We’re all used to website conversion campaigns and usually focused on direct sales from our Facebook pages. But I recently tried a different tactic with one of the clients I’m managing and it is outperforming typical acquisition campaigns.
About the Client
The client is from the apparel niche focusing mainly on specific accessories. These products are very seasonal and we are in the middle of the high season which is summer. So the auction is very competitive at the moment and the main goal is to show the items from an angle that significantly differs from the competitors.
It is quite difficult to do this with simple creatives and broad targeting. So we decided to create another Facebook page and post articles about the product similar to native ads.
About the Facebook Page
The title of the page obviously shouldn’t be the name of the brand but it should represent the main passion points of the customers. For example, if you’re selling snowboards and equipment for snowboarding, you can name the page “Winter hobbies” and write an article about the main advantages of your products. For example: “5 reasons why you should buy snowboards from brand X”. This type of content presents your brand with a less salesy approach.
I would highly recommend putting Learn More as a call to action on your ads instead of Shop Now. This way the customers would consider this article as a review of your product.
So obviously the call to action on the landing page itself will lead to your website. And this opens up more audiences for retargeting.
How to Retarget the New Facebook Page
There is a whole new Facebook page with all the engagers which can serve as an additional audience for your MOF campaign. You can also retarget all the visitors of the posts who read but didn’t purchase the product. In both of these cases I would recommend sending the customers to the main website directly without the blog posts.
There’s no need in a second read and the audience should be sufficiently warmed up for direct sales now. Another important piece of advice in case you’ve got multiple products in your shop: Make sure to put the bestselling item in the post but also make sure to change it in case the product is out of stock.
If the customers see a product in the article but don’t find it on the website, there is a higher chance they will be disappointed and won’t purchase anything. But if you change the main focus of the post, this can boost the performance.
If this tactic works for your brand, I would recommend writing more and more articles presenting your products from different angle, but running from the same Facebook page in order to collect engagement.
Lots of you know that broad audiences can be scaled a lot. We’re talking here min $1-2k per campaign budgets with 1-10 interests. If we have interests inside with 1-10MM audiences, we will start campaigns with $300-$500.
Lately most of them they will stop working when we scale to $1k or more per day, but some of them will. Depends on your account as they all perform very differently.
What about smaller audiences? Can they also be scaled to the same ad spend per day?
Most gurus will tell no, but we have a strategy that can work very well. And if executed correctly, it can bring 2-3x better ROAS that broad campaigns.
So what is the strategy you will ask. Let me tell you first about segmentation and how to make proper campaigns setup for smaller audiences.
Segmentation and Proper Campaign Set Up for Smaller Audiences
Segmentation means that based on our testing data, we will create segmented plan for our ‘pocket’ campaigns.
First we will test the hell out of broad interests and LLAs. I’m talking here about 20-30 campaigns, sometimes 50. We will get enough data so we understand our account and audiences. Placement will obviously be mobile and FB feed is our winner in 80%. But IG feed and stories performs very well too.
We know that online shopping interest works well, and that Female gender is bringing 70% of all sales. Best LLA is Pur 2% and 4% but IC and ATC works too. As we sell worldwide, we know that US, AU and UK are our Top 3.
ROAS for the last 30 days is 1.9 and our client is making 5% net profit.
Not much but we tested a lot and we didn’t lose money. That is a win because client just signed with DimNiko Agency, and before they didn’t know what they were doing.
They spent near 55k on ads in their fresh account, and they ended at -7k loss after 3 months of all kinds of ‘testings’.
And what now? DimNiko media buyer who is taking care of their account is now, ready to go into ROUND 2 of testings.
