Measuring Facebook key to Social Media Success

When you are running ads on Facebook, different options exist for executing campaigns today. That includes the tracking of actionable success metrics.

You are probably familiar with the sponsored (paid) ads. But, you might also consider the sponsored stories, which can be really good for your brand lift.

How do you determine which is better for you business? Analytics and monitoring is key.

No matter what you choose, including the (must-do) free options (the Facebook account itself, events, groups, applications, newsfeeds, etc) – it will be important for your business to reveal what your users do on your Facebook network.

Performance graphs, real-time measurements and in-line ad management are a few of the new things you’ll need to understand.

Here then are the 5 things to consider when reviewing your Facebook account for success:

Image by Cristiano Betta via Flickr

1. Targeting Your Audience

Sharing and displaying your messages are part of your marketing mix. But, if you are not targeting the right audience, it’s like they never saw the billboard – even though you placed it right next to a busy freeway. With ads or sponsored stories, you can select from the 700 million users on Facebook, and target down to your exact demographic. The data will help you decide on what works. You will share your messages with your intended audience, which will really help you.

2. Discover your Overall Reach (fan engagement)

Find out the number of real people that saw your ad or story. Reach is different than impressions, which include people who saw an ad multiple times.

3. Discover your Social Reach (friends of friends ad positioning)

Reveal the people who saw your advertisement with the names of friends that saw the ads, application or event. Note that ads shown with friend’s names are twice as effective as not. This will only work when you advertise a page or similar on the Facebook platform. Sending traffic to an external page (website) will not allow this to work.

Image by Cristiano Betta via Flickr

4. Frequency

Find out when your messages are going out at regular intervals if they are working. Are  they make the most sense on a Saturday (highly popular in many industries) versus a Monday am west coast time, for example. Change your marketing strategy and test this very important element.  The Facebook ad manager reporting system will help you with this.

5. Connections

Reveal the number of people who liked your page within a given time period. This includes other assets like events, applications.  Connections shows you how many people connected with your business. This way, you know you are driving results. This will only works for pages and Facebook assets, not external web properties. Even if conversations are taking place elsewhere, make sure to have a strong Facebook presence.

The data in the Facebook ads manager is continuously updated, so make sure to refresh and visit often if you are looking at intra-day management (which you should). You can also schedule reports to be sent to you via email, and direct to your phone (email).

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Finally, adjust your bids, budgets and targeting to test your advertising account regularly. This will be YOUR secret to success. And, don’t stop if it’s not working. It probably means you have not dug deep enough, worked enough ads, text and positioning.

And, remember that social networks and Facebook are about people and connections. Marketing online today is not about selling, but sharing. So, engage!

Are you running Facebook campaigns for your business today?

Related articles Facebook Advertising Success

• 3 Types Of Facebook Image Ads That Work (searchengineland.com)
• 15 Tips For A Successful Facebook Ads Program (bayintegratedmarketing.wordpress.com)
• Facebook Ads Gaining Popularity Among Local Businesses (webpronews.com)

Image by Intersection Consulting via Flickr

For those of you not familiar with social media, here’s a brief description: “media that is social”. Funny, but true.

We see so many organizations that begin with social media, and they set up a Twitter or Facebook account and tell us their are doing social media.

When we look a little closer, we can see it’s nothing much at all, and its typically “one-sided”, meaning they only speak about themselves, and nobody is engaging with them.

Maybe the reason is that they didn’t build out a strategic plan with specific goals and targets, as well as not understanding that listening is the second word (after competitive & market research) to learn in social media.

Listening to social media chatter can be done for free. But,  there are (great) paid tools as well.

We always suggest (when a company is engaging with social media), to manually learn about their space, and listen/watch in specific channels (their marketplace).

For example, on Twitter – you can search (search.twitter.com) and find out what’s going on both locally and globally with ease. You could spend 20-40 minutes in the morning searching on Twitter to discover much information about your market.

You may then decide to start following a few key people. Perhaps you download Tweetdeck and set up lists of key people to monitor. That’s a good start.

Furthermore, you’ll search in Google and Facebook for competitors and brands that are in your marketplace.

You’ll do the same for the B2B LinkedIn marketplace. And, of course – let’s not forget YouTube. What is your market doing there? You’ll quickly find out if Twitter works better versus Facebook, for example.

You should go where the fish already swimming. It makes little sense to spend time and dollars on Facebook if your audience is highly B2B centric, for example. (Disclaimer: your research is only part of the equation. It’s ok and necessary to “test” markets. Facebook and Google has a powerful advertising platform, for example).

