FB Page Marketing

Hi, my name is Alex Copeland and I work with Richard Fairbairn and the online success model team and this is our course on Facebook Marketing; ‘Facebook page marketing.’

One of the most obvious ways to market on Facebook is to set up a fan page for your business, your brand or your cause. Facebook actively promotes this feature of its website, but what it doesn’t tell you is the fact that Facebook has been actively modifying their algorithm to the point that you’re going to have to have very popular content for you to reach most of the people who have expressed interest in whatever it is you’re promoting.

Put simply not all the people who like your page will get to see your updates. In fact in most cases only a small fraction of those people will get to see them. Sadly, Facebook is actively working to limit the free traffic exposure you get. That is until you can prove that your content is really popular with your pages fans. So here are some steps you should follow to market on Facebook to make this happen.

• Step One: Find Your Competitors On Facebook

The first thing you need to do is to avoid reinventing the wheel, there’s no need. You need to avoid trying to figure things out on a completely hit or miss basis instead reverse engineer your competitors. Let them do your homework for you. How do you do this? Simple, just follow them on Facebook and learn from what they’re doing.

• Step Two: Get The Industry Standard Look And Then Come Up With Your Own Take On It.

Every niche has an industry standard in terms of social media profiles, brand appearance and content strategy. The sooner you understand this, the sooner you will be able to achieve social media marketing success on Facebook. The longer it takes you to learn this, the longer you will struggle. What you need to understand is that your niche audience has to become familiar with how certain brands and websites are positioned on social media. If they can’t make heads or tails of your social media brand then they may not like your page because it seems too weird to them and too far from the industry standard. Your job at this step is to figure out the industry standard look, content strategy and other elements and come up with your own take. By using this as a basis you’re going to be recognized much easier by potential fan.

• Step Three: Reverse Engineer Your Competitors’ Content Strategy And Curate

Lots of business owners would post hot content on their social media accounts as well as on their blogs. But sadly, 9 times out of 10 the content goes nowhere, people don’t click on it, they don’t comment, they don’t share it or otherwise engage. The reason for this is these publishers are basically gambling their content would resonate with the audience. This is something you don’t want to do, so instead pay attention to what your competitors are doing and look for the patterns.

If you notice your competitors keep showing content regarding the same type of theme or topic then they may be on to something otherwise why would they waste all this time putting out that. The effort and energy it takes to talk about the same stuff over and over doesn’t make sense unless of course it connects to the audience at some level or another and produces results for them. But how do you verify this?

Well, to do this you need to look at how many times that piece of content got shared or liked. That should give you some sort of proof that this content actually resonates with your target audience members. When you reverse engineer your competitors you’re certainly making a strategy to reach the same people that they’re trying to reach. This is also true with content curation. This is when you take content that has been published by other people and you promote your own social media platform.

This method creates a win-win situation because you are ripping off their content, you’re copying the original content link, and you’re including a short commentary and allowing people to click on the link. This means that they get traffic from it as well not only to the original publishers of the content get traffic but they can also build credibility because you’re showing the information to your audience which is telling them that you think it’s good.

You’re sharing something because your members will be interested in it and this means that they will look at the original content maker as well. This also leaves the possibility that the people on their pages will like your page. Once you build up enough page likes you can then start showing your own content which leads to direct traffic to your website.

• Step Four: Finding The Best Performing And The Most Popular Type Of Content And Scaling Up

To do this you should post contents for a few weeks and then look at the content that got the most engagement to see what sort of materials that get the most likes shares and comments. Once you have this information you can start to ignore the other types of content and focus on the ones that perform the best. This means you’re not putting wasted effort into things that just don’t work. For example, if you have a Facebook page all about dogs and you notice the content or articles on dog houses get the most shares, likes and comments then you might want to eliminate most other types of content and focus on these dog house ones because those get the most love from your audience so they deserve the most work.

• Step Five: Coming Up With Your Own Version

You may well know what people are like but you should definitely come up with your own version of winning content. For example, if we talk about the doghouses again, we know they get a lot of love and are very popular on your page so you should come up with more articles around that topic. Whereas, before you’re using someone else’s articles these are yours so these articles can drive traffic directly to your blog or your online store.

It’s very important to note that they have the same level of quality as your third-party content or ideally even better. Pay attention to how you’re really popular content talks about the topic and adopt the same style, but deliver something exactly a little bit more. Maybe you can offer longer information or more up to date information or maybe add multimedia elements like videos and graphics. In a nutshell, you basically have to come with content that blows away all the other content that you feature on your page.

• Step Six: Promotions: Photo Tagging By Your Users.

There’s a free promotion technique where you tell your page fans you’re going to get them some sort of digital freebie, maybe it’s some sort of bash to say they joined they’ll maybe mention in a post, maybe you’ll even give them a free eBook or some sort of free software. Whatever it might be that you’re giving away, tell the people who like your page to tag their friends on photos you’re going to post in order to get it. The photos you use must of course be relevant; they must draw attention to your brand, your website or your Facebook page. You’re not just having them tag a random photo, this photo has to say something and it should be promotional in nature. The more photo tags you get the more chance you’ll get a lot of new page likes and also clicks to your website from Facebook.

Now the best news, you don’t have to offer any money or cash incentive. In fact studies have indicated that money offers are not all that effective. So most people don’t believe they’re going to get it and it’s much better to offer some sort of special graphics or digital gifts as we mentioned or maybe even a discount code because people are happy to sign up for this online.

• Step Seven: Promotions: Comments By Your Users

This is kind of the same concept to step six with the photos, but instead of photo tagging you get your friends to post comments. This also helps tremendously if you get them to tag friends in these comments as well. I’ll leave it up to you on how to craft this, but obviously the more tags that are in the comments and the more engaging the comments the more popular they will be.

• Step Eight: Call Your Users To Action

If you’ve got people who’ve already liked your page then post occasional reminders to them that they should invite their friends. This works because of the old adage birds of a feather flock together. Seriously the main reason why you’re friends with people in the first place is because they show the same set of interests you share. People who share basically the same pool of interest tend to attract each other. Use this to your advantage by getting your page friends to invite their friends.

• Step Nine: Use Insights To Promote Your Page.

As much as possible I would suggest going through step one to eight and master all of these before going ahead with this step nine and that’s because this one cost some money. In this one we’re going to use money to promote our page. After a couple of months you can use Facebook very robust audience profiling system called ‘Insights’ to promote your page. The reason to wait this time is because then you will know the right demographic and you will also know the right sort of post and content to promote to get the best out of it.

• Step Number 10: Boost Your Most Popular Content

You can use Facebook’s audience look-alike system to find people who are not currently fans of your page. This feature is in Facebook’s Ads system and it enables you to reach new audiences who show roughly the same interest as the people who have already demonstrated their interest in your page by like it.

Basically using Facebook very powerful interest targeting system in terms of demographics and interests will help you get new eye boost to your page that are already interested in the sort of thing you have to offer. This can be more likes which can lead to more readers of your content which in turn will lead to more clicks and more conversions. From this point you can then targeted Ads.