described above present you with a simple shopping cart check out to sell fans — select how many fans you want and then pay. Yet how could they possibly deliver on that promise if you don’t inform them of your unique selling proposition, which particular audiences to go after, and how you will engage or convert them? Are you trusting them to write whatever ad copy they want, buy traffic from underdeveloped countries, or make misleading promises about your brand to encourage users to click Like? We’ve seen some firms place a dozen Like buttons on a page and offer an incentive to users who click on all of them. Those users who are clicking on the Like buttons machine gun style — have they had a chance to learn about your brand?

Using analytics to optimize your outreach and campaigns

No amount of software or gimmicks can substitute for not having a strategy in place. A key component of that strategy is analytics. You must be able to measure fan quality so that you can use this as a basis to optimize your campaigns. What is a fan worth to you? What are you doing with these folks once they become a fan? And how do you identify and reward your most loyal fans — the people who love your product or service in real life?

The idea of spending money on Facebook ads just because the CEO said to do it or because your competitor has more fans is ludicrous. You might be inviting derelicts to loiter in the lobby of your high-end hotel, which will discourage the very customers you want to serve. Your real fans will notice who is in your community and decide whether they want to spend time with you there.

Imagine your fan page now has a bunch of 13-year-olds from Indonesia and Turkey (no offense, folks). These could be people who clicked Like on your page because they wanted to earn some FarmVille dollars for a Facebook game. Not only do they not know about your product, but they don’t even speak English.

A simple litmus test for quality

Whether you’re evaluating your page, the agency you’re considering, or the clients they put forth as examples, just look at their wall. Is there a lot of user interaction relative to how many fans they have? Count up the number of Likes and comments for the most recent post, which is the number of interactions. Divide that by the number of fans they have. If it’s less than 1 in 200 (half a percent), then the engagement rate is low.

Your cost per fan depends upon the industry your company is in, how well you can capitalize on your brand’s real-world awareness, and how effectively you run your Facebook campaigns. Of 11,000 Facebook campaigns we analyzed in a recent study, the cost per fan was $1.07. But that averages out entertainment categories that are half that cost, versus healthcare and financial companies that might be five times the cost. Just like in regular Pay Per Click marketing or even direct marketing as a whole, the cost to acquire a customer varies dramatically.

So determine what your real world customer is worth, ensure that your Facebook fans are of the same quality, and then apply the same ROI measurements you’d apply to any other channel. Don’t entrust your marketing strategy or Facebook advertising to an outsider. Does this mean don’t hire an agency? No, just make sure you run the strategy, while they execute the details. Does this mean don’t buy Facebook ads? No, just make sure you’re connecting with your valuable customers and nurturing them in a profitable way.

We’ll talk about how to craft the right strategy in the next article in our series.

What do you think? Have you seen these kinds of offers? Have they worked for you?

Related

• How to run an effective Facebook campaign for $5 (by Dennis Yu on Socialmedia.biz)

• Demystifying how Facebook’s news feeds work (Socialmedia.biz)

• 15 ways to increase your Facebook stature (Socialmedia.biz)

• Cheat sheet: Key principles of social media marketing on Facebook (Socialmedia.biz)

• SEO: 9 tips for optimizing a nonprofit site (by Dennis Yu on Socialbrite.org)

• 15 ways to increase your brand’s impact on Facebook (Socialmedia.biz)

• Ultimate guide to marketing on Facebook (Socialmedia.biz)

• Social media marketing: Facebook & Twitter aren’t enough (Socialmedia.biz)

The post The danger of buying Facebook fans appeared first on Inside Social Media.

How to take advantage of microtargeting on Facebook — at a crazy cheap price

Editor’s note: Dennis Yu and his BlitzLocal team helped retool and optimize the Socialmedia.biz website two years ago. We met up again with Dennis at last month’s Web 2.0 Expo, where he gave a preview of this Facebook microtargeting strategy. Today he’s revealing its specifics for the first time. This is the first of a series about strategic use of Facebook.

Guest post by Dennis Yu
CEO, BlitzLocal

Last week there was a buzz in the CEO, Webtrends and CEO, BlitzLocal offices. One of our employees was trying to get my attention. He did so by creating a Facebook ad targeting anyone who lived in Portland, was between 30 and 40 years old and worked at either Webtrends or BlitzLocal. Of the nearly 600 million users on Facebook, only 80 people met that criteria.

It cost him only 6 cents to do it. And for that price, he was able to bombard our people with ads. The cost of that inventory is a 30 cent CPM, which means it costs 30 cents to show a thousand ads. So he was able to send 200 highly targeted messages, as he details in this post on the Facebook Microtargeting trick.

Sounds less like advertising and more like super-targeted email marketing, doesn’t it?

And, in fact, it is, except for this:

• You can send these messages without needing someone’s email address.
• You pay only when someone clicks it (yes, it’s cost per click advertising).
• An impression is guaranteed when the person next opens Facebook (whereas in sending an email, you can only hope that someone will open it).

Now imagine that you’re a software company like Webtrends, building relationships with other agencies that resell your social analytics software. The founders of the data visualization agency JESS3 come to visit and you’d like to strengthen that bond. Maybe you spend $5 on a micro-targeted campaign like the one above, but slice it up to put the ad image more compactly next to the stats. You absolutely bombard anyone who works at that firm with your message almost 3,000 times. If they have 50 people, that’s 60 ads per person. Who cares that we got only 9 clicks (of which 4 happened to become fans)? The goal is not the click, but the awareness.

Total cost: $5.67 in Facebook ads

Create a specialty video with a customized message

But you could take it a step further, since those folks who do click through on the ad can come to your landing page. So imagine that we send all employees of the email marketing company ExactTarget to this Facebook landing page (warning: there is sound). And how much did this landing page cost? Only $5. We have a network of dozens of freelancers that will do voiceovers, take photos, sing songs or do whatever for a few dollars. More examples of specialty videos here.

