Videos are some of the most engaging pieces of content on the web today. More than text, audio or even photos, they are the closest to a real world interactive experience the web can muster.

We can hear the passion in the speaker’s voice. We can read the body language of the people on camera. We can see if their eyes are smiling, or just their mouth. We can watch the product demonstration.

Unfortunately, videos don’t always get the engagement we want on Facebook. Maybe it’s because when people scroll through their newsfeed they don’t want to stop to watch a video while they’re trying to catch up with friends.

However, by leveraging Facebook ads, we can put that video thumbnail in front of them multiple times, so that when they’re ready to watch, our video will be there waiting for them.

Whether you’ve got a product, an opt-in page, a webinar or an event to promote, video ads on Facebook can be a powerful way to inform and engage your ideal customers. Here’s how you can run your own video ads in Facebook. 

Create a video.

Yeah, I know. Kind of obvious. I recommend something short. Generally, the rule is no more than two minutes, but I’d try and keep it down to sixty seconds or less for a Facebook ad. 

As always, decent lighting, a steady camera and good audio help.

Upload your video.

You can’t embed a video from YouTube and make it an ad; it has to be a video that’s uploaded directly to Facebook.

To begin, you’ll want to create a new page post featuring your video. Make sure you’re logged in as your business, not as yourself. Post your video with a title and description. 

Pro tip: since you won’t be able to change the description once you convert your page post into an ad, make sure you get RIGHT to the point. Your ad will only show a snippet of your description, so put your most important information first. 

In other words, learn from my mistakes. 

Once the video starts uploading you can tag people in the video. You’ll want to tag yourself if you were in the video or provided the narrative; you’ll also want to tag other people who appeared in the video. The reason you want to tag people is because it increases the chances that both they and their friends will see your video.

While there’s no rule that they have to be in the video, there’s a word for people who indiscriminately tag people in videos: spammers. So tread lightly.

Your video will go live as a page post as soon as it’s finished processing. 

Create your video ad.

There are several ways to get into the ads manager. I often go to Facebook’s home page and click on the Ads Manager link in the left hand column.

Once in there, click on Create New Ad then choose See Advanced Options. This will allow you to setup pay-per-click ads.

Scroll down and choose the page post you just created.

By default, Facebook will show people how their friends are connected to your brand. I leave these checked.

Once your ad is set, you’ll want to choose your audience. You don’t want to share your ad with everyone, you want to get in front of just the people who are likely to click on your ad and ultimately want to sign up for your webinar, event, or opt-in page.

You can target by geography, age, gender, and interests. In this ad, I’m targeting Mainers who are 21 years of age and older, and like social media, web marketing and other related topics.

Finally, you’ll want to set a budget for your campaign. You can set a daily budget or a lifetime budget, and create a start and stop date. 

In the optimization section, choose to Optimize for clicks and Manually bid for clicks. Facebook will make a recommendation on what to bid. Even if you bid at the top of that range, you’ll only pay one penny more than the next highest bid. By increasing your maximum bid, you’ll get in front of more people, important if a lot of people want to reach your target audience.

Finally, you need to know that Facebook reviews every ad before it goes live, so plan ahead. It might take 24 hours for your ad to be approved and start running.

Takeaways

Video is a powerful way to engage people on the web today. To overcome the sometimes low engagement level of videos on Facebook, consider a video ad.

By creating a short, powerful video, carefully targeting your audience, and setting a budget, you’ll get the engagement you’re looking for.

And while we’re at it, have you grabbed your early bird ticket to the Agents of Change Digital Marketing Conference? Whether you want to visit us here in Maine or grab a digital pass and watch online, you’ll discover how to reach more of your ideal customers through search, social & mobile marketing on 9.20.13!

Rich Brooks

ATTENTION: Join us on 5/30/2013 for a FREE live webinar on Turning Likes Into Sales.

Sure, the kids think email is for “old people” (read: people who watched Seinfeld before it hit syndication), but when it comes to building your business, email marketing trumps social media every time.

Email is arguably the most important tool in your web marketing toolbox. Here are six reasons why you need to start paying more attention to building your email list today.

1. You don’t own Facebook.

(Mark Zuckerberg: if you’re reading this you can skip to #2.)

Or Twitter, or LinkedIn or Pinterest. When you build an audience on another platform, you’re working their land, not your own.

I’m not talking about whether Instagram owns your photos, I’m talking about that every piece of content you share, you’re building their platform, often at the expense of your own.

With email marketing, you’re building your own list and creating value for your own business.

Even if you use an email service provider, like Constant Contact, Aweber, or MailChimp, you still own your list and can take it with you whenever you like.

You should be using social media platforms to engage your audience, but then bring them back to your own website and encourage them to sign up for your email newsletter.

