New Facebook Tips and Tricks

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

How to Create a Facebook Ad Image That Will Get Accepted

Facebook is incredibly picky about the images they allow on their ads, particularly their sidebar ads. Between the 20% text rule and the other arcane guidelines that don’t seem to be easily compiled in any one location, it seems more luck and wizardry than science to get an image approved. Sometimes the same image can be denied an approved on two different ads, for seemingly no reason.

To greatly reduce your chances of having your ad denied because of an image, follow these guidelines.

20% Text, 20% Schmext

Facebook’s 20% text rule is poorly enforced, poorly regulated and poorly monitored. When you submit an image, Facebook puts a grid over it and divides the image into 25 equal-sized blocks. If text hovers within 5 of them, you have more than 20% text and the ad will be denied.

The thing is, it doesn’t count all text. Text in your logo, for example, may or may not be counted, depending on how it’s formatted. Text in a CTA button embedded in the image often doesn’t count.

Another caveat; positioning matters. As Jon Loomer shows, the same text moved slightly down suddenly goes from six boxes to three.

There are three ways to avoid this rule in your images.

Use the grid tool Facebook provides to test your images and adjust the positioning and size of any text to make sure it falls within the rules. This guarantees that your image won’t be denied due to this particular rule, but it’s an extra hassle to deal with for every ad you create.

Ignore the 20% text rule altogether. It is poorly enforced and you have a better than 50% chance to get your ad approved even with more than 20% text. Of course, every time an ad is denied due to that rule, you will have to work to fix it, which takes time.

Don’t use text at all. This is a perfectly viable option; after all, pretty much every ad you make is going to have ad copy next to it. You can let that ad copy do the heavy lifting and use the image for another purpose, like an emotional appeal or attention-grabbing.

The choice is yours. Test different options and see which works best for what you have in mind and for your audience.

Content Restrictions

In addition to the text rules, there are a number of restrictions on the content of your ad images.

You can’t use any image that exploits a political or sexual issue.

You can’t use shock images, such as pictures of car crashes or simulated violence.

You can’t use anything targeting people under 18 if it includes inappropriate content, like alcohol images or sexual imagery.

You can’t use sexual images, images of nudity or images that focus unnecessarily on objectifying the body.

You can’t use images that integrate buttons that don’t work; for example, using a video play button when the ad doesn’t link to a video.

You can’t use QR codes in your images.

You can’t use Facebook icons or trademarked images.

Image Sizes and Specifications

Unfortunately, Facebook persists in changing their platform about once or twice per year. The rules that govern the size and shape of ads are therefore almost always out of date. Right now, for example, a 16:9 aspect ratio on your images is the best idea.

Facebook currently specifies the ideal dimensions for an ad image to be 1200×628 pixels. This can be downscaled as necessary for smaller ad positions.

Image Colors

Color is a hot-button issue in Calls to Action. It has been studied from all angles, and the general recommendation is to make sure the color makes your button stand out as a button. This means whatever color it is, it can’t blend in with other non-button objects on the page.

For Facebook, the ideal colors are very much not blue or white. Grays, particularly lighter grays, are also out. Black is iffy, and only works if it’s providing contrast for another color. This is because, if you were to look at Facebook right now, you’d see primarily white, blue, gray and black. If your ad image is white text on a blue background, it’s just going to blend in with the Facebook background noise and no one will see it.

On the other hand, brighter colors work well. Pink is garish and stands out enough to gain attention. Bright green and any shade of red, really, will give you the contrast you need. It’s a good idea to add a colored border to photographs to make them stand out more, as well.

Image Subject

So what is the centerpiece of your ad image going to be? There are a few different subjects you can pick, depending on the topic if your ad.

Your logo. This works best if the logo can be tinted the colors necessary to stand out. If your logo is blue and you can’t change it, put a colored border around it or pick another image.

Pictures of happy people. Happy people are attractive to the average user, and they tend to bring in more users. Even better if your happy people are happy because they’re using your product.

An illustration of what the user can expect to get out of your product or service. It can be as simple as “Boost your ROI!” in text, or it can be, again, pictures of happy people doing something only your product can provide.

Pick the right subject and your ad will attract people through the image alone; the copy is icing on the cake.

The post How to Create a Facebook Ad Image That Will Get Accepted appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

5 Reasons Your Company Fan Page Isn’t Growing

Fan Page Isnt Growing

When you ask this question online, you’re bound to have a wide variety of answers. You’ll see some people talking about how you don’t use the Facebook page, so of course it’s not going to be popular. Other people will discuss how you’re not posting enough images. Still others will bring up your seeming inability to use a content calendar, as if it’s some kind of personal failing that you aren’t using their own pet software.

This article assumes that you’re at least posting content frequently, you’re attempting to use ads and you’re studying your analytics properly. You have a Facebook page, you have it established and relatively active, and you’re trying to experiment with ads but you’re not having much luck. That’s what many people have to work with, and that’s how we’re going to proceed.

1. You’re Boosting Posts Poorly

The Facebook Boost Post button is a trap. It seems like a quick and easy way to submit your message to thousands or millions of people, effortlessly, with a quick infusion of cash. Doesn’t it sound too good to be true? Like all things online, if it sounds too good to be true, it is.

The Boost Post button essentially creates an incredibly basic ad campaign with all of the targeting options pre-set so you don’t have to know what you’re doing or do it properly. It estimates a high exposure, which you’ll never get. It takes money from you at a higher rate than actual targeted ads would, and when it reports to you how little reach you got for the money, it asks for more money to try to get to its original estimate. In some cases, it can require 5-10x the cash investment to reach that goal; in some cases it’s entirely impossible.

Instead of boosting posts, what you should be doing is learning how to set up an ad campaign on your own. In particular, you’re going to want to dig into the wide and wonderful world of Facebook ad targeting. There are hundreds of options and sub-options to use, and Boosting a post only gives you half a dozen of those.

Not to mention the other limitations of the Boost Post feature, like its limit of only one at a time, the fact that it’s entirely based on reach rather than a concrete objective, and the fact that it’s just plain more expensive.

2. You’re Ignoring Customer Service

For many people, Facebook is one of the most accessible, personal ways to contact a business. Users will frequently experience problems with their purchases, and their first reaction is typically to post about it on Facebook.

Some users will, rather than post on their own walls about their issues, post on yours or message you in an attempt to get your attention. This opens up a line of communication that the user expects will be used quickly. They don’t take into account the number of messages you might get in a day; they just want their response.

Rather than ignore or send these people away, you should consider the problem they face and how to respond to it. You have a few options.

If the problem is known, and it affects a small percentage of users, and you have a solution, you can link them to a page discussing the solution.

If the problem is known, it affects a small percentage of users and you have no solution, you can acknowledge that you’re aware of it and look into a fix.

If the problem is known and affects a larger percentage of users, you should post about it on your wall and link to the post in individual messages. This goes for both problems with and without solutions.

If the problem was previously unknown, thank the user for reporting it, investigate it for a solution and keep them up to date.

In general, Twitter is a better platform for immediate customer service than Facebook, but Facebook is still valuable, and the engagement that comes from this interaction can turn an on-the-fence user into a lifetime brand advocate.

3. You’re Funneling Too Many People Away

Common advice is to fill out your content calendar with curated posts, rather than flooding everyone with nothing but your own content. This is a good idea, because it adds value to your page that you didn’t have to create. Users will come to your page because they know it’s a one-stop-shop for everything related to the industry. If they can rely on you to provide the best, most accurate information from a variety of sources, they’ll do so.