Strategy: Pocket
Budget: 1k per day Testing campaigns: 10 Budget of each campaigns: $100 Campaigns breakdown:
1- best INT 1 – 3 adsets – narrow down – suggestion mix – Female only – Mob – FB feed only – Country: US+UK+AU
2- best INT 1 – 3 adsets – narrow down – suggestion mix – Female only – Mob – IG feed + stories – Country: US+UK+AU
3- best INT 2 – 3 adsets – narrow down – suggestion mix – Female only – Mob – FB feed only – Country: US+UK+AU
2- best INT 2 – 3 adsets – narrow down – suggestion mix – Female only – Mob – IG feed + stories – Country: US+UK+AU
5- PUR 30d LLA – 10 adsets – 2,4,6,8,10% – narrow down best INT1 mix – Female only – Mob – FB feed only – Country: US+UK+AU
2- PUR 30d LLA – 10 adsets – 2,4,6,8,10% – narrow down best INT1 mix – Female only – Mob – IG feed + stories – Country: US+UK+AU
7- PUR 90d LLA – 10 adsets – 2,4,6,8,10% – narrow down best INT2 mix – Female only – Mob – FB feed only – Country: US+UK+AU
2- PUR 90d LLA – 10 adsets – 2,4,6,8,10% – narrow down best INT2 mix – Female only – Mob – IG feed + stories – Country: US+UK+AU
9- IC 180d LLA – 10 adsets – 2,4,6,8,10% – narrow down best INT1+2 mix – Female only – Mob – FB feed only – Country: US+UK+AU
2- ATC 180d LLA – 10 adsets – 2,4,6,8,10% – narrow down best INT1+2 mix – Female only – Mob – IG feed + stories – Country: US+UK+AU
Besides all above, we also have MOF and BOF that are working really well and bringing ROAS around 3.2.
We also have few other broad campaigns that are working well.
Overall, only 30% of our whole daily budget is set for the Round 2 testing phase. After 7-14 days and many turned off ad sets during our optimization process, we can mark our first few ‘big winners’ of ROUND 2, for which we already know they will work for another month or two.
Sometimes even 3-6 months, depends on the creatives and competition.
We noticed that with this segmentation, specially with LLAs, we can find pockets of traffic where we dominate and where our ads can work for a really long time.
With ROAS at 2-3x bigger than with our broad campaigns strategies. So the key to finding good pocket traffic is of course – TESTING.
And with testing we mean testing every small pocket of traffic you can find. At small budget, middle or big budget.
Small for us now is $50 per day, middle is $100-200, and big is $300-$500.
At the beginning of 2020 we would say this differently, but now this is our favorite spot.
There are few exemptions but in general, small budget is used for interest below 1MM, middle is 1-10MM and big is 10MM or more.
Then you might guess, next step is ROUND 3, where we gonna test MALE gender and AUTO placements. Then in 3rd month, we gonna try new creatives and ad copy with our proven winners we got so far. And after that, we will go for video viewers 95% LLAs and Top spenders 5,10 and 25% LLAs.
The end goal is to find enough of ‘small pocket’ traffic, where we can by putting lots of campaigns there, scale to the same budget per day as with few broad campaigns.
Yeah we know, it’s a lot of work but that’s why our results are much better than yours.Not many media buyers and business owners, have time and knowledge to do our way of segmentation.
And not many businesses out there know how to plan testings strategically.
If you know how to make a strategic testings plan for 3-6 months, then you are already ahead of the curve.
Probably for you this knowledge is nothing special so you don’t need us. But if you think you need somebody to execute your 3-6 month scaling strategy, then book a call with us:
https://dimniko.com/msp-apply
We can make things happen.
We have blueprints and tools for different scaling strategies. All we want at the end of the day, is a respectful client who will say:
Damn guys, you nailed it. Let’s make a top notch scaling strategy for 2021!
Back in 2017 Facebook launched a new placement option for advertisers called in-stream videos.
When selecting the in-stream video placement, your ad will appear within another video a user is watching across the platform. As per Facebook definition “your ad will appear in videos from familiar publishers and digital-first creators that tailor their content to Facebook audiences”. The ad will only be played after 1 minute into the video and because the user is already watching a video, in-stream video ads are automatically played with sound, they can have a length of up to 120 seconds and they are non-skippable.For all these reasons, in-stream videos have a completed view rate of 70%, which is a much higher rate compared to regular video ads. In-stream video ads can be used with the following objectives: Video Views, Brand Awareness, Reach, and Post Engagement.
