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Saturday, January 31, 2015

Everything You Need to Know About Outsourcing Facebook Marketing

Facebook marketing, to be successful, requires quite a bit of investment. You need to be creating content to post on the site. You need to be curating content from around your industry. You need to be interacting with your fans at all hours of the day, both when they comment on your posts and when they send you messages. You need to be studying analytics to know what works and what doesn’t, in order to streamline your process to boost your returns. You need to be aware of industry trends in social media, so you know what changes Facebook is making.

All of this takes an incredible amount of time. It’s no wonder that people market themselves strictly as Facebook marketing specialists. It’s also no wonder that many businesses decide, sooner or later, that outsourcing to these experts is a good idea.

What do you need to know to successfully outsource your Facebook marketing?

The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing

When you outsource your Facebook marketing, you’re contracting either a single consultant or an agency to manage your account for you. For most businesses, an agency is going to be preferable; you want as much coverage throughout the day as possible. A single consultant may have other gigs, leaving less time to dedicate to your business.

The pros of hiring an agency or a consultant:

You’re connecting with experts in social media. Facebook can be very complex; an agency that specializes in it knows what they’re doing.

You’ll find your marketing plan reviewed and improved. Marketing specialists know best how to use the platform to market a business, and they can make improvements to your marketing strategy.

You’ll contract with someone who has plenty of tools at their disposal. Your small business might not be able to justify purchasing large suites of analytics and management tools, but an agency will have them.

On the other hand, there are some cons with outsourcing. If any of these is a deal-breaker for your business, you’ll need to consider hiring an in-house social media expert instead.

You lose familiarity. An agency will be able to research your business, but they won’t know the intricacies of your history like you do. You need to make sure the lines of communication are always open, so your agency can get information from you to please a potential client.

You lose the insider perspective. An agency isn’t going to be able to share candid internal photos or anecdotes at the drop of a hat. You can arrange such information, but it’s not going to be as spontaneous as it otherwise would be.

An agency is disconnected. They aren’t part of your culture, they aren’t part of your brand, and while they’re going to be talented mimics, they don’t be perfect.

An Eye to Costs

Pros and Cons List

There’s also the cost factor of marketing on Facebook, either internally or through an agency. Some businesses think that Facebook is a free platform, and paying an agency to manage it is a net loss. In reality, Facebook marketing is far from free. Sure, you can use the platform entirely without spending a penny, but you’re missing out on some of the best features it has to offer.

There are all of the hidden costs associated with Facebook as well. Try an experiment; total up the amount of time you spend creating content, posting, and engaging with your fans. Assign this an hourly rate, either what you’re paid or what you would pay an in-house manager. Add to this the costs of developing a marketing plan, the costs of running advertising, the costs of training an any other associated costs you can think up.

Now compare that to the cost of a social marketing agency. A good agency will run you between $2,500 and $15,000 per month. Larger companies might end up paying even more to manage multiple accounts across multiple sub-brands. Depending on the agency and the costs associated with your internal marketing, this may very well be the cheaper option. At the very least, the costs will be comparable.

Partial Outsourcing

There’s also the hybrid model, where you retain some control over your pages, but you outsource some of the work. What should you outsource, and what should you hold back, if you opt for this model?

Outsource:

Setup and design of your profiles. If you’re not a graphic designer and don’t have one on staff, please don’t try to design a cover photo and profile picture yourself. You’re just asking for an amateur impression.

Basic status updates. You can schedule and automate this yourself, or you can allow the agency you hire to do so. As long as the agency is given some leeway and some information, they can probably create better messages than you can.

User engagement. Basic responses to comments are easy to outsource. You just need to make sure you’re available to answer questions in case something comes up that the agency can’t handle based on what they know.

Picking an Agency or Consultant

Agency

How can you choose the right agency to represent your business? There’s a long interview process involved, and you should always make sure to leave the first month or so of your contract as open as possible, in case the fit just isn’t right. Here are some concerns to address.

Trust. You need to make sure the agency in charge of your accounts is trustworthy. You’re giving them at least moderator access to your page; you can’t have them misrepresenting your brand, stealing information or compromising your users in any way. How can you make sure an agency is trustworthy? Look for past customers and a history of their company.

Boundaries. What will the agency handle, and what will you do in-house? If the agency expects you to do the graphical work, but you expect them to handle it, nothing will get done. It’s the same for any task. Set defined lines as to where your responsibility ends and theirs begins.

Communication. This has been said multiple times, but you need to make sure you have an open line of communication with your agency. This works both ways; so you can monitor what they’re doing and fix issues before they become problems, and so that they can ask questions when they need information on a time-sensitive basis.

And, of course, there’s price. You need to do the cost-benefit analysis to determine how much the time and energy you save on not doing the Facebook work yourself is worth. If the agency in question is far and away more expensive, it might not be a worthwhile investment.

The post Everything You Need to Know About Outsourcing Facebook Marketing appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

How to Create a Facebook Page for a Local Business

There are a few good reasons why you might not have made a Facebook page for your business yet. For example, maybe you just founded your business and haven’t had time to make a social presence just yet. Maybe you had one in the past, but it was deleted through a series of coincidental shenanigans including mistaken identity and doughnut theft. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg personally decided he didn’t like the look of your business and blocked it, only just now removing that block.

