Archive for facebook page
11 Checks to Ensure Your Facebook Page is Up-to-Date
How Your Business Can Use the New Facebook Cover Photos
9 Ways to Become a Better Facebook Community Manager
How to Set Up a Facebook Page for Business
6 Facebook Metrics Marketers Should Be Measuring
5 Tips to Enhance Your Facebook Graph Search Ranking
How to Optimize Your Facebook Page for Facebook Graph Search
8 Ways to Discover Valuable Social Media Content
Do you struggle to find good content to post on LinkedIn, Twitter or your Facebook page?
Would you like to find reliable sources of content your fans and followers love?
This article contains eight tips to help you quickly find great content.
Why Share Other People’s Content?
It’s all about becoming a valuable resource. When you can dig up great articles your audience is interested in–regardless of the source–you’ll become more respected and your content will be widely shared.
And when you have some of your own content to share, people will be more likely to help spread the word.
Here’s where to find valuable content:
#1: Watch Large News Sites
Depending on your industry, you may find topical and interesting articles on large news sites such as USA Today, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. If you have a news site or magazine for your niche that provides industry news, make sure you have that bookmarked as part of your content.
The Huffington Post has a lot of different categories to draw your content from.
Dive into the different categories and subcategories available on the Huffington Post to watch for content.
#2: Watch News Aggregators
If you want to make content sourcing a little easier, use a news aggregator website or tool. Certain sites do a great job of bringing in the latest news and sorting it by industry or niche all in one place.
Stuff To Tweet has some of the most popular posts on different sites including CNN, YouTube and more. Yes, it does mention tweeting, but these articles are good for Facebook, too.
View some of the popular posts on several sites at once.
Popurls is another similar site that has a few more sites listed. You can also customize the results if you sign up for an account.
Alltop is another news aggregator where you can customize your results. The topics are organized by topic alphabetically and by site.
Find topics listed alphabetically or by site.
Inbound also uses categories to help organize their content. They tend to be more online-related topics.
Inbound also uses categories.
If you like receiving an email with aggregated news, SmartBrief may be a good fit for you. They include a variety of industries and send you an email with the popular news.
SmartBrief sends the news stories to your email address.
#3: Pay Attention to Popular Posts
You can also see things that are trending and popular on some of the other social media sites and share them to Facebook.
LinkedIn today has some great features such as Trending in Your Network, which is a natural filter if you are connected to a lot of people in your niche.
LinkedIn today has generally trending articles and also Trending in Your Network.
You can also see what’s trending on Twitter even if you don’t have a Twitter account. Just go to any Twitter account (such as www.twitter.com/smexaminer) and look on the left side to see the hot topics.
See the trending topics on Twitter from any Twitter account.
Notice that you can switch the trends by clicking the Change link and selecting a certain region to get more localized results. Are these trending topics always the best things to share on Facebook? Maybe not, but they can be relevant.
You may be better off just using Twitter Search and plug in some of your niche keywords to find some good articles to share on Facebook.
You can narrow your scope to see what is trending on Twitter in your region.
#4: Have Go-to Sources to Share
Many times you know which other Facebook Pages consistently have good content and valuable posts. They may be in your industry or they may be a complement to your business so your audience will also be interested in their content.
There are a few different ways to watch their Facebook posts. One is to like their Page as your Page and then watch your Page news feed. This makes it easy to share their posts when you see them in your news feed.
Another way to easily monitor other Pages is to create an Interest List of all of the Pages on your personal profile and periodically monitor that feed.
You can make this Interest List public so other people can follow it, or you can make it private so only you know who is on it.
Mari Smith made a public list of Facebook Experts and it’s followed by almost 30,000 people!
Use an Interest List to generate a separate feed of your go-to sources for content.
When you have the Interest List on your personal profile, sharing it to your Facebook Page is not hard. Just select the Share button and then switch the selection to On your Page. Then make sure the right Page is selected and the post will be shared by your Page.
Easily share content from your Facebook Interest Lists to your Page.
You can find public lists that other people have created by going to Facebook Add List (this is the same URL you use to create your own list). They first show you some of the lists that your friends have created or may be on and then they sort the popular lists by topic.
Find other lists to follow or create your own list.
#5: Use Google Reader and Google Alerts
If you have several (or even several hundred) blogs you enjoy reading that provide great content, use Google Reader to access them all from one place. You can easily see the latest posts or just click on the particular blog in the left sidebar to see some of their latest posts.
Google Reader gives you a dashboard for all of your best content sources so you can see which ones have new posts rather than checking on each individual site. You can sign up here.
Use Google Reader as a dashboard for all of your content sources.