Using In-Stream Videos to Drive Conversions
Generally speaking video ads have been proven to have a higher performance than regular image ads and to drive a higher amount of clicks per impression. By increasing the reach and awareness of your brand, you will automatically increase your conversions. And non-skippable videos in particular have a better performance at capturing and holding the user’s attention.
In order to use in-stream videos to drive more conversions into your website, start by creating a powerful and interesting video that will grab people’s attention. The recommended length would be between 5 to 30 seconds, since these types of ads will disrupt the content a user is watching, it’s recommended to keep your ads short and compelling.
Create a campaign to drive engagement or awareness among the different available objectives for in-stream video placements. Select the right audience, it is recommended to create a custom audience to show your videos to the right people and keep your ads relevant, better than showing your video ads to a very broad audience. Once you have a minimum amount of video views, you can then create a custom audience of video viewers. Use this video viewers audience to create a retargeting conversions campaign and target the audience with relevant and similar content to the one used in the in-stream video.
By following this strategy you will manage to lower your ad cost, since you will be acquiring lower cost cold traffic by using objectives like reach and video views, and showing your more relevant content to an already warm audience in your retargeting campaigns. It is also recommended to tailor your content based on which part of the funnel your audience is at.
You can create different custom audiences for those who have watched 25% of your video, 50% or 70%. The longer they have watched your video, the more they know about your brand. You can then adjust the content of your retargeting campaigns based on that.
The more you understand your audience, the more relevant content you can create, and the lower will be your cost per acquisition. Take into consideration that it might take some time and a few videos to create both awareness and engagement, but once you have achieved that, your conversions will increase.
And one last thing before I finish, if you are spending over $500 a day and you want to scale your brand
When Facebook advertising just appeared, it’s biggest advantage compared to TV ads or newspapers or billboards was very detailed targeting. Facebook gave advertisers the ability to narrow down the targeting and create really segmented audiences. So the ideal audience size for Facebook ads back then was under 100.000 people. This was the sweet spot for achieving your goal – finding the best targeting and getting the best results. But years have passed and Facebook’s algorithm has gotten much smarter. The end of 2019 and the first half of 2020 have shown that Facebook is tending to more automated schemes.
Since the introduction of CBO the ideal audience size for Facebook ads increased significantly. Today the broader the audience is, the better results you will get. So the best audience size for Facebook ads in 2020 is over 1.000.000 people.
Here are some ideas on how to broaden your audience size:
Increasing the Percentage of the Lookalikes.
As we just discussed, the best audience size for Facebook ads has significantly increased. So it is also important to increase the percentage of the lookalike audiences we’re using. But let’s start with the minimum size for Facebook custom audience from which we will create a lookalike audience. Facebook custom audience minimum size is 20 people. But Facebook custom audience minimum size for building a lookalike is 100 people. Though Facebook recommends to have a bigger core audience in order to give more data to the lookalike audience. And instead of creating a 1% or 2% lookalike, it is recommended to create a 10% lookalike in order to give the algorithm more space for optimizing.
Using Expanded interests.
Whenever you’re targeting specific interests, don’t forget to mark expand your interests box. This will broaden your audience to the best size for Facebook ads.
Selecting as Many Suggested Audiences as Possible.
Facebook’s algorithm knows your audience very well, so it suggests you specific interests. The more relevant interests you can find, the bigger your audience will become.
Broadening Demographics.
Another easy way to expand your audience is broadening the demographics. The best practice will be targeting all ages and all genders because there are always people from different categories that can be interested in your product and Facebook will find them. So as the ideal audience size for Facebook ads has expanded, the main concept is to give Facebook more data for optimizing.
This will help the algorithm find the best audience for your business and help you scale your business.
Have you ever wondered how social media has changed advertising? Since the birth of the internet it’s a little bit hard to appreciate how far the world has come in a very short time. Especially how it has connected people, businesses and life in general and how small the world has actually become as a consequence of this.
The need for businesses to develop marketing strategies due to the competitive environment has become an art in itself and with the internet, it is more relevant and important than ever. I believe advertising is the biggest factor that determines the success of a business.
