How I Grew Our Facebook Likes by 6400% Posted on February 3, 2016June 28, 2016 by Jessica Lunk The mysteries of Facebook. Would you believe (assuming you don’t remember) that this powerhouse of global sharing technology which has overrun our very existence has only been around since 2004? Just eleven years into its history, Facebook is ranked as the number two most visited website in the world, with 1.44 billion active users each month. Alexa, an internet ranking website, says that Google is the only web page with more hits. Facebook is a juggernaut of marketing power that anyone can use. What was started as a photo and information sharing site among college friends, has also quickly turned into an important advertising tools for all businesses. It’s the best way for a smaller business to connect with their customers on a daily or weekly basis. As Facebook grows, they find more ways to keep their users active and engaged with the platform. Your job is to get in front of the right people with your Facebook page by providing relevant, quality content. You also want to stand out against everything you are competing with on the Facebook algorithm – it’s not just your competitors you should pay attention to. So how do you figure out how to create the perfect Facebook audience, reach more prospects and attract more customers to your business? When I first started Hatchbuck, we had 174 Page Likes. Now, we have over 11k followers. Here are the steps I took to grow Hatchbuck’s Facebook Likes by 6400%: Target The Right Demographic You find pockets of people everywhere on Facebook that react and respond to content they see in their News Feed. To ensure you find the right audience for the content you are producing, you must start developing your buyer personas. You can find all kinds of people so creating specific buyer personas becomes important in order to increase ROI. You’ll want to effectively engage a small portion of these users instead of trying to reach them all. Start with the demographics of your customer base and the demographics of you best customer. As a business owner, you know the difference between a great customer and one that sucks your resources dry. It’s key to pay attention to your promoters. Then, do some research on them. See what they like and dislike about your product. What features are their favorite? Why did they choose you over your competitors? You may also want to get some psychograpic data on them. What are your customers interested in? Is there a common theme? For instance, if your ideal customer is an HR professional who is a middle-aged woman, maybe there is a strong possibility that she also loves music. This is very useful data to know because that’s how you can connect with your ideal audience. The Strategy As you know, Facebook has cracked the whip on organic reach, making it harder for small businesses to get in front of their Facebook audience. By using some marketing spend effectively each month on Facebook Ads will help you get in front of the right people, so you can grow an engaged audience. Start with your content strategy. You want to be providing relevant, quality content for your ideal audience. You can stand out from your competitors and start to develop your place in your sphere as a thought leader. You may need some freelance help getting started or a marketing partner. A strong, content marketing strategy is a long term investment but it gets the ball rolling for more visitors to your site, increased brand awareness and recall, and higher engagement from your audience. Get those Likes. Pump your Facebook Ad budget into a Likes campaign. Play with their audience builder, A|B test ad copy and creative, and start seeing what works for your business. You can set something up and let it run for a while before making adjustments to your audience. If you find a sweet spot with the right ads and audience, increase your spend to get the most out of that pocket. I’m always adjusting and testing new audiences on Facebook and I tailor the messaging to that audience. Once you start seeing the stream of relevant likes come in, the more excited you will become about your Facebook strategy. Be sure to keep your targeting in the United States or even try your city and community if you are more locally based. The key is to get the most ROI out of your marketing spend and you don’t want to boil the ocean with your online ads. Now Boost! Once you have a decent sized audience built, start pulling back from your Likes campaign and adjust it to the quality content you have started to produce. It’s good to have this buffer time so you can start to develop the right type of content for you and your business. You can start to see how often you need to post on your blog. We try to post once a day on the Hatchbuck blog! While this strategy may be overkill for your audience, still consider challenging yourself with more content. The more quality content you can share, the more reach you will have. Feature a blog post on your Facebook page with a boosted post. The reason you want to have an audience built up is so that you can target these boosted posts directly to your audience. This practice gives you a higher relevancy number on your ads and gets more eyes on your content. You will get more post likes and also comments. See how this system starts to hum? A targeted audience comes in through the Page Likes campaign and then they become engaged when they see your Boosted Content. Boost is a great word for this process because it does help boost your engagement, your reach, and your confidence as a small business thought leader.
