I hear you! Anyone with in business at the moment is looking for results first. In other words, anything that is mainly about hype and no positive track records will be considered with a serious grain of salt. The Same applies to the marketing darling of the times: Social Media Marketing.It takes time to wade through all the literature on how to make Facebook and your other social media platforms work for you...For FREE. As you will know though, unless you have someone doing it full time, and very well, your efforts to get more fans may be only rewarded by minimal momentum gain! So is FREE really FREE? Ask those who have outsourced their social media presence and have nothing to show for it.
So once again why not go back to a few basics?
Here are my 5 tips for today:
- Building your social media Audience When FREE doesn't truly mean FREE, look at the real costs of social advertising. Facebook advertising is a good example. Just try it. You will soon notice that most social media advertising for local businesses is dirt cheap and provides much better results, if not in sales, at least in interaction and positive engagement. Let's face it, even if they are not going to become customers right away, it's much better to have someone click "like" through your ad than trying to get the same result through posting 3 times a day on various fan pages and groups, running the ongoing risk of being tarred as a spamer. So don't waste too much time trying to build an illusive audience, get them to come to you...
- Targeting and Analysing When you do facebook advertising, try "split testing". Facebook advertising has such a variety of ways you can target your audience and gives you such good ad statistics that you can use it as a testing ground and market survey even before you even tackle other forms of [more expensive] advertising. Once you know what has worked for you, repeat it on a larger scale and again measure your results.
- When The Social Media Conversation Becomes Worthwhile. Don' t get me wrong, once you have built a good audience through your effective advertising, including catchy headlines, relevant calls to action and intriguing ways to divert your prospects' attention, you are now in a position where it is crucial to give you fans good reasons for visiting your page again. This is where all the tricks you have been taught on facebook interaction become relevant...quizzes, good pictures, talking about today in history, posting videos etc...Now you can build the all important "Know, Like, Trust" that forms the basis of all business relationships.
- How Does It Compare With Traditional Advertising? Once you have tried a few Facebook ads you will know exactly what I am referring to. A quick calculation willl show you very quickly that the results and the market research you can achieve through Facebook advertising would cost you thousands of dollars on traditional media like newspapers and radio. But again the traditional ways are not dead, you can use them to reinforce what you are doing in social media.
- Use Apps For Viral Effect. It is well known now that Facebook is very powerful in the way it can spread the word virally. The concept is that when someonce clicks on your event, your ad, or puts a like on your page, their best friends will see that on their newsfeed, hence the word is spreading! However there are ways you can use that viral spread in an even more powerful manner. A way that has seen this local page in a small New Zealand Town gain 200 likes in 10 days, and lots of sales!
All for now...