But, all this research and constant watching takes time. Just like driving a car – if you understand what’s under the hood, you’ll be much more agile and knowledgeable when things go wrong. That’s why we recommend a manual approach, so you can learn & see better.

When you are ready, here are some free & paid social media tools that can help you further:

1) SocialMention

2) NetVibes

3) Google Alerts

4) Radian6 (paid) * recently acquired by salesforce.com

5) Synthesio (paid)

6) Tweetdeck

7) Hootsuite

Now that you understand your market better, are able to listen and monitor, the engagement part comes next. We’ll cover that in our next post. How do you communicate and connect in a natural, non-threatening way?

And, make sure to connect with us on Twitter

Related articles social media tools

• The Ultimate Guide to Twitter Marketing (copyblogger.com)
• Does Social Media Performance Vary by Country? [Marketing Cast] (hubspot.com)
• Tools to Effectively Listen and Engage Social Media Fans and Followers: Guide for Local and Small Business Owners [Francene Mullings] (ecademy.com)

Facebook Data.

The most well researched ad won’t do you much good if you don’t take advantage of FaceBook’s reporting and metric functionality.

It isn’t enough to post an ad; you must also take a minute to see what is working and what isn’t.

Facebook metrics make it easy to review ad data and info on users who view or click it.

Understand your environment.

Understanding whom an ad appeals to or who clicks the giant go away button can help you craft more effective ads.

To be effective, review profile information, click through rates, impressions, social likes, and even information on those where your ad was cancelled (stopped). Keep in mind that a low CTR is expected. If you are used to seeing 2-4% click through on Google Adwords for example, don’t expect that for Facebook. The key is to continue the cycle explained in each of the Facebook Guide posts we’ve shared with you.

Testing images, titles and body text and running reports to see how you do will be important. Keep in mind, different times of day will have an impact as well. You can add a special URL tracker to see where the biggest impact (clicks/engagement) happens.

Related articles for Facebook Reporting and Metrics

• Facebook Click-Through Rates Are Below Average and Shrinking (observer.com)
• Facebook Ads Get Half the Clicks of Network Banners (clickz.com)
• The Fallacy of Social Media Evaluation (thesocialweb.co.uk)

After all the thinking and research, it’s finally time to set-up your Facebook ad.

Now the fun really begins.

Use the information developed in steps one and two (links above) as guiding principles as you choose a title, text, a destination URL and a picture for your ad.

Remember!

Your title need to be attention grabbing and less than 25 characters.

Text is even more difficult – 135 characters to reach your goal.

A stunning and representative picture is also critical.

To finish, top off the ad with the destination URL that most represents your company or product!

Find more Facebook Ad setup tips here.

Don’t be afraid to test.

In fact, if you spend too much time analyzing here – you’ll never get out of the starting gate. Testing is key. Run reports daily, and learn what works – and what doesn’t.

When you create ads, make sure you are targeting your audience – in a way that “speaks to them”. Don’t throw sales jargon out there. Be a friend, and use the “friend of friend” feature to have people “Like” your ad as well.

Consider using a Fan Page directly, and test between pages (website and Pages).

Related articles Facebook Setup & Pages

• Facebook Ads Can Now Specify Any Page Landing Tab as a Destination (insidefacebook.com)
• Facebook Rolls Out New Pages Layout (allfacebook.com)
• Facebook Announces New Design and Upgrades to Fan Pages (hubspot.com)

Competitive Research.

Defining goals is only the first step of a successful Facebook ad campaign.

Next, focus on competitive research.  This research plays a role not only in creating targeted ads, but also in creating a feasible budget for ad placement.

Build a competitive analysis by focusing on a couple of factors.

The first is your targeted demographic.

Facebook makes it simple to target almost any group of people you can imagine, so picking the right one is critical.  Next, spend some time researching the language or ‘keywords’ you ad will include.

Competitive research is step two in a winning Facebook campaign. Make sure you understand your audience and target smaller chunks of your demographic – don’t go too broad at first.

Do you know what your competition is doing?