The fact that Coca Cola basically created the Santa Clause we know today is the type of marketing and advertising campaign you only see happen once in a lifetime.
Without the internet businesses had to commit to one single gamble to do something truly spectacular or fail spectacularly with it. They had one shot to make it work and could only rely on good research and experience from a well built advertising team. This chance was mostly reserved for massive corporations and made the playing field less “fair”.
The Introduction of Social Media
Social media is one of the biggest industries if not the biggest to develop from the internet, from the original social media “experiment” MySpace to what we see now with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube etc.
Each of these platforms with its own unique twist in the way it has connected people and businesses. This has opened so many new opportunities for a countless number of people; it is truly something spectacular when you take the time to sit back and appreciate it.
Companies have always had the need to develop unique advertising strategies that make them increase brand awareness. With the internet and the thousands of companies that came from it, it has made it difficult to fight for that little screen space.
Before the internet and social media, companies had very limited eyes to compete for, but the space was more limited as well. A lot more thought and money had to go into an advertising campaign back in the day, and it was basically a gamble with little to no direct feedback.
This made even brand awareness campaigns expensive and somewhat reckless, due to the lack of data.
How Social Media Changed Advertising
How social media has changed advertising could be hard to quantify, because of the pace at which businesses had to keep up with the changing environment.
Advertising on social media has made companies gain an advantage of direct feedback that companies from 30 years ago could only dream of.
The data gained from advertising on social media, means that companies can know exactly why and how an advertising campaign is working or not.
One of the negative effects I believe from this is that some creativity is lost in the process because a lot less thought has to go into making an advertising campaign from inexperienced businesses.
If you know exactly what your customers want to see, there is no need to fix something that is working, right? Not exactly, it’s just that most businesses just forget that the creative continuity is extremely important. Which is the reason why it is important for businesses to look at the data when building advertising campaigns.
This leads to the need for something big and extravagant to be put aside in favor of what the data loop shows the person running the campaigns.
If a business knows how to read the creative data, it puts it miles ahead of the competition. Which is the reason why keeping that creative importance with advertising is so crucial to building a great advertising strategy.
Soo how has social media changed the way we do business? It’s simple, it’s made it a hell of a lot easier to conduct business.
How Social Media Changed the Way We Do Business
Some of you might not remember how absolutely daunting a task it was to sit for what feels like hours on hold for a customer service call. This was a missed opportunity for many businesses because customers would rather leave the problem alone than sit on a call.
How does social media affect business communication?
Social media has made it possible for customers to contact the business directly with ease and without effort to give feedback on a product or to make a complaint.
Customers still have the chance to call customer service, but most customers would rather go on Facebook and send them a message or post on their wall. This has allowed businesses to take advantage of the feedback they get from customers and strive to improve, since social media can be an unforgiving environment sometimes. From angry customers to constant policy changes.
Data is a fantastic consequence of social media, it is an interesting phenomenon that mostly media buyers only get to appreciate.
Advertising on social media has become an art, and has led to a gain in knowledge that can’t be compared to anything else in the traditional sense of the industry.
Which is why there are agencies like DimNiko that find the best advertising “artists” around the world.
If you are spending over $500 a day and you want to scale your brand.
Book a call below, to have the best of the best work on your brand.
Facebook advertising is a big deal nowadays, according to statista.com, the global social penetration rate reached 49 percent, with East Asia and North America having the highest penetration rate at 71 and 69 percent respectively, followed by Northern Europe at 67 percent and the number of worldwide users is expected to reach some 3.43 billion monthly active social media users by 2023, around a third of Earth’s entire population. WOW, it’s a big number right? So those who have a business and haven’t started advertising yet on Facebook, I’ll show you how to use Facebook’s business manager and how to use Facebook ads manager.
How to find Facebook Business Manager & Ads Manager?
Firstly if you’re wondering if Facebook Ads Manager is free? YES, FB it’s a free marketing platform however you’ll be paying for advertising. In order to use Facebook Ads Manager, it is not necessary to run ads but if it’s useful to create it.
