New Facebook Tips and Tricks

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Send Money to Friends Could be Used to Pay for FB eCommerce

Up until very recently, if you wanted to run an ecommerce store through Facebook, you would have to use a tab app generated by a third party and hosted on their platform. Something like Shopify, for example, lets you create a storefront to run within a Facebook app. The problem is, this is just creating an external website to host your shop, it’s just that the website isn’t accessible from outside the Facebook platform.

Recently, however, Facebook has been making a few changes to try to integrate payments with their system.

It all started a year or so ago, when the company hired on David Marcus, a former Paypal chief. This was quickly leveraged into a way to integrate a payment system into Facebook. Specifically, Facebook is adding “send money to friends” through their messenger app.

This was first leaked a few months ago, when users of an iOS exploration app and developer tool – a user at Stanford, specifically, Andrew Aude – discovered some options in the messenger app.

This month, Facebook made their announcement.

How Send Money Works

Send Money

The Send Money to Friends is an added button on the bottom of the Facebook Messenger mobile app. It’s a simple and self-explanatory dollar sign. Tap it, and it brings up the send money system. Or, if you’ve set up a numeric pin, it prompts you for the pin before you can access the payments system.

There’s a limit to the system. For now, while it links with your existing Facebook information, you need to plug in a debit card in order to send money to another user. When you receive money, it goes through your linked debit card and into your bank account. It doesn’t get locked into a Facebook Wallet that’s segregated from the rest of your finances.

This system allows users on Facebook to send money back and forth as quickly and easily as sending a text message. Need $10? Have a friend willing to lend you the cash, but unable to do it in person? They can simply plug in the information and send you the cash.

This is a legitimate financial transaction between banks and financial institutions. This means that while the transfer is instantaneous, certain banks may take up to three days to process the payment, which can put a damper on immediate transactions.

The Subtle Details

There are a few interesting quirks of this payment system.

For one thing, it’s linked explicitly with the Facebook messenger. If you’re using the Facebook desktop app or using Facebook via the web, you don’t have access to the payment system.

Second, because it’s linked to the messenger, it’s already given a wide audience. This is simply because Facebook segregated the messaging system from their normal app, so anyone who wants to message anyone via mobile device is forced to use the messenger app.

Third, it’s quite secure. Facebook already has existing infrastructure in place for paying apps, and this security extends to these financial transactions. As for device-side security, you can set up a numeric pin. IOS devices can also use Touch ID. Additionally, there’s always Facebook’s two-step verification to help; it kicks in for this scenario as well.

Fourth, Facebook is getting nothing out of the transaction, monetarily. There’s no transaction fee, so far. However, it’s entirely possible they’ll add one in the coming months, once they’ve proven that people will use it.

Send Money as a Payment Processor

How it Works

So, will the Send Money to Friends system work as an ecommerce payment system? I don’t think so.

A small business or a hobbyist selling items through Facebook can certainly use it this way. They can add their own debit card to attach an account, and they can accept payment and solicit shipping information through the messenger. However, this is limited. For one thing, your audience needs to be using the mobile messenger; those who aren’t wouldn’t be able to pay. For another, it requires direct Facebook messages and is not quite completely automatic like other payment processing options.

Perhaps the biggest argument against Send Money as a payment system is the scale. Medium and large businesses don’t have the luxury of making a manual bottleneck in their payment processing. They’d much rather use the traditional shopping systems available in Shopify and other app-based storefronts. Heck, even Square and Paypal are more widespread and varied.

The other limitation is the debit card. Send Money doesn’t accept payments from credit cards, for numerous reasons.

Realistically, Send Money is being used as a proof of concept for payment processing and user willingness. Very likely, Facebook will implement a dedicated purchase system, a buy button, to their entire platform. A buy button, with a bit of a commerce platform attached, would give small Facebook-based businesses a better home and a better storefront than some janky solution using sending money through a messenger.

That said, Facebook could be using this system as a way to get a bunch of users to plug in their financial information and link their bank accounts with their Facebook accounts. This way, when Facebook gets around to introducing a more generalized payment system, they’ll already have a wide audience of people ready and able to use the system with a single tap or click.

Money and Messaging

There’s also the possibility that the Send Money system is a success, and other messaging systems take up the call. Other messengers, from WhatsApp to AIM could add payment processors to their systems in the same way Facebook has added it to theirs. Google already allows users to send money from Google Wallet to Google Wallet as attachments on emails, though it’s not strictly the same as using a messenger, as it would if they allowed the same through Google Talk.

It will be interesting to see, over the next few months, how Facebook’s plan works out and what other platforms, applications and companies decide to follow suit.

The post Send Money to Friends Could be Used to Pay for FB eCommerce appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

Should Facebook Use “Maybe” or “Interested” for Events?

Maybe attending

Facebook has been trying over the last year or so to test various enhancements to their events system, which has been unfortunately neglected for a long time. The latest test is the “interested” button for the RSVP system. Rather than a simple, binary “join” or ignore, the Interested button allows a fuzzier “maybe” response.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has run this exact test. They ran a similar test with the Interested button back in 2013, when they were testing a whole host of event-related changes. Other changes at the time included a one-tap invite button for mobile, a pop-up box that encouraged sharing the event, a different layout for the events that was similar to groups, a buy tickets button for events that sold admission tickets, and a suggested guests prompt that helped users invite their friends to events they planned to attend.

How many of those still exist today? Events have undergone quite a number of changes to make them much more useful to businesses.

Events for Business

Events are almost always created by pages, and as such, Facebook really wants to encourage businesses to use them. They’re great for promoting business events, trade shows, concerts, and anything you sponsor. They also work for time-limited sales and in-store events.

You can experiment with using them for digital events, though you lose some of the event functionality when there’s no physical location for maps and check-ins to use.

One such benefit Facebook gives pages is the recently-added ability to essentially advertise events. You can create desktop and mobile news feed ads that promote your event specifically, showing the title, the copy, a picture, the date, the location and the number of people RSVPed to the event.

This is one location where an “interested” button can come into play. Depending on how Facebook implements it, the “attending” and “interested” users could combine to make it look like your event has much higher attendance than you’re certain of getting.

You also get a suite of additional Insights into events. As a page, you can see a number of statistics, including the number of people who have seen the event link – the reach – the number of people who have viewed the event itself, and the number of people who have RSVPed, hit maybe, or saved the event to look at later.

Setting Up an Event

Create Event

Now that you’re interested in running an event, rather than just trying to promote an event through your page itself, how do you go about it?

From your page, click to edit the page and choose to update your info. You will need to click the apps link and click through to the edit settings. Click to add an app, and find the event app. This allows you to put an event on your page, in a tab app, which is essential for promoting it later.

Creating the actual event itself is easy from there. Just click the event app and click to create an event. You’ll have to fill in a bunch of information.

The name of the event. What event are you promoting? Feel free to do a little SEO magic here to include all the info you want.

The details and more information section. This can be a long description, so you have plenty of space to write your description, the details and a CTA or two.

The location. You’ll want to be specific about the location of your event. You don’t want any confusion as to where the event is, particularly if it’s not on the grounds of your physical location, assuming you have one.

The time of the event. Facebook doesn’t allow you to choose a time zone, it just takes the time zone of your location. Specify the right time and Facebook will display it appropriately for the user.

Images. You’ll want to have two different images here, one for your event page and one for a thumbnail for your event tab. You can customize the image attached to an event news feed ad in the ad manager rather than in this menu.

Any extras. You can, for example, restrict who can post on the wall for the event. I wouldn’t recommend it, unless you have issues with spammers or detractors on your page. Otherwise, it’s good to have the engagement.

Once you create the event, you’ll be asked to invite a bunch of people. You can’t send out a widespread invite to everyone who follows your page, unfortunately, so you’ll have to take the time to invite a targeted group of influencers.