Whatever the reason, you’re finally getting around to starting a Facebook page for your local business, and you want to figure out how to go about it correctly. Luckily for you, I have all the answers.

The first thing you’re going to need to do is create a personal profile, if you don’t already have one. Pages require a personal profile to create. Ideally, this will be the personal profile of someone integral to the business, such as the CEO or the dedicated social manager. Ownership of the page can change later, but it’s easier if that doesn’t have to happen.

Select a Category

Once you have a personal profile and are logged in, go to the Facebook Page Create dialogue. There, you will be asked to pick a category for your page. This is very important! You can’t change it later. You have six options to choose from:

Local Business or Place

Company, Organization, or Institution

Brand or Product

Artist, Band, or Public Figure

Entertainment

Cause or Community

As a local business, you are going to want to pick the “local business” option, fittingly enough. The reason for this is because of the additional perks you get by picking that category. Each category has a few perks that only that category can set.

Local Business or Place: An About section, a physical address, hours of operation, contact information, parking information and a price rankge.

Company, Organization, or Institution: A founded date, an address, a mission, any awards, and a product list.

Brand or Product: An about section, a founded date, product lists and awards.

Artist, Band, or Public Figure: Label/Party or other affiliation, birthday, address, interests, biography, gender if relevant.

Entertainment: About section, release date.

Cause or Community: Type of cause, description, access to cause groups.

As such, it’s clear why you pick the local business option. Having access to the address, hours, contact information and other options is invaluable. Otherwise, you would have to cram most of that into your About section, which looks cluttered compared to picking the right category.

Fill Out Profile

Once you’ve selected the category and created the page, it’s time to fill out the information available to you.

Your About section should be a 2-4 sentence description of your company, including keywords if necessary, industry, prime product and other such important information. You should also include a link to your primary website, typically your homepage and not a subpage.

You can specify a custom URL for your Facebook page, such as facebook.com/businessname.

You should upload a profile picture, ideally your logo, in a 180 pixel square. You can update this for special events and holidays, but it should be recognizable and branded.

Your cover photo is also important. You can use it as a billboard, special announcements section, or just a compelling picture of your physical location in good weather.

You can specify your additional fields here too. Your hours of operation, your price range, your parking, etc.

Your contact information needs to match the contact information on your website, for maximum SEO benefit.

Any other lingering fields should be filled in as well. The only ones you don’t necessarily have to fill out are the parking and price range options. These are typically most beneficial for upper-class establishments where parking is handled by valet or the price range is considerable.

Create and Schedule Content

At this point, your page is still either hidden or not announced. Facebook will ask you to like your own page, or to import your email contacts; avoid both for the moment. First, you want to start establishing a content schedule.

The key to success on Facebook is to post frequently with high quality content. I recommend starting out at 3 posts per week, on a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule. You can opt for 5 days or 7 days per week if you prefer, but it’s nice to give yourself space to grow.

Your content should be a mixture of content from your own blog and content from other industry sites. With three posts per week, you’ll want one post from your blog – a roundup post or your best post for the week is ideal – and two posts from industry sources. Curating content is very valuable. As you ramp up post frequency, make sure to keep your own content in the fold.

Before you begin promoting your page, you should queue up at least a month’s worth of content. This way, once you’re engrossed in promotion and sharing, you won’t have to worry about your content running out. The more content you schedule, the better.

Invite Users

Once you have your content scheduled, it’s time to get people to follow your page. You can do this in three ways when your page is new:

Like and promote your page through your personal profile. This will get your friends and business associates to follow your page.

Import your mailing list. This will send invites to everyone who subscribes to your business. You should also send out your link in your newsletter, for those who don’t always respond to Facebook’s invitations.

Paid promotion. You can run Facebook ads in the sidebar or the news feed, to encourage people to like your page. This has a lot of intricacy and is not recommended until you’ve built up your audience as much as possible through the first two methods.

You can also do off-site promotion, like press releases or posts on your own site. Use all of these methods to build an audience, get them to engage with your content, and start the cycle of growth and expansion that Facebook is known for.

The post How to Create a Facebook Page for a Local Business appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

How Many Facebook Fans Do You Need to Make Money?

In order to make money from someone on Facebook, you need to get them from their position of doing nothing on Facebook but reading through posts and sharing cat pictures, all the way to your shopping cart, where they can buy something from your business. This is a long, difficult process with a lot of attrition every step of the way.

Zarella’s Hierarchy

There is a theory, created by Dan Zarella, that attempts to model the viral potential of a piece of content on Facebook. I find that it works well to help you calculate the number of fans necessary to make money from your Facebook account.

In order to put this theory to use, you need some ongoing data from your Facebook page. If you’re new to Facebook, or you’re making estimates as to how many users you’ll need to accumulate before you see returns, you’re going to be disappointed. Without actual, factual numbers, you won’t be able to make accurate estimates.