The problem is when curated content fills out so much of your content calendar that you don’t have space for your own messages. Try to emphasize a fixed plan for your content. One such plan would be a weekly 10-5-2 rule. In a seven-day span, post 10 items that are curated from industry sources, post 5 items that are from your blog but aren’t direct, high-pressure sales, and post 2 items that are more direct, intense sales messages. Adjust this scheme depending on how many times each week you want to post, how active your industry is and how much users want to see.

4. You Never Respond

This is the #1 fault with automated social media posting. When you have a robot posting your content for you, what do you do when someone leaves a comment asking a question? Chances are, you never notice the comment, and thus you never respond.

Facebook is social media, and despite that phrase’s buzzword status, that still means something. Specifically, it means you need to be social. When you post content, stick around to monitor the comments. Better yet, set up an automated post scheduler AND an alerter for when comments are posted. That way, you can gain all of the benefits of automatic posting, while still maintaining an active presence in your comments.

Of course, this means you have to actually respond to comments. So, do that.

5. Your Multimedia is Absent

When you’re posting, are you paying attention to the types of media you’re posting? You need to strike the right balance between post types. In general, posts fall into three categories; text, images, and video.

Text posts are the most basic, and I’m lumping links into this section. This will be where the majority of your posts come from.

Image posts should be used frequently, because you can couple them with links in descriptions, and you can use the images in a variety of ways.

Video is important, but you need to use it sparingly. Treat video posts like a secret weapon you pull out at most once per week.

Of course, you should be testing each of these to see how they perform with your particular audience. The balance you find won’t necessarily be the same balance other pages use.

The post 5 Reasons Your Company Fan Page Isn’t Growing appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

The Guide to Converting Subscribers to Facebook Fans

Convert Subscribers to Fans

Whether you’re new to Facebook or you’ve let the account founder, you probably want to get more followers, more fans, more people interested in your brand. In order to do that, it’s a good idea to contact people you already know who are interested in your brand.

You may have heard before about how the most essential thing you can do for your business marketing is build a mailing list. A good mailing list gives you a source of traffic that stays through thick and thin, despite fluctuations with Google. It’s one of the few independent traffic sources you have, and it’s completely yours. It can also be used as a resource for other traffic avenues.

Double your benefit and use your mailing list to get people to follow your Facebook Page. Here’s how:

Step 1: Grow Your Mailing List

The first step is to have a mailing list. What state is your current mailing list in? Is it missing completely? Is it out of date, with a high density of dead emails and disinterested users? It is more recent, but small? If it’s a large, well-maintained mailing list, you can skip this step.

There are a lot of potential ways to add to your mailing list. The first thing you need to know is that a sizable percentage of your mailing list subscribers atrophy over the course of a year. The exact percentage varies, but if your mailing list has been neglected for more than a few years, it’s probably more or less worthless.

Use a mailing list manager, like MailChimp or Aweber. Trying to manage one through webmail isn’t going to work out well for anyone.

Ask for subscriptions when you provide content, such as ebooks or training courses.

Provide multimedia in your newsletters, so users looking to view images and video have something to see.

Split-test copy, positioning and even colors for your messages. You can split-test newsletters individually by segmenting your subscribers.

Consider an exit-intent pop-up for your blog.

Step 2: Add Facebook Buttons to Newsletters

Once you have an active and maintained mailing list, it’s time to start with the subtle social pressure. If your newsletter is largely just plain text, add your Facebook URL and a quick “follow us on Facebook!” CTA to your email signature. You should do this for your personal correspondence as well.

If your newsletter is more graphical and follows a template, more like a minor webpage than an email, you can include your social sharing buttons in the header, footer or dividers throughout the piece. Don’t include them too often; once per newsletter is enough. Split-test different positions and alignments to see what converts the best.

Step 3: Ask Directly for Facebook Follows

The first time you send out your mailing list once you have your Facebook integration set up, you should include a call to action for people to follow you on Facebook. Essentially, “ask and ye shall receive.” The subtle social pressure of the buttons is one thing, but coming out and asking directly is quite another.

You can repeat this call to action occasionally, but you should avoid making it a pressing CTA in every single newsletter. Sometimes, you’re going to have something else you want to promote, and your newsletter can really only support one good CTA for targeted follow-through.

Step 4: Routinely Share Facebook Content via Newsletter

This is what you do instead of posting a CTA to get people to follow you. Your newsletter should feature a few pieces of quality content posted since the last newsletter. At least one of those pieces of content should be something exclusively found on Facebook – a contest, a post, an advertisement, whatever – with no equivalent on your blog. This requires that a user visit your Facebook page to see that content. While they’re there, there’s a good chance they will follow your page.

Step 5: Import your Mailing List on Facebook

In your Facebook page, when you’re logged in as the administrator of that page, you will see a button at the top under the navigation bar labeled “build audience.” Clicking this button will bring up a few options. Click “suggest page” here, and you will be presented with a list of mail services. These services include a contact list file, Constant Contact, MailChimp, VertialResponse, AIM, Outlook, Yahoo and an unspecified other mail service. Click the appropriate button.

This will allow you to import your mailing list to Facebook and suggest the page to everyone who follows your mailing list, assuming their email addresses match. If a user uses a different email between the two sites, it won’t work.

Step 6: Create a Mailing List Custom Audience

Using your mailing list, you can also create a custom audience on Facebook. This will create a list of the people whose emails match, allowing you to advertise to them as you would any other audience on Facebook.

To do this, go to your ads manager and click “create audience.” You will be asked to import your audience, either through a mail service similar to the previous step, or through a CSV file. Follow through the dialogues and your audience will be created.

This doesn’t necessarily help you get followers directly, but it allows you to advertise to both followers and subscribers alike.

Step 7: Create a Lookalike Audience

Once you have an audience made out of your mailing list subscribers, you can create a lookalike audience. Go to create a new audience as you did above, but click to create a lookalike audience. When Facebook asks you for the source, click the audience you created in the previous step. This will scan through all of the people on Facebook who are known to be your subscribers, and will identify common demographics, likes and other information. It will then create an audience made up of people who share those qualities. You can use this to earn more followers, people who have never subscribed to your mailing list.

The post The Guide to Converting Subscribers to Facebook Fans appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

10 Ideas for High Engagement Facebook Posts

Engagement Ideas

Engagement is important. Reach is declining. People are jaded. Children are starving for content, and food. It’s almost 2015. It’s time to change the paradigm, it’s time to leverage synergies, it’s time to boost engagement for the coming year.

Want more engagement? Try out these post ideas.

Post a Story

Have any business growth anecdotes, the equivalent of an embarrassing childhood story? Something you can portray with a moral or a lesson you learned moving forward, a mistake you made but will never make again? These stories, particularly if you have a good picture to accompany them, work wonders for engagement.

These kinds of posts work because they bring you down from the corporate high horse. Too many people are too used to companies trying to present themselves as infallible. It’s all too common in our modern society for a business to falter or fail, only to point the finger and absolve themselves of all responsibility.

Owning up to a past mistake humanizes your company, and it gives your users an idea that you’re going to be just as humble and responsible moving forward, no matter what skeletons you might actually have in your closet. Just don’t actually air those skeletons.

Throw Back Thursday a Milestone

Facebook allows you to add milestones to your news feed, and you have the option of hiding them from the news feed, in case you want to add a bunch all at once and avoid spamming them. Instead of doing any of that, why not come up with tall tales, apocryphal legends or legitimate legacies behind each milestone and queue them up for each Thursday?