Types of RSVP

Depending on Facebook’s testing, users might see the normal RSVP button suite, with Join, Save or Decline. They might also see Maybe, or they might ONLY see Maybe. Facebook’s testing is inconsistent. Be sure to use your personal account to test what users of the event will see, so you know what message you’re promoting and what action you’re trying to get users to take.

Why might Facebook test a Maybe button without other buttons? It’s an interesting concept. A lot of people don’t like outright commitment. You ask them to join your event and they have to think about it, check their schedules, get time off work, and so forth. If they saw a one-time view of an ad, or they don’t see your posts very often, they might forget about the event.

On the other hand, if they see the Maybe option, they can easily click it. This is much like saving the event, only it has less of a commitment attached. Just in case they aren’t sure they want to RSVP, they can click Maybe, and they can come back later to check it out.

Facebook is no doubt testing this exact concept. They want to know whether or not more users will RSVP if their only option is a soft option, rather than the hard yes, hard no and save for later options. I’m guessing that the Maybe button will be put in permanently, but I doubt it will completely replace the Join and Decline buttons. Rather, I think it might replace the Save functionality.

The post Should Facebook Use “Maybe” or “Interested” for Events? appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

What Are Dynamic Facebook Ads and Why Should I Care?

Multiple Product Ads

About a month ago, Facebook released a new type of ad you can use. These are called dynamic product ads, or dynamic multi-product ad units. At the time of their announcement, they were only available through the ads API, with a Power Editor implementation forthcoming. That implementation exists now, and it’s made these ads very much worth looking into. So what are these ads, how do they work, and why should you give them a serious look?

Static Multi-Product Ads

Multi-product ads are a relatively new feature in the Facebook ads pantheon, and they’re really quite good. The concept is simple; instead of a single image for a single product in a news feed ad, the image is slightly offset and a second image is just peeking around the corner. This is part of a carousel of several ad images, each for a different product.

These ads can have up to five different products in them if you’re using the Power Editor. If you’re using the ads API directly, you can push in up to ten. That’s a lot of unique creative copy within a single ad! Given that these work with both desktop and mobile news feed ads, that’s a lot of variation within a single ad.

The promoted use by Facebook is a product ad. The idea is that you offer a selection of products in a given ad, rather than just one fixed product, so you can hit a range of interests amongst a single demographic in a single ad. This way you don’t have to double or triple or quintuple-expose your users to ads for different products; you can bundle them all into one more compelling package.

That said, you’re not strictly limited to products with these ads. You can, for example, bundle up a handful of similarly-themed blog posts to promote in one ad unit.

For the moment, there are only two objectives you can use with these ads; website clicks and website conversions. If you’re not using one of these objectives, you won’t see the ad type. If you’re using it properly, when you go to create an ad, you will see the default “single image and link in one ad” and a variation “multiple images and links in one ad.” This second option is the multi-product ad. For a more detailed explanation of how to create one, check out this excellent post by Jon Loomer.

The Benefits of Multi-Product Ads

Cheaper Ads

These multi-product ads are proving to be very useful for Facebook marketers. Loomer has reported seeing website clicks come in for around half the cost of normal single-product ads. Others report similar cost reductions for great results.

There’s only one drawback to multi-product ads, and that’s the creative. When you pick a selection of 5-10 products to put into an ad, you’re guessing that at least one of those products – or blog posts, or whatever – is going to be attractive to your target audience. If you guess wrong, that product is a waste of space. If the first 2-3 products aren’t the attractive ones, you’ll end up with an ad with a bunch of creative that no one scrolls sideways to see. This is where dynamic multi-product ads come in.

Where Dynamic Ads Live

Dynamic product ads are sort of a cross between traditional multi-product ads and retargeting ads. What they do is adapt themselves to the audience viewing them, via tracking pixels.

Prior to the introduction of these dynamic ads, if you wanted to run retargeting, you would need to create a custom audience based on the people who visit certain pages on your site, as tracked by the Facebook Tracking Pixel. Unfortunately, if you wanted to track at the product level, you would have to create a pixel for each product. If you have hundreds or thousands of products, you can see how unfeasible this becomes.

Dynamic ads use a new type of tracking pixel, called the Dynamic Website Custom Audience Pixel. You put this pixel on every product page you want tracked, and Facebook monitors them all. When a user visits one, Facebook notes the product ID of the product in question. If you have 100 products, and a user visits 7 of them, that pixel will report a custom audience of that person who has visited those 7 products.

Of course, Facebook doesn’t create individual custom audiences for every possible variation; that would be insane. They just use an overall dynamic custom audience.

Creating and Using a Dynamic Ad

Creating ad

Create a normal multi-product ad as usual, possibly using Loomer’s instructions as linked above. He covers it better than I could. The only difference is that you use a Dynamic Ad Template instead of the normal ad template. You create a single ad with a single set of copy, and the dynamic audience tracking automatically populates the product spaces with data from your website.

A user who visits your website and sees a few products will then visit Facebook and see those same products advertised in your ad. They’ll think you have a wonderful grasp on what they like, because you guessed exactly what they were browsing. In reality, Facebook tracked them and shows them what they wanted to see.

You do need to make sure your product pages all have unique product IDs and that the information you want to display in a dynamic product ad is available. If you’re hiding the price of your products behind a shopping cart or something, you can’t display it in your ads. Facebook needs to be able to pull the data.

One amazing benefit of the dynamic product ads is automatic availability tracking. If you have a limited supply of a given product and it sells out, normally you would need to suspend the ad that promotes it. Otherwise, users will click through but won’t be able to convert, which is a big no-no in marketing. With dynamic ads, Facebook tracks availability. When you run out of a given product – as long as your site reflects that lack of availability – that product will disappear from the dynamic product ad rotation. When you get more in stock and update your site, your ad automatically updates as well. No intervention on your part is necessary.

Once you’ve implemented a few of these dynamic ads, you’ll honestly wonder how you lived without them. By now, they should be available in the Power Editor for most people, so you can get started immediately.

The post What Are Dynamic Facebook Ads and Why Should I Care? appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

How to Embed Native Facebook Videos on Your Website

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People sure watch a lot of video on Facebook. And by a lot I mean that every single day people are viewing more than 3 billion videos on the social network.

With its increasing popularity, auto-play feature and Newsfeed distribution, more and more brands have began experimenting with uploading their video content as native Facebook videos instead of sharing a link to their external video content.

This week’s #SocialMediaMinute will cover how to embed a Facebook video on your website.

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Luckily it’s very similar to the way YouTube and Vimeo videos are embed on other websites that you’re typically used to seeing.

style="text-align: center;">See Also: title="How to Share a Facebook Photo or Video with a non-Facebook User" href="http://www.jacobcurtis.com/2013/09/01/how-to-share-a-like-with-a-non-facebook-user/" target="_blank">How to Share a Facebook Photo or Video with a non-Facebook User

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Learn more by watching the short tutorial video below.

Video Tutorial

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How to Embed Facebook Videos on Your Website

Now there’s going to be two opportunities for you two embed Facebook videos on your site. The first would be embedding a Facebook video you see in your news feed that is not uploaded by you.

To do so, first open up the video from your feed and below the view count you will see the option to embed the video. Selecting this option will provide you the video embed code to paste into your website. Easy enough!

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To embed your own uploaded Facebook videos onto your website, open up your video from your personal (or Page’s) timeline or from within your Facebook video album. Next locate the “options” tab below the video’s description. Then just select embed video to generate the code.

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Considerations Before Embedding Facebook Videos

To be honest, with this being such a new feature it’s hard to quantify the pros and cons when comparing Facebook video embeds with other video hosting providers. Here’s a few of my initial thoughts and I’d love to hear your own feedback in the comments.