Firstly you’ll need a FB profile if you don’t have one yet, and then you set up a business manager. Business Manager will help in managing more than one page or if you have a team or agency that you can grant access to help you run ads. Probably you are wondering if you can use Facebook Business Manager on mobile? The answer is yes, so people can spend less time on desktop computers and track everything on the go.
It is necessary to create a Facebook page for your business which will be attached to your business (without is not possible), click here to create one. The FB page will offer you remarketing opportunities, it looks like a normal profile however people will take different actions, and based on this you’ll be able to retarget.
Once done you can add several Ad Accounts under the same Business Manager through the Business Settings and select Accounts. At this point, you’ll need to add as well the payment method.
Now you are ready to dive into the Facebook Ads Manager guide.
Facebook Ads Manager
Recently has been updated the Dashboard, and you’ll find it in the top left by clicking on Business Tools and then Ads Manager. At this point, you can set up the first campaigns by clicking on the create button.
One very important step here is to set the objective of the campaigns, always choose the right goal as this objective is the goal of the whole campaign. The three main objectives are awareness, consideration, and conversion. The budget of the campaign you can determine on campaign level or ad set level, however with this you’ll need to experiment and see what works best for you.
The next step is to set up the ad set, here are all the targeting settings.
Firstly you’ll need to choose the pixel event action you’d like the user to take: the most common for ecom stores is purchase however based on your business model you can select different event types. All this can be set up from Events Manager by choosing it from the Business Tools – top left corner.
Audiences are big players when setting up a campaign. Here as well are 3 main types of custom audiences, lookalikes, and saved audiences. This is where pixel data is super important, as without you wouldn’t be able to track your audience. You can select Audiences through Business tools top left corner.
Going further you can select the location, age, gender, and languages, interest, behaviors to reach a more specific audience.
The next step is choosing the placements where you’d like your ads to show. In the beginning, it is advised to use all placements however you can customize it. One more important step is to choose the right optimization and ad delivery event and bid strategy. This is very important as affects who sees your ads in order to get you the desired outcome.
We arrived at the last step of the campaign set up. It must be selected the FB page at least and if you have an Instagram account choose it as well. There are 3 main ad formats single image or video, carousel, collection. Best practice is to experiment a lot with the creatives and see what works best for you. The rest are the elements of the ads which is customized to your product.
Make sure to turn on the Facebook Pixel for Conversion Tracking as sometimes it’s OFF by default.
Difference Between Facebook Ads Manager and Business Manager
Lastly, I want to highlight what is the difference between Facebook Ads Manager and Business Manager. As I said in the beginning you don’t need a business manager in order to run campaigns but it’s advised to have Business Manager and under it the Ad Account. So Ads Manager is for managing your campaigns, and you can use it for reporting too while Business manager is useful to manage more pages, add more people or agency to manage your ads and you can customize their access.
This is just a general overview of how Facebook advertising works and what do you need to get started.
If you have any questions please feel free to ask. Also, if you’re spending over $500 a day on paid advertising and want to scale your brand you can book a call below: https://dimniko.com/msp-apply
Regardless if your business is offering a service or a product, brand awareness goes hand in hand with your sales. It goes without saying that the more people know about your brand, the higher your sales will increase. And there is no better place to increase your brand awareness than social media.
Having a social media strategy in place in order to increase your brand awareness should be part of your overall marketing strategy. However many advertisers struggle to find the best solutions to achieve this goal.
There are several ways to increase brand awareness on social media, and here are some of them:
Find The Right Platform
There are plenty of platforms where you can advertise your brand. Based on your product or service, some will have a bigger impact than others.
For example, if your business is B2B, you should consider having a presence on Linkedin, while if your product is targeting teens, you should focus on platforms like Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok. Once you have decided which platforms work best for your brand, you should personalize your social media marketing for each one of them. Don’t post the same content across all channels, take into consideration the type of audience you will be reaching in each platform and mold your content based on it.