2. No one sees your tweet.

If you tweet and have 10,000 followers, you’re lucky if 100 people see it. Send an email to 10,000 opt-in subscribers and it will make its way into about 9,000 inboxes.

Even if most don’t “open” that email, they’re reminded of your company and that they need your products and services.

Ignoring your email is impossible; it requires at least clicking the delete button. Ignoring a tweet just means blinking.

3. Email is personal.

Through the magic of mail merge, your email missive begins with your prospect’s first name. That’s a one-on-one message, not like a Facebook status update or a blog post. Think that’s not important %firstname%? Think again.

“There is no sweeter sound to any person’s ear than the sound of their own name…” – Dale Carnegie

4. Email is mobile.

Did you know that we spend 38.5% of our mobile Internet time on email?  That’s about 23 minutes of each hour checking, reading and responding to emails.

With so many of your customers and prospects holding a mobile device in their hand, delivering content via email is critical to engaging them.

5. Email is the “little yes.”

It’s a proven sales technique that by getting prospects to say “yes” to a small question or request, they’re more likely to say “yes” to a bigger request, such as to buy.

Need to see an example? See how researchers moved the needle from 17% to 76% buy-in from homeowners to place an ugly “Drive Safely” sign on their front yard.

Getting someone to sign up for your email newsletter qualifies that they are ready to move down the sales funnel. 

6. Email is a sales tool.

Email drives online and in person sales. It delivers digital coupons, which are redeemed at 10 times the rate of traditional coupons.

It warms leads, establishes expertise and builds loyalty when done right.

Takeaways

By no means do I suggest you stop using social media. Or search engine optimization. Or traditional marketing and advertising.

Rather, you should be using these tools and channels to drive traffic to an email capture page and begin building your business…one email address at a time.

Rich Brooks

ATTENTION: Join us on 5/30/2013 for a FREE live webinar on Turning Likes Into Sales.

Let’s face it: certain businesses struggle with getting liked on Facebook, and maybe you’re among them. Many B2B (business to business) companies find themselves swimming upstream on Facebook, so there’s no shame in low engagement on your fan page.

It’s not that you don’t provide good quality content, it’s just that you may not be a good fit for Facebook. This could be for a number of reasons.

• Maybe your customers and prospects aren’t on Facebook.
• Maybe your customers and prospects are on Facebook, but they don’t want to learn more about your industrial cleaners or care about your approach to managing “big data” while looking at pictures of their friends’ kids or laughing at George Takei’s latest update.
• Maybe people don’t want to admit to “liking” you marriage counseling practice, hemorrhoid cream or bedwetting cure. I’ll let you figure out why.

If Facebook isn’t where your audience wants to engage with you, what platforms are available to you and your business? Where can people learn more without having to like it?

Here are some suggestions on where you can reach and build an audience for your seemingly unlikeable business.

LinkedIn Company Pages

If you’re primarily a B2B company, you should leverage the world’s most popular, professional social network.

And although the personal profiles still get more play than company pages, LinkedIn is offering more tools for businesses to take advantage of their platform. For instance:

• Company Updates: You can now post updates that get delivered to all of your followers. In addition, you can now add eye-catching graphics to those updates.
• Services: You can create pages for your different products and services. Each one can have a description, images, videos and more. In addition, people can endorse your company for its skills for a particular product or service.
• Insights: You can get insights into who’s following you, with breakdowns by industry, position, location and more.

To learn more how to build a following for your company page on LinkedIn, check out LinkedIn Company Pages: A Guide to Getting Your Business on LinkedIn.

YouTube

While many people think this is the platform for funny cat videos and Korean pop stars, for years small businesses have been creating powerful, engaging videos that attract their ideal customer.

Don’t try and create the next viral video; instead, just create short videos that address some of the biggest problems your ideal customer faces.

Once your video is uploaded, use YouTube’s annotation tools to turn viewers into subscribers, and drive traffic back to your website or opt-in page.

For a how-to video on how to create links from within your video to your website, check out How to Create External Links In YouTube Videos.

SlideShare

Think “YouTube for PowerPoint” and you’ll have a pretty good sense of what this social content platform is all about.

As content marketing has become all the rage, more online and traditional marketers are turning to SlideShare to reach their customers.

Like YouTube videos, SlideShare content can be easily embedded on websites and blogs and allows viewers to follow all of your company’s activity.

Consider uploading not just presentations and webinars to SlideShare, but also converting blog posts and other content into a PowerPoint presentation and uploading it to SlideShare.

Podcasts

Every day, professionals mitigate the grind of their daily commute with downloadable content through iTunes and other podcasting tools. They also listen to podcasts while on the treadmill, mowing the lawn, and other “mindless” activities.