Potential Pros of Facebook Video Embeds

Facebook comments on embed videos will be duplicated on the official Facebook-shared story.
Engagement on Facebook embed videos on your site will help the organic reach of your native Facebook videos.
No need to upload your Facebook video elsewhere to host it on your blog

Potential Cons for Facebook Video Embeds

Little to no SEO value or SERP rank
Video content creators can’t monetize video playbacks (yet?)
Limited video analytics when compared to YouTube
Currently buggy on WordPress :/
Profile privacy settings may limit visibility

Pro Tip

The majority of Facebook video uploads I see are just stripped from other sites or re-purposed YouTube videos. While uploading these same videos to Facebook generates additional exposure, my one recommendation is to slightly edit the video to be Facebook optimized. This means your video shouldn’t mention or have graphics asking the viewer to “subscribe to my channel” etc. It’s a small detail but can go a long way in increasing conversions and also shows your fans you’re not being lazy.

Takeaway

Facebook seems to be chasing other video platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and Wistia for embed space on your website or blog. They also want Facebook to be your go-to source for everything online.

While there are some apparent advantages to include Facebook video embeds on your site, consider how choosing one over the other will effect your current video marketing and SEO strategy. At this time, I’m going to wait for a few creators’ feedback before jumping on this bandwagon.

Will you be embedding Facebook videos in your site? Or which video hosting provider will you stick to? 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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Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Increase the Amount of “Talking About This” People on Facebook

Talking about this

All the way back in March of 2014, Facebook declared that they would be removing the “People Talking About This” or PTAT metric from Insights.

Indeed, shortly after the announcements, that metric disappeared. They claimed they would be removing it from the API as well, but the fact is, it’s still visible. It’s just a little harder to get to than clicking into Insights.

How is People Talking About This Calculated?

Calculated

The PTAT metric is a unique calculation, a sum total number, based on the last seven days. It totals up the number of actions that have created news feed stories about your brand. The actions that can generate such a story are:

Liking a page, liking a post, or liking a check-in deal.

Posting on the page’s wall, commenting on a post, or writing a recommendation.

Sharing a post or a check-in deal.

RSVPing to a page event.

Answering a question or poll by the page.

Mentioning the page (using the Facebook equivalent of @mention.)

Tagging the page in a photo.

Claiming an offer.

Any likes, comments and shares of a post generated by one of the above actions.

Each of these actions results in a story being generated and posted to the person’s news feed, for their friends to see, based on their privacy settings.

This is, then, a sort of measurement of viral reach. If viral reach is the people who see a post based on an action one of your followers does after they see a post, then this is a sum total of all the potential vectors for viral reach in a given seven days.

This is a valuable metric to watch, though Facebook doesn’t want you watching it any more. They believed that it encouraged blind sharing and commenting without legitimate and valuable engagement. As true as this may be, this was also before they implemented several other changes, including the demotion of promotional and “share this for X” posts, which have begun to fall out of style.

Facebook also seems to believe that the actual reach measurements are a good alternative. I say that they’re two very different metrics, and that they’re both worth watching.

PTAT Vs Engagement

Posts and Engagement

So what’s the difference between the People Talking About This metric and traditional post engagement? Well, in a sense, engagement and reach are more limited. Engagement measurement tends to only measure what’s on posts you make. If someone likes your page, and someone else comments on that story in that person’s news feed, that bit of engagement doesn’t count. With PTAT, it counts.

On the other hand, PTAT is hampered by the time limit. It’s strictly limited to the past seven days, meaning that if you have activity you would like to track earlier, you need to make note manually of the metric. When Facebook removed PTAT from Insights, so too did many analytics suites remove it from their features list. Even though it still exists, it’s harder to monitor.

Boosting PTAT

Increasing PTAT

So what can you do to boost your People Talking About This, and is it beneficial? Well, obviously it’s going to be beneficial; any engagement, any sharing of your brand is good for you. If you’re familiar with lists of ways to increase your post engagement, this list will look similar.

Post regularly throughout the week. Because PTAT is a measurement of seven days of activity, if you post in spurts, you won’t see a consistent number. Obviously, more people will be talking about you when you yourself are talking about you.

Curate content, particularly content that you think has a good chance of drawing in a lot of interest from users. If you post something and users share it repeatedly, that’s going to earn you quite a bit of PTAT.

Don’t forget some kind of social CTA in your messages. Ask people what they think, pose a question, run a poll, ask for shares; any social activity that generates a story is beneficial for both engagement and PTAT.

Grow your audience. I know, easier said than done, but it’s really a good way to increase your PTAT. Because the metric is a raw number of people talking about you, it depends on volume. If you have a larger base audience, more people in sheer numbers will talk about your content, which boosts your PTAT numbers.

Respond when a user posts a comment. Even if that response is a simple thanks, it grows confidence in your business. If you strike up a dialogue, those users will be growing your metrics every time they participate.

Consider running events. An event with an RSVP system allows users to interact with your page in several ways. Each of those methods gives you a bump to your PTAT. Just make sure you’re not running an event when another means of promotion might be more beneficial.

If you’re a local business, don’t forget the local metrics. Check-ins, Facebook’s Foursquare imitator, also help to increase your PTAT. The same is true when users leave you reviews or rate your business, because it counts as a post that mentions your business.

Try to get other brands into a cross-promotion partnership. If another brand talks about you, it exposes you to their audience, which can be quite sizable while not overlapping with your own. This can dramatically increase your PTAT, though it’s most beneficial if it happens regularly.

Maintain successful techniques. Again, because PTAT only shows seven days worth of data, it’s highly beneficial for you to do what you can to maintain your activity and your engagement. If you find something that works, keep it up.

While you’re watching your PTAT, by the way, you can also watch that of your competitors. It’s publicly visible information, it’s just not broken down in detail in your Insights like it used to be. Check out your competitors and see how they compare, in terms of audience size and PTAT. If they have a significantly higher PTAT with a similar audience, study their posts and figure out why.

The post Increase the Amount of “Talking About This” People on Facebook appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

Sunday, March 22, 2015

The Ultimate Guide to Using Facebook’s Ad Manager

Ad Manager

Facebook hasn’t gotten where it is today by being a half-assed platform, and you won’t get anywhere on it by being a half-assed marketer. Learn the ins and outs of the platform so you can maximize your ad revenue, grow your page quickly, and watch your conversions explode.

Ad Types

Ad types

Ads on Facebook show up in two different locations; the sidebar and the news feed. Sidebar ads are the most like traditional ads. They have an image, a headline, copy, and a link. There are no limits on text on the image, but there are limits on the grammar and formatting of your copy. News feed ads have limits on the text you can have on the image. They can also include videos for specialized video ads.

The same differences appear on mobile, between feed ads and mobile app ads. Mobile app ads are either within apps, or in the news feed asking you to install apps. Get to know which types work for your audience, specifically between the mobile-desktop divide.

Ad Objectives

Ad objectives

There are also a number of different objectives you can choose for your ads, regardless of where those ads are displayed. Always be mindful to pick the right objective for your ads. If you want a link to your Facebook page, don’t use the website link ad, use the page likes ad. You’ll only pay when people actually perform the objective, so it’s better to not waste money.

The most common types of ad are the post engagement ad, the page likes ad, the website clicks and website conversions ads, and the app installs ads. The other types are much more specialized and, while they work when you use them for their purpose, they’re less generally useful.

Targeting Options

Targeting options

There’s so much to learn about targeting options on Facebook that we have written not once but twice on the subject. Read this post to learn about targeting in general, and this one to read specifically about the geolocal targeting options.

There’s also the entire concept of custom audiences to learn about. Custom audiences are specialized groups of people you can use as targets, based on various factors. You could create an audiences made up of everyone who matches the demographics of the people who follow you, but who don’t already follow you. You can make one based on people who are friends of the people who follow you. You can make them based on email lists or general demographics, as well.

