Q & A with Abagail & Emylee: All Things Facebook
Episode 090: Show Notes
Today on the podcast we are doing Q&A style episode, but can you guess what the theme is? Yeah, that’s right — Facebook! We asked in the group for y’all to send us your questions about Facebook strategy and being successful on the platform. Now that we kinda know a thing or two, we feel that we can answer your questions and make sure you guys are on a good solid foundation and that your Facebook game is strong. We are jumping right in, so keep listening if you would like to know more about Facebook and how to use it as a tool in your business.
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Facebook For Business? How?
Facebook is an overwhelming platform with so many hidden doors and secret things, you might wonder, “Why would Facebook work for me? How would it work for my business?” Well, we’ve felt like that too! But Facebook has worked for us in many different ways, so we’ll break it down for you. You have your Facebook page for your business, and then you have your Facebook group, which are two different things. Our Facebook group has been very beneficial to us in sales, in engagement, in audience growth and in getting to know our people better. It’s a separate feature, not connected with our page whatsoever, that has helped us grow an audience. Our Facebook page can be looked at in two different ways — we have the content that we’re sharing to the page on the daily, and we have our page as we use it during a launch. You have to ask yourself which area you want to focus on first. None of the answers are wrong; you just have to choose one of the channels to pour your energy into or it can get really overwhelming.
How Can I Use Facebook As a Marketing and Networking Strategy?
Sharing engaging content and getting people excited as well as actively posting on your Facebook business page is probably the most basic you can get. Facebook ultimately rewards people who keep audiences on the platform. Facebook also often tends to reward video content, specifically live video content, more than anything else. If you don't have an ad budget at this point, consider having some sort of consistent Facebook Live presence on your Facebook page to start getting out there. That’s a marketing and networking strategy. Using Facebook as a marketing strategy means getting people aware of what you’re doing, selling the experience and letting people in behind the scenes. The networking side of it means engaging with those people. You’re going to be showing up in all kinds of people’s feeds, including some people who are doing similar things to you. They may want to work with you or collaborate. Pick your path, using groups as marketing and your page for networking. Even if you don't have an ad budget, choosing to be present on Facebook is going to do more for you than not being there.
What to Post On Facebook?
Make time for blogging if you want to use it as a strategy for your business. If you don't have time to post then you need to make time to create content to post. We suggest you start everything as a blog post and push it out from there, and you choose to push it in different ways. Facebook prefers you to keep people on their platform, and they also prefer you to post natively from the platform. This means not pushing your Instagram posts and not automatically setting your RSS to post your blog post to Facebook, but posting something authentically inside the platform. If you’re trying to figure out what to say, how to say it and how to interact on a different social media platform, we always suggest that you ask yourself who in your audience is on that platform and how are they using it. Make sure your engagement, your content and your questions are geared around how people use that platform.
If You Queue Rotating Posts, is There a Number of Posts You Should Try to Reach to Schedule on a Per Day Basis?
Well, the answer to this is: it depends. Ultimately, everyone in every type of business is going to have different results. Different audiences are going to enjoy different things. You might have success posting twice, or you might do better posting 5 times — it’s a matter of testing and seeing what works and where people are engaging. You might notice that certain people like certain types of content more than others. Having stuff queued up sounds great and it’s what we do. What we’re finding is that Facebook is smart and it knows when you’re just recycling content for the sake of recycling content. So if it’s just the same stuff over and over again, even if there are days or weeks in between, Facebook knows that and it’s not going to prioritize it because it doesn't see it as valuable content. Instead of scheduling a lot of stuff, take the time to natively post a more engaging and social message. If you have any hesitation, go lower. You don't need to have a crazy number of posts to be successful. Facebook posts are lasting longer than they used to because of the way the algorithm changed, so your posts can last days or weeks or months depending on the engagement of it.
If Video is Not Your Thing, What Else Can You Do?
If you really do not feel comfortable with the usual style of video, you can do video in other ways. Video is still being rewarded, so we would urge you to try it but maybe in a different format. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a video of your face. You could do a moving graphic with just words and have music playing, you could have a small clip of your product or you could do an unboxing and show what your product looks like in the packaging and then what it looks like when it arrives on your doorstep. We also love testimonial shares, especially during a launch. People really love that and you can ask clients and customers of your own if they feel comfortable getting on video to do a quick blurb on their results, thoughts, feelings about you or whatever it is you’re offering, and posting those to Facebook. You can still use static images, just know that you won't be getting the same results.
How Many Ads Are You Typically Starting Out With, and Are 2/3 of Them Video?
What we found worked for us, and this is going to be different for everybody, is that we would send one video ad about a free thing. We would run that same video ad for about a week to cold and warm audiences to get as many sign-ups as we could for the free thing. Inside that free thing, at the end of a challenge, at the end of a webinar or whatever it might be, we would open the door to the paid thing. On that day we would do another video ad about the paid thing. We generally keep our carts open for 7 days, sometimes a little longer. While that video ad is running we usually also turn on or turn off (depending on how they do) 1-3 testimonial video ads and potentially a video ad about the cart closing. In the past, we've only done a cart closing as a graphic ad, so it’s just text and graphic without a video component. This could be different for you depending on what you’re offering.
How do You Reach Cold and Warm Audiences?
There is no difference in how you should approach cold and warm audiences. You really just brainstorm who you want to target and create those audiences, then who your warm audience is and create those audiences, and then send the ad to both of those people. You just determine this based off the amount that you want to be getting — a good conversion rate. Your rates will change depending on the products you are selling. If your product is high-end and you’re spending $5 on a lead but it’s a $10 000 program, who cares? Keep it in line with the price of what you’re selling them and how much its costing to get them to buy the thing. Generally, as long as what you’re selling costs more than what you’re spending, then you’re good. It’s a balance on the return of investment. If you spent a dollar and you make two, that’s awesome!
How do You Pick Your Audiences?
Our favorite trick to do this is to open up Facebook, click on the search bar, and type in “people who like” and put it in any page name you think your audience follows. It’s going to show you a list of profiles, and if you click on the little arrow on the right-hand side of their name it’s going to drop down and say you can view their friends, their profile and their interests. Click on “interests” and you’ll see all the other pages that that person likes. You need to pay attention to ways in which you can target this person. Do that for about 5-10 people, and you’ll get a list of 50 different audiences. Then you go into the Power Editor and say what you want to target and if they pop up, great, you can target their audience. If they don’t pop up, you can’t target them. Don’t make the mistake of targeting all your audiences in the same ad.
Quote This
Video performs way better than pictures or graphics.
Highlights
How does Facebook get used for business? [0:02:38.2]
What’s the best way to use Facebook as a marketing and networking strategy? [0:06:05.4]
What to post on Facebook that is different and unique? [0:08:07.1]
If you queue rotating posts, is there a number of posts you should try to reach to schedule on a per day basis? [0:09:34.1]
If video is not your thing, what else can you do? [0:13:30.6]
How many ads are you typically starting out with, and are 2/3 of them video? [0:21:04.8]
Tips for reaching cold and warm audiences. [0:27:45.8]
How to pick your audiences. [0:29:17.8]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
Facebook for business, Marketing and networking strategy, What to post, Rotating posts, Posting frequency, Ads, Reaching cold and warm audiences, How to pick audiences