While each of these examples might be clever or interesting, the question becomes: How do you scale this? Social media success is about pinpoint precision targets — ultimately, because we’re simulating the one-on-one conversations that friends have among themselves. But if you want to have 1,000 conversations, you need 1,000 different ads and 1,000 different landing pages. Who has the infrastructure, staff, or the budget to do that?

This is where smart automation comes in. Here’s an example of our scoring platform at work:

Webtrends sells analytics software to the big boys who don’t mind paying $100,000 per year for analytics software. Trouble is that every website needs some form of analytics. Maybe they’ll use Google Analytics — it’s free and pretty good. But we want to talk to only those customers who have the money and need for enterprise analytics software. It would be suicide to buy the keyword “web analytics” on PPC because of all the players that offer web analytics for free or super cheap.

So we took the Fortune 1000 and ran a script that collected a wide range of data — market cap, their industry, annual revenue, P/E ratio, website url, homepage pagerank, pages indexed, Facebook page, number of fans, company logo from Google images and so forth — dozens of metrics. See the detail from our spreadsheet/CSV file below.

And then we ran this data through our scoring algorithm to calculate their Social Score — how well they did versus peers in their industry. We might say, “Shell, you got a 56 and rank 7 out of 9 in Oil and Gas.” Or we might say, “Shell, why do you have only 53,548 fans while others in oil and gas have 184k on average?” Then we target people who work at Shell — not just everyone, but those people who have titles of VP of Marketing, Chief Financial Officer, Public Relations and so forth.

There might be only a couple dozen people and not everyone puts their information on Facebook, but it’s enough. And you can bet it gets their attention! They come to a landing page that has their social scoring report, which shows a portion of the metrics that we’ve gathered. But they have to click Like to see the rest of the report, which is grayed out.

Now what happens when that person clicks “Like”? Of course, some of their friends and co-workers see it. And as all curious co-workers will do, they want to check out what you found to be so interesting. And then when these people see our ad, it shows that their friend liked it, which makes our offer of a report that much more credible (image at right).

A move to quality targeting over mass media blasts

Now do you see how this works? It’s quality over quantity, folks. Think about who you want to target as precisely as possible. Where do they work? Where do they live? What kind of car do they drive? What TV shows do they watch? What industry conferences do they attend?

Can’t afford $15,000 to exhibit at your favorite conference, plus the $3k to ship the booth out, the cost of the people to have to man the booth during Expo Hall hours, the schwag you have to give out and so forth? Then run an ad for the three weeks leading up to the conference targeting fans of the conference.

Bingo, you’ve now spent $5 to target this audience with your message and you have plenty of time to set up in-person meetings with those folks who are worth talking to, as opposed to any random people who might wander up to visit you at the show. And then you can thank them later.

Need some PR help, but can’t afford a New York PR agency for $10,000 a month? Then let Facebook do the work for you, running ads that target journalists who write for the Wall Street Journal, Mashable, Forrester, VentureBeat, the New York Times or whoever. What would you like to say to them?

Can’t afford to hire a big sales staff to cold call people who don’t want to talk to you? Easy. Just run ads targeting the competitors of your existing customers. Let’s say that Marriott is your client and you’ve got a great case study there. Run ads targeting the folks who work at Hilton, Starwood, Motel 6 or whoever. You can bet they want to know what their competitors are doing. Inquiring minds want to know!

Making waves with 5 bucks in your pocket

By now, I hope to have shown you that with some ingenuity and $5 in your pocket, you can make some serious waves on Facebook. If you’re a small business or start-up, learn how to master some of the techniques mentioned here. If you’re a big brand and looking to scale, then you’ll need some process and software automation to make this happen across thousands of conversations.

Know of any companies that offer software that will do mass personalization of ad and landing page content? Ad agencies are good at throwing bodies at client accounts — great service, but no scale. Software companies are good at building code based on a predefined set of rules that can be repeated. But success for your company can’t be solved by either a pure agency or a pure software company. The agency can’t throw enough people at the problem and the software company can’t offer a one-size fits all solution to everyone.

Only you can work the magic at your company. As much as we’d like to sell you some software, vendors like us can only assist you in coming up with the creative strategy that resonates best with your customers, the PR strategy that gets the press talking about you, a unique way to position how you solve your client’s pain. Ultimately, these $5 campaigns, whether you run just one of them or 10,000 of them, boil down to a marketing strategy — a unique, compelling message — that we can multiply out to your customers and get those customers to spread on your behalf. (Again, if you’re a smaller company targeting just a few potential or existing clients or partners, go for it yourself!)

In our next segment, we’ll explore that topic in more detail — how to get your fans to do your marketing for you. The techniques that work are probably not what you’d expect, since the world of Facebook relies upon the game dynamics of News Feed Optimization, advertising, applications and Open Graph widgets. We’ll show you how the harder you make it for customers to convert, in certain instances, the more likely they will take action. Stay tuned to learn why.

Related

• Demystifying how Facebook’s news feeds work (Socialmedia.biz)

• 15 ways to increase your Facebook stature (Socialmedia.biz)

• Cheat sheet: Key principles of social media marketing on Facebook (Socialmedia.biz)

• SEO: 9 tips for optimizing a nonprofit site (by Dennis Yu on Socialbrite.org)

• 15 ways to increase your brand’s impact on Facebook (Socialmedia.biz)

• Ultimate guide to marketing on Facebook (Socialmedia.biz)

• Social media marketing: Facebook & Twitter aren’t enough (Socialmedia.biz)

The post How to run an effective Facebook campaign for $5 appeared first on Inside Social Media.