This hierarchy is an inverse pyramid of decreasing numbers, representing the drop-off of users each step of the way. You’ll understand once it’s all explained. Also, Zarella’s Hierarchy deals with shares, rather than conversions, so it’s not a perfect analogue.

Try out this thought experiment. Your Facebook page has 10,000 people following it. That’s not an insignificant audience, but with Facebook’s hundreds of millions of daily users, it’s a drop in a bucket. You can assume 10,000 is a reasonably attainable number.

You want your content to be shared. You post a piece of content. This content is available to 100% of the people following your page. Anyone visiting your page can see it. This is NOT the same as reach! Reach is the next step. The “Exposure” of your content is 100%, therefore 10,000 people.

Next, you need to get the attention of your users. This, on Facebook, is your reach. Reach on Facebook is just Facebook’s calculation of how many people actually saw your post. Typical average reach is around 6%. This means out of your audience of 10,000, approximately 600 people will actually see your post. That’s the number of people whose attention you get, even for a moment.

Now you need to motivate those people to actually take action with your post. In this case, you’re trying to earn a share. The average engagement rate of a Facebook post is around 1%. This means of the 600 people who saw your post, 6 of them will engage with it. The distribution of this engagement across clicks, likes and shares will vary depending on the post.

Monetary Calculations

Calculations

For the main topic of this post, we’re considering Zarella’s Hierarchy to be accurate, but we’re taking it one step further. We’re also simplifying it slightly. First, assume that all engagement is a click through. This allows us to assume that the motivation phase is equal to your click-through rate. It’s also likely close to the truth; not many people are going to like or share your post without clicking it.

To take it one step further, we need to measure one off-site metric; the conversion rate of your Facebook visitors. With the 10,000 users, 6 clicks example above, you need to track those 6 people on your site and determine how many of them will convert. Thankfully, you can track this information directly using Facebook’s conversion pixel.

Consider the simplest possible definition of making money from Facebook. One conversion is all it takes. Assuming you’re using Facebook for free, with no investment other than time, one single conversion is a positive ROI. Let’s work backwards.

You need one conversion. Assume your conversion rate is on the high end, at 10%. This will vary by industry and by advertising method, and won’t be accurate for your Facebook page, which is why you’ll need to plug in your own data. More on that later.

A 10% conversion rate means that 1 out of 10 visitors will convert. Therefore, to earn one conversion – and thus make money from Facebook – you need 10 people to click through to your site.

Using Zarella’s Hierarchy and working backwards, we then take it up to the motivation/click/engagement step. You need 10 people to click through to your site. With an engagement rate of 1%, to get 10 people to click through, you need 1,000 people to see your post.

Up one more step, to the attention/reach step. Average Facebook reach is, again, about 6%. Therefore, to get 1,000 people to see your post, you need an audience of approximately 16,700 people.

Therefore, to make money from Facebook by the absolute simplest definition, you need – based on average calculations that don’t apply to your business – nearly 17,000 fans.

Applying to the Real World

This is where your data and your calculations come in. You need to measure several metrics.

Your website conversion rate amongst Facebook referrals. Measure this with the Facebook conversion tracking pixel.

Your average link post engagement rates. Only measure the engagement rates of the posts you make linking to your website! If you’re measuring engagement on posts that have no chance of earning you money, you’re skewing the numbers.

Your average reach. Again, only measure the reach of your promotional posts with links to your site.

You also need to determine what, for you, counts as earning money from Facebook. Is it one single conversion? Is it 10 conversions? 100? The precise number needs to be determined as your goal for this exercise.

Now take all of the data and plug it into the formula.

Take the number of conversions you need to make.

Divide this number by your conversion rate to determine how many people need to make it to your site.

Divide that number by your average engagement/click-through rate. This will tell you how many people you need to reach with a given post.

Divide that number by your reach. This will determine how many people you need to have following your page in order to get your required conversions.

If you’re doing the math properly and your conversion metrics are low, this will result in some depressingly high numbers. You might end up calculating that you need millions of followers in order to make your sales goals from Facebook. This is normal, but a few things alter the calculations.

Increasing Rates and Altering Calculations

There are a few things you can do to make the numbers a lot more in your favor.

Increase your website conversion rate.

Increase your Facebook post engagement rate.

Increase your Facebook reach.

Additionally, you can invest money into Facebook in the form of ads. Ads, with the click-through metric, will guarantee you X number of clicks. You will need to adjust your sales goals to compensate for the expense, but you can also eliminate other portions of the calculation entirely.

The post How Many Facebook Fans Do You Need to Make Money? appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

How to Report Fake News Feed Stories and Hoaxes on Facebook

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Have you fallen for the latest Facebook hoax or hate being ‘trolled’ by your friends who share fake News stories on Facebook?

Recently, Facebook added an option for people to report a story they see in News Feed as false, which helps save the rest of us from being fooled!

Because while Facebook is great for spreading breaking news, not all of the stories you see in your News Feed are true.

This week’s #SocialMediaMinute will cover how to report fake News Feed hoaxes on Facebook.

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Reporting a hoax works in the same way as reporting a story as spam. Check it out in the video tutorial below.