In iTunes you’ll find business podcasts on real estate, trial lawyers, PR, Indie Book marketing, Oregon nurses, lean manufacturing, and just about any other business-related subject you can think about.

And if you don’t see any of your competitors using a podcast to educate and engage their audience, that just means that you won’t have any competition for the attention of your ideal customer!

Blogs

Still, my favorite platform for any company, whether you’re B2B or B2C, is a business blog.

Blogs allow you to create valuable content that increases your online visibility because it ranks well at the search engines and acts as a hub for all of your social media activity.

One simple way to get started is to create blog posts that answer some of the most frequently asked questions that you field every day.

Make sure your titles are optimized for the search engines, and put sharing buttons at the top and bottom of each post so that your readers can share your posts with their networks.

Email

All of these platforms should lead people back to your website or opt-in page where you can capture their contact information. And these days, their email address is probably the easiest and most effective channel to use.

As long as it’s an opt-in list, your subscriber base is made up of customers and prospects that want to receive more targeted information about your products, services and solutions.

In other words, they like you! They really like you!

Takeaways

Just because your business isn’t a perfect fit for Facebook doesn’t mean you should abandon social media or digital marketing.

Instead, look to the social networks and platforms where your ideal customer hangs out and is looking for information to do their job or run their business better.

Create engaging content on these platforms that drives traffic back to your website where you can get your visitors to opt into an email newsletter.

If you need any help optimizing your B2B business profiles on these platforms, developing engaging content, or creating a strategy that generates more leads and business, please contact flyte new media today!

Rich Brooks

Do you have a business blog that’s not getting the visits, readership and engagement that you are looking for?

Spending a lot of time writing blog posts and not seeing any sort of return on your investment can be frustrating. Chances are, you may not be creating the right type of posts, or not optimizing them, or not promoting them. Any one of these can turn your blog post into a tree falling in the forest. 

In this post, I’ll walk you through a step-by-step process of making the most of every single post. (Hey, I’m a poet, and I didn’t even know it!)

1. Conceive of a topic that solves the problem of your ideal customer. 

Chances are you’ve been doing this long enough that you know the challenges your customers face. Come up with an idea of what the blog post is going to cover, whether it helps them raise their child, raise donations, or raze a building. 

2. Uncover the keyword phrase that your ideal customer is using at Google.

I recommend Google’s Keyword Tool.

Drop a couple of variations on a theme into the search box, deselect “broad” and select “exact” and “phrase” under match types in the left column, and hit search. 

This will generate some keyword ideas. Look for phrases with lots of search volume. The competition is based on the pay-per-click bidding, but it will give you some insight into whether this phrase will be relatively easy or difficult to rank well for. 

3. Start with an engaging, keyword rich title.

Your title is critical. It must grab the reader’s attention and get them to want to read more or at least share it on Twitter. 

Lead with your best keywords, as the search engines put the most weight on the first few words of the title. If your keyword phrase was “cheap valentine day gifts,” you might have a title: “Cheap Valentine Day Gifts: Saying I Love You on a Budget.”

4. Write an opening sentence with your keyword phrase.

A title needs help. Search engine look not just for your keywords, but where you place them. Make sure you use your phrase in the opening sentence. 

5. Explain the benefit to the reader in the next paragraph.

There’s a number of ways to go about this, whether you start off by asking a question, like I did above, or just jump right into the problems that your post will help the reader solve.

6. Keep your post focused.

Both your reader and the search engines appreciate focused content. This can help with your search engine visibility and the likelihood that your readers will share your content.

7. Make it easy on the eyes.

Big blocks of text on the screen are difficult to read. Break up your content with subheaders (like in this post) and bulleted lists.

8. Wrap it up.

Don’t leave the visitor hanging. Give them a recap, or some takeaways, or draw some conclusions.

9. Ask for comments.

While I’ve often said that comments aren’t customers, they can help with the social proof on your blog, and make your blog more engaging. 

There are several ways to get people to leave comments, including the outright ask, or posing a question that they can answer in the comment section, or asking for people to provide examples of when something similar happened in their own life or business.

10. Find a good breaking point.

Your blog home page should work like a good news page: it should tease the stories, showing more “above the fold.” To accomplish this, use the Insert Page Break feature in your blogging platform.

I recommend right after where you’ve explained the benefits of reading your post.

11. Find a great image to use at the top of the page.

People are visual and a good image can really pull them in. Plus, with the rise of Pinterest, an eye-catching visual can greatly increase your chances of getting pinned and driving more traffic to your blog.

12. Use an appropriate alt-tag for that (and every) image in your post.

Google’s image search can drive more traffic to your site, and alt-tags are just the right thing to do. Start by saving the image file with a keyword rich name, like potato-peeling-tips.jpg, and then add an appropriate Alt Tag like “Potato Peeling Tips.”

