Are Your Facebook Page Updates Boring Your Fans?

Are Your Facebook Page Updates Boring Your Fans?

Have any of these situations happened to you?

• You post day after day, but your engagement is always low, with maybe a single like for every three posts.


• You post what you think is a pretty interesting story, only to get two likes from your 20,000 followers.


• You post an incredibly interesting story, but every comment you get just talks about how boring it is.


• You post story after story, but nothing happens. You hear a sound. You turn up your speakers, and you hear crickets chirping.

If so, you might be suffering from Facebook Post Boredom Syndrome.

Signs of Bored Facebook Followers

There are a number of ways you can tell that your followers aren’t interested in what you have to say. Unfortunately, there’s only one way to tell whether they’re bored or just not real fans. Fake fans are a real problem, and the only way to tell the difference between a disengaged real fan and a fake fan is to be less boring, so the real fans start to engage more.

Sign 1: No one is responding. Whenever you post an update, you should expect a certain amount of engagement on each post. If you have zero engagement – no likes, no shares, no comments, no clicks – either no one saw the post, or no one cares about the content. You might be posting at the wrong time of day, or you might have attracted the wrong kind of people. Checking your content, however, is the easiest first step to take.

Sign 2: No one is sharing your content. This is arguably worse than no one commenting. People can share without comment, after all. A share is also incredibly valuable. It’s like a personal recommendation from one person to each of their friends, saying hey, look at this interesting content.

Shares benefit you in a number of ways, so you always want to get more of them. If no one is sharing your content, it’s a sign that they don’t find your content interesting enough to share.

Sign 3: You aren’t growing. When your content is interesting, it gets spread around and made more visible. When users who don’t follow you see that interesting content, they might follow your page in order to see more of it. If your content isn’t interesting enough to hook them, you won’t get any new followers from it.

Sign 4: Minimal reach. Part of the algorithm that determines who sees your posts on Facebook relies on how much they have seen and interacted with your posts in the past. If they don’t find your content interesting, Facebook will notice, and will show them less of it. If this happens on a broad scale, due to boring posts, your reach in general will drop.

Becoming Less Boring

The key to being less boring on Facebook is to be more interesting. If that sounds obvious, you aren’t giving it as much thought as you should be. Just think about it from the user’s perspective. What do you find interesting when you’re browsing Facebook? What about when it comes from a business?

Tip 1: Be less formal. Chances are you can stand to be less formal in your discussions online. You don’t need to drop down to using chatspeak just to seem hip, or anything. Just don’t talk like you’re writing a corporate press release. Be casual! Be fun! Refer to customers as people, rather than customers or clients. You’re a human, let it show.

Tip 2: Have a little pride in your work. Proofread your posts before you share them and make sure your word choices are all correct. Nothing kills trust in a post like a their/they’re/there error. Likewise, always make sure any link you share is definitely the link you meant to share, any picture you upload is the version you wanted to upload, etc.

Tip 3: Keep it short. Social Media Examiner recommends keeping your Facebook posts under 100 characters. This is about the same length as your average tweet. This has the additional side-effect of making your longer posts stand out more, as if they’re more important.

Tip 4: Images. Probably over half of your Facebook posts should be images or image-related. Posting pictures, posting motivational images, posting memes if you know how to use them; they are all heads and shoulders above plain text posts in terms of engagement and interest. It’s exceptionally easy if you’re a brand selling a physical product you can pose in various locations, but with a little creativity, any brand can use imagery.

Tip 5: Reveal the backstage. Sometimes it can be very compelling to give a glimpse behind the scenes, at the people who work in your office and their daily lives. Of course, you want to spice this up a bit so it’s not actually depicting the gray, boring drudgery that daily live typically is. Birthdays are great for this.

Tip 6: Ask questions. Questions can range from the superfluous to the serious. Ask about the weather, ask about holiday plans, as for product feedback, whatever. The point is to ask something that compels the user to answer. Answers = comments, and comments = more visibility.

Tip 7: Exclusive information. Post a special deal on Facebook, but don’t share it on Twitter or on your website. Give Facebook fans a reason to feel special. You can’t fan-gate content, unfortunately, so you can’t decidedly limit the promotion to just Facebook fans. You can, however, make the announcement timely and limit how far it can spread before time runs out.

And, of course, you just have the choice of topic. What do you talk about? Well, what are your fans interested in? You can get a lot from peeking into your audience Insights, though it’s not strictly guaranteed to help. Find some common interests and speak to them. Get to know your users and figure out what they like. Cater to those likes. With practice, you’ll get it.

The post Are Your Facebook Page Updates Boring Your Fans? appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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How to Find How Many Fake Likes Your Facebook Page Has

How to Find How Many Fake Likes Your Facebook Page Has

Fake likes are a problem endemic to Facebook. They’re something that has plagued the site since the concept of likes mattering to businesses first came about, years and years ago. They’re still a problem today, though the people who sell or provide fake likes have gotten more sophisticated.

Why Fake Fans are Dangerous

Fake likes, fake followers, fake fans; they’re all dangerous. The reason is the way Facebook’s algorithm works. Facebook picks a selection of people who follow you to show each post to. Users who are engaged with your brand have a higher chance of seeing your posts. Users who barely interact with your brand have a lower chance. Users who never interact beyond their initial follow have an even lower chance.

If it were a simple filter, it would be easy. Fake fans would sift to the bottom, never see your posts, and remain worthless in every way. Unfortunately, Facebook’s algorithm isn’t a simple filter.

Instead, Facebook picks a random selection of fans, partially based on that algorithm. Fake fans can see your messages in their news feeds. The problem is, every fake fan that sees your message is a real fan who missed it. The more fake fans you have, the harder it becomes for real fans to see your posts.

Even this might not be that much of a problem, unless you had a massive number of fake fans that outweighed your real fans. The problem is, fake fans are also detrimental in other ways. All of your metrics go down, for example. Anything based on a percentage counts those fake fans, and those fake fans drag your legitimate metrics down.

Fake fans, of course, will never engage with your posts. They never click through to your website. Most of all, they never sign up for your mailing list or buy your products. They are essentially immune to your sales funnel, because they don’t exist. It’s like standing on a podium to give a lecture to a crowd and sell your product on stage, only to discover that two thirds of the seats are filled with mannequins.

When you’re caught buying fake fans, you can be punished. Facebook won’t likely block your page or actively punish you, but competitors can use the information against you. Your real fans, learning that you bought fake fans, feel devalued.

Facebook is also known to go through and delete the accounts of fake fans by the thousands. When these purges happen, your follower count can drastically decrease. This will be noticed and remarked upon, which leads to all of the detriment mentioned above.

Identifying Fake Fans

You can check in several ways to see if the fans following your page are fake. If your page has hundreds of thousands of followers, but your posts only get one or two comments, your messages aren’t reaching the people who care. This might be because of low engagement due to boring posts, or it might be due to fake fans seeing your posts more than real fans.

You can also check through and see what the person behind a given account looks like. Fake fans typically do not have profile pictures and have very little information posted to their page. Conversely, they “like” thousands or hundreds of thousands of pages. This combination of little information and a huge liked pages count indicates a fake account.

Some pages get a little more tricky. They might use images of non-people, making it harder to identify whether they’re real or not. Again, check how active the fan is. If they never post anything and they like a ton of pages, they’re probably fake.

Some fake fans are real people, typically from developing nations, who are paid to use Facebook all day. They are simply handed lists of pages and asked to like every page on the list. These accounts might be more legitimate, actually in use by the people who run them, so they can be harder to identify. Foreign names are one signifier, though that alone isn’t a sign of a fake fan. Don’t just blindly remove all foreign-sounding names from your follower list, that would be racism.

As always, check to see how many pages a given user likes. A few hundred liked pages is fine. It’s easy enough to rack that up, particularly when it’s left over from the days of like-gated content. A few thousand or tens of thousands of liked pages, now, that’s less likely to be legitimate.

Dealing With Fake Followers

We have written before about the troubles with removing fake likes from your Facebook page, and unfortunately, since that writing there haven’t been any updated methods for removing followers in bulk.

Manually, the best you can do is go through your followers in the social graph and identify any fake followers. Remove them and continue expanding the list until Facebook no longer allows it. Once you’ve gone through as many as possible, you may be able to refresh the page and go through a few more, equivalent to the number you removed. I’m honestly not sure if Facebook allows the list to update in that manner or not.