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What are Hoaxes?

Hoaxes are a form of News Feed spam that includes scams (“Click here to win a lifetime supply of candy”), or deliberately false or misleading news stories (“Man sees Bigfoot on hike in Oregon”).

People often share these hoaxes and later decide to delete their original posts after realizing they’ve been tricked. This usually comes in the form of lots of comments from friends letting them know it’s a hoax or links to hoax-busting website.

Reporting News Feed Hoaxes

To reduce the number of these types of posts, News Feed will take into account when numerous people flag a post as false.

News Feed will also take into account how many people choose to delete their posts after being informed it’s fake.

This all leads to reduced distribution in News Feed and applies to posts including links, photos, videos and status updates.

Huzzah! No more hysteria or viral disinformation!

More importantly Facebook’s update to News Feed will add an annotation to posts that have received many of these types of reports to warn others on Facebook.

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However Facebook will not remove stories people report as false and are not reviewing content and making a determination on its accuracy. So it’s really up to Facebook users to self moderate their feeds.

Takeaway

The goal of News Feed is to serve stories that matter to you. Facebook seems to have learned that hoaxes ruin its users’ experience. Luckily, the majority of publishers on Facebook will not be impacted by this update though publishers who do frequently post hoaxes and scams will see their News Feed distribution decrease. You have been warned!

Keep in mind satirical content intended to be humorous, or content that is clearly labeled as satire should not be affected by this update as users rarely report this type of content.

Have you ever fallen for a Facebook hoax? Are you excited to have the power to further moderate your News Feed? Let me know in the comments below and make sure to come back next week for more title="SOCIAL MEDIA TUTORIALS" href="http://www.jacobcurtis.com/social-media-tutorials/" target="_blank">social media tutorials.

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The post rel="nofollow" href="http://www.jacobcurtis.com/2015/01/29/report-fake-news-feed-hoaxes-facebook/">How to Report Fake News Feed Stories and Hoaxes on Facebook appeared first on rel="nofollow" href="http://www.jacobcurtis.com">Jacob Curtis | Social Media Tutorials.

For Once and For All: Is Buying Facebook Likes Worth It?

Is buying likes worth it

There’s a lot of conflicting information about buying Facebook likes. Some people claim it’s legitimate. Some people claim it’s dangerous, but can be made to work when you do it right. Some people talk about legitimate sellers, in a world full of scammers. Others offer evidence of consistent failure with every aspect of the process. So, to answer the question once and for all, let’s discuss the intricacies of buying Facebook likes.

It’s Against Facebook’s Rules

First of all, buying likes from any source other than Facebook’s PPC ads with the “page like” objective is against the rules and terms of service for using Facebook. This means, if you were to buy likes, you will be subject to a wide range of possible penalties, depending on the scale of the purchase.

First, you can have the likes removed. Facebook has a number of systems in place, ranging from personal review to robotic scans, specifically designed to identify and remove fake likes. It doesn’t matter if the account is clearly fake or passing itself off as real; the account can be removed, and with it any like it has performed.

Second, identifying fake likes on your account can lead Facebook to perform an audit of your likes as a whole. This will help them determine more fake profiles to remove, but it will also result in the mass removal of likes from your page. Facebook doesn’t care if you paid for them; you broke the rules.

Third, if the scale of the violation is large enough, you risk the suspension or removal of your account entirely. This is a rare penalty, but it occurs fairly often with businesses on the “wrong side” of the law; businesses selling other black hat services, for example, using bought likes to look more legitimate.

Shady Websites can Steal Information or Money

This is the second risk you run when you purchase likes from a seller. Depending on how that seller operates, you’re putting yourself at significant risk of account violation. At the most basic level, you might find the seller just takes your money and disappears. This isn’t a huge deal if you’re just losing the $5 you spent on Fiverr, but if you’re spending hundreds of dollars on a more “professional” looking service, you can find yourself out a significant amount of money.

Worse, you have no legal recourse. You can take the site to court, if you can get any information about the seller, but there’s little chance you’ll be able to pull off any settlement that would cover your legal costs, let alone recoup your losses. After all, many like sellers are base in developing nations where monthly incomes are measured in tens of dollars.

You also run a risk if you’re using certain sellers that want your information to use your account. They’ll look legitimate and make you trust them, right up until they gain access to your account, steal whatever information is available to them, and disappear. You have little alternative but to go through the lengthy process of securing your account and protecting yourself from future intrusion.

You End Up Contracting Click Farms

When you purchase likes, most of the time what you’re getting is a bunch of people sitting in a small, hot building in Bangladesh. These people are working their way through lists of links, clicking to like each page in turn. To obfuscate their actions from Facebook’s automatic detections, they click ads on the sidebar or other links they see and like those pages too. They’re handed another file, another list, and your business page is listed along with dozens or hundreds of others.

Sure, you get a bunch of likes. You get a bunch of likes from these people sitting in these digital sweatshops, who don’t even know what the name of your business is. Some of them may not even be able to read English. They certainly don’t have the money or the interest to go in and buy your product based on that like. They don’t check news feeds, they just like pages, day in and day out.