13. Find appropriate places to link to other blog posts or pages on your website.

Creating links to other posts and pages can provide additional help and resources to your readers, and can help promote older posts. In addition, those internal links can really increase your search engine visibility.

14. Find appropriate places to link to other sites.

Share the love! Linking to authoritative sites provides value to your readers and may help your search engine visibility.

15. Proofread it.

Nobody’s perfect, but too many typos can damage your credibility and hurt your message. If you suck at grammar, give the editing job to someone else.

Ironically, “proofread” never looks right to me.

16. Publish it.

‘Nuff said.

17. Use your share buttons.

You know how bartenders put a dollar or five in their tip jar at the beginning of their shift? Yeah, do that.

Click on the Facebook like button, retweet button, +1 button, and anything else you have. This primes the pump for the next visitor to your post. They see that people have already shared it and say, “wow, this must be valuable,” and hopefully share it themselves.

Plus, you’re spreading the word.

18. Send it to your email list.

These days I recommend sending out a teaser email rather than the full blog post to your subscribers. It brings them back to the post where they can more easily share it or comment on it.

19. Schedule some tweets.

I’m not a big fan of automation, but scheduling out some tweets isn’t a bad idea. I use TweetDeck, but others prefer Hootsuite or Buffer.

Since your tweets don’t have a very long shelf life, it’s a good idea to post 3 or 4 times during the day. I try and phrase things differently, and feature different elements of the post. You can even find out which tweets drove the most traffic to the post with this nifty trick. 

20. Publish it to your Facebook profile.

I know you just “liked” it through the Facebook share button, but you’ll get more visibility if you head back into Facebook and post the link into your timeline.

21. Publish it to your Facebook business page.

If you’ve got a lot of overlap between Facebook friends and your business fans you might want to stagger this update by a couple of hours or so. I also recommend taking a screen capture of the top of the post and making that part of your update so that it shows up more prominently in the newsfeed. Just remember to keep the link in the update.

22. Like, comment on, and share that update.

Switch back to your personal profile and like and comment on your business page’s post immediately. An hour or two after that, share it on your personal profile. Any likes, comments or shares you get on this will also count towards your page’s engagement ranking.

23. Find appropriate groups on LinkedIn and share it there. 

Yes, you posted it to your LinkedIn profile when you clicked on the LinkedIn share button, but you’ll get more mileage when you post it to a relevant LinkedIn group. Or two. Or three.

If you’re a pro, you might consider staggering the posts to the groups, one per day, so you don’t look like one of those guys who posts the same self-promotional crap to every group he belongs to. (Hangs head in shame.)

24. Post it to Google+ as yourself, and later as your business.

There are search as well as social benefits to Google+.

25. Pin it to Pinterest.

The shelf life of a pin can also be short, so consider posting it once a day for two or three days.

26. Use other social media platforms as appropriate.

Reddit, StumbleUpon, even Digg might be appropriate for your content.

27. Respond to comments.

If you want to build a community and get subscribers and repeat visitors, you need to get them engaged. Respond to every comment on the blog, whether positive or negative, for as long as you can keep it up.

That might mean for the first 10 comments, or the first two days, or forever. Your call.

28. Be consistent. 

The trick to blogging, or social media, or life, is to be consistent. Whether that means daily posts (crazy!), weekly, or even every other week. Create consistently valuable posts and publish them consistently.

Rich Brooks

Recent changes in Facebook mean that only 16% of your Facebook fans are seeing your content in their newsfeed…and those are people who have actively liked you!

ATTENTION: Join us on 5/30/2013 for a FREE live webinar on Turning Likes Into Sales.

Combine that with the fact that seemingly every business in the world has a Facebook page and the average Facebook user has 262 friends (and counting), and you’ve got a recipe for Facebook invisibility.

Although creating engaging content for the Facebook newsfeed is helpful, you may not be able to attract all the attention you desire strictly through being clever and helpful. Some advertising may be required.

In this article we’ll show you how to get more out of your advertising dollar on Facebook with three expert tips.

Get New Fans for Pennies

Let’s start by increasing the number of people who like your business on Facebook.

Birds of a feather flock together, as the saying goes. You can take advantage of this old adage by targeting friends of people who already like your page.

• Start by creating a new ad to promote your business page. Choose CPC (cost per click) pricing so that you only pay when someone clicks.
• Narrow the people who will see your ad by age, gender and other demographics. You can also use narrow and broad interests to further filter your intended audience, allowing you to target just who you want.
• Don’t preach to the choir. Since this campaign is to increase your likes, we don’t want to show it to your fan base. In the Connections section choose “Only people not connected to [your business page.]
• Now get in front of fans’ friends. In the same section, target people “whose friends are connected to [your business page.]