An Example Guide

Example

Learning theory is all well and good, but until you put it into practice, you never know how much you don’t know. Here’s a sample start-to-finish ad creation tutorial, which you can follow to create a basic ad.

Before you begin, you need to have a Facebook page with at least some audience built up. You need this as a resource to use for future steps, as well as to make your ad effective. If you don’t have an active page, no one who sees your ad and clicks through is going to want to stick around.

First, you’re going to create a custom audience. To do this, go to the Ads Manager and click through to the Power Editor. This tool is near essential for running a Facebook ad campaign, and even though it’s a little daunting, you need to learn it. In the Power Editor, click the Audiences section, click to create an audience and select Custom Audience.

Here you can create an audience based on your website, your mobile app, a MailChip audience or a data file. The easiest to use is a data file, which you can get as an exported list of Facebook IDs or an email mailing list. Assuming you don’t use MailChimp, export your mailing list as a CSV and upload it here.

You can run an ad with just this audience, but you might also want to create a lookalike audience. This custom audience searches Facebook for people who look, demographically, like the people in the list you uploaded. This effectively multiplies your list with people who are very likely to be interested in your page.

To create an ad, first you need to create a Campaign. To do this, just click the Campaigns button and click to create a new campaign. Here, we’re going to assume you want to get your email subscribers and people like them to like your page. To do that, click the “Page Likes” objective for your campaign and set the buying type as Auction. Name the campaign whatever you would like, so long as it’s descriptive and memorable.

Within the campaign, you will need to create an ad set. Think of an ad set as the base from which all split-test ads are derived. If you’re creating a new base, you create a new ad set. If you want a different objective, you create a new campaign. Make sense?

Create the ad set and give it a name. Here, you’ll want to create two ad sets. The first should be something like “Email Audience” and the second can be “Lookalike Audience.” Set your budget and the date range for your ad to run. For maximum split-testability, set the same information for each set.

Within each ad set, you need to create your ads. Click to create an ad and specify which campaign and ad set it’s part of. Then follow the directions. You’ll want to set up your creative as well as you can, with a compelling image, good copy, etc. A lot goes into this, and it’s too much to cover here.

Under the audience tab, specify which audience you’re going for. Exclude people who are already fans, as they already like your page and won’t be able to convert. Optimize your pricing.

You can repeat and adjust the creative of each ad, and you can use a created ad as a template for a future ad, so be sure to make as many variations as you want to test. Just be sure you watch them in Insights in order to figure out which works best and focus on that given ad.

Once your ads are created, you’re free to set them loose. Facebook will review them and make sure they don’t violate any guidelines. Once approved, they’re free to be viewed and clicked by anyone in your audience.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Using Facebook’s Ad Manager appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

Saturday, March 21, 2015

Is Being Facebook Verified Only Possible for Celebrities?

Celebrities

People go absolutely wild for official verification. Twitter is a hotbed for it; anyone of significant enough stature can gain a Twitter verification. This has led to anyone who wants to be thought of as someone applying for verified status. It has also led to a proliferation of accounts who claim they will get you verified status, all you need to do is follow them and send them $5 or maybe just your login information. You know, totally legit-like. Really.

Facebook jumped on the verification train way back in the ancient age of 2013, when we were all younger and a little more invested in Facebook. A wide range of entities have been verified, from Coca-Cola and Mozilla to Justin Bieber and Barack Obama. Yet not everyone can be verified. One of the biggest names in SEO, Moz, isn’t. The Spider-Man movie is, but one of its stars, Kirsten Dunst, isn’t. Of course, her page hasn’t been active since 2012, which probably has something to do with it.

It seems really hit or miss, but it generally seems that the more famous your entity is, the more likely you are to get verification. It makes sense. After all, an imposter could fool a lot more people posing as Coke than posing as Dave from accounting. Specifically, Facebook says “Celebrities and public figures, global brands and businesses, and media entities” can be verified.

The Process

There are two ways to get yourself verified. One is the passive method, and one is the active method.

The passive method is actually a lot more work than it sounds, based on the name. You need to be famous, either as a nationally-recognized personage, entertainer, or media page. Big brands, global brands, hugely popular brands, individual rising star singers and actors, these sorts of entities catch the eye of Facebook.

So how do these people get their verification? Essentially, they are popular enough and recognized enough that Facebook looks at them and says “yup, you deserve verification.” It’s as simple as that. The brand or entity doesn’t need to do anything, they just wake up one day to an email telling them their account has been verified.

What about those of us who think we’re pretty famous, you know, in the right circles? Those of us who consider ourselves prominent personages in our industries, or who just want verification to stop potential impersonation problems? We’re left with the active method.

The active method requires a bit more work on our part than the passive method. The passive method involves being visible until Facebook takes notice. The active method requires that you be more proactive about things. You can’t wait for Facebook to find you, you have to send a petition to Facebook. Now, I don’t mean something on Change.org, no matter how many signatures you get. I mean via their own verification page. Here’s the general process:

Have a page with a significant number of followers. I’ve seen verified pages with as few as 82,000 followers, though there are probably verified pages with less.

Have a link to your official website on your Facebook page.

Make sure your About section is properly filled out with enough information to make sure the page is controlled by you. This probably includes accurate Name/Address/Phone number if applicable.

Visit this page. This is the contact form for submitting a verification request. If you have a Page that meets the standards required to be verified, it will show up under the “Page you’re requesting to verify” section. Otherwise, it will say “you have no eligible admined pages.”

Scan and attach images of your driver’s license, your passport, your birth certificate, or articles of incorporation for businesses. Also, include a link to your official website.

Wait.

After step 6, you have a lot of time on your hands. Facebook will slowly go through their verification queue and will eventually get back to you, probably to tell you that you don’t meet the standards necessary to receive verification. If you are verified, you’ll be notified via email.

Right now, Facebook claims that they are only accepting verification requests from pages that represent celebrities, public figures, sports teams, media entities and entertainment entities.

So, to the original question in the title, is verification only limited to celebrities? Not quite. Many celebrities aren’t verified. In fact, many only have Wikipedia-styled informational pages like this one. One assumes that these celebrities are not active on Facebook as a social media page, and Facebook has created these informational pages to avoid someone else running a fan page or impersonator and becoming the top search result.

Dealing With Impersonators

BIll Gates

One of the primary reasons to request verification is when you have to cope with impersonators harming your brand. This can happen to celebrities, small businesses, large businesses and everyone in between. Verification helps users know to trust the right account.

When you find out someone is impersonating you, it can be harmful. You might have to deal with the PR fallout of that account saying something racist, sexist, violent or threatening under your name. You might have to cope with them misleading your customers to their own competing business, or simply stealing their information. In every case, it’s a danger to your business, and you need to deal with it.

The process on Facebook to deal with an impersonator is through a report. You can visit the page in question and click the … icon in the corner of the cover photo. From there, report the account. It will ask you why you want to report it, so tell Facebook the account is impersonating you.

What constitutes impersonation? Technically, a completely unrelated page that just happens to use your logo as its cover photo can be considered impersonation. Facebook says any account that pretends to be you, uses your photos, lists a fake name or doesn’t represent a real person in the first place is a reportable account.

As an added bonus, if you have to deal with an impersonator, reporting them and getting them removed might result in your verification. Facebook would probably rather verify you than deal with impersonators constantly.

The post Is Being Facebook Verified Only Possible for Celebrities? appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

Friday, March 20, 2015

How to Generate Revenue From Your Facebook Fan Page

Most people these days simply refer to Facebook Fan Pages as simply Pages, and for a good reason; the era of their use primarily as pages for fan worship is long past. Today, Pages are used as marketing hubs and tools to build communities around certain brands, entities, events and media.

