Plus how one post got a reach of over 400%
There's not a lot that Facebook offers brands for free any more but here's a little known technique that might just net you a few new fans without having to shell out any advertising spend.
Most reasonably popular posts on a brand's Facebook Page end up surfacing occasionally on the newsfeed of non fans - normally in the form of a notification that a friend has liked or commented on the post. With a really popular post you'll often find a domino effect whereby you pick up Likes to the post from the non fan too. What a fantastic opportunity to convert to fandom. But how to do it?
It's actually pretty simple. Take the post below. Now we have just over 10,500 fans on the Musicademy Facebook Page but I'd picked up on a news story that I knew would appeal…
Plus a clever Facebook cover image trick
With ever lowering Facebook reach, fan acquisition on Facebook is increasingly less of a desirable goal. Yet I do believe that the platform still has a major role to play for many brands, not least because of the ubiquity of the platform, but also for its simply awesome targeting potential.
Savvy brands are using the platform to acquire new potential customers, but not necessarily as fans, instead they are using Facebook's wealth of advertising opportunities to data capture email addresses for their own databases.
Page admins have moaned long and hard about decreasing reach - how hard it is to reach fans which many have paid to acquire. With the end of like gating and further algorithm changes afoot in January (Facebook will drastically reduce the reach of Pages that have a tendency to post promotional content with limited "context"), it is most certainly time to…
Facebook plans to filter out "promotional posts" in the News Feed from businesses and brands from January 2015
Importance: [rating=5]
Recommended Link: Facebook announcement: Facebook's overly promotional page posts in News Feed
Getting your brand status updates to reach your fans is becoming more of a challenge as Dan Bosomworth recently noted in this post on techniques to increase organic reach in Facebook.
This new change which Facebook say is due to research where their Fans told them that were looking for more personalised posts in their News Feed from friends and 'those they cared about', with less promotional content. Their alert says:
'What we discovered is that a lot of the content people see as too promotional is posts from Pages they like, rather than ads', according to Facebook.
Of course the cynics amongst you will think this might have something to do…
Will 'Facebook at Work' reduce the power of LinkedIn?
Importance: [rating=5]
Recommended link: Facebook at Work
This is an interesting development, particularly for B2B marketers, but also for all of us who use LinkedIn to progress our careers and seek jobs!
The development has not been widely reported other than in an FT.com article from 16th November which described the forthcoming new service like this:
"Facebook is secretly working on a new website called “Facebook at Work”...
The Silicon Valley company is developing a new product designed to allow users to chat with colleagues, connect with professional contacts and collaborate over documents, competing with Google Drive and Microsoft Office, according to people familiar with the matter.
The new site will look very much like Facebook – with a newsfeed and groups – but will allow users to keep their personal profile…
What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Facebook's new ad network?
Importance: [rating=1] Current importance to small, mid-size businesses.
Value: [rating=4] for larger businesses and brands.
Recommended link: Facebook Atlas announcement
What is Facebook Atlas?
1. Atlas is not a new service
There has been a lot of hype around Facebook's recent re-launch of Atlas which you may know as an ad-serving product which has been used for managing display campaigns by large media companies for many years. Facebook purchased the Atlas ad server from Microsoft in early 2013 and are building it into their ad offering.
2. Atlas will offer targeting based on Facebook profile information and remarketing across publisher sites
Atlas will enable targeting of audiences on publisher sites based on their Facebook demographics and interests. Remarketing or retargeting should also be possible - this is an established approach by brands to offer people reminders about products or services. It's unclear…
Changes to how you share photos, clickbait and likegating on Facebook
Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Facebook announcement on algorithm updates
Given the amount of traffic that Facebook drives to sites, any significant changes to Facebook’s algorithm are now big news in the way that Google’s algorithm updates have been for years. So in our alerts we look to update readers on all the major changes made by Facebook. This data on visits prompted by shares of articles via social networks shows that Facebook is far more important for driving visits than other social networks across all sites, although this may be different for B2B sites.
The major change to the Facebook algorithm announced this week has two main parts: a Clickbait filter and a change to processing of links related to status updates. While most commentary on the changes has focused on Clickbait, this…
Why and how marketers must respond to the decline in organic reach
There are many articles talking about the demise of Facebook, articles like this on Forbes discussing the decline of organic rearch. Other research suggests growth in users is strong, albeit from new markets. At the same time, Facebook is demanding that we now ‘pay to play’, no more organic reach - at least not reliably for those cheap contests and product-led posts brands seem to love so much - this is resulting in fellow whining marketers like these guys bemoaning the gifted “free” ride that we’ve had for the last free years. But hasn’t it always been this way, haven’t we had to evolve with this change from Google too as they led the search engine charge that marketers were so keen to follow, a case of déjà vu?
Remember how…
New report reveals the effectiveness of different Facebook retargeting options
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Facebook ad research
With the continued decline in organic reach in Facebook, opportunities for brands to get visibility for their brand page status updates is getting severely limited.
According to this Social@Ogilvy report, the organic reach of brands’ posts may soon reach zero, meaning that brands will no longer be able to reach their Facebook fans at zero cost. They recommend advertising as one option, which begs the question of the clickthrough rates and costs of Facebook ads. This new report from Facebook retargeting service AdRoll provides useful data for brands to make the case for investment in Facebook advertising.
The research shows that overall clickthrough rates of both News Feed targeting on desktop and mobile were significantly better than general web retargeting according to the report, with desktop…
Are Facebook Admins not paying enough attention to the data behind their Reach figures?
I've been digging down a little deeper into Facebook Insights of late trying to get a handle on the organic reach issue with the current incarnation of the algorithm. I had this theory that whilst a lot of Page Admins were breezily talking about how their reach had not been throttled in recent months and were still regularly reaching over 50% of fans, that in fact they were reading their data wrongly.
I've watched really popular posts of mine in recent months and a cursory look at the Insights data does indeed suggest that some posts are reaching an awful lot of people. Here's our top performing Facebook post of recent months (it used to drag an image through but I imagine the original link author has since removed it).
…
A handy guide to the size specs and range of ads available on Facebook
If like the rest of us you are continually flummoxed by the myriad of ad types on Facebook, let alone the idea size dimensions for mobile, desktop newsfeed and right-hand side, help is at hand.
The nice people over at Facebook For Business have given us permission to publish their Facebook Ads Product Guide. You can download it here totally free-of-charge.
>> Download the Facebook_Ads_Product_Guide <<
You'll find other guides online but most are pre-April 2014 when lots of changes were made.
The aim of this guide is to introduce you to the various ad types available but also give advice on how best to drive awareness and engagement whether by video, image, offer or plain old message.
It will show you the ad types for driving clicks to your website, driving people…