Building a Small Biz Audience Using Facebook Ads Posted on November 23, 2015June 3, 2016 by Jessica Lunk There are 900 million people signing into Facebook every single day. And those people are discussing trending topics, sharing content with each other, and even looking to build their own business. You won’t have the time or the money to boil the ocean and reach every single persona on Facebook but you can carve out your own slice of the pie and reach the people that will be most likely to share and engage with your content. To help create a map that points you in the right direction of how to use Facebook for marketing success, consider some of the most popular ads on the site, how they work, and most importantly, why they work. So what is going to make them click your ad? Get Eyes on Your Ads The Facebook flow might be familiar to you… the blur of scrolling past political arguments, baby pictures, complainers, positive thinkers, on and on. And you want your brand to stand out amongst all that noise. Visual ads grab the attention of the individual and stop them from scrolling right past it. Even with the most intriguing content, if your ad isn’t attractive, no one will respond. So what can you do to get your ads seen? Use high-quality images Use the recommended dimensions: 1200 x 628 pixels Use images of people, especially your real customers. Avoid stock photography that’s too generic or cheesy. Your logo alone isn’t going to cut it unless your company is well known – plus, often your logo is in your profile picture already. Use bright, warm colors to help ads to stand out. Buyer personas come in handy here because you need to have a good idea of what will capture the attention of the audience you are trying to create. The more you know your ideal customers, the more relevant and targeting your ads will become. Test Different Audiences So there are 900 million people on Facebook and you want to create an audience for them. You’ve created a buyer persona and you have your creative ads ready to go. Always run ‘Page Like’ Ads to promote your page. With these ads, you can test your buyer persona and start to determine what makes your ideal customer tick. Show a little creativity; what are your ideal customers doing outside of the buying process? What interests can you use to tap into their emotions and get them to click to learn more? I like running these tests because they don’t have to take up a lot of your budget and you can play around with all the different targeting options Facebook provides. Mix and match your audience, creating many layers for a hyper-targeted segment. Track and compare all these tests next to each other so you can drill down to what’s working and what didn’t. Video: The Darling of Facebook Ads You’re likely hearing a great deal about new formats for advertising and the value of interactive advertising. There’s good reason for this. It’s engaging and less promotional. It helps to draw in customers and get the click. Facebook video ads are becoming an increasingly valuable investment for businesses as a result. These appear in the news feed. About 50% of all people who visit Facebook will watch at least one video during that visit. Brands are finding videos incredibly helpful in getting people to sites and to build their brand. To get more engagement, create a video that can be understood with or without sound. Show Off Your Products Often times, we hear about Facebook ads being all about brand building. However, you can and should use your ads to showcase products. Multi-product ads are very effective, for example. You can use the Power Editor feature from Facebook to create these. They allow you to promote more than one product (or service, or blog post, etc) in a single ad. You’ll get more bang for your buck this way. In addition to these types of Facebook ads, you’ll also find some outstanding success with local ads, promotional offers, and event ads. The key here is to be versatile and flexible. You’ll get the most attention from your ads if you invest in a variety of formats and put the time into creating a campaign that maps out a clear path to conversion for that treasure trove of leads. Drive Engagement Once you have built a good audience, you can start driving more engagement. In the beginning, I felt like I was talking to an empty room on social media. But once I found my audience, engagement soared and the chatter was ignited. Targeting your Facebook audience with your Facebook Ads make your ads more relevant so they are favored by the algorithms, sparking better conversations on social. You’ll notice with this approach that your relevancy scores will be through the roof because this is your audience that your are targeting. If you’ve been ramping up your content strategy, this is a great tool to start building some traction around it. Using Facebook advertising effectively can increase your audience and engagement without putting a gaping hole in your marketing budget. Want to see more ways I’m managing social media at Hatchbuck? Like our Facebook page!