Add Video to Your Facebook Ads

Not too long ago I saw a video for my friend Amy Porterfield‘s upcoming webinar on Facebook. What I also noticed was that there was a play button on the ad. When clicked it, I was treated to an engaging video where Amy explained the benefits of the webinar.

Here’s how you can pull off the same trick: 

• Create a video and upload it to your timeline on Facebook. Uploading it to YouTube and sharing it on Facebook won’t work. This creates a status update with a bold headline.
• Once it’s uploaded you can turn that video update into a promoted post or page post ads.
• This will create a clickable play button in your ad, increasing the likelihood people will click on it.

Takeaways

After getting traffic from Facebook for free all this time, it’s difficult for many small businesses to like the idea of paying for likes or to reach fans they’ve already engaged.

However, by using these three Facebook advertising tricks:

• Targeting friends of fans to like your page
• Advertising to your contact database, and
• Adding video to your Facebook ad buys

you’ll greatly increase your Facebook ad ROI.

Rich Brooks
 

ATTENTION: Join us on 5/30/2013 for a FREE live webinar on Turning Likes Into Sales.

As web and mobile marketing continue to evolve, so do your opportunities for reaching more of your ideal customers and building your business.

Here’s what you should focus on in 2013.

Your mobile website.

By 2014 most of the traffic to your website will come from a mobile device, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker.

Other studies have shown that mobile users are more likely to buy if your site is mobile optimized, and more likely to leave immediately if it’s not.

If you don’t get a mobile website up this year you are literally just handing off your customers to your competition.

No matter how much money you throw at SEO (search engine optimization,) no matter how much time you spend on social media marketing like Facebook and Twitter, no matter how many resources you dedicate to blogging and online video, if your site isn’t mobile compatible you will lose business.

Period. So get on the phone to your web developer now and start the conversation.

Improve your SEO, especially for the locals.

No matter how popular Facebook gets, or how much traffic Pinterest generates, people still turn to Google (and to a lesser degree, Bing,) to find stuff.

If you generate a good portion of your business locally, you really need to step up your local SEO in 2013.

Visit GetListed.org and make sure that your company is listed in all the local databases that power the web. You can “claim” your listing, and thus take control of it.

Once you have control of your listing you can update your information, post photos and videos, and take other steps that will increase your visibility for local search (which puts you in front of even more mobile users…see above section. 

And whatever your take on Google+ may be, most search experts agree that Google+ Local (formerly Google Places), can help business’s local search visibility. In short, go visit Google+ Local and make sure your business is listed there.

Rethink your social media marketing.

Maybe 2013 isn’t the year for adding another social media platform to your marketing mix. Maybe it’s the year for dropping one.

What if you quietly dropped your Twitter account, or stopped making videos?

Or, if you’ve been investing all your time into Facebook, with nothing to show for it, maybe it’s time to rethink your priorities.

If you can drop one or more platforms without losing business, maybe you can reinvest that time into forming deeper relationships with the customers that matter more on the platforms they spend the most time on.

Build your email list.

Nothing is sexier than a big opt-in list.

You will always get the best ROI from your email list, so focus the rest of your marketing on getting people to sign up for it.

Here are a few tips for building your email list:

• Appreciate that most people don’t want to sign up for “yet another email newsletter,” so use “email bait” to persuade them. It could be a white paper download, entry to a raffle, or discounts in your store.
• Make the calls to action for your email signup more obvious, and place them in multiple spots on your webpages.
• Use social media and offer free webinars as ways of building your list.
• Create landing (aka squeeze) pages that focus on converting visitors into subscribers.
• Deliver amazing content, since every email newsletter is an invitation to unsubscribe from your list.

Takeaways

By following a few simple steps, 2013 is going to be a banner year for growing your business.

Start by attracting more qualified traffic to your website by improving your local and organic search visibility. Then, refocus your attention on the social media platforms that are actually delivering leads and traffic.

Finally, make sure that your website is mobile-friendly in preparation for the 2014 mobile tipping point, and use that mobile-friendly site to turn more visitors into email subscribers.

If you need help with developing or executing your own web marketing plan, please contact flyte today! 

Rich Brooks

Is your Facebook business page going unnoticed? Are the posts there getting no likes, comments or shares? Are you struggling to build an engaged fan base?

ATTENTION: Join us on 5/30/2013 for a FREE live webinar on Turning Likes Into Sales.

It may be that you’re overlooking the power of your personal profile. In this article I’ll show you how to leverage your personal Facebook profile to grow your business.

First things first: I know many people out there want to keep their business and personal lives separate on Facebook. With a few extra clicks in your Facebook settings, you can configure who sees which updates you post.

Photos from your kid’s birthday party gets hidden from your “networking” pals, and a post about your upcoming webinar won’t bore your family and friends to tears.