Another option, if you’re lucky, is to change age or alcohol restrictions and back. If the majority of your fake followers are from an alcohol-restricted country, setting an alcohol warning on your page will automatically remove them. Unfortunately, it will also remove legitimate followers if they are underage. There’s nothing you can do about that.

Otherwise, the only real option you have available is to immediately stop any fake follower purchases, block fake follower countries such as Bangladesh, Turkey and India, and remove what followers you can. Moving forward, the best option is just to outweigh the fake followers with real, interested followers.

Hopefully, Facebook will come through and audit their member list, removing many of the like-farming fake user accounts. These are easy enough to spot, as mentioned above; a huge number of likes alone is suspicious as it is. Sooner or later, the fake accounts following your page will be removed.

The post How to Find How Many Fake Likes Your Facebook Page Has appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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How to Build a Sales Funnel for Your Facebook Page

How to Build a Sales Funnel for Your Facebook Page

Think of Facebook like a giant pool of millions of people, all milling around, just waiting to fall into one of the many holes in the ground. Every hole leads to a funnel, which slips that person through and into a room where they are given the option to pay to go through a door and get a prize, or pay nothing to exit through another door and return to the surface. On the way down the funnel, they are shown messages about the nature of the prize.

This is more or less how establishing a sales funnel on Facebook works. You have a massive pool of people, and you try to hook them into your page. When they view your page, they are exposed to various messages, some of which are designed to push them down to the next phase of the sales funnel. Depending on how you have your funnel set up, it might be only one or two more steps before they convert.

A good sales funnel is steep, but not too steep. You don’t want to turn up the pressure and drive users away. On the other hand, you don’t want to go through too many steps before you start with the sales, otherwise you’re wasting time and money courting people who might not convert. Here’s a good example of a Facebook sales funnel, and how to implement it.

Step 1: Attract Fans

This being the first step assumes a few things. You have to have a Facebook page, and you should probably have a website. You have something to sell, and a means to sell it. With everything in place, the first part of the funnel is turning that massive pool of Facebook users in to a smaller pool of relevant Facebook fans.

The keyword here is relevant. There are a lot of ways to get a lot of Facebook fans, but most of them won’t be worth anything. Here are a few bad examples:

• You go to a site like Fiverr and buy 10,000 Facebook fans. Even if the seller claims they’re highly targeted, if they’re doing anything other than running ads on legitimate sites, they’re very likely giving you fake fans.


• You buy an overpriced piece of software that puts your Facebook account in front of clickfarm workers in Bangladesh, who like your page, then go on to like a few thousand others.


• You run a contest to give away a $500 gift card to Walmart. You get an absolutely astonishing number of new fans, all of whom could care less what your business is or what you sell. They only want the Walmart Fun Bucks.

In all of these cases, you’re hurting your funnel. See, the only people who filter down to the next step of your funnel are the people who are interested in your brand and your product. Any of the above ways of attracting fans just attracts people who don’t meet those criteria. Worse, they dilute your messages meant for interested fans. Every disinterested fan who sees your post is a lost opportunity.

There are many ways to attract relevant fans, but the easiest is to run some cheap Facebook PPC ads targeting people who like things similar to your brand and product. Spend as little as possible, as long as you’re getting quality fans out of it.

Step 2: Give Away Value

Your Facebook page should be a hub for interested users. On that hub, you definitely cannot sell your product. See, Facebook has numerous rules in place against using organic posts to try to sell your products. It’s okay to try to sell through Facebook ads, but those aren’t relevant to this particular sales funnel; they’re part of another funnel entirely.

Instead of trying to sell on your Facebook page, provide value. This value should typically be on your website, through your blog or some other landing page. Send users from Facebook to your website, and they’re able to explore and find what interests them. You can use this information to further fuel more value.

Step 3: “Sell” Value

The purpose of step 2 is to get users to recognize that you have value, by giving them a taste of that value. The purpose of this step is to provide more value, but charge an admission fee.

Now, don’t misunderstand; this isn’t the part where you sell your product. You’re not selling anything, here. You can put calls to action in your valuable information, but again, that’s a secondary sales funnel. The primary purpose of this funnel is to gather email addresses.

Why email addresses? It’s fairly easy to get people to give you their email address in exchange for something of value. It might be access to premium content, it might be more content delivered to their inbox, it might be a free ebook they’ve been told is valuable. Email addresses, then, are used in the final step of the funnel.

Don’t forget to use those email addresses in a legitimate way as well. For every direct, special offer sales message you send, you should be sending several regular newsletters. If everything is a special offer, nothing is special. Don’t fall into that trap.

Step 4: Sell, Sell, Sell

Your mailing list becomes your most direct source of contacting your fans to deliver your sales message. It’s going to be a highly personal experience, and very little advice I give will be relevant to your exact situation. Different audiences – particularly the interested segment you’ve attracted – have different needs and desires. You need to consider a number of factors.

How often are your followers seeing ads targeted at them? How often are you sending out advertorial messages? How much can you segment your mailing list to test different messages? You have a lot of options.

The goal is to use your email direct line as a way to sell your product to the most interested people out of the pool of interested people you’ve culled from Facebook at large. Craft the right message and your funnel is complete.

The post How to Build a Sales Funnel for Your Facebook Page appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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The Ultimate Guide to Improving CTR on Facebook Ads

The Ultimate Guide to Improving CTR on Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are some of the most potent PPC ads in the world, and it’s all because of the unique combination of factors that led to Facebook’s success. Their massive platform, the huge amounts of personal data people share from day to day, and the ability to use all of that for marketing combines to create the best platform available.

If you know how to use it.

A simple tip to keep in mind is that any time you see someone complaining that Facebook ads had a low conversion rate, or they have excessive costs, or they just don’t work, chances are that person or business had no idea what they were doing and never tried to learn.

The key to success with Facebook ads is two-fold. You need to take the time to learn the platform, the options available to you and the ins and outs of using their PPC system. You also need to test and iterate different improvements until you hit upon one that works.

When you find something that works, abuse it for all its worth. Things change, ads go stale, and what works today might not work tomorrow. Use it until it stop working and find something new to use when you tap the first source out.

What can you learn about the Facebook ads system, and what improvements can you test and iterate to find these pockets of value?

Ad Objective

When you create an ad, you use one of Facebook’s set of objectives. These range from the traditional website clicks to specially tracked website conversions, page post engagement, video views or app installs. Typically, you will be using either page likes, page post engagement, website clicks or website conversions. The other objectives have their place, but don’t use them when they aren’t explicitly what you’re going for.

Remember that in general, the harder an objective is to meet, the more expensive it will be. A page post comment is harder and thus more expensive than a page like. A website conversion is harder and more expensive than a website click. Use the right objective.

Optimize Images

Facebook ads have an image and a text component, and Facebook is strict about not allowing much text in the image portion. This is fine, because a text image is not as compelling or as useful as a straight image.

When in doubt, use action photos, photos of people smiling, or photos of your product. Test variations on every image you use. Sometimes the hair color of the model matters, or the presence of a tinted border, or the orientation of the image. Sometimes the angle of the picture is important.

Try to tailor your picture to the subject at hand and to your audience. Are you selling primarily to new mothers? Pictures of children in various states – clean or dirty, happy or sad, etc – can be very compelling.

You can also go off the wall and use strange, odd or out of place images. You have to be careful, though. You still need some kind of internal logic or consistency to your users don’t click your ad and end up confused.

Optimize Text

There are several places text shows up in your ads. You have your title, you have your URL and you have your copy. You also have the text you can cram into your image, but it’s typically better to leave the image to be an image.

Your title is blue and stands out from the rest of the ad column as something worthy of attention. Make sure it’s something compelling and attention-grabbing. A value proposition is typically a good idea.

Your URL isn’t typically customizable. Facebook just takes the main domain name, not the sub-folders.

Your copy is the biggest source of possible improvements. Experiment with different forms of capitalization, different uses of names, different symbols, and different meanings. Sometimes all it takes is a bit more capitalization to draw in more users. Sometimes an entirely different few words is more beneficial. Play around with it until you strike gold.

Optimize Targeting

Targeting is where the power of Facebook comes in. You can target through a huge number of factors.