This gives you three benefits. First, you’re able to add a milestone in a way that’s visible and encourages engagement and discussion. Second, you’re able to participate in the Internet-wide #TBT meme. Third, you bring a bit of corporate lore or history to the fore, giving your users something interesting to learn about you.

Post a CEO Selfie

Selfie culture is often scoffed at by senior citizens and those out of touch with the modern youth, but they are alive and well on social media despite all the ferocious backlash. Why not get in on the game and ruin it for all the youngsters?

You need to up your selfie game if you’re going to take one for the unwashed masses, of course. Your selfie needs to be astonishing, extraordinary, unusual or just plain weird. Take a picture from an exclusive location most people won’t be able to visit. Take a selfie involving stars the usual customer would never meet. Or go the down-to-earth route and take a selfie with a customer and feature it. Just, you know, make sure your selfies are worth viewing.

Curate Viral Content

Sometimes the best post isn’t one of your posts at all. Why not become a content curator and gather up some of the best posts making the rounds in your industry each week? You could easily start a Friday feature to bring these posts to your audience, and all you need to do is accumulate links throughout the week. Don’t worry if your readers have already seen them; plenty of them won’t have, and it makes following your page a perfect way to keep up with industry news, not just your news.

Poll Your Fans for Business Decisions

How would you improve our <insert top selling product here>?

What one feature do you want the most in <Our Software>?

If you could add or remove one thing from <Our catalog>, what would it be?

These are the sorts of questions you can ask your users to bring in a ton of engagement. Everyone has an opinions. Everyone thinks they know how to make your business better. Maybe one out of ten thousand of those suggestions is worth listening to, and one out of another million of those is worth implementing, but you never know when that one in a trillion suggestion is going to show up. Even if it doesn’t, you can still brainstorm ideas or identify the truly awful suggestions to mock around the office on Monday morning.

Inspirational Quotes

Everyone loves a good pithy quotation now and then. Find some that haven’t been used on inspirational images recently and shop one up. Just throw it right on there, over top of the image, on text that stands out. Tint the background image if you want, skew it so it looks more artistic, I don’t care. It doesn’t even matter. A starry sky, a bunch of leaves, an empty road, a full road, it’s all the same.

If your company is the right mixture of pop-savvy and quirky, you can go an alternate route. Post quotes from nerdy movies. You’d be surprised how much engagement you’d get from a picture of a tree with the words “I am Groot” shopped over it. Bonus points for making that the only description.

Post a Video

What video? What of? Who cares! Videos on Facebook receive a massive amount of engagement, though the number itself is a bit of a lie because of how Facebook both counts video plays and autoplays videos. Even discounting views, you’ll get a pile of engagement deep enough to bury yourself in, just by posting a video. If your video is somehow related to your industry, business or product, all the better.

Post Your Products

No, don’t just post an advertisement for your product. Post a picture of someone making use of it. Sell a watch? Post pictures of your watch in creative positions, on a high-class businessman eating dinner or on someone on the red carpet. Sell software? Well, uh, I guess just post a picture of someone smiling at a computer. It won’t be the most ridiculous picture ever posted, at least.

Highlight Fans

Your fans are the people giving you engagement, so make a game out of it, somehow. Pick some way to choose a fan each week or month and give them something of a featured reward for winning the competition. If it’s a monthly contest, it doesn’t need to be much; a 10% discount coupon is plenty.

Post About a Trending Topic

You can see trends on the sidebar of Facebook. If you want to get in on that action, you need to be quick; they change from day to day, even from hour to hour on busy days. Monitor trending topics, pick something to write about, write a quick post and send it along for editing and publication. Follow the trends and get people talking.

The post 10 Ideas for High Engagement Facebook Posts appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

How to Calculate Your Facebook Fan Page Engagement

Calculating Engagement

Facebook gives you a lot of numbers in the back end, but all of them – if you look hard enough – are deceptive. Sure, you can see your reach, but how does that reach compare to your competitors? You can see your engagement for given posts or entire categories of posts, but is it good or bad? Does it mean anything?

You can get an absurd amount of engagement with one of those “like this if you like X, share if you prefer Y, ignore if you want Z” posts, but very little of that engagement comes from people who actually want to do anything on your page. Plus, one viral post will skew all the numbers.

Industry Benchmarks

Before we begin, let’s put everything into context. Social Bakers does ongoing studies every year, and these are the statistics for 2014.

1: Engagement should be compared to the size of the page. A smaller page with a lower number of fans is going to have a higher reach and higher engagement levels. It’s also going to have a higher chance at having a tight, close-knit community, which you can’t find on the pages of global brands.

Pages under 10,000 fans average around a .94% page engagement rate and a .65% post engagement rate. This is the best it’s going to get.

Pages over 1 million fans average more like .28% page engagement and .11% post engagement.

2: Engagement should be compared to the industry of the page. Some industries have much more engaged audiences than others. This stands to reason; in some industries, the presence of thin resellers and boring businesses is high, whereas other industries have a much higher barrier to entry.

Automotive pages have an average post engagement rate of .58%, which is high compared to others. Automotive dealers tend to need resources to break into the industry, making it harder to have low quality businesses.

Financial pages have a post engagement rate around .30%. It’s easy to give financial information and advice, without that necessarily affecting the underlying business.

Telecom pages have the lowest measured industry post engagement rate, at .23%.

3: Engagement should be compared to the reach of the page. This makes sense; a page with higher reach is going to reach more interested people, and have a higher percentage of their total audience engaging with their posts. This can also be compared to industry and page size.

4: Engagement is on the decline. This stands to reason, as it’s a derived metric that includes reach and audience figures. As your reach goes down, you reach fewer people with an organic post. This means your engagement rates without assistance are going to go down. Don’t worry if you see a minorly declining trend, or the work you put in has left you at a holding pattern.

Basic Facebook Engagement Rate

When you visit your Facebook insights page, or your Insights through a third party tool like Raven Tools, you’ll see a basic metric just called “engagement rate.” This is a specific measurement for each individual post, though you can see the same number for categories of posts as a whole.

This engagement rate is calculated, by Facebook, as the number of lifetime engaged users divided by the total number of people seeing the post. For example, if you posted an image, and 100 people saw that image, your reach would be 100. If 10 people liked, commented, shared or clicks the link in your image description, your engagement rate would be 10/100, or 10%.

The Hazard of Engagement Type

Facebook considers different types of action all to be “engagement” with a post, but not all types of engagement are created equal. For example, if your post is a text post and it’s long enough to have a “read more” option, clicking that option is considered an engagement metric. Yes, even if the user never clicks the link in your post, comments, likes or shares. Speaking of, likes, comments, shares, link clicks, video plays and any other sort of interaction with the post is considered engagement.

This means that Facebook’s measured engagement tends to be higher than your reasonable engagement numbers, particularly on videos and on long text posts. Don’t let it be deceptive.

Measuring and Monitoring

The first thing you want to do is measure your engagement to create benchmarks. You can do this at any time; it just gives you numbers you can compare your results to later on down the line, to see how your engagement numbers are performing.

You should consider two numbers. The first is the average engagement per post. You can calculate this on your own, or you can look into your Insights and pull numbers for individual posts or for post types. The second type is engagement per page, which is the average of all engagement your page receives in a given time.

Remember that anything affecting the reach of a post – particularly promoting or boosting the post itself – will affect the engagement rates as well. The percentage might not change, but the raw numbers will go up. Alternatively, the raw number for reach goes up but the engagement is low, leading to a lower engagement rate. Be aware of this possibility, and experiment to find posts you can improve.

Competitive Engagement

You can’t take Facebook’s numbers and compare them to your competition, unless for some reason your competitors have let you have access to their Insights. Facebook holds this information privately, so you need to change your calculations to compare yourself to others.