Or, you may choose to live the life of the modern entrepreneur and share your life as the mixture of business and pleasure that it actually is.

Why isn’t my company getting much engagement?

We generally find other people more interesting than companies, meaning we’re more likely to engage people than brands on Facebook. Compound that with recent changes in Facebook’s algorithm, and most of your company updates will only be seen by 16% of your fans…the people who have “liked” your page.

If you’re willing to work the networking angle of Facebook, you can greatly increase that reach. However, abuse this power and even your mom will mute or unfriend you.

1. Start by finding your real world contacts you’re not “friends” with yet.

The Facebook Find Friends Browser is a great tool to catch up with people from your past. Facebook will help you track down people from your hometown, college, previous jobs and more.

I’m not suggesting you randomly friend everyone with whom you’ve ever shared a beer, coffee or chocolate milk.

However, I’ve had people reconnect with me, ask what I do, and then say, “that’s so funny, I was just looking for a….” Next thing you know, contracts are being signed because there’s a trust built up from our shared history.

2. Engage your friends in the timeline.

When you’re logged in as your company, you can’t really engage with your fans unless they’re commenting on your page. As a friend, you can like, comment and share just about anything they post. Your activity—especially comments and shares—will be noticed by your friends and their friends, increasing your visibility.

3. Chat your friends up.

Most of your friends have Facebook chat enabled. Haven’t seen someone in a while, but they pop up as available to chat? Go ahead and send them a quick message. It’s amazing what a one-on-one chat will do to hold you over until the next face-to-face.

One marketer shared with me that when he sends “like my page” requests via chat he has a 48% success rate, compared to 9% through Facebook invites.

That being said, I personally can’t stand when people I’m not close to ask me to like their business page in a chat window, so use your best judgment.

4. Tag your friends in photos.

This is especially powerful if you have photos on your business page of a recent event that friends attended. Once you post the photos as your business, tag people as yourself.

Not only will they be alerted that they’ve been tagged, but their friends may see that activity, too. As they and their friends like and comment on the photos, your page’s engagement goes up.

5. Share your business page updates.

Be sure to like, comment and share your business page updates as yourself.

Like and leave a comment as yourself for almost everything you post as your business; this can prime the pump and encourage other people to engage with your content.

Shares carry more weight and are more powerful than a like or comment, but they should be used with discretion. It might be best to only share the best, most engaging content so your don’t exhaust your personal good will.

Any engagement you get with your personal share counts towards your page’s engagement rating, so don’t worry about diluting the reach of a business page update.

Takeaways

If you’re comfortable blurring the lines between business and fun on Facebook, you can greatly increase your company’s reach and engagement. This in turn can help grow your business.

Even if you prefer a separation of “church and state” when it comes to your company, you can use Facebook’s privacy settings to have two de facto personalities on Facebook: one for business and one for family and friends.

Let’s call it the mullet approach to Facebook marketing: business up front, party in the back.

If you need help marketing your business on Facebook, please contact flyte new media today.

Rich Brooks
President, flyte new media 

Whether you have an upcoming conference, webinar, or bike ride, Facebook Events can help you reach a wider audience. 

ATTENTION: Join us on 5/30/2013 for a FREE live webinar on Turning Likes Into Sales.

In fact, if you’re looking for new ways to promote your business, creating a real or virtual event may be just the ticket. 

Spreading the word by creating a Facebook Event for your event can help you reach a wider audience, persuade more people to attend, and build a bigger fan base. Setting up your event and marketing it is free, and if you decide to advertise your event, you can easily limit how much you spend.

Creating Your Event

You should create your event off your Facebook business page. (If you don’t have one, you can create one off your personal profile, but it begs the question why you don’t have a business page.) Make sure you’re logged in—or at least “posting as”—your business, and not yourself.

If you are, you’ll see the option for “Offer, Event+” when creating an update. Click on that and choose Event.

That will bring up a popup window for you to populate.

Once you’ve filled out all the appropriate fields, click “Create.”

You should now be on the event page itself. 

I recommend creating or using an eye-catching graphic as opposed to the generic image Facebook provides. 

One thing I’ve noticed lately is that once you’re invited to an event through Facebook, every update to the event generates an email to you. I don’t know about you, but i find that VERY annoying. I am much quicker to “decline” an invitation if I start getting follow up messages about it.

Since we don’t want people declining your invitations—and therefore cutting off communications about your event, such as last minute reminders—try to avoid those chatty updates unless absolutely necessary.

If you do have some additional info you want to add or feature, create a new post on the event page before inviting anyone else. An additional message might be about dress code, limited seating, or a reminder that attendees still need to register on a separate events page if they want to attend.

This is incredibly important if you’re collecting payment or email addresses. Often people think by accepting your Facebook event invite, they are confirmed. If you need additional confirmation, make this clear.