Google Alerts are another great way to monitor the web for fresh content. Google Alerts use the latest relevant Google results and send them as an aggregated set of stories to your email address.
You can use keywords related to your niche and have a set of fresh posts brought to your email inbox every day.
You can sign up here for Google Alerts. If you find that your keywords aren’t bringing the right content in, you can always delete the alert by clicking “Manage your alerts” in the lower-left corner.
Having your company name as an alert is also useful to watch for any new mentions of your company on the web.
Try adding a few Google Alerts to bring fresh content into your email inbox.
#6: Look for Funny Posts
People are typically on social media to have fun and be social. Even if you’re a more serious brand, don’t forget to lighten up every once in a while with a humorous post. Humor can be difficult and you always run the risk of offending someone, so be careful.
George Takei posts a lot of humor (but not all posts are appropriate for a business Page).
Sometimes you can create your own funny posts using sites like Quickmeme or Someecards.
Or you can find sites that post a lot of funny content such as Know Your Meme or Cheezburger.
Just make sure you know the rules of the sites and understand how you can share their content so you don’t have any problems with copyrights.
#7: Create Your Own Images
Images are still getting a lot of engagement on Facebook. They continue to get a lot of comments, likes and shares even if they don’t have the same reach as a text post.
Images take up more space in the news feed and 0are generally more interesting than a plain text post.
But what if you don’t have many pictures to share? You can find images to illustrate a point at sites like iStockphoto or 123RF (you can’t just find images on Google and upload them to Facebook).
If you would like to find free images, you can use the Creative Commons area on Flickr or stock.xchng (make sure you read the guidelines on giving proper attribution).
You can also use Compfight to help you search for photos that you can use. You can use the Commercial hotlink to see which ones are for business use (again, make sure you read about proper attribution).
Use Compfight to find images you can use.
If you want to add your own text to the photo to illustrate a point or add some special effects to make the picture more interesting, use an online editing tool like PicMonkey or iPiccy.
Special quotes are popular things to share on Facebook, but you can use these tools to turn the quote into something more visual. Of course if you’re well-versed in something like Photoshop, creating an image to use is a breeze.
You may also have an occasion to take a screenshot and edit it. This technique works really well if you’re teaching something about websites or computers.
At Social Media Examiner, we frequently have “Hot Tip Tuesday” where we share a hot tip from one of the social sites.
Use a screenshot tool to create a picture that helps your audience do something.
Use a screenshot tool such as Jing or Snagit to help you easily create and edit screenshots.
#8: Monitor Your Stats
Finally, make sure you watch what works with your audience.
Dive into your Facebook Insights and sort the posts you have by Engaged Users. The Engaged Users stats include the number of unique users who have clicked on your posts, which can include people clicking on the photo or link, liking the post, commenting or sharing your post.
Notice what types of posts your audience responds to and post more of those.
Sort your posts by Engaged Users to see what interests your audience.
Hopefully this gives you a running start to find more awesome content that your audience will love.
Once you get some of your favorite content creators in place, don’t forget to continue to monitor the web for new sources of great content. And make sure you work in plenty of your own original content!
What about you? Where are you finding your best content to share on Facebook? Let us know in the comments below.
5 Facebook Ad Tips to Maximize Your Facebook Campaigns
Have you tried the new Facebook Ads interface?
Are you interested in getting more bang for your buck when it comes to advertising?
This article will show you five ways to enhance your Facebook Ads.
What Changed Within Facebook Ads?
If you’ve been running Facebook Ads over the past year, you may be confused by some of the new options and the new layout of the Ads area. You may have felt like you had a good handle on everything if you read our previous post about Facebook Ads.
But of course, this is Facebook, and the only constant with Facebook is change. Let’s dive into some of the new changes with the Facebook Ads platform so that you can fully maximize your next Facebook Ad campaign.
The first step is to choose what you want to advertise. You can choose an external URL or a Facebook Page, App or Event. This step has not changed much from the previous iterations of the Facebook Ads interface.
First decide what to advertise.
You’ll notice your first difference if you choose to advertise your Facebook Page, Event or App.
#1: You Have New Choices
One big change with the new Facebook Ads layout is the choice of objectives.
Your new choices when advertising your Facebook Page.
The changes are as follows.
- Get More Page Likes. With this selection, you’re advertising your Page and trying to grow your Likes. You can write your own ad copy, but the title of the ad is still unchangeable as the title of your Facebook Page. If your Page name is too long, the ad will only show the first 25 characters of your Page name. (More on this in a bit.)