• Demographic targeting is the more obvious and is shared amongst most PPC platforms. You can target people based on their age, their location, their gender, their relationship status, their income level, their workplace, their ethnicity, and much more. Typically, demographic targeting is most useful for businesses with certain fixed audiences. A store like Babies ‘R’ Us wouldn’t really want to blindly target teenagers, for example, but new mothers or expecting mothers are good choices.


• Geographic targeting. Worth noting that, while it falls under the general heading of demographic targeting, you have quite of bit of variance with geographic targeting. You can be as broad as excluding entire countries, or as narrow as limiting yourself to just a single city.


• Interest targeting. This is where the most power comes from Facebook ads. Experiment with different interests, typically those interests that best fit with your business.

Lookalike targeting is also incredibly potent. As you build an audience following your Facebook page, Facebook gathers data about those users. You can then create a lookalike audience. Facebook essentially scans their entire database of users for anyone who shares the same interests as the people who follow your page, excluding the people who already follow your page. These people, it stands to reason, are similar to your audience and would be interested in the same things. Use this audience type to get new followers.

Test, Iterate, Test

The key to success with Facebook ads is to test variations. Constantly. If you don’t have at least one test running with two or more variations at all times, you’re probably throwing away money. Sure, when you strike gold, it’s a good idea to go all-in on that ad. That doesn’t mean you should stop running other tested ads, though. You always have room for improvement and you can always take a different angle and find more gold in other areas.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Improving CTR on Facebook Ads appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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Improve Your Ad Strategy with Facebook Relevance Score

Improve Your Ad Strategy with Facebook Relevance Score

Facebook has long used a sophisticated algorithm to determine the reach of posts in its main feed. Delivering the right content to the right people at the right time is crucial.

But what is the best way to do this?

With content from friends, Pages, and advertisers flooding News Feeds, the social network relies on what it calls “relevance” as one of many factors to determine not only what posts members engage with but also what ads they see.

Now, Facebook is specifically honing in on the efficacy of News Feed ads for businesses. With Facebook relevance score, advertisers get a more transparent view on the back end of how their ads are performing, allowing them to make tweaks to campaigns and extend their company’s ROI. It’s a win for everyone: the more relevant the ad, the higher the engagement.

“Taking relevance into account helps ensure that people see ads that matter to them, leading to a better experience for people and businesses alike,” Facebook wrote on its blog.

To that end, here’s everything you need to know about Facebook’s advertising relevance score — and how to leverage it across your broader marketing strategy.

Getting Started with Relevance Scores for Ads on Facebook

The Facebook relevance score for ads is available globally and can be viewed in any of the social network’s ads reporting tools or through its ads API. Of course, to see the relevance score of your ads, you must already be a Facebook advertiser. If you need help getting started with Facebook advertising, check out this guide.

With your ads up and running, you can begin tracking your relevance score — a particularly good data point to be aware of. Why? Because shifts in your score will help you identify trends and think more strategically. It may even save you money.

Where to Find Your Facebook Ads Relevance Score

1. Go to your Ads Manager.


2. Click Reports on the left menu.


3. Select Customize Columns.


4. Check Relevance Score. For more information, check Positive Feedback and Negative Feedback.


5. Click Apply.


6. On your Reports page, click Level and select Ad.

The relevance score column will display a number between 1 and 10, while positive and negative feedback will be shown as a rating of low, medium, or high.

Don’t see a relevance score? That’s because your ad needs at least 500 impressions before the data will appear.

 

 

How Facebook Relevance Score is Calculated

Your relevance score is a metric in ads reporting that provides an estimate of how relevant an ad is to its target audience. A score of 10 is considered the most relevant; a score of 1 is the least. When your ad’s score is high, it’s more likely to be shown to your audience.

Facebook calculates this score based on the positive and negative feedback it expects your ad to receive from its intended audience.

The more positive interactions expected, the higher your ad’s relevance score will be. If Facebook expects more people to hide or report your ad, your relevance score will be lower. A low initial score doesn’t mean you’re locked in forever; the score will update as people interact with and provide feedback on the ad.

Positive Feedback That May Yield a Higher Facebook Relevance Score

• App installs


• App engagement


• Clicks


• Conversions


• Event responses


• Likes


• Offer claims


• Shares


• Video views

Keep in mind that ads with guaranteed delivery, such as those bought through reach and frequency, aren’t impacted by relevance score. According to Facebook, the score has a smaller impact on cost and delivery in brand awareness campaigns since those ads are optimized for reaching people rather than driving a specific action.

Why Facebook Relevance Matters

Used strategically, your relevance score can help you in a few key ways: it lowers the cost to reach an audience; it allows you to test ad creative options before running a full campaign; and it provides insights to optimize campaigns already in progress. Here’s what all of that means.

1. Lower Cost of Reaching People

Simply put, the higher a Facebook ad’s relevance score, the less it will cost to be delivered. This is because Facebook’s ad delivery system is designed to show the right content to the right people, and a high relevancy score is viewed as a positive signal.

Relevance, however, isn’t the only factor considered by the delivery system. Bid also plays a role. For example, if two ads are aimed at the same audience, there’s no guarantee that the ad with an excellent relevance score and low bid will beat the ad with a good relevance score and high bid.

The key takeaway here is that, overall, having a strong relevance score will help you see more efficient delivery through Facebook’s system.

2. Test Ad Creative Options Before a Campaign

This is something we always recommend doing to optimize your ads, and relevance scores add another layer of success measurement. You can test different combinations of images and copy with different audiences, and learn which combinations offer the highest relevance scores.

3. Optimize Existing Campaigns

Monitor your ads’ relevance scores while campaigns are running to identify fluctuations. Watch for patterns in your existing ads that might lend insights into what works: which of your ads have the highest score and what do they have in common? If a score starts to dip, you may need to refine the creative or targeting.

Facebook warns that relevance score shouldn’t be the primary indicator of an ad’s performance. The most important factor for success on Facebook is bidding based on the business goal you hope to meet with an ad.

Let’s say that you want to run a campaign that drives online sales. The desired outcome is more important than your relevance score. If you have an average score but a solid bid, and your ad is meeting your goals, you probably don’t need to change anything.

Simply put, having a good relevance score isn’t the be-all and end-all of your performance. If anything, consider tweaking the ad to see how you can get lower cost of delivery by improving the score, or monitor your score, along with the sales you’re driving, to learn when it’s time to update your campaign.

How to Improve Your Relevance Score for Facebook Ads

Want to maximize your impact? Here’s what to do to get that score up.

1. Know Your Target Audience

To be relevant, you need to develop a clearly defined audience segmentation strategy. That means getting specific. Trying to reach men and women, ages 18-25, in the U.S. is too broad. Narrow your audience with a few considerations in mind:

• City


• State/province


• Age


• Interests


• Behaviors

Custom Audiences can help.

Behold: targeting done well. It’s clear that Zipcar is speaking to a younger audience that enjoys the perks of city living (though that often comes at the expense of owning a car).

2. Develop Compelling Creative

Think about how your ad’s message and execution will resonate with your audience. Images and multimedia are more noticeable than text, so focus on improving that first. Also, show the benefit of your product, not just the product itself.

For example, instead of using a screenshot of your food delivery app, show off the meals that customers can order using it.

Well played, GrubHub.

 3. Keep It Simple

Your message should match the audience you’re targeting. Need to reach two different groups? Don’t cram that all into one space. Create two separate ads with customized messaging that gets right to the point.

Take the Next Step with Facebook Relevance Insights

Facebook’s relevance score may have cross-channel implications. It’s up to you to determine, but if you’re advertising on other social networks (or even offline) and you’re trying to reach the same target group, take insights gleamed from your tests and consider applying them to those campaigns.

The Facebook relevance score may give you insights, for instance, into messaging that is twice as relevant to a specific audience. Use that number to inform your broader segmentation strategy across all of your advertising channels. Your team’s decisions moving forward will be more data-driven rather than opinion-based, and your brand will be more relevant than ever.

The post Improve Your Ad Strategy with Facebook Relevance Score appeared first on Sprout Social.

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Do Facebook Contests Really Grow Your Page?

Do Facebook Contests Really Grow Your Page?

One of the primary benefits of running a Facebook contest, in the past, was the ability to add a like gate to the entry. In other words, users would need to like your page in order to gain access to the contest. It was an instant method of growth; offer a product to people and get a lot of new followers.

This all changed at the end of last year, when Facebook decided to passively ban like gates. I say passively, because Facebook doesn’t go out and hunt down pages using like gates to block them. Rather, they just removed the functionality from their API. Tab app developers are no longer able to use that functionality, and any apps trying to use it will cease to function.