While your content should be different across channels, your profile should be recognizable in any case. The main objective of brand awareness is for your brand to be recognized. From your profile image, your bio, to the content you post, everything should match your brand and your followers should be able to recognize you.
Connect with Your Audience
There are plenty of ways in which you can connect and engage with your followers. Answering their questions and providing information, the faster you react to the comments, the higher engagement you will create. Creating polls or contests, people love to participate and compete, and contests or giveaways are a great free tool to ensure your content will be shared. Creating posts to initiate conversations or debates, if the topic is interesting enough it will reach non followers that might become one. Doing live videos, live-streaming is here to stay, and is one of the most successful ways to engage with your audience.
Work Hard on Your Content
Brand awareness is not only based on the amount of content that you share, but the quality of it. In order to increase brand awareness through your social media, your content must be interesting and useful. Whether it’s a video or a blog, your content must catch your audience’s attention, that is the only way to create engagement and therefore awareness.
Keep your content relevant, search for the latest news or topics and adjust those that are relevant to your brand in order to follow the trend. Include images in your content, visual posts have generally a higher impact across any channel since are easier to catch by the eye while scrolling down the platform. Considering Corporate Social Responsibility content, more and more people prefer brands that have a social responsibility program, either giving back to the community, volunteering or donations. If your brand offers any type of social program, make sure you include it in your social media content.
The above are just some of the actions to take into consideration when preparing your social media marketing to increase your brand awareness. If you have any questions about this or any other topic or you need help to scale your brand and you are spending over $500 a day.
As I’ve mentioned in one of my previous posts every page has its feedback score. It is based on the surveys that Facebook sends out to your customers several weeks after they purchase your product.
What can we do in order to improve the page score? This is the question I asked one Facebook representative recently and here is what she answered.
Be Absolutely Transparent with Your Customers
What does this mean?
For example, if you are having some issues with the delivery or stock, it’s very important to write it on the website. It is also very good to send out email updates even if the product hasn’t been delivered yet. Something like: “We know you’re still waiting, but here are some tutorials or videos about the product.” If you know approximately the shipping dates, add them as well. If you don’t, highlight that you’re doing everything you can so they get the product as fast as possible.
These constant news will help the customer understand the situation and be less angry about the delays.
Be Super Responsive on Customer Support
Being responsive on customer support will allow your customer’s questions to be answered quickly and nothing is left unanswered. A customer feels much more safe if he can address any concerns regarding the product to the customer support and get a real answer.
Do NOT Overpromise
Do not overpromise your product or offer to your customers. Be truthful on the quality, effects, and how long it takes to work.
Let me explain what is meant here. For example, you are selling a product that helps lose weight or grow muscles. This obviously doesn’t happen in the first 2-3 days after the product is delivered. It takes time to achieve the goal even using your product. So it is very important to highlight this in the ad and on the website. In this case the customer won’t treat your product as a magic wand and won’t be angry after the first week using it.
All these points will influence your customer’s attitude to your product and page. And whenever they get a survey, they will be more positive about your brand. Even if they still haven’t got it! But they know the exact dates when it’s going to arrive and that it takes time to get there.
If you’re spending over $500 a day and want to know other tips we use
Is it better to advertise on Google or Facebook? And what is the difference between Google ads and Facebook ads and why do some brands choose Google, others choose Facebook and some choose both. Firstly to determine which is better Facebook ads or Google Ads, we need to understand the difference between Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
Google Ads
Google Ads are a search based platform showing ads based on Keywords. Meaning ads are shown to people looking for specific items or very closely related items to the search. If you are actually searching on google for ‘blue light blocking glasses’ you will see ads related to blue light blocking glasses. Google ads are shown to people that are already intending to buy or looking for items. So the ads are usually very relevant to the search.
Facebook Ads are different. They work on the method called interruption marketing. Meaning the ad is actually interrupting your social media time as you are not on the platform actively looking for items. Facebook holds a lot of data on its users, and advertisers utilise that data to show you ads related to what you are interested in.
If you have recently been browsing websites or doing research on blue light blocking glasses, Facebook gets access to that data and therefore the advertisers target interests similar to what you are searching and that is how ads related to what you are searching for show up on your Facebook feed.