It’s entirely possible to make money from Facebook, though there are two different, non-exclusive ways to go about it. Which you choose depends on your goals, your resources and the nature of your business. You can even use them both, if you have several paths to monetization.

Step 1: Create a Page

Both the easiest and the hardest part of the whole process is properly creating your Page. Make sure you choose the proper classification; some types of pages are limited in what they can do and what they can display, while others have additional features specifically for that type of entity. Picking the wrong one will hamper you. Likewise, be careful in selecting the name you use. You can change your name and URL once, but it’s not easy; Facebook doesn’t want you to casually rebrand at the drop of a hat.

Take care when setting up your Page with all of the information you can fit in. This includes, primarily, you About section. The About section requires several sentences as a description of your business, a link to your main business page – essential if you ever hope to be verified, among other things – and your industry.

Your profile picture and cover photo are crucial as well. No one trusts a Page without a cover photo, for example. Your profile picture can be as simple as a recognizable shot of your logo, or you can jazz it up for a special event. It’s a good idea to change up these pictures every few months, as long as they stay recognizably branded.

Step 2: Build an Audience

When you’re first starting out, you can upload a mailing list if you have one, and Facebook will cross-check those emails with valid Facebook accounts. Any user who maintains a Facebook account with that email address will be given the option to like your page. You might want to hold off on doing this until you have some content on your page, though.

For content, you’re going to want to post and schedule several posts for the coming days. Ideally, you’ll post interesting industry content, content from your blog, content from other partner blogs and general interest content your users like. You might not know what works best yet, but time and study will reveal those secrets to you.

Once you have some content, you can upload your mailing list. You can also employ other techniques for growing your page, including running paid ads if you have the budget to do so.

Step 3: Funnel the Audience to a Monetized Page

This is the first of the two options you have to monetize your Facebook Page, and it’s not entirely just monetizing Facebook. See, the primary purpose of this method is to funnel people away from Facebook and on to pages where people can actually earn you money.

See, you can’t just run affiliate ads on Facebook. They don’t even really like affiliate links, though you can get away with those in organic posts. So, instead, you lead people off-site and on to your own website, blog, or storefront.

You can do this through ads and you can do this through posting content on your site and linking to it on Facebook. In fact, you should be doing both. Every person who visits your site from Facebook is a possible conversion.

You can’t really use optimized landing pages in organic posts. Facebook doesn’t like organic posts being dominated by such advertising. They’ll deliver a hit to your organic reach and make it harder for your other messages to make it through. Ads, however, can and should always link to an optimized landing page.

Once the users have left Facebook and landed on your website, you have all the flexibility and power of SEO and conversion rate optimization available to use.

Step 4: Create a Facebook App Store

The second option available is to run a store directly on Facebook. If you do this, you can potentially eliminate off-site marketing entirely. It’s not as effective as having your own store – people prefer to shop off Facebook, and you lose the presence of a good blog – but it’s perfectly acceptable.

There are a number of services you can use to set up a store in a tab app, including Shopify. The idea is that the service will create and host a storefront for you, and Facebook will become the portal to that store.

Note that such a store is in a tab app, which is somewhat limited in use on Facebook. You have one space in the top bar for your store to be labeled, but it’s not a fancy graphical label like tabs used to be. The graphical label is on the left sidebar some ways down the page. It’s not a lot, so you have to put a little extra effort into linking directly to your shop at every opportunity, so people know where to find it.

Step 5: Engage, Maintain, Grow

Once you have the path to monetization set up, everything else is about maintenance and growth. You have to grow your fan base, which you can do by posting compelling content and running advertisements that ask for page likes. You have to engage those users so they keep seeing your posts and thus are continually exposed to the idea of your business, leading them to like you more and potentially convert. And, of course, you have to maintain your store and your sales funnel so that you never miss sales due to a broken line of code or a missing product.

Your bread and butter with this process is going to be Insights. Study your Facebook insights and learn your audience. Cater your messages and your products to their needs and desires. Get them where they want it, and they’ll give you money to do so.

The post How to Generate Revenue From Your Facebook Fan Page appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Facebook Alert About Fake Likes Being Removed: Now What?

Likes Dropping

Earlier this month, Facebook rolled out a new like counting algorithm that has many Facebook page admins beside themselves with worry. Many business owners logged in to find a particular message on their page home. “We Remove Some Fake Likes” they say. “We recently protected your Page against fake likes to make sure your audience remains authentic.”

Message

In other words, Facebook drops your like count because they have removed likes from your pages. There are three particular reasons why a person’s like may be removed, and while they don’t all fall under the heading of “fake”, they all trigger the banner.

Reason #1: Removing Fake Accounts

This is the most common trigger, though it often happens in waves. When Facebook pulls a fake fan purge, it often makes headlines, like this one from 2012. Facebook also has a low-volume constant scan for fake accounts to remove, but the big purges are the ones that are really noticeable as a page owner.

Reason #2: Deactivated Accounts

This one makes sense. When an account is deactivated, it’s still there, ready and waiting for the user to come back. Users can come back and reactivate their account, or they can put it in the queue to be deleted permanently.

A deactivated account doesn’t lose its likes. How would a user feel if they had a bunch of pages they liked, only to find that list purged when they returned from their Facebook vacation? But from the business perspective, keeping those likes is detrimental. A deactivated user can’t see and respond to posts or messages.

Facebook has already been filtering comments made by accounts that have been deactivated. This helps businesses avoid wasting time responding to comments that can’t become conversations.

Reason #3: Deceased Users

When someone who has a Facebook page dies, there are a few options that can be taken. The page can be ignored, as many people do when Facebook isn’t a central part of their life. They can have the page deleted or deactivated, if they know the login information and can click the right buttons. Finally, they can memorialize the account. This action require providing Facebook with contact information and an obituary, and it prevents identity theft or vicious trolling that can be harmful to friends and family of the deceased.

Like a deactivated account, a memorialized account isn’t valuable from a business perspective. The user can’t engage with brand posts, and seeing them doesn’t do any good. Therefore, Facebook is taking action to remove them from business reckoning.

Who is Hit Hardest

Likes removed

How can you tell if your business is at risk of having a significant number of likes removed? Well, in this specific update, with the deceased and deactivated account removal, small businesses aren’t as likely to be affected. In general, the older your page is, the more likes you will have from accounts that have since been deactivated.

At the same time, if your fan base is generally older, or your target audience is older, you have a higher risk of people dying. That’s not to trivialize the deaths of younger Facebook members, but a page for a senior citizen’s home is more likely to lose followers due to death than a kid’s clothing store.

Of course, if you’ve purchased fake likes from a shady seller on Fiverr or something, you’re at a much higher risk of a significant number of your followers disappearing whenever Facebook rolls out a new update or purges a bunch of fake fans.

Don’t Be Worried

If you logged into your page and saw this message about lost fans, don’t worry. Chances are it was just the removal of a few shut down or memorialized accounts. You shouldn’t see a serious dip at all. Most businesses will see a hardly noticeable shift, maybe a dozen or so accounts, maybe even less. Some businesses won’t be hit at all.

Facebook’s removal of fake likes, meanwhile, is a benefit to your business. For one thing, it’s really hard to remove them yourself. In some cases, if you want to remove more than a handful of fakes, you have to get into weird code exploits and near-hacks of the Facebook code. It’s far more effort than it’s worth.

Facebook removing the accounts for you is a great thing, because you probably couldn’t remove those accounts on your own, and they’re hurting your engagement rates and your viral reach.

This will, in the short term, likely increase your organic reach. Your posts will reach more real, active users than before, leading to more exposure, more likes, more shares, more comments and more visibility. There’s just one caveat; this doesn’t affect Facebook’s ongoing slow decline in organic reach. While your short term reach will increase, you’ll likely see it return to its decline over the next several months.