Without that instant source of followers, are Facebook contests still valuable? The answer, in my view, is yes. Just look at what contests can do for you.

The Benefits of Facebook Contests

While the practice of like-gating content is dead, you still earn likes from running a contest. Some people will like your page because they want to, they just hadn’t thought to before your contest. Some people will only like your page if they win. You may not get as many likes as you would have with gated content, but then, many of the likes you get from a gate end up being disinterested users only after the prize.

Contests also boost your traffic, through a combination of a limited time and the scarcity of a prize. Even if the prize isn’t all that great in the grand scheme of things, it can attract a lot of attention from people who see it as a special value. Besides; winning something is better than paying for it.

Certain types of content can be highly beneficial in other ways as well. For example, a contest that encourages users to submit content becomes a pool of resources. User content can be taken and used in other ways later. You can publish photos or share videos produced by fans, which further encourages fans to submit more content.

Other contests can provide market insights you don’t normally get. In this case, rather than gating your prize behind a Facebook like, you gate it behind a short survey. It can be as simple as a product comparison and a vote, or as complex as a lengthy survey. You just need to make sure the prize is adequate incentive to ask for what you’re asking.

Finally, of course, if you can’t get Facebook likes directly, you can at least harvest email addresses for your mailing list. As long as it’s clear that users are signing up for messages when they enter, everything is perfectly legitimate.

Cautions for Contest Administration

Before you begin a contest on Facebook, you do have to be aware of the risks. There are numerous mistakes you might make, each of which can hurt the viability of your contest. Some can even violate Facebook’s rules and earn your page a suspension or removal.

• You can’t require a like on either a page or a post in order to enter a contest.


• You can’t run a contest on your wall; it needs to be within a tab app.


• You need to explain how you’re picking a winner, so it’s assured you’re not picking someone within the company so you don’t “lose” the money in the product.


• You must contact the winner privately, not through a public Facebook post.

You also need to be aware of the prize vs the requirements of entry. Don’t give away something incredibly valuable if all you get out of it is an email. On the other hand, don’t try to ask a 100-question survey and give away a $5 gift card.

Always make sure your prize is relevant to your business. You don’t want to give away a free tablet, unless you’re a business selling tablets. Why not? All the people you get signing up for your mailing list are people who want tablets, not people who might buy something from your business.

Types of Contests to Run

There are a wide range of potential contests you can run to pull in users. Which one you choose depends on your objectives, your business and your prize. Giving out local sports tickets doesn’t work when you’re an online brand, for example.

• Sign up to win! These contests typically involve an email opt-in as the primary means of entry. Some also allow additional entries by liking a page, tweeting a hashtag, referring friends and sharing posts.


• Fill in the ___. Ask a simple question. “If I win Product X, I will use it to ___” is a simple example. You can feature the best answers on your wall and pick a winner at the end of the contest period.


• Long-form essay. Ask your readers to tell you a story about something. Picking the best story based on pre-published criteria allows you to award a winner based on merit.


• User feedback. Run a special survey with a few questions about your product. Pick a winner out of the people who respond. Make sure you’re giving something away that isn’t required to enter! No one would want to win something they already have when they’re answering a survey about it in the first place.


• User feedback part two. Market research, specifically “what should we do next?” comments can go a long way. Use compelling ideas as the basis for product refinements, added features, or new products entirely.


• Awareness quizzes. Ask your readers to provide you with information based on a recent marketing campaign. This will allow you to gauge how effective that campaign has been. Make sure the entries aren’t public! Otherwise everyone will bandwagon on the correct answer and your research is diluted.


• Media contests. Ask users to submit short videos or Vines, Instagram pictures or Facebook photos. Award the best photos based on merit. You can turn around and use these images in promotion later, so long as the terms of your contest explicitly state that submitting the image gives you permission to use it.

The post Do Facebook Contests Really Grow Your Page? appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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Using Content Curation on Facebook Pages

Using Content Curation on Facebook Pages

Over the course of the past few years, a shift has occurred in the content we post and share on Facebook. As businesses, it began with us sharing as much of our own content as possible. It was rare that we shared posts by other businesses or brands; after all, that’s our audience, our viewership, why should we dedicate it to others?

These days, sharing the posts made by other people is the key to success. No one wants to follow your page just to see posts you make on your own site. If all they want to see is your site content, they can just follow your site.

Your Facebook page, today, should be a hub for industry content, not just your own content. However, there’s an art and a science to this form of content curation, or “stitched content”. You can’t just share anything that comes across your path. You need to pay attention to what you share, who posted it originally, how much it’s been circulated and how it fits with your audience.

Okay, so it’s not strictly true that a page with no curation is doomed to fail. Some popular pages only share their own content. Just take a look at PCMag’s page for an example. Half a million followers isn’t bad. Then again, take a look at a page that does curate; George Takei. A man who primarily shares third party content has racked up 8.3 million followers.

Content Curation Guidelines

So you want to get into content curation, but you don’t know where to start? Before you begin, you should learn the ground rules.

1. Use a content curation suite. There are a whole bunch of tools available to use, depending on your CMS, how much you’re integrating your curation with your blog, and what tools you may need. Pick one and give it a shot; you can always change if it doesn’t work out.

A content curation suite allows you a bunch of extra flexibility in curating content. You can schedule posts, you can track their performance, and you can generally turn curation into a well-tuned machine designed to benefit your page.

2. Schedule curated posts in a mix with your own posts. How many curated posts should appear between your posts? That’s a question for the ages. In the extreme examples above, George Takei curates dozens or hundreds of posts in between each of his own personal posts. PCMag curates nothing. Your ideal is likely somewhere in between.

Here’s one example; if you post 14 times each week – twice per day – ration out your posts. Figure you post 1 highly tuned advertising message, 4 of your own posts, and 9 curated posts in a week. That gives you plenty of exposure on your own page, but doesn’t drown your readers in branded content.

3. Avoid curating promotional content from other brands. This one is simple; you want to show informational content rather than advertorial content. You’re not a billboard or a spokesman for those other brands, right? Unless you are. In which case, well, go ahead and be as promotional as you want.

4. When curating, copy as little of the original content as possible. This is part of the ethics of sharing content. You don’t want to copy so much of the content that you trigger copied or scraped content penalties, for example. This is less of a problem on Facebook than it is on your website. Facebook allows you to share posts and add your commentary, while still listing the original source. Speaking of…

5. Always identify the source of the curated content. Curation is all about community and sharing. If it looks like the post is coming from your site, you lose out on the association with other brands. You also look like you’re potentially stealing content. Neither is a good thing. Facebook makes it easy to trace a post back to its source, so make sure to do the legwork before you share.

6. Provide added value to the content you curate. Clicking share on a post and forgetting about it isn’t good curation. You need to add a comment to it. On Facebook, all you really need is a sentence or two explaining the value of the piece and hooking your readers into viewing it.

7. Curate from a wide range of sources, lest you look like a paid affiliate. If you’re always curating from the same 2-3 sources, you look like a partner for those sites. Curate from around the web; hundreds or thousands of authoritative sources exist in your industry, if you know where to find them.

8. Never promote curated content. This one is simple. Why would you pay to promote a piece of content that does you no good in terms of conversions?

So, with those ground rules out of the way, it’s time to move on to the actual nitty gritty of content curation; content discovery and sharing.

Curation Details

The first thing you’re going to want to do is set up a feed of possible content to curate. Feedly is a great tool for this, though you can use anything that works for you. The idea is to aggregate the publications of every authoritative source you like, all in one place.

As you find content you might want to curate in this feed, set it aside. Don’t immediately schedule it; you don’t want to fill your feed with content you scheduled, only to need to go back and remove posts later to fit in better posts. Consider this first stage the gathering of raw materials.

Once you have a pool of posts to curate, examine each one in more detail. Remove those that are too promotional for your tastes. Remove the ones that don’t fit with your brand, on a second review. Remove any others that turn out to be secondary sources, or that don’t have as much depth to them as you would prefer.

Once you have your more focused feed, begin to schedule these posts. Make sure to leave room in your content schedule for your own posts. As you add posts to your scheduled feed, make sure you’re adding value to them. Add a question or a comment to engage readers and offer your brand perspective on the content. Done properly, people will engage with your post after reading the content.