Oh, and how far do you think your $5 payment is going to stretch with 1,000 likes? After the seller takes their cut, each individual person in that sweatshop is making a penny from you, tops. You can’t even assuage your guilt by pretending you’re helping provide work for these poor, unfortunate souls.

The Users that Like Your Page are Fake

This was partially mentioned above, but who do you think is liking your page when you buy likes? It might be people from developing nations. It might be robot-controlled accounts. It might be people operating bot farms in the middle of Utah. You don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. The end result is the same; none of these accounts are valuable to you at all.

Nothing, anywhere on the Internet, gives any value to the number of likes your page has. Even marketers who care about the number of followers on a page know that Facebook likes are a faulty metric. Increasing that number, alone, does nothing for you.

Meanwhile, you get a lot of people following you who don’t care about the posts you make. They may never even see those posts; after all, they have thousands of followed pages, all competing for the space on their never-used news feed. Even if they see your posts, are they going to read them? Of course not!

Oh, and there’s just no way they’re going to turn the $5 they’re paid per week and turn that into a purchase of your $200 training course.

You Dilute Your Message

Facebook shares your posts, mostly, with the people who are interested and engaged with your brand. Every person who sees your post then becomes a vector for it to be shared and spread. Facebook also throws in an element of chance, showing your post to a selection of random users, giving them the opportunity to become engaged users to see your posts more often.

Every person who sees your post is a potential person who will share it. Now imagine that the majority of your followers are fake. Most of the people who see your post, then, won’t care about it. They won’t share it. Any chance of going viral you had died. You’re left with conversion rates in the low fractions of fractions of percents.

So yeah, buying likes is worth it, if your end goal is to completely destroy any viability your Facebook account has.

The post For Once and For All: Is Buying Facebook Likes Worth It? appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

The Ultimate Guide to Split Testing Facebook Ads

Until you know what it’s all about, split testing – also known as A/B testing – sounds like a meaningless marketing buzzword. It’s the kind of thing cheesy consultants charge $500 an hour to talk about, with no actionable advice at the end.

Then you read up on it, and you realize that no, split testing is just about the most effective single experiment you can perform. It’s highly scientific when done properly, and it virtually always results in an increase in conversions, ROI or whatever other metric you’re testing to improve.

How Split Testing Works

Split testing is an incredibly simple idea. It works like this. You start off with an audience of, say, 1,000 people. You’re running an advertisement and you’re getting 50 signups per month with that ad.

To split test, you take your audience and divide it into two segments, each containing 500 people. To one audience, you continue running your current ad. You can expect this will result in 25 signups monthly; 50% of the audience, 50% of the signups.

For the other group of 500, you run a variant of the ad. You might change the copy. You might change the image. You might change the landing page. The point is, you’re changing one – and only one – variable. Never change more than one variable at a time; you won’t know which change was effective.

After one month, your original ad should have brought in 25 signups. Compare that to your new variant. If it brought in 20 signups, you know the change was bad. If it brought in 30, you know the change was good. When you find a good change, you implement it for your main ad and start a new split test, testing a different variable.

That, of course, is the most simplistic way to look at it. Very rarely will a business run a split test with half of their audience for a full month. Tests are typically shorter, on the scale of days or weeks, because you don’t want to sink a lot of time into an ineffective variant.

You also might run multiple tests at once. You take your audience of 1000, put 500 of them on your main ad, and divide the remaining 500 into five 100-person segments, each with a variant of the ad.

Split Testing on Facebook

Pointing at a Graph

Facebook is a marketer’s dream with all of the ways you can split test your ads and audience. You’re not limited to just dividing your ads up by a pure numerical standpoint. Instead, you can split up your audience along demographic or interest targeting lines, giving you more options to test. Here are ways you can test Facebook ads.

Testing copy. Facebook ads, sidebar ads in particular, give you a very limited space for your copy. You have less space than the average tweet to make your case, and you have all the infinite variations of the English language to do it. Copy is where you’re going to be spending the majority of your time testing, at least on a low scale. You might be surprised at how much a minor change can affect your conversion rates.

To test copy, create two ads with identical targeting, budgets and images, and change up the copy. Swap out words for synonyms. Swap out CTAs. Try using a different tone, more casual or more stuffy. Even just minor punctuation can have an effect.

For promoted posts, you have more space to make your changes, which gives you even more options for split testing. On the other hand, you’re limited in time; Facebook’s timeliness factors in showing your posts to people, even when they’re promoted. Even perfect copy and a huge budget won’t save a months-old post.

Testing images. Here, you again have incredible potential for variation. Anything that can be an image can be tested. You need to make sure you fall within Facebook’s image guidelines, including the 20% text rule, the rules on political or sexual issues, the rules on shocking content, the rules on sexual content and the rules on functionality.

Even within those limited, you have a lot of leeway. You want your image to be a smiling woman, that’s fine. How many millions of pictures of smiling women exist for you to use? You can spend an incredibly long time testing through just that subject, let alone all the other potential subjects.