First, reach: you have no way of seeing the reach of posts your competitors make. Therefore, instead of comparing engagement to reach for posts or for the page, you need to compare it to total number of fans. Do this for both your competitors and your own engagement, for comparisons.

Second, engagement types. You can’t see clicks, so the raw numbers for engagement will be down. The best you can do is come up with the total number of likes, shares and comments on a given post. Total these numbers for both your posts and your competitor’s, and you’ll have a reasonable number to compare.

Be aware that this number is going to be smaller than the ones Facebook Insights reports to you. Don’t be discouraged when your own figures are lower than expected; just compare them to your competition and see how they stand up.

The post How to Calculate Your Facebook Fan Page Engagement appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

Can You Use a Milestone on a Facebook Page?

For a long time, Facebook has been adding minor improvements and little features to both personal profiles and business pages. One such feature was the introduction of milestones. For personal profiles, these tend to be major life events. A milestone might be a date of birth, a registration for Facebook, a marriage, a child’s birth or another such event.

For a business page, milestones are very flexible. You can add one for almost anything. One great example is Facebook’s own Facebook profile. Just click here and view the date timeline on the right. Click the lowest date, 2005, and see what milestones have been added. You’ll see things like

High School Students Join Facebook – September 2, 2005

Facebook Opens for Everyone – September 26, 2006

Some businesses add dozens of milestones, particularly if they have long and storied histories. Others limit themselves to the basics; founding date, particularly.

A milestone is essentially a special type of page post that stretches across the news feed and sits under a special flag icon. It shows the title, the date and an attached image if you have an image to attach. For example, Coca-Cola has a “founded” milestone with a scan of an old piece of company stock.

Tips for Milestones

When you’re creating a milestone, you have two basic categories; current milestones and old milestones. Adding an old milestone would be adding something like your company’s foundation date, or a grand opening, or the opening of your first international branch. These are older events, but you want them chronicled on Facebook. A current milestone would be something happening today. The events are the same, but the dates are more important.

Before you add milestones, consider the oldest possible milestone to add. This will typically be the date your company was founded. You need to add this milestone first, otherwise trying to add older milestones later won’t work. For example, if your company was founded in 1990, and you add a “opened second branch” milestone in 1995, you won’t be able to go back and add the “founded in 1990” milestone. More on adding old milestones later.

Adding a Milestone

On your page’s administration account, look above your news feed, above the box where you typically create a new post. One of the options, often overlooked, is the “Event, Milestone +” option. Clicking this will bring down a drop-down menu of the options, particularly event and milestone. Click milestone.

This brings up a dialogue box with your various options. You can specify a title, which becomes the bold headline in the post. You used to be limited to specific verbs related to businesses, such as “founded” or “opened,” but this is no longer the case.

You can specify a location, which allows you to specify a physical location if you have one for your business.

You will be asked to select a date. Unless you perform certain optional steps in other parts of your page, you will be limited to the date you opened your Facebook page as the earliest you can post. Choose year, month and day, as desired.

You can also write a “Story” here, which will be the text of your post. For older events, you don’t need to pay much attention to this, unless you’re trying to draw attention to your older milestones. For current events, you should include something attention-grabbing to make the milestone post the hub for discussion.

You can choose to upload a photo or add a photo you’ve already uploaded, as well. Use all the typical rules of Facebook photos, including the 20% text limitation and the usual resolution and text concerns. For older events, of course, you have much more leeway. The aforementioned bill of stock from Coke very much breaks the 20% text rule, but it’s a perfectly acceptable photo.

Finally, you have a tick box that allows you to hide the post from your news feed. If this is left unchecked, the milestone will be broadcast the same way any normal page post is broadcast. If you check the box, the post will remain unnoticed, though not unpublished. This allows you to add a bunch of historical milestones all at once without worrying about spamming your users.

Posting Old Milestones

Twice now I’ve glossed over what’s necessary to post milestones older than the creation date of your Facebook page. If this is what you want to do, here’s how to do it.

First, click the “about” section below your cover photo and like box. This will take you to the page info editing area. Make sure the “page info” section in the left sidebar is clicked, if it’s not by default.

Second, in the “Start info” box under page info, click the link provided. If you haven’t specified a start date before, this will be more or less blank.

You will have to select one of the fixed number of start types. These are: Founded, Born, Started, Opened, Created and Launched. Pick the appropriate type for your business.

Next, add the year, month and day that apply to the start date. You can pick a year as far back as the year 1000, though chances are your business has not been running for 1,015 years. If you’re the exception to this, congratulations on being so forward-thinking as to be using Facebook in the first place!

Once you have specified this start date milestone, you’ll be able to add other milestones at any date between that date and present day. As of now, there’s no way to add a date in the future, so your future history milestones will need to be added as they occur.

Types of Milestones to Add

So, what sort of events might you want to add as milestones? Here are a few ideas.

Businesses that have physical locations could add milestones for each time a new branch or franchise has been opened, or each time your offices have moved.

Businesses that sell physical products can add milestones for each time a new product is launched, or major products if your catalog is excessive.

Businesses providing a service and add milestones for each additional service or expansion of services.

Any time your business earns an award, you can add a milestone for that award.

You can add milestones for reaching certain numbers of fans, even making a game out of it.

Consider posting milestones slowly, with advertisement, to foster discussion of your history. You might piggyback on the Internet trend of Throwback Thursday to post a new milestone each week.

The post Can You Use a Milestone on a Facebook Page? appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

How to Optimize Facebook and Twitter for Mobile

Optimize for Mobile

At this point, the majority of traffic you receive on Twitter and Facebook both comes from mobile users. They might be using last-gen smartphones or cutting edge tablets, but they’re still displaying the sites in mobile resolution or through mobile apps. How do you cater to these people?

A note about Twitter: the service began as Twttr, and it was specifically designed to be used via mobile devices. In those days, however, the term “mobile” typically applied to what we call dumb phones. You would write a message up to 140 characters, SMS it to a specific shortcode, and it would be posted to the web. For the sake of this piece, consider this to be outdated functionality. You can, should you desire, still operate Twitter via SMS. Virtually no one does, and optimizing for display on SMS isn’t what this piece is about.

Mobile Web Requirements

Before we get into specifics about optimizing for Facebook and Twitter, take a step back and think about mobile devices as a whole. If you use one, what are your pet peeves? What annoys you and makes you turn away from a site or skip a post? What irritates you when it happens, or doesn’t? Here are some common ideas:

Size of the window. Whenever you’re forced to browse a full desktop-sized page on a mobile device, you’re left struggling to read tiny text, click – tap – tiny links and scroll around in three dimensions. It’s like being forced to read a magazine through a cardboard tube.

Size of the text. In the aforementioned desktop page example, you have two choices; zoomed out or zoomed in. Zoomed out text is too small to read unless you hold the device an inch from your eyes, which is stressful and uncomfortable. Zoomed in text requires constant horizontal scrolling, and it’s probably still too small to be comfortable.

Text on images. Mobile devices are typically low resolution, and that means images don’t display in great detail. You might be able to zoom in on them, or you might not. If there’s text on the images, it might be too small to read, or it might render fuzzily.

Links. There are all sorts of issues you can find with links. Links that are too small, either because of the short anchor text or because of the font size, are hard to tap with any precision. If you’re trying to tap a specific link and that link is too close to another link, you might click the wrong one.

Unrenderable multimedia. Mobile devices historically have issues with Flash, and some will refuse to properly load video content of any sort, even YouTube. Some users don’t want to load a secondary app to watch your content. Some scripts won’t load as well, making it difficult to insure your site is displaying properly.