The post Using Content Curation on Facebook Pages appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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Is It Still Possible to Use Like-gating on Facebook?

Is It Still Possible to Use Like-gating on Facebook?

For a long time, the go-to method for growing a page was to run a contest with a like gate. A like gate was a simple wall between the user and the entry to your contest. If they wanted to enter your contest – or read your post, or view your video, or whatever else you hid behind the wall – they would need to like your page.

Facebook determined that like gates were artificial growth and that they didn’t benefit the users or the page much at all. A like gate would increase your followers, yes, but most of those followers would subsequently not care about your page. If they didn’t win, they wouldn’t come back, and they generally wouldn’t engage with your brand in any way.

Therefore, last August, Facebook decided to block like gates from their platform. The bit of their API that allowed third party app developers to create like gates was removed. App sellers like Shortstack were forced to adjust. The final removal of the like gate was performed on November 5, 2014.

So, to answer the basic question; no, you cannot still use like gating on Facebook. The functionality itself has been removed, and if you’re found trying to replicate it through a third party app, that app is liable to be removed as well.

Why Like Gates Sucked

I’ll just come out and say it; like gates kind of sucked. Sure, they were effective, but they had some major issues that you weren’t able to address. Foremost among those issues is the problem of audience focus.

See, when you gate content or contests behind likes, you get a lot of people liking your page who otherwise wouldn’t.

From a user’s perspective, here’s a statistical tidbit; without Facebook’s algorithm, the average user would see around 1,500 posts per day. Facebook cuts that down to closer to 300. This is a good thing; after all, if you spend 5 seconds looking at a post on average, seeing 1,500 posts would eat up two full hours per day.

Facebook’s algorithm uses a number of signals to determine which posts to show. One of those signals, for posts from pages, is whether or not you’ve liked that page. If you’re liking it because of a contest or a like gate, that signal becomes much less valuable. Facebook can no longer say “they like this page, therefore they want to see more from this page.”

From a business perspective, this means your likes are devalued. It also means your audience is full of people who don’t necessarily care about what you have to say. They liked your page for a contest, and they never removed their like because why would they care? They don’t see your posts anyways.

Then you have the analytical perspective. When you’re looking into your Facebook Insights, you’re seeing the aggregated data of your followers. If you’ve diluted your followers with a like gate, you have a bunch of data that’s skewing your results. If it were weighted, it would be useful to know, but it’s not. You just have to deal with diluted, skewed results.

The simplest example is the iPad giveaway example. You like gat a tablet giveaway and a bunch of people who don’t care about your brand will come in to like your page for a shot at the tech. Later, you want to run an ad targeted at a lookalike audience similar to your own, and it turns out to be largely ineffective. Why? Your targeting includes the interests of deal-seekers and tablet-wanters, not business-followers.

Effects of the Like Gate Ban

Like gates are just one of several methods of page growth and contest running that have been restricted or banned in recent years. Another is the non-app contest. Technically, you can still post a photo explaining a contest and requiring a like to enter. It’s against Facebook’s rules, but it’s difficult to enforce. Facebook can take down the contest if they notice it, of course.

You can also ask for likes as a supplement to whatever else you’re doing. A contest that requires an email opt-in works fine, and you can add “please like and share this contest!” to the end of the description with no issues.

The most widespread effect of the like gate ban, however, is the shift to other action gates. Facebook just removed the ability to require a like in exchange for something. Other actions can still be required.

Action Gating Ins and Outs

Functionally, an action gate is identical to a like gate. It works in exactly the same way, only instead of requiring a page like, it requires some other action. Otherwise, your campaigns work the same way. Ideally, the action you require is even more valuable to you than an unrelated like.

What can you use as an action for an action gate?

• Requiring an email opt-in to either your normal mailing list or a high-pressure introductory mailing list.


• Require a visit to a particular landing page, where you offer a valuable free item or offer.


• Reward current fans with special offers. A like gate is primarily beneficial in getting new fans; it does nothing for existing fans.


• Require a form submission, which can get any information you choose to ask for. This might include a basic name and email, or it might require a photo upload or a survey completion.


• Require submission of location data, so you get an idea of the geographic locations of your best users or the general location distribution of your users.

By using a gate like this, you’re gathering data to supplement what you already know about your users. You’re also getting data you can’t get otherwise, and you’re building an email list. Specialized email lists like this can allow you to build and nurture leads you can’t get through organic SEO or through social media marketing any other way.

The like gate ban requires some adjustments, but it’s an overall good change. You just need to get used to it and start using more beneficial actions as gates. While you’re at it, take the time to clean up your existing fans; your reach and engagement will benefit for it.

The post Is It Still Possible to Use Like-gating on Facebook? appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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11 Types of Images Proven to Engage Your Facebook Fans

11 Types of Images Proven to Engage Your Facebook Fans

Video is all the rage on Facebook, but it still can’t surpass images in terms of sheer market share and engagement. According to Social Bakers, images still receive the lion’s share of engagement, particularly amongst the largest pages with over a million fans. Video is, of course, swiftly catching up.

The power of images, though, is never going to go away. Even if video expands and becomes more engaging, it’s still more costly and more time consuming to produce. A talented graphic designer can create a great image in no time flat, while even the shortest video takes a while to script and produce. Unless you’re just going for the Vine, but that’s not designed for Facebook.

What kinds of images work best on Facebook? It’s hard to say. There are so many types of images, and so much variance within each type, that it’s difficult to scientifically study. That said, you can’t go wrong with these images, generally. Always be mindful of your brand, however, and try to pick image styles that fit with the atmosphere you’re trying to create.

1. Quotes on Images

President Obama has been very good at using this type of image on Facebook – or at least, whoever has creative control over his social media page has been. A compelling image with a quote laid over it makes for a great source of comments and other engagement. You also see this style of image frequently on pages making motivational or inspirational pictures, overlaying positive quotes on cheerful landscapes or collages.

2. Expansive Vistas

You see this style fairly often on brands that have a global reach; they post pictures of people in action, or extreme landscapes. The idea here is to appeal to the side of people that wants adventure. There’s always something your users have “always wanted to try,” whether it’s skydiving or surfing or just visiting a unique location. Posting pictures of your product in those locations can be a great way to draw engagement. Now, I’m not saying you should make a CD of your software go skydiving, but hey, wouldn’t that be a neat viral campaign?

3. Adorable Animals

I don’t think I need to tell you how effective pictures of adorable animals can be. After all, the Internet is almost literally supported by an underground economy of black market cat pictures, puppy videos and other adorable animal currencies.

Okay, so that’s not literally true, but the fact remains that everyone loves an adorable animal. Young animals are particularly cute, and thus do very well. If you have more exotic followers, you can post pictures of photogenic lizards and birds as well.

4. Pop Culture References

Oreo’s Facebook page is incredibly good at the pop culture and current events posting. Just scroll through their photos page and you’ll see a bunch of product shots, but they’re all innovatively taking advantage of current events. There are football-themed pictures for the recent Superbowl, there are holiday themed images, there are creative uses of Oreos in recipes, and the list goes on.

5. Infographics

Infographics are a compelling visual way of sharing data. A well-designed infographic can go viral very quickly, across all different social media outlets and blogs. The power of an infographic comes from the depth of information and analysis present, and the interesting visuals that accompany it. Rarely do you see an infographic with nothing more than pie charts and stats; you see cartoon references and board game layouts, graphics that tell a narrative with their information.

6. Seasonal Imagery

Holidays are ripe for the picking when it comes to Facebook imagery. Right now, we’re just getting over Valentine’s day, so you have both the romantic and the singles-apologist imagery circulating. President’s day has some circulation among certain brands. Coming soon, you have Chinese New Year, you have St. Patrick’s day, you have the equinox; all valid holidays to use in imagery.

7. Political Issues

Political issues and current events can be very potent sources of engagement, but you have to be very careful using them in your marketing. The power of the political image comes from it being divisive, unless it’s the kind of social issue that has an unquestioned backing, which is rare. However, if you try to abuse a divisive issue and pick the wrong side compared to your audience, you’ll see more backlash than you will benefit.

8. Product Shots

Go back to Oreo and you see the vast majority of their images are shots including their product used in innovative ways. Starbucks does this as well. Food brands have it easy; their products are photogenic, and they can be adapted to a wide range of situations and scenarios. A software company has it harder, unfortunately, but that’s just the nature of the game.

