Every week as SmallBizLady, I conduct interviews with experts on my Twitter talk show #SmallBizChat. The show takes place every Wednesday on Twitter from 8-9 pm ET. This is excerpted from my recent interview with @MariSmith.
Often referred to as “the Queen of Facebook,” Mari Smith is considered one of the world’s foremost experts on Facebook marketing and social media marketing. She is a Forbes’ Top Social Media Power Influencer, author of The New Relationship Marketing and coauthor of Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day. Facebook recently selected Mari to partner with as the company’s leading Facebook expert, where she facilitates and teaches at the 2015 Boost Your Business series of live training events across the United States. Mari consults with businesses and brands of all sizes around the world to help accelerate their profits by integrating proven Facebook and social media marketing strategies. She is also often cited in prestigious publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Inc., Fortune, and Success Magazine. For more info, visit marismith.com.
SmallBizLady: What is the best type of content for maximizing reach on Facebook?
Mari Smith: Without a doubt, video is dominating on Facebook right now. Social analytics company, Socialbakers.com, recently published a study that showed native Facebook video is getting the greatest organic reach. However, this is not prescriptive; Page owners should publish a variety of content types, such as photo posts, link posts and status updates. In addition, Events and Offers when appropriate. Ideally, check your Insights on a regular basis and see what is resonating most with your audience.
SmallBizLady: What are some ways to optimize your Facebook Page with videos?
Mari Smith: Create short, informational videos and always load them natively to Facebook. You should also load the same videos to YouTube, but you’ll get way more organic and paid reach when you upload the file to Facebook vs. sharing a YouTube link.
Think about how you can create instructional content that is both entertaining and informative. Take a look at Oreo Cookies’ Facebook Page for great examples of short video content. Facebook video ads are becoming increasingly popular – I like the ones with subtitles so you can even make sense of them while scrolling through your News Feed without sound (and the videos autoplay). For instance, the movie trailer of Shawn the Sheep keeps catching my attention – it’s very well done. (And, I just got to watch a preview of the movie on a flight back to San Diego from Scotland!)
SmallBizLady: With very low organic reach these days, how can businesses ensure they reach the right audience on Facebook?
Mari Smith: It’s very important to set aside a budget for advertising on Facebook in order to really optimize your efforts on the platform. Facebook ads are the most targeted traffic your money can buy. You can get very granular with demographics, right down to zip code, interests and likelihood to purchase.
In addition, I highly recommend making use of Custom Audiences – this is where you upload your own email database and then target the list or segments of it with Facebook ads. Given email open rates are not 100%, this is a very effective strategy to reach more of your email subscribers – these are your hottest prospects. They have opted in to your marketing messages. Also, make use of retargeting – where you place Facebook ads targeting visitors to your website. This is also highly effective. It can take many touch points for prospects to make a buying decision; not everyone makes a purchase the first time they visit your website. With granular retargeting, business owners can dramatically increase conversion rates.
SmallBizLady: What is one of the important things to change on your Facebook Page?
Mari Smith: I am a huge fan of changing your cover image regularly. Changing won’t give you a lot of reach, probably the least amount of reach; but it can catch the attention of some existing fans and new visitors as well. When clicking on the image — and this applies to other photo posts as well — make sure you utilize the description area. The description area should contain a call to action (CTA) and a URL. You will have an informative description when visitors hover over your cover image.
Also, don’t ignore the tagging feature; here’s a “ninja trick” for you. Go ahead and tag your personal profile; you will then show up in the News Feed and “Ticker” of some of your friends, which may create more visibility.
SmallBizLady: Which tool do you recommend for creating your Facebook cover image?
Mari Smith: First, let’s ensure you have the proper dimensions for your cover image: it’s 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels tall. Next, one of the tools that is super user friendly is Canva. This platform has a great template that you can easily use and personalize. This tool also makes sure it is Facebook profile friendly, so it allows your profile picture to not obstruct the actual image of the cover image. You can also use Canva to create visual wall posts with proper dimensions and Facebook ads and link post images – those dimensions are 1200×627 px.
SmallBizLady: What are some actionable tips for optimizing the profile picture on your Facebook Page?