Testing destination. In this case, you run two identical ads in both copy and image, with the same budget and same targeting factors, but you change the landing page. Maybe on one of them, you send the user to a compelling post. Maybe on another, you send them to a video landing page. A third might send them off-site to your website landing page, which is a whole other avenue for testing.

You need to make sure, whatever your destination, that it matches the promises made in your ad. You can’t run an ad about shoes and link them to a post selling umbrellas; it just doesn’t work. Anyone interested in umbrellas won’t click your ad, and anyone clicking your ad to see shoes will be disappointed and leave.

Testing budget formats. Facebook allows you to use CPC (cost per click), CPM (cost per thousand views), or Optimized CPM. Testing these is a matter of running 2-3 identical ads, all with the same copy, image, landing page, targeting and everything else, just choosing a different budget structure. Some will burn through your budgets, others will leave you money left over. There’s no way to tell from the outset which will work best, and you need to re-test each time you make a major change in your campaigns.

Testing by demographic or interest. This is where Facebook’s unique targeting comes into play. Facebook records a ton of information relating to interests and demographics, both from the platform itself and purchased from third parties.

Like budget formats and destination, you need to leave every aspect of your ads the same, changing only your targeting. This will be a little more complex, however. Unlike the nice, clean 500/500 example in the beginning of this post, interest targeting will end up giving you segments of your audience with varying sizes. You’ll need to perform an extra step when comparing these tests.

That extra step is performing the basic calculations at the end to get you the precise cost per metric. For example, if you run two ads, one with 1,000 people and one with 2,000, and you end up with 100 conversions from one and 150 from the other, you have to make two calculations. For the audience of 1,000, you have 1 in 10 people converting. For the audience of 2000, you have 1 in 13 people converting. Even though the 2,000 audience gave you more raw conversions, it had a lower conversion rate, thus making the other ad the better one. Once you factor in the cost per view or click, you can see which is more expensive and thus which is better to run.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Split Testing Facebook Ads appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

Edgerank: A Guide to the Facebook News Feed Algorithm

facebook news feed algorithm image custom

Do you ever get the distinct feeling that not all of your brand’s Facebook followers are seeing your Page posts? Sometimes it can even feel like your business is only seeing engagement from the same core group of people.

Those feelings might be validated by actual data. Implemented in 2010, the Facebook news feed algorithm Edgerank was created to pick and choose what Facebook users see in their News Feed. This means that Facebook is choosing which of your followers see all of the updates that you create. The Edgerank algorithm has a rather complicated, controversial history, so we’ve put together this guide to break down what it is and how to take advantage of it.

Why Does The Facebook News Feed Need an Algorithm?

Whenever someone visits their News Feed, there are around 1,500 stories waiting to be seen from the friends, people, and Pages that they follow. Since the average person doesn’t have the time to read through 1,500 posts, Facebook’s algorithm prioritizes these stories to show users what they’re most likely to be interested in.

Facebook seeks to show you the information that you want to see without making you dig for it through a bunch of stories that, let’s just face it, you’re really not that interested in seeing.

The Beginning of Edgerank

In the spring of 2009, Facebook released the first iteration of a real-time News Feed. It was a completely unrestricted feed and would display every single story as it published. With this feed, Facebook started to see a large spike in the amount of Likes and comments from each user, which essentially created a cycle of sharing.

The increased engagement led to more content, which eventually resulted in too much noise for the user. The problem for Facebook became showing each user topical and interesting information without overwhelming them with posts. The answer came at the 2010 f8 conference with the announcement of the News Feed ranking algorithm Edgerank.

The Edgerank Formula

The video above includes a portion featuring Ari Steinberg, the first to introduce the idea of Edgerank at the 2010 f8 conference. His presentation included a slide with the actual formula on it:

Where:

∑ – The sum of each individual edge. An edge is a story that can show up in your News Feed, like a status update, comment, Like, tag, and so on.

u – The affinity score. This is the factor that weighs how close you are with the person doing the posting. If you frequently interact with the person posting, have several mutual friends, or are related, Facebook is more likely to give that content a higher weight.

w – The weight for this edge. Not all actions are considered equal in the eyes of Facebook’s algorithm. For example, a friend creating a status update would carry more weight than someone simply liking a status update.

d – The time decay factor. As a posts gets older, it’s more likely that it has already been seen or that it is no longer as relevant. Facebook remedies both of these problems by taking the age of the post into consideration.

Important Edgerank Updates

Facebook is constantly making adjustments to its News Feed algorithm to make sure it’s showing users what they want to see, so it can be tough to pinpoint exactly what makes up the formula in recent years. You can follow all of the News Feed adjustments on the Facebook blog under the News Feed FYI Series, but here are some of the most important updates along with the examples they used.

Aug. 23, 2013: Facebook Enforces Quality

Facebook developed an algorithm based on over 1,000 different factors to gauge the quality of the content a Page posts. After testing it out, Facebook saw an increase in News Feed engagement, so they made it part of the core algorithm.

Dec. 2, 2013: Facebook Breaking News

Facebook found that more and more people were turning to the platform for the latest news on current events, sports, and other interests, so Facebook started to reward links to quality news sites. This update also saw the addition of the Related Articles section.