Search for them in Facebook, and check other important social media channels like Twitter, LinkedIn & YouTube. What are they doing there? How are they “inter-linking” social media assets and Facebook. Do they have a Facebook fan page specifically, or just a profile page? How often is content updated? What ads are they running? (if at all)

Related articles on Competitive Facebook Research

• More on Competitive Analysis Using Keyword Opposition to Benefit Score (stuntdubl.com)
• What Are You Doing To Engage Your Facebook Customers? Here Are 5 Tips You Can Do! (socialmediadudes.com)
• Intentional Targeting: Search vs. Facebook (searchenginewatch.com)

If you are looking for more ‘face time’ with potential customers, advertising on Facebook may be great opportunity.

Begin your quest by identifying some workable goals.

Remember that not all ads are driven by the force of the sale.  In fact, a more workable solution may be using Facebook advertisements to generate leads, increase brand awareness or generate increased traffic for a specific page of your site.

Use these goals to help develop text for your ad – always remembering that Facebook limits the number of words you can use.

A successful Facebook strategy always starts with identifying  specific goals. What objectives are you thinking about?

So, what goals have you defined? Here are some examples:

How many leads? How many new likes? How many fan pages? How many ads? What pictures to use? How many new content pieces each day? Contests? Quizzes? What else?

And, goals don’t get met in a day. Space these over time, and make sure you have a process in place to make it happen. Build out a plan for it, including resources if you don’t have it.

Related articles About Facebook Strategies

• Facebook Announces New Design and Upgrades to Fan Pages (hubspot.com)
• How To Create and Optimize a Facebook Content Strategy – Advice from Alison Zarrella (bethkanter.org)
• New Facebook Pages: Everything You Need To Know (allfacebook.com)

A recent Cambridge University study, photos deleted from photo sharing sites such as Facebook were still available thirty days later.

According to the BBC, sites like Facebook store photos in one place and their main page in another, which can account for a delay from the time that you delete a photo to actual photo deletion. Seven of the sixteen sites tested, including Facebook, failed the test.

Facebook allegedly denies the findings of the study, telling CNN.com that “when a user deletes a photo from Facebook, it is removed from our servers immediately.”

Whether the findings of the study are accurate or not, studies like these serve as a warning to anyone who posts photos online—make sure that you aren’t posting anything that would embarrass you if your co-workers, clients, relatives, friends, or potential employers saw it.

What some are calling the “great Aussie Firewall” may make Australia one of the strictest Internet regulators among democratic countries if the measure is approved, reports Yahoo! Tech News.

The mandatory filter would block access to some 1,300 government prohibited sites, including sites that feature or advocate drug use, terrorism, child pornography, graphically excessive violence and other controversial issues/topics. Critics insist that this measure, if approved is nothing less than censorship and that the money would be better spent on raising awareness about the prohibited topics.

“The filter may not be able to in fact protect children from the core elements of the Internet that they are actually experiencing danger in, “ Holly Doel-Mackaway, an adviser with Save The Children, one of the world’s largest child advocacy groups, told Yahoo recently.

Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, who proposed the filter, told the Associated Press via email that “this is not an argument about free speech.”

“We have laws about the sort of material that is acceptable across all mediums and the Internet is no different. Currently, some material is banned and we are simply seeking to use technology to ensure those bans are working.”

This proposed filter announcement comes in the wake of a recent historic ruling by Australian officials, which allowed a lawyer to serve a lien on behalf of his client via FaceBook.

According to a recent study, film trailers, and radio and TV ads are no longer the primary way that movie studios advertise their newest releases. Since so many people utilize the Internet, social networks, mobile phones, and other electronic means of communication, studios and marketing agencies are turning to them to get the word out.

“Radio and television are passive,” Chris Gomersall, creative director at Moxie Interactive, a digital marketing agency, told DMNews. “This kind of stuff has real audiences who are really purchasing things.”

Moxie Interactive was responsible for helping 20th Century Fox create a Facebook application for the movie Jumper. Agencies like Moxie are creating social networking site pages, applications, and interactive features for users, including games and contests.

With everything being marketed online today, from movies to baby products and more, The Internet is becoming a more important resource than ever before. I personally use the Internet to shop, pay bills, bank, read the news, and yes, watch movie trailers and read about the latest movies. Think about how often you use the Internet on a daily basis I’m sure that it is a bigger part of your life than your realize.

This means that if you have something to promote, the Internet is definitely the place to do it. Forget the newspaper, the TV, and the radio. The most effective marketing tools may just be a mouse click away.

Related articles of interest:

• Learn This: Twitter, Social Networking, and Micro-blogging
• James Cameron says he can’t live up to ‘Avatar’ hype
• 10 Not Simple Success Strategies for 2009

Thanks to Manoj Jasra for providing this information.