Fortunately, when we’re talking about Facebook and Twitter, most of those are already taken care of for you. The size of the site, the layout and the font size are all set by the site. Users might even be using a mobile app, which makes it even easier to read everything. You essentially have to be aware of your images, your link positioning and density, and your multimedia.

Optimizing Facebook for Mobile Users

Here are a few rules and tips you can follow to make your Facebook page work properly for mobile users.

Fill out all of your relevant profile information. Mobile is even more sensitive than desktop to the immediate needs of the user. If they’re performing any sort of potentially local search, you need to have your local information in the proper fields in order to appear. This includes business name, business category, check-ins and all the rest.

Optimize keywords in your profile information. Again, to appear properly in search, you need to use the right keywords. This typically means sufficiently long-tail keywords for whatever industry you’re part of.

If you have a local branch, make sure you have a map and contact information, including your business hours, clearly posted.

Optimize your images for mobile users. Remember that excessively detailed or high-resolution images won’t appear properly for most users. They might appear fine, or even small, on tablets, but on most smartphones they’ll look muddled. Likewise, try to use a font that’s mobile-readable if you’re putting text on an image.

Be wary of any multimedia you use. When you post a video, consider limiting the targeting of that video to desktop users. Experiment with mobile targeting and determine if your particular audience can handle it. If they can’t, avoid driving them away by using them frequently.

Limit your posts to one link each. Very rarely should you tag other accounts or post more than one link. Typically, it’s a good idea to generate a link preview and then remove the actual link, so the only link a mobile users sees is the large preview image and link in the post.

All of this goes double for advertising.

Finally, when you link to your own site from Facebook, you very much need to have a mobile landing page. You have two options here. You can link to one unified landing page and make sure that page is responsive, or you can link to a dedicated mobile landing page. If you choose to link to the dedicated page, you might be best served to target your posts specifically to mobile users. If not, a redirect will suffice, but is slower than loading the page directly.

Optimizing Twitter for Mobile Users

As mentioned above, Twitter is already optimized in pretty much every way for mobile. You’re never going to have issues with layout or text size using Twitter on a mobile device. That said, you can still keep a few things in mind.

Make sure your branding is consistent. Your logo, your cover photo, your URL; they should all be an extension of your brand image.

Be aware of image limitations, once again. An overly-wide header image can be cut off on the sides, which can eliminate the value you put to the sides. Center your information and make sure it’s easily visible on mobile.

Be aware of link spacing. Once again, you have limited space; trying to cram more than one link in might drive away users. Not that you have space for multiple links in the typical tweet.

All of the above advice about landing pages? This all applies to Twitter as well.

Finally, don’t forget to make use of Twitter from mobile yourself. Don’t try to save your tweets for when you’re in the office; tweeting on the fly is much more satisfying.

The post How to Optimize Facebook and Twitter for Mobile appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

10 Great Examples of Facebook Call to Actions

Since Facebook launched their new call to action button, pages have begun putting it to use. This, in conjunction with the existing means to a CTA, like the cover photo and the typical page post, compounds the resources businesses have to make a call to action.

As a business looking to implement a good CTA yourself, you should probably investigate some of the best existing CTAs to see what works and what doesn’t. Here are some great examples.

1. Search Engine Journal

SEJ has a nice large cover photo as a call to action on their page. It’s a pleasant image that meshes well with the Facebook color scheme, which adds to the ability for the white text to stand out. The title of the event in brushstrokes is a little hard to read, but it does combine with the beach image to give the air of a vacation. The image also includes both a URL and a hashtag for the event. SEJ is savvy enough, of course, to include additional information and a link in the description of the image.

One thing SEJ might want to do to further promote the event is use the Facebook CTA button up to with the “sign up” or “book now” options, linking to the invite request URL.

2. Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard is one of the largest video game companies in the world, but their page could stand a few optimizations. First, the good: the top bar tabs include two custom entries, one for job applications and one for contacting their customer service, which they realize most of their visitors will want to do at some point or another. Additionally, their December 20^th post – currently the top post on their page – is a large graphical CTA for Hearthstone on Android devices.

Now the bad: their cover photo has no included call to action, their news feed posts don’t use CTA buttons and their page has no overall CTA button, which could easily link to something related to the cover photo.

3. Budweiser

Bud is one of the larger and more generally known alcohol producers, and their Facebook page is set up for Christmas. The top cover photo in particular is a special holiday product draped with seasonal decorations, and their top post is a video commercial for additional engagement. They could improve, perhaps, through a CTA button, but the best kind of CTA isn’t available through Facebook’s system here.

4. Webs

The web design company Webs is in full holiday spirit with their profile picture draped in Christmas lights. Their cover photo is more restrained, using a classic CTA with large, bold text and generally creative examples of web design in the back. They also use the “sign up” CTA button and link it directly to their registration page on their website.

5. Dollar Shave Club

DSC has run on viral power almost since its inception, but it has grown quite a following. They were also the prime example of the CTA button used by Facebook in their announcement of the button, which gives them some exemplary power. They haven’t taken to the holidays in their profile picture or their cover photo, however. Their most recent post is a themed Christmas post, at least, though the CTA attached is sort of tacked on. They do make sure to include a good CTA in their About section, however.

6. BBC America

One of something like twelve million verified BBC accounts on Facebook, BBC America is all about Doctor Who for this season. Their cover photo is an advertisement for the upcoming Christmas special, complete with air times. Their top post is a roundup article and a selection of the rest of their posts are Who related. They know their audience and they’re catering to them in full force. They could be a little clever and use the top CTA button for a “book now” that leads to a calendar with the episode showtimes, though.

7. Marvel Entertainment

Marvel goes all-in with their movie promotion when they release a movie, and right now their page is still trailing with Guardians of the Galaxy. The CTA in question here is the cover photo, which includes a large graphical depiction of the movie along with the dates for the DVD release of the film.

Beyond that, however, the Marvel page is something less than marvelous. They could stand to use CTAs in a few more places, though to be fair, Marvel isn’t exactly a company struggling to make ends meet for the holiday season.

8. Twitter

Yes, Twitter has a Facebook page, though you would think they don’t need it. One glance at the top of their account shows two distinct CTAs.

The first CTA is in their cover photo, which is advertising their 2014 year in review. Several other companies, Google included, are doing the same sort of annual retrospective, so it’s not unusual. They have bubbles of iconic images, but they have carefully avoided the most divisive of issues.

The second CTA is in their top post, regarding their seasonal #NFL hashtag to encourage everyone to follow their favorite sport on the site.

9. Monstercat

This electronic record label uses their cover photo as a great illustration and CTA for the newest compilation album they’re releasing, helpfully labeled their 20^th release. Fans of Monstercat recognize the album cover format immediately. This ties in to their top bar app, which links directly to a page to listen to and purchase the album. Following down the page, you get their most recent post, illustrating their holiday sale wherein you can buy the album and get a second copy to share for the season.

10. ShortStack

The app developer ShortStack is featured frequently for their progressive social media usage, but right now there’s nothing truly spectacular about their page. They’re noteworthy because they’re one of the few pages that uses the CTA button, though they don’t tie it in to anything else.

Dishonorable Mention: Hubspot

Take a look at Hubspot’s cover photo. See the text at the bottom? They’re talking about attention-grabbing Facebook ads, but their own advertisement is covered up by their Facebook industry selection and their like button. Come on Hubspot, you’re better than this.