Jan. 21, 2014: The Importance of Text Updates

Facebook found that the more text updates that someone saw from their friends, the more inclined that person was to write one of their own, so the company increased the distribution of those posts. Although the same didn’t hold true for brands, Facebook introduced a new format for brands to share links.

facebook text updates example

Feb. 24, 2014: Tagging for Additional Reach

Whenever one Page tagged another in an update, Facebook increased the chance that the audience of the tagged Page will see the update as well. This held especially true if Facebook deemed those audiences to be similar.

facebook tagged post example

Aug. 25, 2014: The Fall of Click-Bait

Facebook started to penalize posts that encouraged users to click links without providing much context about the content. Facebook used the post below as an example of click-bait:

facebook click bait example

Sept. 18, 2014: Taking Advantage of Trends

Facebook realized that some posts are only interesting at certain times, so it made two updates. One was to show posts about trending topics higher in the feed. The second change was to not only look at how much engagement a post got, but when the post got engagement. Here’s an example of a trending topic:

facebook trending topic

Nov. 14, 2014: Penalizing Promotional Posts

Based on results from a massive survey, Facebook found that users were getting annoyed with Pages that only seemed to promote their own products or services. Posts that solely pushed people to a product, asked people to enter promotions, or reused the exact same content from ads saw a huge decrease in their organic reach. Facebook gave this as an example bad post:

Arguments For Edgerank

Advocates of quality content are all for the idea of Edgerank. Imagine that you only have enough time left in the day to check out one more status update. Would you rather spend that time reading a status update shamelessly promoting a product or service, or looking at what some of your friends and family are up to?

The fact of the matter is that early adopters of Facebook advertising were in a prime position, but it just wasn’t a sustainable model for the social network. Facebook is aiming to create a better experience, and for better or worse, that experience doesn’t include individuals being aggressively targeted by ads.

Arguments Against Edgerank

The average Facebook member is likely to care very little about Edgerank. In fact, every update Facebook has made to Edgerank has led to an increase in overall engagement, so it’s unlikely individuals will be rioting over each change. The biggest arguments against the algorithm have been from brands.

The biggest argument from brands fits this general idea: they are, and have been in the past, encouraged to spend their Facebook ad dollars promoting their Pages to increase their followings. This made sense in the past. Brands would pay Facebook to increase their their follower numbers, and every time they created an organic post their followers would see it.

But now that these Edgerank updates have seriously cut into the amount of organic reach a Page’s posts get, these advertisers feel like they’ve invested into their social followings for nothing. Even brands that never spent a dime creating a following dislike Edgerank because they find it difficult to reliably reach their audiences.

Can You Check Your Edgerank?

Don’t trust any site, short of Facebook itself, that says it will provide you with an accurate gauge of your Edgerank. The Facebook Edgerank algorithm is built up of thousands of different factors that nobody, except the developers at Facebook, have intimate access to. So instead of trying to figure out each post’s Edgerank score, use the tips below to try your best to increase it.

6 Ways to Increase Facebook Reach with Edgerank

So we’ve covered the formula that will put you and your brand in front of your customers; all you have to do now is put that knowledge to work. Looking at each individual factor of the Facebook news feed algorithm when creating a post can help you improve your results. Let’s break down some of the algorithm factors and discuss how improving them could lead to an increase in reach.

1. Increase Affinity Score

How can you increase the affinity score between you the person viewing your post? Build and nurture relationships with your Facebook followers. Create conversations around the things that you post and make sure to to follow up with the people who comment on your posts.

2. Gain Edge Weight

Increase the weight of the Edge with comments, Likes, and shares. Try creating a status that poses a hot or topical question, people will surely want to chime in with their own thoughts. So long as you make sure to create amazing original content, there’s a good chance that people will notice and reward it with their engagement.

3. Beat the Time Decay Factor

This doesn’t mean that you should post updates more often than you already do. It’s important to find the perfect balance of posting frequently enough to remain fresh and infrequently enough to not overwhelm your followers. Run some tests to see how often you can post content while still seeing good reach and engagement.

4. Take Advantage of Trends

The Sept. 18, 2014, update started rewarding the Pages and people who were posting about relevant and trending topics in a timely manner. Though it’s always a good idea to plan your posts in advance, don’t forget to take advantage of some of-the-moment marketing efforts.

5. Share Brand Adjacent Content

Don’t just post your own material! Try to sprinkle in links and mentions to other thought leaders in your field. This isn’t only good in terms of expanding your reach, but it’s also great for developing relationships with the leaders of your industry.

6. No Hard Sales

More often than not, Facebook Pages seem to fall into the poor habit of promoting their products or solutions to their audiences. The most recent algorithm update has made this a questionable tactic. Instead, try sharing content that your audience would find useful.

Using Sprout Social to Help Your Efforts

Social media tools like Sprout Social can help you take advantage of all of the tips above. With Sprout, you can:

Maintain engagement with your followers, increasing affinity score.

Schedule and post content at ideal times for engagement, increasing edge weight and reducing time decays.