Looking Forward

What should you do moving forward?

First, don’t worry about the hit if it hasn’t happened. Facebook primarily rolled out this update on March 12^th. If your likes haven’t decreased yet, they won’t until Facebook does another major purge. At least, no more than normal fluctuations.

Second, don’t buy fake likes. Use high quality like sellers or run advertisements yourself, as both result in targeted real people rather than clickfarm fakes.

Third, don’t worry about trying to minimize the number of deactivated and memorialized accounts. You can’t exactly tell people not to die, can you? Unless you’re a company selling safety equipment. Then maybe if you boost your product’s popularity, you can help with the problem. As for deactivated accounts, most are deactivated for reasons outside of anything your brand can control. Just do what you can to get people on your mailing lists rather than on Facebook; that way you’ll have a connection even if they delete their account.

Beyond that, there’s nothing you should do differently than normal Facebook marketing advice. Post good content, curate good content, use visual content, and so forth. The better your pge, the more you will grow.

The post Facebook Alert About Fake Likes Being Removed: Now What? appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

7 Things to Know Before Making a Facebook Business Page

Facebook has a rocky history with business. For a while it was ignored, then it became the new paradise for businesses marketing. Saturation made it hard to break into, and it was rife with scams. It settled down, and businesses settled with it, but it has been growing increasingly hostile to those looking for a free ride. Businesses looking to get into it now have a lot to learn before they have a chance at success.

1. It’s Not Free

You can set up a Facebook page, upload pictures, post, target posts and interact with your customers for free, but it’s growing increasingly difficult to succeed using only free methods. Part of this is Facebook’s problem with advertising outside of the ad platform. Specifically, they hate it when you write and publish posts that involve advertorial language or calls to action, and consequently those sorts of posts are receiving much less visibility than other organic posts.

In order to be truly successful on Facebook, you need to go into it with a budget. Even if that budget is just $1 per day, it’s enough to fuel a basic level of production within the ads manager. If you have the money for a larger budget, you’ll see that much more in terms of returns.

There are two ways to spend money on Facebook for valuable returns. The first is through their PPC ads, specifically sidebar ads. These can be very potent, but only if you’re targeting the people who already follow you. Typically, it’s a lot harder to reach people who aren’t your followers.

The other form of paid promotion is in news feed ads or promoted posts. These are organic posts that you pay to promote, not through the boost posts button, but through the ads manager. It’s a bit daunting if you haven’t done it before, given the proliferation of options to set, but it’s well worth the time getting to know the system. Use the Power Editor; it’ll save you a lot of time.

2. It Takes Time

Facebook is not a platform you can adopt one day and see immediate returns. It takes a significant amount of time and energy to set it up, get it rolling, build momentum, test ads, run posts and build a schedule. It can take even longer for all of that effort to begin to show returns. While your PPC might show you an immediate ROI, you have to be cautious not to dig into it too deep to the exclusion of the organic side of your page.

Many businesses fail with Facebook marketing because they’re trying to get into it quickly and don’t have the willpower, time or budget to keep it up without getting something back. Assume that it will take at least a full year of use before you get a Facebook page up to a level where it will begin to provide such returns. You might be able to do it in a much shorter amount of time, but always prepare for the worst.

3. It’s Easy to Make Mistakes

Mistake

Social media is a realm characterized by two things; immediate reactions and an inability to ever take anything back. Once you make a post, that post is on the public record forever. If you make a gaffe, chances are that gaffe is going to show up in some social media fails compilation online somewhere within the next few months. If you can handle it tactfully, you can come out of it with your ego bruised but your business unscathed. If you handle it poorly, you can suffer an immediate and permanent loss of reputation and business, not to mention having it thrown in your face constantly as an example of what not to do.

Just in case you think I’m kidding, just take a look at a few of these compilations. Any business, large or small, can fall victim to social media arrogance, bad timing or a poor understanding of their own reputation.

4. It’s a Lot of Work

If you haven’t grasped this by now, you might need to rethink the entire reason you want to get on Facebook. What do you need to do to go from nothing to a successful page?

Well, you start by creating the page, with the right URL and name. You move on to filling out all of the information fields available, complete with accurate information you keep up to date, with an eye for SEO keywords besides. You need to make clever and interesting cover pictures and profile images to upload, possibly with several variations for the future. You need to start writing posts and scheduling them, as many as 2-3 per day, up to several months in advance, leaving room for more timely updates in between. You need to start measuring which posts perform and which don’t, and analyzing their content.

Speaking of analysis, you need to be watching your competitors and seeing what they’re doing. You also need to be watching your industry and curating plenty of content, because no one wants to follow your page when it’s just your own stuff. Meanwhile, you need to be taking what you know of your audience and using it to target your posts and your advertising, you need to be engaging with those fans, you need to be advertising your Facebook page off-site, and so much more. It adds up; don’t underestimate it.

5. You Need to Track Goals

Facebook’s Insights are incredibly valuable once you establish a baseline and monitor them, but that means you need to, well, do that. Insights are critical in learning about your audience, their posting habits, and their demographics. They’re also essential for learning which posts you made perform well, which perform poorly, what types of content do the best, and when you should post for the best effect.

Before you can measure success, you need to have established goals, and you need to know what you need to measure to monitor whether or not you have achieved those goals. It’s all familiar if you’re experienced with conversion tracking, but many businesses seem to forget that Facebook needs to be tracked just as much as any other marketing channel.

6. It Works Best When Used Constantly

The number one killer of new Facebook pages is an inconsistent posting schedule. If a user is interested in your page, they follow it. They expect, then, to see updates from your page on a regular basis. If they aren’t seeing those updates, they aren’t engaging with your page. If they aren’t engaging with your page, they’ll be shown fewer and fewer of your updates, until they see nothing at all. As simply as that, you lose out on all of your organic reach. This forces you to pay more and more just to be seen, on those occasions when you do post.

7. You Need to Know Your Audience

Everything you do on Facebook centers around growing your audience, holding their attention, engaging them in conversation and getting them to like your brand a little bit more than they did before they saw your post. It’s not even about getting them to click through to your website. Think about it more as reputation management than direct advertising.

You can’t do any of that if you don’t know your audience. Learn who they are, learn what they like, learn where they live, learn how to captivate them, and you can learn how to get them to convert. Learn nothing, and you might as well just stand in the NYC subways and hold a sign.

The post 7 Things to Know Before Making a Facebook Business Page appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

The Ultimate Guide to Marketing with Facebook Video Cards

Way back in November, Facebook introduced what they called Say Thanks. The idea is pretty simple; one person wants to say thank you to another person, so they use Facebook’s little automated video creator to make a short video and send it over. It’s a personal message in video form, something a little more personal and a little more touching than a text post or picture message.

All of this goes hand-in-hand with Facebook’s driving intent to, apparently, dominate the world of video. They’re already trying to surpass YouTube in terms of views and video shares. Why not make it easier for users to make videos, as well?

How it Works

How it works

The Say Thanks feature is pretty easy to use. It starts by visiting the Thanks URL, found here. You can probably click that link and learn about all you need to know, but just in case you don’t want to, here’s what you do:

Select a friend from your friends list. This will automatically begin the customization process for their video template. It begins with circles showing your and their profile pictures with a “hey <friend name>” message. You can click the video image to preview it right there.

Choose a theme. For the moment, it looks like Facebook only has three themes available; Old Friends, Friends, and Family. Go ahead and preview each of them to see which fits best.

Pick pictures and posts that have some association with both you and your chosen friend. Facebook’s algorithm to choose these is somewhat suspect, largely relying on tags and other commonalities. You can pick up to 15 photos – including pictures you upload specifically for the video – and a single text post.