The post 10 Great Examples of Facebook Call to Actions appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

Where Journalists Can Find Shareable Content

Journalists are content curators, which makes social networks an ideal professional fit. Social sharing allows you to curate content and add commentary that goes beyond the scope of article assignments, plus it and can help grow and engage your social following.

But just what should you share on social channels? Here we discuss where you can and should be pulling content from to make sure you have a smart, relevant, and dynamic social presence.

Share Your Work (And Other Articles from Your Publication)

When thinking through what content should be shared, the simplest and most obvious place to begin is with your own clips. To maximize your social potential, be sure that you know all the specifics on when your articles will be published so you can share with your followers when the story’s fresh. This is especially important for freelancers.

For major stories, you may find it worthwhile to post teasers, behind the scenes information, live news updates, or commentary while you’re working. This keeps your followers up to date on the latest news and helps build interest for what you’re working on.

In addition to sharing your own work, however, it’s a good idea to share other content from your publication when it’s relevant to your news beat and your social followers. Even though it might not drive people to your work specifically, building interest in your publication can help your work indirectly. Your publisher will likely approve of any social boost you can offer, and sharing or commenting on articles is a good way to connect with your fellow writers.

Share What You Find Interesting (And Relevant)

Most journalists have a specific area of expertise and therefore have a pulse on what is going on in that industry, as well as followers who are interested in that subject. Since you probably can’t cover your beat comprehensively on your own, it’s useful to share relevant news, articles, and resources even if they weren’t written by you or published by your publication.

One rule of thumb: you probably don’t want to share content that’s extremely similar to other articles you’ve shared or articles you’ve written yourself. This isn’t to say that you can’t publicize your competition when they’ve written a solid take on a relevant topic, but you don’t want to subject your followers to content that’s repetitive or they might not be your followers for long. Adding your own commentary when posting links to these articles can help them stand out from work you’ve done as well as kick-start discussion amongst your followers.

Because there are so many potential beats a journalist may be covering, it’s impossible to offer you a comprehensive list of links to draw on here. Do you cover business? World politics? Technology? Look for publications that write interesting, authoritative content in your field of expertise and draw from those sources. Chances are the best place to start is your own personal reading list: what you read and enjoy is likely to be interesting to your readers as well. In addition to sharing article links, you may also want to follow your favorite publications on social channels and share their work from there.

Remember that quality counts here. If you want to build a personal brand as a reliable journalistic source, you don’t want to share inferior or inaccurate information. Sharing bad information can impact your own online reputation, which is why it’s important to cultivate reliable news sources to draw from for social sharing. Don’t be any more lackadaisical with content you’re sharing than you would be with content you’re writing.

Network with Other Journalists

Inevitably, some of your social attention will be spent on networking and talking shop with other writing professionals. When you’re setting up your social profile, it’s a good idea to follow co-workers and publications you write for to keep up with the latest happenings. Following these accounts means you’ll see discussions as they happen, making it easier to share content or join the conversation.

However, if networking is one of your social goals, it’s also key to stay in the loop on industry news. When you run into something interesting about the media, you can share it with your followers to start a conversation or use it as a springboard to pose a specific questions. Whether keeping up with the news helps you build a reputation as an industry insider or lets you start relevant conversations with other journalism pros, it’s a great way to network.

Resources for Journalists

If you aren’t sure where to look, here are some great resources for industry news and features:

Poynter Institute: A journalism school, Poynter collects and publishes news and features about the industry.

Pew Research Journalism Project: A nonpartisan fact tank, this division of The Pew Charitable Trusts publishes interesting statistics about the news media.

Columbia Journalism Review: Though the printed industry magazine is published only six times a year, the website is updated daily with industry news.

Mediabistro: Part job board and part online academy, Mediabistro publishes industry news and offers resources for continuing education.

Nieman Journalism Lab: Part of the Nieman Foundation, Nieman Lab publishes in-depth features about media industry.

On the Media: This NPR show and podcast discusses top media issues.

The post Where Journalists Can Find Shareable Content appeared first on Sprout Social.

Why Raven Tools Analytics Is Better than Facebook Insights

It has come to our attention that some number of marketers under 100% of all marketers are using tools other than Raven Tools. This will not stand! If, for whatever reason, you’re using some other suite of analytics software, you’re doing yourself a disservice. What’s more, you’re wasting time.

Today, I’m going to tell you why Raven is better in every way than using the default Facebook Insights.

What? I can hear you crying out from here. Facebook Insights, you say, is a perfectly fine, robust tool! After all, just look at everything it can do!

An overview tab with a great selection of information, including page likes over time, post reach, engagement for of different types, all filtered by a time selection of your choosing.

A likes tab that shows your fan page growth over time, rise or fall, including a day-by-day graph of likes you’ve earned each day. If that wasn’t enough, it can also show you where those likes came from.

A readout of your reach, in all forms, from organic to paid to viral. A breakdown of actions on the tab, showing the likes, comments and shares each post earns.

A cool visits tab that shows where, specifically, users visit when they view your page, as well as any actions taken on those pages, from check-ins to likes, plus a graph showing referral traffic by day from external sites.

A posts tab that shows a wealth of data on individual posts, including their reach, what type of reach, the number of clicks and the number of engagement metrics for each post, all categorized by type of post and sortable by any metric.

A people tab, showing you a full readout of demographic information, including age, gender, location down to the city level, language spoken and more.

A competitor tracking panel for pages to monitor, for good or for ill, to see what they’re doing on Facebook including their growth.

All of that sounds positively wonderful, you’re right. Yes, I know you’re giving me a funny look, I tapped into your webcam for this conversation. I’m agreeing with you! Facebook Insights are detailed, robust an awesome. I think so to.

That’s why I use Raven tools.

Here’s why: Raven tools taps into your Facebook Insights to pull every last bit of that information and collate it in new and interesting ways.

Raven applies basic critical thinking and comparisons to the raw data Facebook provides, to not only give you the raw information, but give you actionable intelligence from it as well.

Raven allows you to generate custom reports with whatever data you want, for whatever time frame you want, and nothing but that data. Want a special report delivered to you once a month about your growth, your individual engagement metrics, your reach and your pageviews? You can do it, all with one easy report, with graphs, tables and everything you could want.

Obviously, Raven includes social scheduling tools to allow you to schedule your posts to appear at the peak of visibility. How does it know when those peak hours are? Through examination of the data Facebook provides, of course.

Okay, sure. Other tools can do the same sort of thing, I understand that. You might not have the same fancy reports, but you’ll get some kind of report. You might not have information laid out in the same stark, black and white way with actionable intelligence, but you’ll get the same information. After all, all these tools pull from the same data sources, don’t they?

Raven takes it one step further.

Picture a GooGoo bar. No idea what that is? Me either, but that’s the metaphor Raven used in that blog post. I’m discarding it, because comparing Raven to a cheap candy bar, even a deluxe cheap candy bar, is doing it a disservice.

The point is, Raven doesn’t just pull in and analyze your Facebook Insights data. The tool also, if you give it access, can pull information from your Google Analytics installation on your website. This gives you access to way more data than you had just from Facebook. How much more? Think:

All GA primary dimensions for traffic and referrals.

All tracking information for landing pages, exit pages and everything in between.

All the custom information you could ask for pulled from your AdWords campaigns.

All of your goals and goal tracking, along with custom Raven goal analysis.

Audience analysis, including mobile analysis, geographic analysis, browser and OS targeting, frequency and the variation between new and returning users.

All sorts of additional social analysis, including conversions, network referrals – including Facebook – and a great overview.

Easy and automatic color-coding to see rises and falls in metrics as they happen.