9. Action Shots

Skullcandy is a good brand to look at for this one. They’re a manufacturer of high performance headphones, but they appeal primarily to a certain type of active culture of young people. If you look at their photos, many of them are sports action shots, with sports like surfing and snowboarding featured heavily. This resonates with their target audience, and thus works for their goals.

10. High Quality Art

Sometimes, your readers just want a little feast for the eyes. High quality art might not be ideal for presenting your message, but it’s great for feeding the imagination. In particular, brands that represent artists or museums can benefit from these kinds of images.

11. Sheer Insanity

Never underestimate the power of going completely off the wall. Old Spice has a great social media presence, but if you were to describe the pictures they share without context, you’d be liable to be thrown in a mental institution. The same goes for Denny’s, though their insanity is more limited to Tumblr than to Facebook. If your brand can go bonkers and own it, it can be an amazing move. Just don’t try it and then back off; it’s an all-or-nothing affair.

The post 11 Types of Images Proven to Engage Your Facebook Fans appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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How to Diagnose a Drop in Facebook Reach

How to Diagnose a Drop in Facebook Reach

Can it really be called a scandal if it’s been the norm for years? The “scandal” of Facebook dropping brand organic reach has been going on for at least three years, if not much longer.

If you’re a brand running a commercial page, declining reach is bad news. It means your messages are reaching fewer people… or does it? That’s one factor discussed below. In any case, it means a lower number in your analytics, and lower numbers are scary. What caused it, and what can you do to fix it?

An Influx of New Users

Reach, specifically organic reach, is not a fixed number. It is a number derived from a calculation. Rather, in a sense, it is both. When you see a reach number, like 1,114, that’s the number of users who saw your post organically. When you see a reach percentage, like 6.48%, it’s a calculation of how many people saw your post out of how many people are part of your audience. If you have an audience of 10,000, and 1,000 people saw your post, you have a 10% reach, a reach of 1,000.

What happens, then, if you were to see an influx of new users? Maybe you ran a newsletter informing your past customers of the presence of your Facebook page. Astonishingly, 5,000 new users followed your page. If those users are all valuable users, your reach percentage will stay the same, or even increase. At 10% reach, your new 15,000 user audience would mean your post reaches 1,500 people. A fixed percentage, a new higher raw number.

On the other hand, what happens if you buy a bunch of awful fans from a clickfarm in Bangladesh? You spend $20 and get 10,000 new followers, which boosts your total audience to 20,000. However, because those users don’t actually care about their news feeds, and they don’t interact with your brand in any way, so Facebook doesn’t show your posts to them. Your reach stays fixed at 1,000 users. However, because that’s now 1,000 out of 20,000, your reach percentage has dropped to 5%. That’s quite the sharp decline!

If you find your reach percentage dropped, check to see if you received a sudden influx of new users, as a result of some campaign or some purchase you made. Occasionally, these can be valuable users who haven’t had a change to engage enough to see your posts. Other times, they’re bad users, and you’ll want to remove as many as possible.

A Facebook Algorithm Change

Facebook changes their algorithm in much the same way Google does; abruptly, sometimes without warning, and inexorably. Sometimes, you can check the Facebook business news to see warning or announcements of those changes. Sometimes, they happen behind the scenes and are barely acknowledged.

If your reach declined suddenly, but nothing has changed in your post types, frequency or scheduling, you might consider checking to see if Facebook rolled out a new update. It’s possible that you were simply left in the cold by a change in guidelines.

A Shift in Posting Style

Facebook is currently on a crusade against “organic advertising.” What I mean by this is advertising that makes use of organic channels rather than paid channels. This is happening for a number of reasons.

First, regular Facebook users don’t like to see advertising in their feed. While they accept sponsored posts as a fact of life and tolerate them, they don’t like to be shown posts from brands that advertise without being sponsored ads. Facebook, ever mindful of curating the best – by their measure – news feed experience, have been cracking down on overly promotional organic posts.

Second, Facebook is in it to make money. The less attractive organic advertising is, the more likely businesses are going to turn to paid options. If a few businesses drop out along the way, well, that’s just fine. Facebook makes more money in the long run.

Facebook has to strike a careful balance here. If they push too hard and look too much like a money-grubbing scrooge of a company, businesses will abandon the platform in droves. If that happens, Facebook will lose copious amounts of money, ruining the business and the site for everyone as they scramble to stay afloat. Some say this is exactly what’s currently happening. I’m not so cynical, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if it happened in the next few years.

In either case, a shift in posting style towards a more advertorial style, particularly if you’re trying to push a new released product or a new event in a way that’s too commercial, will mean a decline in reach.

A Challenger Appears

You know what else causes a decline in reach? When your users abandon your page in favor of a better competitor. Up until now, you may have been living in something of a bubble, where your competitors just didn’t understand how to use Facebook. Now they’ve hired a competent Facebook marketer to run their page, and they’re drawing in users by the thousands.

If your reach declined, it could be because a bunch of your users have forsaken your business for a competitor. This hurts your reach specifically because those users very likely didn’t un-like your page. Most people don’t prune their likes very frequently, after all.

A Handful of Stray Reports

This is one of the more minor, less common reasons your reach can drop; your page has been reported as spam. Sometimes, users will try to harm your page out of spite, and will try to report your posts regardless of their content. Facebook’s automatic damage control can hurt the reach of each post before a manual review removes the penalty. It’s not common, however, and unless your posts have been removed, there’s no real way to tell if it’s happening.

Increasing Reach Organically

Entire posts have been written – on this blog and others – about increasing your organic reach. Therefore, I’m just going to summarize some of the better advice.

• Post a little bit before your fans are typically online.


• Post frequently and on a regular schedule. Daily is good. Multiple times daily is better.


• Schedule evergreen posts for a repeat performance during off-peak hours.


• Produce great content. It goes without saying, avoid advertorial posts to avoid penalties.


• Build a better audience, and prune out inactive or fake users.

The post How to Diagnose a Drop in Facebook Reach appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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Your Handy Guide to Facebook Marketing Terms

Your Handy Guide to Facebook Marketing Terms

Whether you’re a novice or experienced Facebook marketer, it’s easy to get tripped up on terminology. The social network has an extensive vocabulary that you’ll probably never be quizzed on, but knowing the difference between terms such as “total reach” and “organic reach” will impact your Facebook strategy.

We’ve compiled some of the most commonly used Facebook terms that you’ll come across as a marketer. Our resource is broken up into sections for convenience: General, Pages, and Insights.

General Definitions

This section might be a bit of a refresher for most readers. But if you or your admins are new to Facebook, it’s good to get acquainted with these terms as soon as possible.

1. Account Settings: Your settings are used to manage basic account preferences. Here you can edit your name or email, change your notification preferences, turn on extra security features, and more.

2. App: Facebook Apps are created by third parties and add more features and functionality to your Facebook experience.

3. Badge: A Badge is a personalized box you create to share your Facebook profile, photos, or Page on other websites.

4. Chat: Chat is a feature that lets you send instant messages to your friends.

5. Event: Use the Event feature to organize events, gather RSVPs, respond to invites, and keep up with what your friends are doing.

6. Follow: Follow is a way to hear from people you’re interested in, even if you’re not friends. The Follow button is always a way to fine-tune your News Feed to get the types of updates you want to see.

7. Friend: Friends are people you connect and share with on Facebook. You can send as well as receive Friend requests from other Facebook members.

8. Groups: Facebook Groups make it easy to connect with specific sets of people, such as coworkers. They’re dedicated spaces where you can share updates, photos, and documents as well as message other Group members.

9. Like: Clicking Like is a way to give positive feedback and connect with things you care about. When you Like something, the action appears as an update on your Timeline. Liking a post means you were interested in what a friend was talking about (even if you didn’t leave a comment). Liking a Page means you’re connecting to that Page, so you’ll start to see its stories in your News Feed. The Page will also appear on your Profile, and you’ll appear on the Page as a person who Likes that Page.

10. Messages: Messages are similar to private email messages. They appear in your Facebook Inbox and can include text messages, chats, emails, and mobile messages from your Facebook Friends.

11. News Feed: Your News Feed is a constantly updating list of stories in the middle of your homepage. It includes status updates, photos, videos, links, App activities, and Likes from the people, Pages, and Groups you’re associated with.