3 Quick Ways to Build Traffic to Your Next Blog Post Posted on January 16, 2015October 7, 2022 by Travis Arnold A Guest Post by Chuck Aikens, Founder & CEO of Volume Nine You already know how valuable blogging is, which is why you already have one. But if you don’t have enough people visiting your blog, the whole purpose of having a blog is lost. Ever wonder how some bloggers arrive out of nowhere and skyrocket their blog’s traffic and subscriber numbers, while some others struggle forever to move the needle? With over 164 million blogs already out there, you need to do a lot more than just write good content and present it well. You need to begin the groundwork even before you press that “Publish” button. Want to know how? Read on. You spent all week writing a great piece of content that your industry is going to love, and now you’re ready to relax. But wait a minute, this new blog post is going to get published on Tuesday morning and you have to get the word out. Don’t worry, go enjoy your weekend! Here are three things painlessly simple you can do on Monday morning to increase the traffic to your blog post. 1. Boost Your Facebook Post Facebook has an astonishing 1 billion active users, and an average user spends about 22 minutes every day on this social network. No matter who your target audience is, chances are high that they will be on Facebook, so you should try everything possible to leverage this. Facebook’s Boost Post is a good starting point. Boost post is a feature that allows a post from your business page to appear higher up on the News Feed. Facebook charges a fee for this service, depending on how many people you intend reaching out to, and the number of impressions your post gets over time. By boosting your posts on Facebook, you earn an extra degree of visibility for blog posts that you think are important. There is a much higher chance of a boosted post being seen by users who have liked your business page, that relying on organic Facebook impressions alone. To boost a post, all you need to do is click “Boost Post” button next to the post, select the target audience, set up a budget, and you are good to go. 2. Use Coschedule to Schedule Social Media Follow-ups A major mistake that many bloggers make is that they publish the blog, notify the social networks, and do nothing after that. By doing this, they lose the opportunity to get the click-throughs that the content deserves. The good news is that there are there are tools to help you promote your blog with social media in a more effective manner. Coschedule is a tool that lets you leverage the full power of social media. With Coschedule, you can implement a sharing schedule, and maintain a more consistent social presence. More than an editorial calendar, Coschedule is a Plugin that connects to your WordPress site and social media connections. Once added to WordPress, Coschedule lets you publish to your social connections, all through a calendar format. You can add as many social connections as you want, integrate with Google calendar, track analytics, interact with team members, and more. Our recommendation is to use it to schedule 5 Tweets and 2 Facebook Follow-ups – a solid game plan for your next post. 3. Write Some Teaser Articles and Send it to a Few Influencers A simple secret to rapid blog growth is blogger outreach. You can get other key bloggers in your niche, or influencers, to promote your blog for free. Just write some teaser articles and send them to a few influencers. By doing this, you can actually put your content before the movers and shakers in the niche, increasing changes that your blog is well received and highly circulated. For example, in the following snippet, an SEO influencer, references an article from another SEO website’s blog, increasing the reach and audience for the blog post: How to Create an Awesome Hashtag for Your Business https://t.co/XxpynQxmvR via @v9seo #socialmedia #marketing pic.twitter.com/zdKTZzeDjw — Chuck Aikens (@chuckaikens) September 14, 2016 With better tools and an air-tight strategy, you’re ready take your blog to new heights of success. About the Author Chuck Aikens is the CEO of Volume Nine, an SEO Agency which has been helping clients build organic traffic to their websites for over 9 years. Chuck enjoys living in Denver with his wife and 2 children where he enjoys running, skiing, and working on his golf game.
Celebrate Achievements With Milestones Posted on November 4, 2014June 3, 2016 by Jessica Lunk A great way to step back and recognize your achievements is through social media. As a small business owner, you’re hustling to get as much done in a day so it’s hard to celebrate those achievements and goals you have met. Facebook has a cool, underused feature that can help you document and showcase your achievements in a simple, easy way: Milestones. Here’s how simple it is to upload your Milestones to Facebook: Step One: Go to your Facebook page. Step Two: In the section that Facebook asks you “What have you been up to?” and where you type out your status, there are three tabs in that box. Click “Offer, Event +” Step Three: Select Milestone Step Four: Complete the form (don’t forget to add a bit of background in the story section & a photo!) and be sure to keep ‘Hide from News Feed’ unchecked! Publish! Milestones can serve as a post in your social strategy to increase engagement! Your milestones will show in your About section under Life Events. You can use this as a quick reference and a source of inspiration to see how far you have come with your business! Add your milestones to Facebook when you complete a large goal such as earning your first buck and other big events. Other great milestones ideas are highlighting when your rockstar employees came on board, when you hit your 10th, 100th, and 10,000th customer, facelifts to your company with rebranding, and the launch of your big marketing campaign. Take pride in your great milestones as a small business owner and show the world the strength of your company with Milestones!