By Joseph Manna
Last week at New Media Expo (NMX) in Las Vegas, thousands of people attended to share best practices, case studies and insights on how to stand out with new media. One such rock star who presented was Amy Porterfield who delivered an insightful session on best practices when advertising on Facebook.
Advertising on Facebook is critical to mastering Facebook for business purposes. Just like how Google changed the game for online advertising through AdWords, Facebook’s advertising methods are incredibly targeted and effective for today’s small businesses.
Amy shared a boatload of helpful strategies and tactics designed for entrepreneurs. Why entrepreneurs? Well, because they tend to be more motivated to act on Facebook without the layers of bureaucracy getting in the way. Plus, it’s a level playing field – anyone can advertise on Facebook whether you have a budget of $5 or $5,000,000.
Here are few of the most important tips that you can implement right now for your bottom line:
Engage Existing (and Reach New) Fans with Page Post Ads
Essentially, Page Post Ads are advertisements based strictly off of a post made to your Facebook Page. The benefit here is that your content will be targeted to the audience of your choosing and can be directed to a custom application, a website, as well as traditional engagement through Facebook.
Use Facebook Offers for Lead Generation
Do you need to hook up your ecommerce software into Facebook to use Facebook Offers? No, Facebook Offers acts somewhat like Groupon in the sense that Page administrators can publish an offer that is time-sensitive or of a limited-quantity and increase the visibility of their commercial offerings through people who claim the offer. You can then direct people who claim the offer to a specific lead generation form for your site where you can capture their information. I never thought of using Offers this way, but it works and will help you bridge the gap between “engaged fans” and “paying customers” quickly.
Be aware of updated Terms of Service for Facebook Pages
Recently, Facebook mandated that Page owners may not publish images (image posts, cover images and promoted posts with images) consisting of more than 20% of text. What does this mean? Simply, your content has to be visually rich and attractive on its own merit without excessive text to inform fans. It is Facebook’s intent to ensure that their social network doesn’t get degraded with poor quality advertisements littering News Feeds.
Advertising Your Page? Change the Headline!
Facebook recently enabled a feature for advertisers who promote their Facebook Page that they’ve been begging for. It’s the ability to promote a Facebook Page with a different headline than the Page name. For instance, we could promote “Infusionsoft” with the “All-in-one Marketing & Sales” headline and engage people who agree with the generalized subject, but not necessarily know about our company. This is a big win so you can increase your fan reach based on intent.
These tips are helpful for businesses of all sizes, though I believe that small businesses have the upper hand because they are likely to have less overhead and are able to adapt to the changes on Facebook more smoothly.
For additional marketing tips, download Infusionsoft’s free 30-page Internet Marketing Guidebook.
This post 4 Helpful Facebook Marketing Tips from Amy Porterfield was first published on the Big Ideas Blog.