12. Notes: The Notes feature lets you publish messages in rich-text format, giving you greater flexibility than simple updates allow. In addition to formatting your text, you can add photos and tag other people in your note.

13. Notifications: Notifications are updates about activity on Facebook. For example, you can be notified when an update is made to a Group you belong to or when someone accepts your Friend request. While you can’t turn off notifications entirely, you can adjust what you’re notified about and how.

14. Poke: People use the Poke feature when they want to get someone’s attention or say hello. When you Poke someone, they’ll receive a notification letting them know that they’ve been poked and by whom.

15. Profile: Your Profile is your collection of photos, stories, and experiences that tell your story. It includes your Timeline, profile picture, biography, and personal information. It can be public or private, but is only for non-commercial use.

16. Search: Search is a tool to find people, posts, photos, places, Pages, Groups, apps, and events on Facebook.

17. Social Plugins: Social Plugins are tools that other websites can use to provide people with personalized and social experiences. When you interact with social plugins, you share your experiences off Facebook with your friends on Facebook.

18. Tagging: A tag links a person, Page, or place to something you post, like a status update or photo. For example, you can tag a photo to say who’s in it or post a status update and say who you’re with or where you are.

19. Ticker: The Ticker is positioned on the right side of your homepage and is updated with your friends’ activities in real-time. You can use it to keep up with the latest news as it happens, listen to music with your friends, or hover over a story to join in the conversation.

20. Timeline: Your Timeline is where you can see your posts or posts you’ve been tagged in displayed by date. It’s also part of your Profile.

21. Timeline Review: This is a tool that lets you approve or reject posts that you’ve been tagged in before they go on your Timeline. When people you’re not friends with tag you in a post, they automatically go to Timeline review.

22. Top Story: Top Stories include the stories published since you last checked News Feed that Facebook’s algorithm thinks you’ll find interesting. These items might be different depending on how long it’s been since you last visited your News Feed.

23. Trending: Trending shows you a list of topics and hashtags that have recently spiked in popularity on Facebook. This is a personalized list based on your location, Pages you’ve liked, and what’s trending across Facebook.

Pages Definitions

Although your Facebook Page is just one of many aspects of the social network, it has a lot of its own terminology and features. This section focuses on the most important terms that you and your team need to know.

24. About Section: This section contains basic information that’ll help visitors quickly learn about your Facebook Page. Different types of basic information will appear in your Page’s About section depending on your Page’s category.

25. Activity Log: The Activity Log helps you manage your Page’s Timeline. It shows you a complete list of posts and comments by your Page, including posts you’ve hidden. Only people who help manage your Page can see the Activity Log.

26. Boost Post: Boosted posts appear higher in News Feed so there’s a better chance that your audience will see them. You can boost any post you create on your Page, including status updates, photos, videos, and offers. The cost to boost a post depends on how many people you want to reach.

27. Check-ins: This action announces a person’s location to their Facebook friends. If your Page includes an address, it will appear in a list of possible locations to check into when people are nearby. Once someone has checked in, a story (definition below) will be created in their friends’ News Feeds.

28. Cover Photo: This is the large picture at the top of your Page. All cover photos are public, which means that anyone visiting your Page will be able to see it. Best practices include using a unique image that represents your brand.

29. Liked by Page: This section features all of the other Pages that you, as the Page, Like.

30. Milestone: Milestones are a special type of Page post that lets you highlight key moments on your Page’s Timeline. You can use milestones to share important events that tell the story of your Page is about.

31. Offer: Certain businesses, brands, and organizations can share discounts with their customers by posting an offer on their Facebook Page. When someone claims an offer, they’ll receive an email that they can show at the Page’s physical location to get the discount.

32. Page: Facebook Pages help businesses, organizations, and brands share their stories and connect with people. Like profiles, you can customize Pages by posting stories, hosting events, adding apps, and more. People who like your Page can get updates in their News Feeds.

33. Page Admin: When you create a Page, you automatically become the Page’s admin, which means only you can change how the Page looks and post as the Page. You can then assign roles to other people to help you manage your Page.

34. Page Roles: There are five different roles for people who help manage Facebook Pages. These roles include admin, editor, moderator, advertiser, and analyst. Any person assigned to these roles will log into their own personal accounts and work on the Page from there.

35. Pin to Top: Any post that you pin will move to the top of your Page’s Timeline and a “pinned” icon will appear in the top-right corner of the post. Your pinned post will stay at the top of your Page’s Timeline for seven days. After that, it’ll return to the date it was posted on your Page’s Timeline. Only posts created by your Page can be pinned; posts that other people add to your Page aren’t supported by the feature.

36. Post Attribution: Your posts, Likes, and comments on your Page’s timeline will be attributed to the Page itself — even if you’re logged into Facebook as yourself and not the Page. Whether you’re creating a post or scrolling through News Feed, you can choose to act as a Page or as yourself from a convenient drop-down box.

Under Page Settings > Post Attribution, you can change the default to post as the individual rather than the Page. With this enabled, when anyone who manages your Page creates a post or comments, it’ll be attributed to that individual rather than the Page.

37. Posts to Page: Posts to Page are any posts made to your Page by someone other than an admin. This way, your Timeline will showcase messages and content from your brand only. Any questions or feedback from customers will be found in the Posts to Page section on the left-hand side of your Page.

38. Suggested Edits: People viewing Pages with locations that they can check into may see the option to suggest edits. This lets people suggest information that might be missing, such as a category, phone number, or address. If multiple people make the same suggestion, this information can be added to your Page to help other people find it. Page admins can confirm or remove information that’s been suggested.

39. Tabs: These are sections that come with your Page when you create it. They keep your Page organized and help people see specific content types, like photos and events.

40. Verified Page: Some Pages and profiles are verified by Facebook to let people know that they’re authentic. These can include celebrities and public figures, global brands and businesses, and media. Once verified, you’ll see a blue badge next to your Page’s name.

Insights Definitions

While Facebook Insights is similar to traditional web analytics data offerings, some of the terminology is unique to the platform. To make sure you’re not confused by any of the information you find in your Insights data, the following definitions should help make things more clear.

Analyzing Your Audience

From demographic characteristics to where they were before they came to your Page, Facebook Insights offers you a wide variety of metrics to help you analyze your Page’s audience. The following terms will help you understand what the data provided through Insights means so you can use it more effectively.

41. Cities/Countries: This is the number of people who saw any content about your Page grouped by country or city, based on IP address.

42. Daily Active Users: This metric is the number of people who have viewed or interacted with your Facebook Page on a specific day. It’s categorized by the type of action they perform.

43. Engaged Users: This is the number of engaged individuals who have clicked anywhere on one of your Facebook Page posts. For example, someone could have Liked one of your posts, commented on it, or shared it.

44. External Referrers: External referrers are the number of views your Facebook Page received from website URLs that aren’t part of Facebook.com.

45. Fans: In Page Insights, and other places on Facebook, “fans” is another way to refer to the people who Like your Page.

46. Friends of Fans: This shares the number of unique individuals who are friends with people who Like your Facebook Page. These people represent the total potential reach of content you publish to your Page.

47. Gender and Age: These demographic metrics detail the percentage of people who saw any content about your Page for each age and gender bracket, based on the information people enter in their personal profiles.

48. Language: This is the number of people who saw any content about your Page grouped by language, based on default language settings.

49. Like Sources: This is the number of times your Facebook Page was Liked, categorized by where the Like occurred during a specific date range. This lets you see whether the Likes come from your Page itself, from your website, or from other sources.

50. Monthly Active Users: This is the number of people who have viewed your Facebook Page or interacted with it during the previous 30 days. By tracking this metric, you can determine the degree to which your Facebook influence fluctuates monthly or seasonally.

51. Net Likes: This is the difference between the number of people who have Liked your Page and the number who unliked it over a specific period.

52. New Likes: This total is the number of unique individuals who Liked your Facebook Page during a specific date range that you set yourself.

53. Organic Reach: Organic reach is the number of unique individuals who saw a specific post from your Page on their News Feeds, tickers, or directly on their Pages.

54. Other Clicks: This is a measurement of clicks not on the content of your Facebook Page post, but rather of clicks on the Page title or to “see more.”

55. Paid Reach: This is the number of unique individuals who saw a specific post from your Page through a paid source like a Facebook Ad or Promoted Post.