So you have all of your Facebook Insights data pulled into Raven, and you have all of your Google Analytics data, both regarding Facebook and regarding your website in general, all in one place. You then have all of Raven’s analytical tools layered on top, to give you any conceivable report you could ask for, comparing metrics, monitoring changes and providing advice every step of the way.

You then have all of those reports – and nothing more, should you desire – delivered to you on a schedule as regularly as you could desire. Want weekly updates to your reports? You can generate a PDF at will.

There’s one more thing. Do you manage more than one Facebook page? More than one website? What about your team? Do you have different people working on different aspects of your social experience and your website marketing? Do you have team members who shouldn’t have access to all of this data and all of these tools?

If so, Raven is perfect. You can monitor multiple Facebook pages and profiles at a time. You can monitor multiple websites worth of Google Analytics. You can compile it all into one report, or divide it through different user accounts. You can even provide certain clients or management teams to have access to read-only reports, so they can see but not tamper with your data.

I stand by my claim; if you’re not using Raven, you’re missing out on some seriously useful data.

The post Why Raven Tools Analytics Is Better than Facebook Insights appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

The New Facebook Features Marketers Will Be Using in 2015

Christmas has come early for marketers on Facebook. The social network has been busy releasing new publisher features and updating existing tools, including Search and Trending. Although your campaigns might be winding down for the holidays, here’s a look at everything that’s new for your strategies in 2015.

Last January, Facebook introduced Trending to help people discover timely and relevant conversations around the news and people they’re interested in. For brands, not only did this increase awareness across the platform, but it also helped marketers keep a close watch on what people are talking about, providing the perfect “in” for relevant conversation and targeted posts.

Previously only available on desktop, Trending now supports mobile, allowing the 399 million “mobile only” Facebook members to take part. Additionally, Trending conversations are now organized in up to five different sections:

Articles: Displays how news organizations are covering the story.

In the Story: Displays posts from people who are part of the story.

Friends and Groups: Shows what people within a network are saying.

Near the Scene: Displays posts from people near where the story is unfolding.

Live Feed: Offers a real-time stream of reactions from people around the world.

These categories are especially beneficial for news organizations, journalists, local businesses, and public figures. The only downside is that not everyone can enjoy the update just yet. The new Trending experience has already rolled out for members in the U.S. on the web and Android; however, support for iOS and other countries is coming soon.

Search

Introduced in 2013, Facebook’s Graph Search allows you and your customers to use simple phrases to search for people, places, and things. Initially, the best use case for brands was using Graph Search to better understand their audiences. For example, you can conduct a search about the details of your Page’s fans. Marketers can see things like a list of followers who Like a certain musician or TV show, who live in a specific town, or who are currently engaged.

But beyond market research, Graph Search has made it easier for members to find and interact with posts from Pages that have already been shared. A lot happens in Facebook’s News Feed, and although targeting and proper calls-to-action help minimize being passed over, it’s not uncommon for a post to slip away. But now the social network is making it easier to get it back.

In Facebook’s latest update, rather than have to scroll down an endless stream of posts, people can easily get back to a fun video from an event, a news article they’ve been meaning to read, or photos from your company’s holiday party using Search. The updates are also available on Facebook for iPhone in addition to desktop.

Although it’s not a major feature upgrade, it does improve upon the existing user experience providing publishers with a greater opportunity for engagement. If it’s easier to find your posts, then it’s easier for members to Like, comment on, or share them.

Publishing

Regardless of objective — whether you’re looking to increase sales or boost sign-ups — reaching fans is the number goal of your Facebook Page. You accomplish this by connecting with customers through relevant and interesting content. But that process can always be improved upon, and Facebook just has. The company has created new tools for publishers and made improvements to Insights to enhance communication between your brand and customers.

Interest Targeting

Facebook offers a plethora of targeting options on a broad scale, but now you can get even more precise. To help you reach the right people, the social network now offers that ability to target posts to a subset of people that Like your Page. For example, you can use Interest Targeting to post a story about a sporting event that’ll only be shown to people that like the teams playing. By doing so, you increase your chances of interactions without alienating anyone else.

Post End Date

This new feature allows Page admins to specify a day and time to stop showing a post in News Feed. It prevents people from seeing out-of-date content in News Feed, but posts will continue to appear on your Page. For example, you can use it to remove yesterday’s weather report or a teaser that has since been revealed. Of course, you’ll want to talk it over with your social team before choosing to remove a post from News Feed. Check Insights to make sure that post isn’t pulling in a ton of engagement for your Page before removing it.

Smart Publishing

Here’s an optional new tool that’ll help publishers identify and publish stories that are popular with people on the social network. Once enabled, frequently shared links to your website can appear in News Feed for people who Like your Page. Although those posts won’t appear on your Page, you’ll have access to a new dashboard in Insights to see analytics, moderate comments, and choose which you want to post to your Page.

Smart Publishing is currently limited in availability with only a select number of media organizations having access. Facebook hopes to make it more widely available in the coming months. You can opt in via the Publisher Tools section within Page Settings. Otherwise, the rest of the new features are currently available on desktop to all Pages that have enabled the Targeting and Privacy setting.

Insights

Last but not least, Facebook has made several improvements to Domain Insights to show how Pages and social plugins drive traffic to websites. For starters, the company has added a new Top URLs section that displays URL-level reporting and shows when other Pages and influencers share a post you’ve made to Facebook. So if a celebrity shares one of your URLs, you’ll know why it reached more people than other URLs. Deeper insight into Page performance is critical for understanding and optimizing content strategies.

Whether you’re looking for a couple of last-minute enhancements or preparing for next year’s strategies, these tools and updates should be considered. Review them with your team and think about how they can support your main objectives. And for more information about these tools, or any Facebook feature in general, visit the social network’s Help Center.

The post The New Facebook Features Marketers Will Be Using in 2015 appeared first on Sprout Social.

What’s the Average Cost of a Fan on Facebook Ads?

The goal of most of your Facebook ads eventually ends up being getting more likes on your page. You want likes on your posts, but to do that, you need followers. You want people to click through to your website, but the people most likely to do that are your followers, so you want to grow your followers.

Facebook, of course, wants to charge you for the privilege of having followers. They do this by decreasing your organic reach and making paid reach more enticing, so ads are a more beneficial option.

You can’t buy likes directly through Facebook. You can only buy them through a third party service, and even then, you need to make sure of the quality of your service. If you’re finding 10 likes for a penny, you’re probably playing with Bangladeshi bots and you won’t see any benefit from their likes.

Through Facebook, you can only “buy” likes by buying traffic to your page and hoping your page is attractive enough to keep them around. The three methods you can use to do this are sidebar ads, news feed ads and mobile ads. Each will have a different audience and a different view of your page, and so each will have a different cost per like.

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what the cost per like you’re going to pay for your fans will be. I can give you numbers that other people have calculated for their own accounts, but they can vary wildly. Some businesses report spending less than $1 per fan. Others spend closer to $2 per fan. Some have cheaper costs but pull in far fewer fans, while others have expensive costs but pull in way more fans.

Of course, there’s also the value of an individual fan. Some businesses get more out of a fan than others. Oreo calculated that their average fan is worth a bit over $75. Walmart’s average fan is worth over $830. It all comes down to what you sell and how frequently you sell it.

The cost per fan can also grow the more you invest. Initially, your $100 might get you 75 fans. Dump $1,000 in, though, and you’re not likely to get 750 fans; you might only get 600. Your audience is finite, as is your reach, and only so many people in a given time frame are going to like your page. You need to monitor your ad spend and see when it begins to taper off, so you know when to cut off your spending due to diminishing returns.