Mari Smith: You can update this from time to time, if you wish. Keep in mind that your profile picture is frequently in the news feeds. When you hover over your profile picture, your picture and cover image presents a nice hover card, that is more than likely the first snapshot of you. The time that you put into this area is worth it. Brand your profile picture if you have a personal page and business page with the same name. Another “ninja trick” is to try adding the naming convention of “business page” vertically or horizontally on your picture so that there is a distinction. This will help when you show up in the notification stream, it will identify which profile/page people are viewing.
SmallBizLady: What are some other features to optimize on our Facebook Page?
Mari Smith: Take advantage of your call to action button (CTA) on your cover image. I highly recommend all Page owners utilize this feature. Simply click on it to ‘edit call to action’ box and insert the URL you’d like people to visit.
Other tools on that same level (under the little dots); you’ll find where you can invite your email contacts from any of the email databases that you might be using…Mailchimp, Vertical Response, or Constant Contact to name a few. There is a limit of 5,000 contacts that you can invite at any one time. Also, there’s the invite your friends feature for those who are connected to your personal page; this is another way to bring them over to your business page. It is a tedious task, but an excellent one for an admin.
SmallBizLady: What are some tips for ensuring our Facebook Page is Google SEO optimized?
Mari Smith: The ‘About’ area is all indexed on Google. Make sure you have all sections in your About Tab filled out with keyword-rich descriptions. Milestones are another good feature to utilize. Feel free to include accomplishments such as # of fans reached, book launched, etc. – let your community know.
SmallBizLady: Which third party apps do you recommend for our Facebook Pages and why?
Mari Smith:I’m a huge fan of 22Social – you can stream live Google Hangouts via your Facebook Page, as well as create lead generation landing pages and offer items for sale. It’s super easy to use and the team is just awesome – they are based in San Diego and I know the founders. Head over to www.22mari.com to take a look! I also enjoy Woobox – I like their URL redirect feature.
SmallBizLady: What are some mistakes business owners make with their Facebook Pages?
Mari Smith: Turning their wall off! There are some exceptions where the business is either highly regulated or you’re a mega celebrity with a bazillion fans – then it can be unwieldy to moderate a ton of fan posts. If you’re not in either of those two categories, then it’s really important to have your wall on – this sends the message that you care about what your audience has to say and you’re not just doing old-school one-way push marketing!
Another mistake is not responding to fan posts/comments – at minimum, make sure you have trained team members who can like comments/posts and respond. Use people’s first names, and sign off with the moderator’s first name. As for the Message button, this is a personal choice as to whether you have it enabled or not. Facebook recently rolled out a new “Highly responsive to messages” feature – Page admins have to respond to 90% or more of messages in an average of 5 minutes. It can be very demanding to do this, but a lot of my students and clients are managing to get this new highly responsive icon!
SmallBizLady: What do you see as some future Facebook trends that we should be on the look out for?
Mari Smith: Facebook video ads revenue-sharing for starters. Also, the huge push towards Messenger as a separate, standalone platform. At the annual f8 Developer conference in March 2015, Facebook announced that the API is now open for Messenger.
There’s also Messenger for Business – see www.messenger.com/business – for sure sign up to get on the wait list. Facebook will soon begin integrating Messenger for online merchants – this will provide the opportunity to communicate directly with your customers via Messenger, which is almost as good as being able to text message them! Facebook also recently announced that Messenger is now available for people to use without even having a Facebook account – this is huge!
SmallBizLady: Any final words of wisdom for our audience today?
Mari Smith: The important thing to remember with Facebook and social media marketing is that it’s all P2P – people to people. Relationship marketing has been around for eons and will always prevail. Think about “service as the new social” and provide exemplary customer care at all times. Cultivate deep relationships with your audience, prospects, peers, even competitors! Technology will always change and evolve, but fundamental human values and character remains steady. With this approach, you can better create a Facebook marketing strategy that has an evergreen foundation, with a fluid element that allows you to be nimble with Facebook’s changes.
Sign up for Mari’s Facebook Business Breakthroughs and get access to this powerful online 6-part training program with self-paced training modules and 6 live hands-on support sessions. Discover how to increase your reach, leads, sales and profits on Facebook.
If you found this interview helpful, join us on Wednesdays 8-9 pm ET; follow @SmallBizChat on Twitter. Here’s how to participate in #SmallBizChat: http://bit.ly/S797e. For more tips on how start or grow your small business subscribe to Melinda Emerson’s blog http://www.succeedasyourownboss.com.
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