5 Tips to Conquering Facebook's 2018 Newsfeed Challenges

Greetings. This is Eric Cook, co-founder of Free Webinar Wednesdays with my good friend Jeff Simpkins and digital marketer with WSI. Today's Free Webinar Wednesday show was originally recorded on Wednesday, February 21st, 2018. Unfortunately, yours truly forgot to hit the record button when we went live in GoToWebinar, so we lost the beginning portion of the show. Sorry about that. So I wanted to record this brief little introduction to officially welcome and thank Cheryl Baldwin for joining us. She is the Director of Marketing for WSI's corporate head office in Toronto. And today we're going to chat about the 5 tips for conquering the 2018 Facebook newsfeed changes as businesses look to use Facebook as a way to connect and engage with their customers and their community and their prospects. These changes are making things a little different, a little more difficult, and she shares some insight on things that you should know and some strategies and ways that you might want to think about using Facebook a little differently in the coming year. So with that, it is my pleasure to formally turn the show over to Sheryl, and we'll go ahead and let her get started. Thanks for joining us.

Make sure, you know, we kind of all know what I mean about these latest Facebook changes, so maybe give you a little bit of a brief background, and then we'll get into some of the nitty-gritty on things that, you know, a lot of people are looking to do to kind of help bridge their marketing strategies as a result of these changes. So here's a quick screenshot of a post that Mark Zuckerberg, I think we all know who Zuckerberg is, that he posted on Facebook himself. And it says on Thursday, but that actually was January 11th that he posted that, where he officially announced that Facebook was going to make changes to their newsfeed algorithm. And I think if you read a lot into the articles that are talking about this, these changes actually they've been making kind of over time. They're just kind of getting more into the front and forefront ahead of it and making official announcements around it. But basically the change is coming as a result from, to make an effort to make the site better for people's wellbeing. And that's kind of always been the main mission that Facebook has said they have for the site. And so they feel, essentially Mark says that Facebook feels like they have a responsibility to make sure their services aren't just fun to use, but also good for people's wellbeing, and that when they use social, that they should do it to connect with people they care about and feel good about the time that they spend on the site. And so, So basically in an effort to do that, they are making some tweaks to their news feeds changes that will basically change the priority of the different posts you see in your news feeds. So I'm sure we've seen all different types of posts from people that we are connected with on Facebook, from businesses that we follow on Facebook, but equally posts from people we've never even heard about or businesses we've never ever heard about. And so as a result of these algorithm changes, essentially, they're going to make sure posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people. And that means that you will start to see a prioritize of content from your family and friends because you're connected with them. There's inherent reasoning behind the fact that you would have more interactions and they'd be more meaningful conversations with those people. And it will, as a result, possibly deprioritize certain content or public content from businesses or publishers that you really don't converse with on a day-to-day basis. And there's no specific timing other than the fact that they're currently testing these changes, slowly rolling them out, but they are saying that businesses can expect to see some changes happening in their actual reports as it relates to their organic reach of posts and their organic traffic from Facebook. So I'm not sure how many, I mean, I use the term algorithm. That's a very common term we use in digital marketing where it just means, you know, behind-the-scenes scraping of content to bring up people's preferred results based on their searches. So like Google, Facebook has an algorithm. That's what drives their newsfeed and how posts come up into your newsfeed. But this algorithm change is very similar to what we saw with Google. I'm sure if you're kind of familiar with anything with Google and have been following what they've been doing or listening to your digital marketing consultants talk to you about ranking in the search engines and generating good quality content, you've probably heard about things like Penguin and Panda that were algorithm changes that happened in Google to help ensure that they were reducing spammy content and people doing a lot of link building that wasn't really gonna be meaningful to people's searches. So it's a very similar kind of approach that Facebook is changing when they're working to clean up the newsfeed and provide overall a better user experience. Same thing Google did, just to make sure that quality content was coming in, that relevant content was showing based on someone's search. So I'm not super surprised that something like this is happening. I think we see with a lot of marketing channels, especially online, that's driven by a lot of behind-the-scenes processes. to rank content that, you know, there's an evolution in, in a channel and a tool. So, you know, you kind of make it available for the masses and see how people are using it. And then these businesses or large corporate brands have to kind of take a step back and reassess and make sure that they're always improving the experience that a user has on their system. So it's very similar in that way to what we saw with Google, just a few years ago. But I think a lot of people are, and when this announcement first came out, a lot of the posts were around, oh my God, this is the end of ranking on Facebook or getting anything out of Facebook. And it's a lot of people were dropping this Facebook apocalypse term and, you know, oh my God, how are you gonna survive this, this blowup of the Facebook newsfeed? But I kind of feel that's I think that's somewhat overly dramatic. I'm sure Eric probably has some similar comments on that fact, being a digital marketer himself. I mean, Facebook at no point has said that they'll stop showing your business's page content. They just said that they're gonna focus on content that inspires, remember inspires meaningful conversations. So they're not gonna stop showing it, but they wanna make sure that the content they do show to users is something that they will engage with. And so basically, Facebook told us that as long as you are publishing content that entices somewhat of an engagement level, that you will continue to get some reach with your posts. But things that entice no engagement will be impacted. And so we just want to make sure that we are just taking a look at what we are doing currently from a Facebook strategy. What type of posts are we putting on our business pages in Facebook? Are those resonating? Would those entice a conversation? And see what we go from there and make adjustments. I mean, you can't do the same thing in marketing forever. You always have to reassess what you're doing, and now's a great time with these changes to make sure that you're engaging with your audiences as relevantly as possible. So because there is going to be be a reassessment of what type of posts and how up in the newsfeed your posts appear based on user activity. You can expect to see some sort of organic reach to be impacted. Definitely, you will see any organic reach on your posts. So actually how far out your posts get and how many interactions and how many people see it. And there will probably be some impact because of that. Some referral traffic back to your website. If you're getting lots of referral traffic back from your website from Facebook, that could be impacted as well, as well as video watch time could decrease also depending on what you're doing with your videos. I'm going to be talking about videos a little bit later and on how to do that a little, a little more effectively now. But like I said, this, this, these changes, they've been kind of implementing them. They're very Facebook is a lot more upfront now about things happening. But you may actually notice that changes have been happening in your Facebook metrics over the last year. And if you actually went back and took a look of a full year of Facebook metrics and looked at it month by month, you might see some of those trends. And so it'd be interesting. It's probably something you want to take a look at just to see how much it has impact, because businesses are all different in how they use Facebook. Some really use it to drive a lot of organic traffic.