General Trends and Advice

Look back to the three types of ad placement. Each of them will vary drastically in terms of audience reached and conversion rates.

Mobile news feed ads are by far the highest cost, but they also have an extremely potent audience. More than half of all Facebook traffic is mobile, so a mobile ad can reach an extremely large audience.

Desktop news feed ads have been growing, particularly because they’re so similar to normal news feed posts today. They’re not slathered with sponsorship flags or warnings.

Sidebar ads are by leaps and bounds the lowest in terms of click rates. However, they are also insanely cheap by comparison. Where you might spend $7 per thousand impressions on a news feed ad, or $8 per thousand on mobile, you’re spending no more than a quarter on sidebar ads. Not a quarter of that; a quarter, 25 cents.

Depending on your optimization, you might expect to pay anywhere from $0.50 to $3.00 for each page like you receive, depending on numerous factors. This is an average increase from a few years ago, when the Wall Street Journal reported the average cost at a hair over $1.

Optimizing Conversion Rates

There are a whole host of ways you can optimize your ads, so they bring in more converting users for a lower price.

oCPM – This is Facebook’s specific optimized cost per thousand bid structure. It’s actually a very well designed algorithm that stretches your bids and budget as far as they will go. It takes a lot of the work out of your hands and gives you, by default, the best results you can get out of the ad you put in. However, just like any algorithm, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. Optimize other factors and let the oCPM do the work for you.

Audience – How precisely are you targeting users? It might not cost much to advertise to an audience of millions, but you probably won’t actually reach all of those millions. Your bids can only be stretched so far. It’s generally a better idea to narrow down your audience targeting as much as possible, based on demographics you learn from your existing audience. You can do this in part by targeting a lookalike audience made up of your existing audience, to advertise specifically to people who are just like the people who already watch your page.

Copy – What you say and how you say it is just as important, if not more so, than the placement of your ads or the content of your page. You need to say something in just a few words that attracts users and gets them to click through your ad. You then need to make your landing page – probably an unpublished post made through the Power Editor – compelling enough to convert those visitors to followers. There’s no guaranteed method to accomplishing this goal; you just have to experiment with different styles and types of copy, and hope you stumble upon success. It can help to see what your competitors are doing, if they’re doing something right.

Images – The images you use to accompany your ads are important as well. On one hand, they need to stay within Facebook’s 20% text rule. At the same time, they need to stand out enough from the rest of Facebook that they don’t get lost in the shuffle. Displayed in the sidebar, they’re easy to lose amongst the other suggestions Facebook displays. Use vibrant colors, non-blue colors, and interesting or compelling subjects. Happy women and pets work well, if you’re not aiming at a specialized field that wouldn’t suit them.

Placement – Testing your ads in various positions will help you figure out which position is best for a given ad. Run each ad in each position for a few days or for a fixed budget and monitor the results. Split test and optimize ads for their positions.

Duration – Even the best ad in the world will only work for so long before users get tired of seeing it. The greatest Superbowl commercials get tiring after three months of seeing them every 20 minutes. You can’t afford to throw money into the same ads month after month; users will start to ignore them.

Optimize your ads, to it costs less per impression, so you can earn more impressions and thus a higher number of conversions. Optimize your landing pages, so your conversion rate goes up, so those impressions convert to more followers. Every change you make for the better lowers your cost per like.

The post What’s the Average Cost of a Fan on Facebook Ads? appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

How to Customize the Facebook Page Call to Action Button

Earlier this year, Facebook added a new feature to both ads and posts that changes the way you display your calls to action. Specifically, it allows you to customize their little call to action button.

Since then, Facebook rolled out a redesign that moved those buttons and the way posts are displayed in the news feed. They still exist, but they require the Facebook Power Editor to create, unlike the buttons we’re about to discuss.

To make it up to pages, Facebook has rolled out a similar feature over the last few days. In fact, the new feature is still rolling out, and will be for a few weeks. This feature is the custom call to action button for your individual page.

Page Call to Action Buttons

You can see examples of this new Facebook call to action button for pages on some of the profiles that already have it. The example Facebook uses in their developers news post is the Dollar Shave Club. If you click that link and visit their page, at the top, next to the “like” and “message” buttons, you see a button labeled “sign up” with a pen icon. This is one of the customized call to action buttons Facebook has debuted.

If you click that sign up button, you are taken to the Dollar Shave Club website. The URL takes you to their homepage, though it’s laced with tracking parameters. This tells you two things. First, you can use this call to action button to link to an external site, which is brilliant for semi-permanent links. Second, you can use tracking parameters, including Google’s UTM parameters, to track your referrals in detail.

The button is customizable in a limited fashion. You can choose from one of seven different objectives. These objectives are:

Book Now

Use App

Play Game

Shop Now

Watch Video

Customizing the Call to Action Button

Right now, you might not have the call to action button on your page. You’ll know when you log in to your page and view it. If you don’t have the feature yet, your page will look as it always does. If you do, you will see the location of that call to action button occupied by a new button. This button is labeled “create call-to-action.”

Click this button, if it exists on your page. You will open up a menu that has three fields.

Choose a Button. This is where you pick from among the seven available call to action buttons. These are all functionally identical; the only differences are the words and the icon. For example, the “shop now” button has a shopping cart icon, while the “sign up” button has a pencil icon.

Website. This is where you put in your link. You can link to your homepage, to a subpage, to a landing page, a product page, a video page or any other page you choose to specify. It’s unknown whether there’s a character limit to the field at this time. You’re also free to use tracking parameters for this link.

Mobile Website. This is an optional field, but it can be very beneficial to certain webmasters. This field allows you to link to a different URL for mobile users. This allows you to customize specific mobile landing pages, particularly if your site isn’t responsive.

The next bits of customization, past the first window, include additional options to specify destinations for iOS devices and Android devices individually. You can choose between website – which pushes them to the website specified on the previous screen under mobile – or app. If you choose app, you specify an app URL, and a backup URL in case that app fails to load.

Once you have filled out at least the top two fields, and the third if you want a different mobile destination, click to create your call to action. Once that’s done, your button is live.

Analytics

We all want to know how effective our buttons are, and you can track your data in a few different ways with these new call to action buttons. The first way is, as mentioned, adding tracking code to the URLs you use. This allows you to, for example, track your visitors through Google Analytics.

On Facebook natively, when you click the drop-down arrow on your live call to action button, you will be presented with three options. The first is to go to the destination link, as a test. The second is to edit the call to action, in case you want to change it. The third is to delete it entirely, which you might do if you want more real estate for your cover photo or if you find the button isn’t converting for you.

Additionally, in the sidebar, there will be a new field of information. This is information for the last week relating to your button. Specifically, it shows you the number of clicks. You don’t get much more information than that readily at hand, unfortunately.

CTA Limitations

Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t allow you to customize the copy, icon or color for your CTA buttons. You’re limited to specifying one of their seven options, as well as the destination URL.

On the landing page, of course, all bets are off. You’re free to do as you will.

Call to action buttons still work for ads, and in fact they work very well. As recently as October, studies showed that the presence of the button increased click rates by as much as 2.85 times. They work the same for promoted posts, as long as you use the Power Editor to create the post and the ad. There are some oddities with the way Facebook native links are displayed – it occasionally changes your CTA button choice – but otherwise they work the same way.

Armed with this new tools, it’s time for you to go out and create your custom call to action. Make a nice landing page, get people to click through and see how it affects your marketing.

The post How to Customize the Facebook Page Call to Action Button appeared first on Boostlikes.com.