Promote Your Event

Although there should be some mention of your event automatically on your business page, it’s so minor that I strongly recommend creating a special update announcing your event.

Since images tend to draw the biggest engagement on Facebook, I like to create an image post. The downside? That prevents you from creating a link post. 

There is a simple solution, however. As you can see in the example below, I uploaded an image of the title slide of my upcoming webinar. Then, in the post itself I included a link to the event page (which I just copied and pasted from the address bar), as well as a link to the GoToWebinar signup page since this event requires registration outside of Facebook.

I also “pinned” this post to the top of flyte’s Facebook page, but since only 4% of your fans ever return to your Facebook page, I’m not sure how much of an impact this actually makes.

Once you’ve created this post on your business page you can share it as yourself on your own timeline. Two things to keep in mind:

• If you’ve got a lot of overlap between your business fans and your Facebook friends, you may want to delay your share for a few hours so you can reach a wider swath of your audience.
• Likes, comments and shares from all shared posts add to your page’s engagement, so you’re not diluting your engagement by sharing your content.

Invite Your Friends

Depending on how much lead time you have, you may want to do this next step immediately or wait a day or so.

Return to the event page and make sure you’re “going.”

Once you are, you’ll want to invite some friends. Click on that button and choose the appropriate friends from the popup window.

As always, use discretion when sending out invites. I get way too many invitations from Facebook “friends” just because they can invite me to events so easily. It may take a few extra moments, but really think about whether this friend wants to come to your Introduction to Yoga session. Especially if she lives in Texas and your studio is in Maine.

You also may want to stagger your invites if possible. By default, people who visit your page can see how many people were invited, and how many confirmed.

In general this is a good thing, because they can see if anyone they know is attending, which will increase the chances they’ll attend. However, it can backfire if they see thousands of people invited and only four confirmed. You may be able to overcome this by only invite a few dozen people at a time.

Advertise Your Event

If it’s important to reach a wider audience, some Facebook advertising may be required. 

Since only 16% of your fans see a given update from your business, you may choose to reach more of your fans through a Promoted Post. Costs will vary based upon how many fans your page has.

If your event would be beneficial to people who haven’t yet liked your page, you definitely want to take out some targeted Facebook ads. For a quick lesson in how to set this up, read How Does Facebook Ads Bidding Work? over at the flyte blog.

Takeaways

Facebook events can help you promote an event or your entire business when done right. 

Create your event, share it on your business page and your personal timeline, and invite your Facebook friends.

If you’re not reaching the audience you need, spend a little bit of money on Facebook ads to drive traffic to your events page.

BONUS TIP! At the event itself you should capture attendee email addresses. This will bring down your advertising costs over time as you can email your list directly without having to spend money on Facebook advertising.

Have a follow up question on Facebook events or marketing? Need some help on promoting your own business or event? Let us know!

ATTENTION: Join us on 5/30/2013 for a FREE live webinar on Turning Likes Into Sales.

Businesses often strive to be number one at the search engines for their targeted keywords, and for good reason. A study last year showed that the number one result got an average 36.4% click through rate. 

The second place result? 12.5% and a set of steak knives. Third place and beyond? 9.5%, 7.9%, and 6.1% round out the top five, respectively.

In other words, moving from second to first can increase qualified leads to your site nearly 300%! So, how do you take advantage of this information? 

Well there’s a new report (new to me, at least) in Google Analytics called Queries. You can find it under Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimization > Queries. 

What does this report show? “The top 1,000 daily queries (by clicks) that resulted in impressions, clicks and click-throughs to your website,” according to Google.

In other words, it shows you the keyword searches for which your website or blog showed up as a result (whether #1 or #200), how many times a day people searched on that phrase, how many clicks your site got, how well you ranked, and what the click through rate (CTR) was.

To make the most of this report, re-sort it from Impressions to Average Position, then flip it so that your highest position (#1) is at the top of the list.

Next you’ll want to skip past the searches where you rank #1, and start looking for phrases where you rank 2.0 or lower.

Look for phrases where there’s a decent number of impressions (let’s say 200 or more) and your CTR is 50% or lower. In the example above, #187 (sorry, no peeking!) gets 200 searches a day, but flyte only get 35 click throughs for our number two spot.

Let’s say the phrase is “Pinterest marketing tips.” (It’s not. Stop worrying about my keywords. We’re talking about you here, right?)

With this knowledge there are two immediate actions I could take.

I could go to the Google search for “Pinterest marketing tips” and see who’s number one and determine if there’s something I could learn on improving my own page.

I could also head over to my blog and create a number of Pinterest marketing tip-related blog posts and link each one to each other and to my original article. That might be enough to push me to number one, and greatly increase the qualified traffic I’m getting to that page.