Preview the video. It has some music, it has a slideshow of your pictures and your chosen text post, and it has some basic messages to splice them up.

Share the video. It’s posted on your timeline, with your friend automatically tagged. It’s visible for all to see, unless you limit the visibility of the post, just like you an any other post on Facebook. You can also customize the post that goes along with the video.

According to Facebook, the Say Thanks feature is most used amongst users in Brazil, with the United States and Mexico coming in second and third. Millions of these videos have been made, and as yet their impact in business is largely unused.

Personal Messages in Business

For Business

At first glance, it looks like the Say Thanks feature is designed – and pretty limited – to be personal. The messages it sends are designed to be a one to one message of gratitude, and to come from a business directed at another person seems a little out of place. Well, fortunately, you can use them for business if you apply a little creativity.

Here’s an idea; use them to say thanks for a job well done. This isn’t a business-to-customer message. It’s more of a manager-to-employee message. When an employee goes out of their way, above and beyond the call of duty, to do something that benefits the department or the company as a whole, they deserve recognition. One way to give that recognition in this era of tight deadlines and overwhelming workloads is to create a customized thank you video and share it with them. It’s a simple gesture.

Ideally, the pictures you use for the video will be pictures of the event or project they helped make a success. This is particularly useful for public events they helped organize. If no such pictures exist or are suitable for a public video, you can upload various “thanks” and “well done” appreciation images. Just don’t make it too impersonal, and definitely don’t re-use the same set of images for multiple videos to different people.

Another idea; say goodbye to an employee when they leave or retire. This, of course, has to be a parting of voluntary nature and with goodwill between the employee and the company. A valued tech leaving for greener pastures might be deserving. A 20-year veteran retiring to spend time with family certainly does. A guy from accounting who got fired certainly would not.

You can use the friend or close friend template, depending on their relationship with their department. Fill it with group pictures from their time in the office, and special farewell pictures taken for the purpose. The more personal the better. The key here is the post that accompanies the video; explain the purpose and wish them well on their way.

Client and Customer Satisfaction

Client Satisfaction

Making a Facebook video to praise your employees is one thing, but you can also use the Say Thanks system to offer gratitude to customers and clients. It’s best used in a sort of B2B manner, though. Facebook doesn’t like businesses directly messaging customers; the kind of solicitation that reeks of spam would undermine the entire purpose of the Thanks program.

You can, for example, thank a prominent freelancer you’ve been working with for some time with a customized Facebook Thanks. You might not have much in the way of personal images to show, but you can showcase some of the better work they did for you. You can also turn the video into a bit of a recommendation with a “highly recommended” text post or image splashed in.

As an added bonus, you can tell the freelancer that they can use that video in conjunction with using you as a reference, if they need a reference for picking up future clients.

The Friend Debate

There’s one question you need answered before you can make moves like this, and it comes down to the etiquette of friending employees or clients on Facebook. Facebook is primarily used – personal account to personal account – as a means for friends and family to keep in touch and socialize. Despite what we marketers would like, it’s purpose as an advertising platform is secondary.

There’s already a lot of debate over whether or not employers should friend employees. On one hand, in a positive environment, it’s no different than coworkers becoming friends. On the other hand, in a less positive of downright hostile environment, it puts pressure and stress on the employee and can be seen as a sort of business stalking.

Between clients, businesses friending each other works just fine. It’s not much different from using LinkedIn for professional networking. You only run into issues if you then use “private” Facebook information for negative effects in your working relationship.

If you’re friends with your clients or employees, you can certainly make use of the Say Thanks features. If you’re not, I wouldn’t go out of my way to use them.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Marketing with Facebook Video Cards appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

Monday, March 16, 2015

20 Ways You Can Spot a Fake Fan on Facebook

Fake Facebook Account

Fake Facebook fans are an endemic problem with the platform, and there’s not a lot any of us can do about it. We can monitor the new users who follow our page, and we can remove them if they look like fake fans, but other than that, it’s all down to Facebook’s enforcement. Facebook even makes it exceptionally hard to go through your entire fan list, making it completely impossible for larger brands. On top of that, there’s no app or API call you can make to scan your fans and remove the fake followers.

How can you identify fake followers? Unfortunately, all you can do is check through the lists Facebook makes available. You’ll be able to refresh the list for a while, up until you see a few hundred of your fans, but that’s it. Even brands with millions of fans are limited, so it’s generally impossible to go through all your followers. Still, whenever you get an influx of followers, it’s worth giving them a look to make sure they’re legitimate. Here are warning signs that a follower might be fake.

Picture Problems

Picture problems

These are the problems you can spot relating to pictures, the most graphical indications of a fake follower.

There’s No Picture. The most low-effort fake users don’t use their accounts at all for anything beyond liking posts and pages. They won’t have any pictures uploaded, so they’ll just have the generic “new user” silhouette in their profile picture spot.

The Picture is Generic and Shared Elsewhere. In this case, you have suspicions that the user is fake, but they have a picture. Save that picture and run it through Tineye or Google’s Search by Image. If there are a wide range of matches, with the picture posted elsewhere, you may have a fake fan on hand.

The Picture is Not Human. Fake followers might be hip to these methods of detection and may use unique pictures. However, they can’t use real pictures of themselves, because they likely have dozens of accounts to manage. Therefore, they use pictures of animals, cartoons, quotes or otherwise non-human images. In and of itself, this isn’t too bad, but if it’s coupled with other warning signs, the follower may be fake.

They Have No Cover Photo. Cover photos are an important part of individuality on Facebook, and while some people don’t use them, fake followers often forget that they exist. This is also a problem with old fake accounts that existed before cover photos were introduced, and never added one.

The Picture is a Female Model. Studies have shown that fake followers are female 97% of the time. This is very likely because they want to accumulate friends, and strangers are more likely to friend a cute female than some dude they don’t know.

Their Pictures have Tons of Tags. Another aspect of that fake follower study shows that fake fans tend to tag a ton of people in their pictures, as many as 35 tags per picture, which is blatantly excessive.

Account Problems

Bot

These are the problems you can spot by looking at a user’s account and its activity. You can often spot the signs of a fake fan this way, though be aware of the difference between a fake fan and a fan with their privacy settings locked down.

The Account has No Activity. Fake followers don’t do anything other than add people as friends and follow business pages. There’s no reason to do anything else when they’re just setting up the account to sell.

The Account has Tons of Likes. This is by far the most damning piece of evidence. If an account has thousands of liked pages, they’re very likely fake. No normal person likes that many pages. Heck, I’d have a hard time thinking of that many brands, let alone that many I like.

The Account is Exceptionally New. Very, very few people are going to create an account just to like your page. Those that do are doing it just because of a contest you’re running, so if you’re not running a contest, give that account a second look.

The Account has No Information Posted. Blank accounts are bad accounts. In general, even if a real person is behind it, it’s not doing you any good because it’s not active and it looks fake.

User Information Problems

fake location

These are the problems that relate to the user, their set information, their location and other telltale signs. This can help you spot real users who just aren’t valuable to you, as well as fake followers.

The User Location is a Clickfarm Country. Clickfarm countries include Bangladesh, India, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia and other such areas. Developing nations and third world countries, mostly.

The User Location is Odd. Some clickfarms operate within the United States as well. If a business only serves people in Arizona, a bunch of followers coming from Maine aren’t very useful.

The User Doesn’t Engage with Brand Posts. This one is bad whether or not the user is fake. Fake fans don’t bother to engage with your posts, or the posts of anyone else they like or are friends with, so they aren’t valuable to your business.

The User Fits a Fake Profile Demographic. Female, young, beautiful, likes thousands of pages, has thousands of friends, never posts, lives outside of the country; all the warning signs together make a fake fan.