Analyze and build on your most successful content, increasing potential edge weight on future posts.

The post Edgerank: A Guide to the Facebook News Feed Algorithm appeared first on Sprout Social.

How Do I Remove the Fake Facebook Likes from My Page?

Fake Facebook fans can come from a number of different sources. The most common, obviously, is when you bought them. You might have bought them a long time a go, realized they weren’t valuable to your page, and ceased doing so but did nothing about the fans. You might have been buying them recently, thinking you were getting something you weren’t.

Another source of fake fans is, unfortunately, running Facebook ads. If your ads aren’t properly targeted, or they’re targeting the locations where fake fans are found, you’re going to accumulate them normally. See, most fake fans are powered by real people in clickfarms, and those people have to avoid certain like profiles. When Facebook detects a large number of accounts bearing certain characteristics, all mass-liking the same set of profiles at roughly the same times, it can reasonably determine that those profiles are fake for like-selling purposes.

To get around this detection, clickfarm employees are encouraged to go about liking other pages, to obfuscate their like profiles. One way they do this is by liking the pages they see in Facebook ads. Then, of course, once one clickfarm discovered your page, you’ll rake in fake likes from dozens, hundreds or even thousands of fake profiles.

So, sooner or later, you’re going to end up with a swath of fake likes on your page. Chances are they’re already there, particularly if you’ve had a profile for a long time.

Fake Likes Matter

By now, everyone knows that fake likes are bad for your page. They dilute your message but they don’t do anything beneficial in return. They never click your links, they never visit your website, they never buy your products, and in the case of fake likes brought in through ads, they eat up your ad budget for no reason.

In the past year, it’s become an even worse deal. Facebook has made changes to their algorithm expressly to punish pages that buy and keep fake likes. That means even if you have a few thousand likes from times past, you’ll end up facing the issues. Specifically, a proliferation of fake likes means decreased engagement and visibility.

Step 1: Value Determinations

Value Determination

The first step to removing fake likes is determining if you even should. Yes, all of the above has been focused on telling you how bad fake likes are. On the other hand, if you’re a company with millions of followers, digging through them to root out 1,000 fake followers isn’t going to be cost or time effective.

Essentially, you need to make an estimate of how many of your fans are fake. If there are a significant number of them, a distractingly high percentage, you should consider investing the time in removing them. You can also consider moving to a new Facebook page, but that can involve a lot of hassle and will start you at square one in terms of your audience.

Over time, Facebook will identify and remove fake accounts. As long as you’re not getting any new fakes, the number of fakes you have will decrease. However, this isn’t a wholly reliable way to remove all of your fake followers.

Step 2: Identify Fake Fans

If you have under 500 or so followers, you can go to Facebook’s fans icon and click the “See all” button. This list only loads 500 fans, and if you have more than that, you won’t be able to see them from this menu.

To see a longer list of your fans, you might need to use the Social Graph. It’s a tedious process to identify all of your fans, but you can get a complete list here.

How can you tell if your fans are fake? Look for indicators.

Fake fans tend to be located in areas outside of your working area. If you only market in Minnesota, what use are fans based in Mexico, China or Indonesia? Even if they’re real people, they aren’t benefitting you all that much.

How full is their profile? If they only have one picture, minimal information and a huge number of likes, they’re probably a fake account.

Have they ever interacted with your page before, other than the initial like? Sure, plenty of people naturally don’t do much more than read your posts, but combined with other indicators, this can be a sign of a fake account.

Is their profile picture copied from another source? You can do a reverse Google image search to find other places the picture has been used. If it’s the head of a number of other profiles, it’s probably a fake account.

Step 3: Removing Fake Fans

Identify Fake Fans

Removing fake fans is another tedious process. The easiest way to help deal with them is to report the user as a fake spambot account. This will help Facebook remove them from the site entirely. However, it doesn’t remove it from your page.

In that 500-limited Facebook fan readout, you can remove any fan following your page. However, this is only limited to the top 500 fans in the readout. By all means, remove any you can, but this doesn’t deal with the full extent of the problem.

In order to remove every fan, you need to take that list of users found in Social Graph. Every Facebook user has a unique URL. Copy that and use a service like Find My Facebook ID to find the numerical ID for that fan. Once you are done with this process, you will have a long list of fake fans sorted by ID number.

Now go back to the 500-limited “all fans” tab. Instead of clicking the gear icon, right-click it. You will want to choose “inspect element” here. It will pop up a window with the code of Facebook, the line for that button highlighted.

What you do next is right-click that line and click “edit as HTML.” In that line, you will see the Facebook ID number of the fan you are editing. Replace that ID number with one of the ID numbers of the fake fans, then click outside of the coding box to save the change.

Now, when you click to ban that user, you’re banning the fake user. It helps to do this while using a button related to another fake user, so if it goes wrong, you won’t accidentally remove a good user.

Now repeat as many times as it takes to remove all the fakes. It’s going to take forever, but it will help your reach in the end.

The post How Do I Remove the Fake Facebook Likes from My Page? appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

Edgerank: A Guide to the Facebook Algorithm