Search engine optimization–like football–is a game of inches…move up one spot and you can more than triple the qualified traffic to your site.

How much more business would that translate into for your company in the next year? Head on over to Google Analytics and start identifying the low hanging fruit on your own website today. 

If you need help installing, reading or analyzing your own traffic reports, or help driving more qualified traffic to your website, please contact flyte new media today. Operators are standing by.*

Rich Brooks
President

*We actually don’t have operators. And even if we did, they wouldn’t be standing. Chairs for everyone at flyte, that’s our motto. 

ATTENTION: Join us on 5/30/2013 for a FREE live webinar on Turning Likes Into Sales.

In days of yore, businesses could reach just about any prospect by use of broadcast media, such as TV, radio or the daily paper.

But because of disruptive technology like cable, Netflix, Hulu, satellite radio, YouTube and trillions of blogs, broadcast isn’t as “broad” as it used to be.  Furthermore, chances are your business can’t afford a commercial during American Idol, let alone the Superbowl.

So how do you reach your ideal customer today?

By leveraging the biggest disrupters of our age: search, social & mobile marketing. These are what I call The Agents of Change.

Search Engine Optimization

These days it seems like businesses have focused all their attention on social media marketing to the detriment of their SEO (search engine optimization.) That’s an unfortunate development for them, but a great opportunity for you to grow your market share.

Whether people use a PC, tablet or smartphone, when they’re looking to solve a problem or fill a need, they regularly turn to the search engines for help.

By providing expert advice developed in a search engine friendly way, you can get in front of your ideal customer when they’re ready to make a buying decision.

Is your ideal customer a bride looking to plan a wedding? Create keyword-rich blog posts that help her find a wedding planner, hire a band, find a venue, choose a florist, or create a seating plan that addresses every drama in her extended family.

Remember that every blog post is a unique web page, and every web page is another opportunity to rank well at the search engines. 

Is your ideal customer a small business that needs to increase sales? Create short how-to videos on appropriate dress, phone etiquette, crafting the perfect sales letter, and 13 ways to close the sale.

Video is a powerful way to get to the first page of the search results, whether people are searching at Google (the number one search engine in the world) or directly at YouTube (number two.)

Combined with keyword-rich pages at your website, search is the first place most businesses should focus on, whether your offerings are local or global.

If you haven’t optimized your site yet, I recommend reading Why Doesn’t My Website Show Up in Google? 

Social Media

With your ideal customer spending so much time on social media, it only makes sense that you are there, too.

The first step is to join the networks that your ideal customers are active on, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or LinkedIn.

Don’t feel the need to be on every platform! Better to start small and go deep than spread yourself too thin.

Wherever you invest your time, customize your profile and/or business page so that it reflects your branding…that will help build trust with your prospects.

While opinions vary on how much selling you can do within social media, here’s a good rule of thumb: behave like you would at a networking event.

In other words, if you went into a new networking event, would you interrupt every conversation and push your business card into every hand before you even learned that person’s name and what they’re looking for?

(If you just answered “yes,” you can ignore my advice.)

By engaging with your audience where they already hang out in social media, and treating them with respect, you’ll build loyalty and generate strong word of mouth recommendations.

Also check out What is Facebook EdgeRank and Why Is It Critical to Your Business? and LinkedIn Power Tips for Growing Your Business.

Mobile Marketing

It seems like everyone walks around these days with a portable computer in their pocket or purse in the form of a smartphone (or feature phone.) So why do so many businesses have no mobile presence whatsoever?!?

Admittedly, mobile is confusing. There’s mobile-friendly websites. Mobile apps. Location-based services like FourSquare. QR codes. SMS. Text messaging. And probably a half-dozen other categories I’m not thinking of right now.

So where do you start?

A recent study showed that 61% of Americans using mobile devices would immediately leave a website if the site wasn’t mobile optimized.

There’s your answer.

Start by making sure your website is mobile optimized. If your website is built on WordPress, you might want to check out WP-Touch, a plug-in that can get you started with a mobile site. (In my opinion, it’s just a start…you’ll want to spend some time tweaking the user-interface, but it’s better than nothing. 

After that, it depends on your business and industry. Retail should look at location-based apps and text messaging. Technology companies with sophisticated users might look to a mobile app…but remember: an app requires people to take multiple steps just to engage with you.

Be sure to check out QR Code Marketing for Small Business and Do You Need a Mobile Website?

Takeaways

The next step is for you take care of the basics by following some of the links in this article.

If you’d like to learn more on how you can reach your ideal customer through search, social and mobile, you should attend The Agents of Change Digital Marketing Conference on 9.14.12.

Whether you can join us in Portland, Maine, tune into the live stream, or watch later at your convenience, I hope to see you there!

Rich Brooks
flyte new media