The User Doesn’t Fit Audience Demographics. As a business, you should know the demographics of your typical users. Fake fans won’t fall into those demographics, so at least you can exclude them from custom audiences.

The User Posts Advertising Messages. Sometimes fake fans are sold to advertisers or accept money to broadcast advertising messages.

Brand Problems

Fake Fans

These are the problems you see at a macro scale, which can help identify if a brand is buying fake followers or accumulating them en masse, rather than the occasional fake here and there.

Their Twitter is Full of Fake Fans Too. Unlike Facebook, you can use tools on Twitter to scan your profile for fake followers. A brand buying fans on one platform is probably buying them on both.

They Suffer in Fake Fan Purges. Periodically, Facebook will go through and purge fake accounts. If a business sees significant follower loss after one of those purges, they probably still have fake followers lingering.

Their Fan Growth is Exceptional for No Reason. An explosion of fans after a contest is normal. A surge for no reason, tied to no marketing, is a sign of purchased fans.

The Fan Numbers are Exceptionally High. A small business in a small town with tens of thousands of followers looks a little sketchy. Always use a bit of common sense in these instances.

The post 20 Ways You Can Spot a Fake Fan on Facebook appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

Sunday, March 15, 2015

A List of Businesses and Websites Facebook Ads Won’t Allow

Denied

I’m going to get one thing out of the way right off the bat; I can’t give you a full list of all businesses and website URLs blocked from using Facebook’s ad program. The reason for that is two-fold. First, it’s a huge list. Just imagine trying to list out every website Google has removed from the search index for being a spammer, and you get some idea. Second, it’s always changing. Changes in policy and changes in guidelines put formerly good businesses in the doghouse, while changes in action from the business side result in a business being blocked.

That said, what I can give you is a rundown of what is typically blocked and why. Here’s a hint: it’s almost all for violations in advertising guidelines.

Dating Sites

Dating

This is a big one, and it was the talk of the marketing world for the first couple months of the year.

There are hundreds of dating sites out there, ranging from the big eHarmony and Match.com giants to the much smaller businesses. Facebook’s advertising guidelines have this to say about dating sites:

Ads for adult friend finders or dating sites with a sexual emphasis are not permitted.

Ads for other online dating services are only allowed with prior authorization from Facebook, and must adhere to specific rules.

What are those specific rules?

Images may not be provocative, imply nudity, be sexually suggestive, show excessive cleavage or skin, or be otherwise inappropriate.

Images cannot be blurry or pixilated.

Images cannot be selfies.

You cannot target users with a relationship status other than Single or Unspecified.

You must set gender targeting to men or women, not both or another option.

You must set age targeting to 18+.

Additional language factors are involved as well, including no vulgarity or profanity, no misrepresentation of the company or the service, no spam formatting or grammar, and no direct references to users.

This results in a very limited number of dating sites that can advertise on Facebook. Unfortunately for small dating services, this generally works out to the old, long-established giants. No small new services are getting in. Additionally, any service promising a “mail order bride” is allowed.

Illegal Services

A second category of companies blocked from advertising on Facebook includes various illegal services.

The biggest iteration of this right now is the marijuana industry. Several states across the nation have been legalizing various forms of pot, but Facebook – as well as Google, Twitter and other sites – is blocking those businesses from running advertising.

There’s a good reason for this, of course. Even if a state legalizes the drug, there are still issues with federal enforcement. Because Facebook is a global company, it has to obey national, global and regional laws, as well as anything in between. It’s simply easier for Facebook to block all mentions of the drug from their ads program than it is to try to restrict those ads to geographic areas that legalizes it. That, and there’s always the chance that the federal government could get involved and make things difficult for everyone.

This, of course, extends to other illegal services. Any illegal or controlled substance, and in fact just about any pharmaceutical at all, is blocked from using Facebook ads. Pharmacy spam is one of the most common forms of spam, and Facebook doesn’t want to open the floodgates.

Likewise, businesses selling illegal services are blocked. You won’t be able to advertise your bittorrent tracker, regardless of the supposed legality of the content on it. You won’t be able to advertise your shop selling guns of any sort, up to and including bb guns or paintball guns. You can’t sell alcohols that are banned, foods that are banned or services that break laws. No dog fighting, no paid assassinations, nothing like that.

Conditionally Restricted Content

Denied

There are a lot of businesses and services that, while not outright blocked from the program, have to jump through a lot of hoops to get their ads approved.

Adult products are heavily restricted. No pornography of any kind is allowed, and ads for any adult product cannot show nudity, adult toys, or suggestive activities. Sexual wellness products and contraceptives can get a pass, as long as the ad passes acceptable language and image guidelines.

Alcohol is heavily restricted and limited. You can’t advertise it to people under the age of legality in a given geographic area. You can’t target it towards pregnant women or new mothers. You can’t negatively portray sobriety or abstinence from alcohol. You can’t glorify drunkenness or intoxication. You can’t tie alcohol to violence. You can see the full list here.

Financial services are somewhat restricted. Payday loans and shady lending services are blocked, as are misrepresentations of financial services. Gambling services are very restricted, with anything involving actual money more heavily restricted than “for fun” gambling apps.

Fitness and health ads aren’t as heavily restricted, but you still can’t make finite claims or use before-and-after comparison pictures.

Tobacco is subject to national laws regarding the advertisement of tobacco products, which generally amounts to “you can’t.”

You can’t promote the sale of spy cams or surveillance equipment, though you can promote private detectives.

Facebook will also review every ad on a case by case basis, though breaking a guideline with a specific ad won’t get your business blocked from the ads service entirely, unless your business is trying to sell something that’s otherwise blocked by the guidelines.

There are a number of other niche businesses Facebook doesn’t like, though the list is always changing. Clickfarm services or services trying to sell meaningless Facebook metrics or fake followers are blocked, for example.

If your ads are flagged as spam, or if your business receives too many spam flags, Facebook will come in and review your business as well. This can occasionally lead to a block from ads, or a ban from Facebook as a whole. Most of the time, it just removes the given ad or post that was flagged.

The post A List of Businesses and Websites Facebook Ads Won’t Allow appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

How Send Money Works

The Subtle Details

Send Money as a Payment Processor

Money and Messaging

Saturday, March 28, 2015

Events for Business

Setting Up an Event

Types of RSVP

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Static Multi-Product Ads

The Benefits of Multi-Product Ads

Where Dynamic Ads Live

Creating and Using a Dynamic Ad

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Video Tutorial

How to Embed Facebook Videos on Your Website

Considerations Before Embedding Facebook Videos

Pro Tip

Takeaway

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Wednesday, March 25, 2015

How is People Talking About This Calculated?

PTAT Vs Engagement

Boosting PTAT

Sunday, March 22, 2015

Ad Types

Ad Objectives

Targeting Options

An Example Guide

Saturday, March 21, 2015

The Process

Dealing With Impersonators

Friday, March 20, 2015

Step 1: Create a Page

Step 2: Build an Audience

Step 3: Funnel the Audience to a Monetized Page

Step 4: Create a Facebook App Store

Step 5: Engage, Maintain, Grow

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Reason #1: Removing Fake Accounts

Reason #2: Deactivated Accounts

Reason #3: Deceased Users

Who is Hit Hardest

Don’t Be Worried

Looking Forward

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

1. It’s Not Free

2. It Takes Time

3. It’s Easy to Make Mistakes

4. It’s a Lot of Work

5. You Need to Track Goals

6. It Works Best When Used Constantly

7. You Need to Know Your Audience

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

How it Works

Personal Messages in Business

Client and Customer Satisfaction

The Friend Debate

Monday, March 16, 2015

Picture Problems

Account Problems

User Information Problems

Brand Problems

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Dating Sites

What are those specific rules?

Illegal Services

Conditionally Restricted Content

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