- Promote Page Posts. This option was previously under the “Sponsored Story” section of Facebook Ads. This is a way to advertise one of your recent posts and the ad is prewritten for you. This type of ad still appears on the right side of Facebook Ads, as shown in the preview, and it appears in the News Feed where people can interact with the post itself right from the ad. A word of caution on this type of ad: You will get charged for a click if someone likes the post that you’re advertising. They don’t have to like your Page to like the post and they may even think that they are liking your Page by liking the post. So make sure you’re using this option wisely. But one thing I like about the Promote Page Posts selection is that you can select a post that had a photo and get a “bonus” photo in your ad.
If you advertise a page post with a photo, you will have your profile photo and the post photo in your ad.
- See Advanced Options. Selecting this option allows you to have more flexibility in the bidding on your ad. If you select this option, you still have the same options of choosing to advertise your Page or a page post, and you will have to make those selections initially. The main difference here is in how you want to bid for your ad.
Only the Bidding options change with the See Advanced Options selection.
Also note that when you choose to advertise your Facebook Page, you can change the landing view so that when users click on your ad to see more information, you can direct them to a particular tab on your Page.
#2: Sponsored Stories Are Automatically Selected When Advertising Your Facebook Page, Event or App
Be very cautious about this next step, because it is one of the major changes with Facebook Ads.
Facebook auto-selects the Sponsored Stories choice for any ad that advertises something on Facebook, such as a Page, an Event or an App. Facebook says, “No increase in budget is required.” But that is a little misleading.
What that statement means is if you are spending $10/day on your ad, then Facebook will also run your Sponsored Story within that $10/day budget, but will still charge you when someone clicks on that Sponsored Story.
So now you may have $5/day going toward the Sponsored Story and $5/day going to the ad you intended and that has the copy you want.
Notice that Sponsored Stories is on by default.
Now this may not be a bad thing if you’re truly looking to increase your likes. Remember that Sponsored Stories are the ones that go into the News Feed (and they are shown on the right side also), where more people notice them.
The Facebook Ad I ran recently that included the Sponsored Story Ad performed very well. When you look at the data, the Sponsored Story looks like it had a 100% conversion rate (Actions to Clicks), versus the Facebook Ad that had an 80% conversion rate of Actions to Clicks.
The conversion on the Sponsored Story looks better than the ad.
But make sure you dig a little deeper into these numbers. When you expand each of these ads (notice how each of the ads has a different line item in your reports), you see more information.
You find that while the Actions were high on the Sponsored Story, they didn’t all result in an actual Page like. Some users just liked the post, some commented on it and some shared it.
Dig deeper into the Facebook Ad stats.
In this case, the Ad conversion now becomes 80% for the Sponsored Story and 77% conversion for the regular ad (74 likes from 96 clicks). The Sponsored Story still outperformed the ad in this case, but make sure you watch your numbers!
And do your own testing on Facebook Ads—you may find that your Page and your ads perform differently. Remember you can deselect the Sponsored Story if you do not want to create a Sponsored Story with your ad.
#3: Click See Advanced Options to Only Advertise a Sponsored Story
Another change with the new layout is that it’s more challenging to advertise just a Sponsored Story about people Liking your Page. To do so, click See Advanced Options, then Remove the Ad itself to leave just the Sponsored Story behind.
Click the See Advanced Options selection and Remove the Ad.
#4: Know Your Bidding Options
Bidding has not changed that much, but it is definitely something you should understand. When you choose to advertise something you have on Facebook such as your Page, Event or App, and you select the first radio button (Get More Likes, Increase Attendance, or Get New Users, respectively), then Facebook does your bidding for you. They optimize your ad with the CPM (cost per mille, which is cost per 1000 impressions) model.
If you choose the basic pricing model, Facebook optimizes your bid for you.
You can switch to the Advanced Pricing either here in the Campaign and Budget window or by choosing to See Advanced Options as mentioned in #1. If you choose the Advanced Pricing option, you can then use the CPC (cost per click) model, as well as set your own bids for the CPM model.
Switch to Advanced Pricing to set your own bids with either the CPM or CPC models.
#5: Use the URL of Your Facebook Page to Edit the Title of Your Ad
This isn’t a brand-new trick in Facebook Ads, but it’s one that seems to work sporadically. Luckily with the new Facebook Ads interface, this trick seems to be more available.
If you enter the URL of your Facebook Page, rather than select your Facebook Page from the drop-down menu, you can then edit the headline.
Use the URL of your Facebook Page to modify your headline.
The Choose your Audience section of Facebook Ads still works the same way as before and is great for reaching your perfect customer.
Hopefully these tips have helped you stay on top of some of the changes in Facebook Ads and maybe even given you some new ideas on how you can leverage Facebook Ads.
How about you? What have you found to be working with your Facebook Ad campaigns? How frequently are you using Facebook Ads? Share your experience with us in the comments section below.