There are Positives and Negatives to Both Platforms So Let’s Dive into Facebook Ads vs Google Ads.
Google Ads are very specific to what someone is searching for so typically they will have a higher return on ad spend compared to Facebook Ads as the ad will only show up if people are searching for specific keywords. Google Ads are great for very specific or niched products that have low competition. A negative of Google Ads is that you have a limited budget as there are only so many people at one time actually actively searching for your related keywords you are advertising for. Another negative is you can only convey your product or service with words on Google.
Facebook has a much larger potential buyer pool. Meaning you can have much larger budgets on Facebook and acquire many more customers compared to Google. But typically Facebook Ads will have a lower return on ad spend compared to Google Ads. Facebook allows you to show images and videos so you are able to showcase your brand much easier compared to Google. You can show customers using your products, how the product works and even show your brand message.
So ultimately is it better to advertise on Facebook than Google Ads?
95% of eCommerce brands are better to be using Facebook Ads and only a small percentage of brands are better off on Google Ads. But there is merit to running both platforms at the same time. If you are looking to scale a brand to higher levels of spend, revenue and profits Facebook is the way to do that. If you are looking for higher returns on every dollar spent with lower ad budgets use Google Ads.
If you want help scaling your brand with Facebook Ads make sure to book a call with our team and we can show you what opportunities you are missing & how to grow the brand.
First question, does growing your social community still matter? The short answer is yes, to a degree! Great! So what now?
Marketing plays a huge role in media buying and for one to compliment the other, certain facts need to be considered. In the past, the more page likes you had on your Facebook or Instagram page, the more legitimate your business seems to be. This also led to increased organic engagement on your page which led to more likes. The reliance on the perception of the legitimacy of your Facebook and Instagram page meant that this was the main goal for many businesses. However social media marketing has evolved over the years and businesses started popping up to fulfill these needs, this caused a surge in illegitimate Facebook likes, or Instagram followers that could be purchased which many brands happily did.
Those metrics of Facebook likes or Instagram follows aren’t as important today, especially when those metrics compete for finite amounts of space and budget. AKA your own ads. But this can start to work against you, because consumers have started to validate the brand by their amount of likes, but not in the way you think. There are many more social proof signals that need to be met for a potential customer to trust your brand.
This biggest factor, your page likes vs your organic engagement, for example. Like if you have more than 50k likes on your page but only get about 50 or 60 likes on your post and 5 comments on average. The customer will think that something is up, when they quickly check your page when they see an ad… Well…atleast I do.
In recent times, Facebook algorithm has tanked the organic reach of normal page posts, this is an important factor to consider. This is due to the competition for space in the news feed, which has rapidly increased as the user base grew. So far, this means that at the moment, a low percentage of your community is selected to see your post. And those who have been selected by the algorithm, have to compete against a news feed that favors ads and their friend’s posts. This can get frustrating, from what I explained above “this makes your brand seem fake” due to the balance between organic engagement and the total likes/follows. It’s not as prominent on Instagram, but we’re focusing on Facebook for now, because many company pages look like graveyards.
Page likes don’t really matter as they used to, this might seem a bit harsh, but this is the reality that we live in. The sweet spot is, finding that balance where the organic engagement can compliment the total amount of likes, in order to seem more legitimate to those users who check and care. Less might mean more in this case. Lowering the total amount of likes from “dead” facebook pages, inactive users are those who don’t fall under your demographic, is a good start. This will get you to the point where the discrepancy between your engagement and total likes gets less. You want this.
Encourage your community to engage with your post, and come back weekly or daily to check out the latest deal or next giveaway, you can get creative here. Like Boosted posts – that’s what they are there for, unfortunately, because you’re competing for newsfeed space. You’ll need to pay for that, because at the end of the day, your phone is a little portable billboard. From here when your community has reached that level which might mean smaller, you can restart your community growth as you continue to grow your brand on the business and advertising side. But this only works if you have the right agency partnered with you!
If you are spending over $500 a day and you want to scale your brand