56. Post Reach: This is the number of people who have seen your post. You post counts as reaching someone when it’s shown in their News Feed. Figures displayed in Insights are for the first 28 days after a post was created and include people viewing your post on desktop and mobile.

57. Reach: Reach is the number of people who received impressions (definition below) of a Page post. Reach might be less than impressions since one person can make multiple impressions.

58. Story: This term is used to reference the ways people can interact with your Page, including:

• Liking your Facebook Page


• Liking, commenting on, or sharing a post from your Page


• Answering a question you asked on your Page


• Responding to an event you posted on your Page


• Mentioning your Page within their own posts


• Tagging your Page in an uploaded picture


• Checking in to or recommending your Page

59. Total Likes: This is the number of unique individuals who have clicked the button to Like your Facebook Page.

60. Total Reach: Total reach is the number of unique individuals who have actually seen any content related to your Facebook Page. This includes content published on your Page as well as Facebook Ads and Promoted Posts that lead people to your Page.

The sum of Post Reach won’t equal Total Reach because Pages can reach people through content other than posts. For instance, if someone visits a Page after searching for it, they’ll be counted in Total Reach but not Post Reach. Also, if someone sees more than one Page post, they’ll be counted in Post Reach for each post they see, but they’ll only be counted once in Total Reach.

61. Unlikes: This is the number of unique individuals who have unliked your Facebook Page during a specific date range.

62. When Your Fans Are Online: This shows you when the people who Like your Page are on Facebook content.

63. Where Your Page Likes Happened: This is the number of times your Facebook Page was Liked, broken down by where it happened. People can Like your Page using the Like button on your Page or from Page suggestions, ads, and stories about others who have Liked your Page.

64. Viral Reach: Viral reach is the number of unique individuals who saw a specific post from your Page through a story published by one of their Facebook friends.

Measuring Content and Engagement

It’s also helpful to learn which content you publish on your Page is most popular and creates the most engagement from your audience. The following Facebook terms explain some of the most popular Insights metrics that you can use to measure content performance and engagement levels.

65. Audience Retention: This metric details views of your video at each moment as a percentage of all views, including videos shorter than three seconds.

66. Daily Page Activity: This breaks down the different ways people engaged with your Facebook Page on a specific day other than by commenting on or Liking your posts. You’ll be able to see when fans post to your Page, upload photos or videos to your Page (if enabled), write reviews, or mention your Page in updates of their own or to friends.

67. Daily Story Feedback: This breaks down how people responded to your stories by engaging with them (through Likes or comments) or unsubscribing from them (which means your Page stories won’t appear in their News Feeds in the future), on a specific day.

68. Impressions: Impressions are the number of times a post from your Page is displayed, whether the post is clicked or not. People may see multiple impressions of the same post. For example, someone might see a Page update in News Feed once, and then a second time if their friend shares it.

69. Media Consumption: This is the number of times a piece of media content that you published on your Page – including a video, photo, or audio clip – is clicked and viewed on a specific day.

70. Page Content or Post Feedback: This is the number of Likes and comments on stories published in your Page’s News Feed during the time period you select.

71. Page Views: Page views are the total number of times your Facebook Page was viewed during the time period you select.

72. Pages to Watch: This helps you compare the performance of your Page and posts with similar Pages on Facebook.

73. Post Views: Post views are the number of times a story published on your Facebook Page News Feed was viewed during the time period you select.

74. Tab Views: This is the total number of times each tab in your Facebook Page was viewed when people were logged in to Facebook during the time period you select.

75. Video Views: This is the total number of times a video posted by your Page was viewed for three seconds or more.

The post Your Handy Guide to Facebook Marketing Terms appeared first on Sprout Social.

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Twitter Ads versus Facebook Ads: Which is Better?

Twitter Ads versus Facebook Ads: Which is Better?

Facebook has long been the go-to social network for paid advertising. There are two reasons for this. This first is value; Facebook’s robust targeting, it’s huge audience and it’s great tools all come together to create something of a perfect storm of advertising. The second reason is more artificial; Facebook has been lowering the amount of reach a given Facebook post has, forcing businesses to pay to reach the number of people they formerly were able to contact with a normal post.

On the other hand, Twitter has been a rising star in the advertising world since they introduced paid ads. Twitter ads aren’t quite the same as Facebook ads; they have less force behind them, fewer placement options, and a whole host of other issues. Still, they exist, and they’re gaining traction. So which is better?

Reach

Facebook has a shockingly huge number of daily active users, and a pool of total users that utterly dwarfs just about every other source on the Internet. On the other hand, Twitter is no slouch itself. At last count, Facebook has 890 million daily active users, with a grand total of 1.4 billion total users. Twitter, meanwhile, has a “mere” 288 monthly users, with around 500 tweets being sent every day. Vine, if you consider it part of Twitter, has some 40 million users.

Therefore, in terms of pure reach, Facebook has the win. On the other hand, you have to consider reliable reach as well.

On Twitter, when you send a Tweet – or run an ad – that artifact of communication is shown to everyone. It’s just up to those people to check at the right time, or to scroll far enough down their feed, to see it. The post is there, it’s not hidden.

On Facebook, meanwhile, only a small percentage of your audience can see a given post. Agorapulse did a study, and found that the percentage varies based on the size of the audience. Pages with under 1,000 fans typically reached 25% of their fans with one post, while pages with more than 100,000 fans only reached around 8%.

Then again, 8% of Facebook’s massive userbase is still more than Twitter’s monthly active user count, so the numbers just don’t matter all that much. What matters is your audience, since most of your ads will be targeting the people who follow you, not the world at large. At least, they will be if you’re any good at advertising.

Ad Performance

There are a number of factors that can go into measuring ad performance. Facebook is cheaper in both CPM and CPC than Twitter, though Twitter doesn’t’ typically publish reams of CPC data. The clickthrough rate for Facebook, however, is significantly lower than Twitter. Twitter ads can perform as much as 10x better.

Facebook, however, wins the game again in terms of average revenue per visitor. In general, Facebook has nearly double the average revenue per visitor of Twitter.

Of course, this is again a game of individuals. Different businesses with different focuses will perform better in different scenarios. You will need to test the average revenue per visitor for each site and determine which is better on your own.

What about mobile, specifically? Facebook has increasingly become a mobile platform, but Twitter began life designed for mobile and has never left that arena. Facebook suffers, because many of their ads revolve around the sidebar, and sidebar ads don’t exist for mobile users. Twitter ads are right in the primary feed, making them much better overall.

It’s up to you if that’s a benefit. It means Twitter is less varied for desktop platforms, where Facebook offers several placements for desktop users. If you make use of them, maybe that’s more valuable to you than the mobile emphasis.

Ad Formats

Facebook used to have dozens of ad formats. It was, by all reports, something of a confusing mess for marketers. Which of the options did you use for which ad? How could you even begin to test them all with a reasonable budget? You simply couldn’t.

Facebook did dial back and simplify their ads, but while some applauded the move, many just realize it was Facebook admitting their ad formats didn’t work. These days, you still have a number of ad formats, but they’re simpler. App ads, domain ads, mobile app ads, offers, page like ads, post link, photo, text and video ads, and sponsored stories. Whew! That’s still quite a lot.

Twitter, meanwhile, has three types of ads corresponding to the three types of information found on the site. These are promoted tweets, promoted accounts and promoted trends. All three of them are clearly denoted, and they’re all valuable in their own ways.

Conclusions

So, to recap. What does Twitter have going for it?

For one thing – and this wasn’t mentioned above – Twitter has some surprisingly great analytics. It doesn’t seem like a site that features 140 character micro-messages would be harvesting all that much data, but you can get a lot about your audience just from a few basic tweets.

Twitter is perfect if the business in question can keep up the sort of casual, conversational tone that’s common amongst Twitter users. On the other hand, businesses trying to use sales language are going to falter and fail. This is true on Facebook as well, but at least Facebook’s sidebar ads work with sales language, even if their news feed posts do not.

Twitter is also astoundingly good for customer service. Many businesses are using the immediate response time as an incentive for quick, robust customer service. Facebook just lacks the messaging options to handle it the same way. That’s not really ad related, but it does make users more inclined to pay attention to your ads.

Facebook, meanwhile, is nice if you want cheap social ads. You won’t get quite as nice returns or click rates from Facebook as you will from Twitter, but you’ll be spending even less. Use it properly and you can rake in the leads.

The post Twitter Ads versus Facebook Ads: Which is Better? appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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