Tag Archives: Facebook

Facebook Advertising Secrets

Posted on by May 2, 2013
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4-13-five-tips-for-facebook-imagesHow to Use Facebook Ads to Gather Leads and Sales

Facebook ads are among the fastest, easiest and most effective do-it-yourself platforms for getting traffic to your offers, building prospect lists, and for practically any other objective imaginable for your website. Ad campaigns are extremely simple to set up, include excellent targeting tools, and can be online in minutes. There is one factor to understand, however, when it comes to obtaining the best results and return on investment: That is finding the most effective images available. It has been shown that imagery is 70-89 percent of the success or failure of a Facebook ad campaign. Let’s have a look at some useful tips for obtaining the most from your Facebook ad images.

5 Great Image Tips for Facebook Ads

Creating an ad that produces a real impact and statement for your product or services is a matter of standing out from the rest. Listed below are five ways to do just that!

  1. Use very high quality stock images – As your images will end up very small, be sure you’re purchasing from a reputable resource. Fotolia and iStockPhoto are two of our faves. The XS size of available images will undoubtedly be fine, as even these are going to be cut down to the size of a postage stamp (110×80 pixels).
  2. Crop to deliver impact – Crop your photos closely to focus on the key aspect of your ad. Cropping faces from the eyes to mouth is the most impactful technique for riveting people images. Also, be sure that your model’s eyes have life. Whenever using product images, get close!
  3. Choose eye-catching colors – Using bright, visually arresting images is going to do wonders for your click-thru rates. Too many people opt to blend in with the pervasive Facebook blue, and thus consign their ads to a form of “banner blindness”.
  4. Choose attractive images – Unless you are going for a certain statement, choose the most attractive photos you can find. People are attracted to beauty. Period. This is not to say that sometimes beauty can’t be trumped by cute, funny or outrageous.
  5. Use humor whenever you can – All of us love a good laugh. If you have the opportunity to inject humor into your ad, don’t miss it! It will undoubtedly result in a higher clickthrough rate!

For some terrific illustrations of these ad-image principles in action, check out this great article at Search Engine Watch.

Top 7 Ways to Delight and Engage your Facebook Fans

Posted on by March 19, 2013
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You have a Facebook page. You have some fans. Nicely done. Now, like the smart business you are, you’re looking for some proven ways to engage your followers so you can acquire more of them and make the most of your presence on Facebook.

Engaging your fans is a critical piece to building and maintaining a long-lasting relationships on Facebook—and offline! Here are a few timeless strategies that local businesses are using with great results.

1. Spread the Love

Tell your fans how much you appreciate them. Tell ‘em often!

Thanking your fans for their questions, complimenting them on their comments, highlighting their success stories—these things go a looong, long way in social media. Many smart businesses on Facebook run a ‘Fan of the Month’ promotion to encourage and reward engagement.

This is really savvy way to make people feel good about themselves and your business while also capitalizing on the power of social proof.

2. Offer Coupons and Run Promotions

Discounts, coupons, special offers … your followers will NEVER get tired of opportunities to save money and get more value from their purchases. Pro tip: If you want to run a promotion for a specific geographic location, use the Custom menu when you’re posting to target your followers in a certain area.

3. Share Your Knowledge

You run a business. You have special knowledge and insight. You can help people. So share! People are always grateful for information that makes their lives easier or more fulfilling. Sharing helpful tips is some of the best engagement around.

It also helps you take advantage of the reciprocity principle: do something nice for someone, they’ll feel bound to return the favor.

4. Issue a Challenge

We humans are deeply competitive by nature and simply cannot resist a challenge, an opportunity to show the world that we’re pretty darn smart. Test your fans’ knowledge using fun quizzes and polls. Trivia, brain teasers, riddles … you’ll have your followers eating out of your hand by day’s end, trust me.

5. Take Photos of Your Happy Customers

Don’t hire a professional photographer. Just start snapping photos with your cellphone and post them to Facebook. You will be amazed—truly—at how people respond. Data collected by social media expert Dan Zarrella shows that photos get more shares and likes than text, video and link updates. This also a great social-proof strategy: other folks will see people enjoying your products/services and they’ll want to join the party, so to speak.

6. Ask for Advice

The highest compliment a business can pay to its customers is to ask for their input. If you own a pizza parlour, ask your fans to come up with a new pizza recipe! Or let them name your new product. Make it a contest! Solicit ideas and then let your fans vote for their favorite.

7. Use Insights to See What’s Working

Here’s the beauty of Facebook: you can see what’s working and what’s not. Just export your Facebook Insights data to an Excel spreadsheet to a get quick, clear look at which status updates performed best, what kind of media your audience responds to and what’s driving engagement.

Improve Your Facebook Page

Posted on by March 12, 2013
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Make Your Facebook Page Come to Life

Curious about how you can improve your Facebook page quickly and easily? There are lots of ways to do this, but to help you get off to a flying start we’ll limit ourselves to just eight for the moment. These methods will not only help you get more visibility in Google, but in addition lay the foundation for better customer relationships that result in greater loyalty, which has obvious and numerous benefits.

  1. Commit to Facebook – Facebook takes some effort, plus a bit of time. Many marketers who have set up a Facebook page for their business subsequently abandon it, this makes a statement about their company. Make a rock-solid commitment to post updates and content regularly, and to engage with those people who are following you. Otherwise, it’s a waste of time.
  2. Lose the Facebook-generated URL – Make sure you get a custom URL for your Facebook page. This will help greatly with search engine optimization (SEO)  or anyone trying to find you.
  3. Don’t Auto-Post Your Tweets – Twitter is great, but don’t make the mistake of reposting the exact same tweets onto your Facebook page. Make sure you post fresh content, not warmed-over stuff from somewhere else.
  4. Keep Updates Short and Sweet – Short is in these days. Short content, short videos, short stacks. (No wait, that was breakfast …) There is a time for longer posts, but generally make an effort to keep them reasonably short – less than 150 characters.
  5. Deliver Lots of Awesome Content – Creating content that people can use and are talking about will always be the #1 mission for your page.
  6. Engage with Your Audience – Encourage discussion, post great photos and shareable content, hold contests, ask questions, anything to get the conversation going!
  7. Be Responsive – Take complaints seriously, and be proactive responding to anyone who asks questions. You’ll be able to head off a lot of trouble this way.
  8. Post Photos – According to Facebook, posts that include a photo album, picture or video generate about 180%, 120% and 100% more engagement than text-only updates, respectively.

Using these tips will give you a terrific head start toward making your Facebook page a subject of conversation!