Yeah.

Some are still getting a lot of traffic back to their site, referral traffic back to their site, and some are still kind of dabbing in it here and there. But if you are looking to get more into Facebook, you do have to consider these newsfeed changes as part of your strategy so you're concentrating your efforts effectively. So I mean, I didn't want to give you this update on Facebook and the newsfeed changes and saying that things are going to possibly decrease, you'll see things happening, without giving you some tips on how you can maybe bounce back from that. It or do things just more effectively. So I do have 5 tips that I want to share with you. Hopefully you have questions around them, we can get into some discussion afterwards. If you do, feel free. We're here to answer any questions we can on this topic for sure. The first one I want to talk to you about is using the see first option. And so it is to encourage customers, one, to to make sure they're following your Facebook page, that's still important, and also to turn on the See First option. And I've got a visual here just so you can see. I did use our WSI page just to show you, but you can see here under a WSI, sorry, under a business Facebook page, at the top here where it says Following, the user can actually set preferences. And one of them is to see See First. And what that means is actually, um, saying that I want to see, uh, posts from this business first in my news feed so that they still hit my news feed because I do care about what they're posting about.

Hey, Cheryl. Yeah, just one other little note on that, and I don't know if you mentioned this later on, but you also have the ability to turn on See First for individuals. And I've got my good friend, Mr. Jeff Simpkins, as a see first because he shares cool quotes. And, you know, I want to know what Jeff's doing because I'm stalking him all the time. But in all seriousness, if there's an individual that you're friends with, and I know a lot of businesses become friends with their customers in addition to following their businesses, you can do this with individuals on Facebook as well. And then when that person posts, It increases the likelihood that you're going to see their posts in your newsfeed.

For sure. I mean, I think the separation between personal and business sometimes gets blurred in social media now, just because a lot of the times individuals become, you know, the people that you want to follow, not just the business that they're from. I mean, equally, I mean, Eric as a digital marketer from an individual perspective has a lot of expertise in his, in his own right that he's probably sharing, but equally may have a business page that he posts general content on as well. So you could see first on both of those. So yeah, so I just wanted to make sure that people know that this does not mean, oh my gosh, well, I have this business page, what do I do with it now? There's no need to put posts on my Facebook newsfeed. That's not what it really means about this. This newsfeed change. It just means that we need to consider what posts we are putting on and make sure they are engaging. And there are things you can do to help encourage your customers to still connect with you on Facebook. So you definitely want to make sure you don't give up on the community you've already built. You probably, you might already have a good following on Facebook. And if you do, then it could just be putting out a quick reminder or post to them to say, hey, because of some of these changes in Facebook, we don't want you to miss out on some of the great content we are sharing. be sure to see, add us to your See First list, or to see us first. And so you might want to remind your followers that this option is available, because they may not know. And then they can become very loyal followers for you. And equally, you still want to make sure that you are building your following on Facebook. So that means anytime you make a connection, pointing them to your Facebook page to follow you, and then equally to add you to See First. Also, your customers that make purchases or convert and become sales for your business, definitely if you're using Facebook to share a lot of great content with them, then encouraging them to still follow you on Facebook is still, is still a great part of your strategy. So you don't want to lose out on continuing to build your following. So I also wanted to talk about content that you are going to post. So this means that the content that you post on Facebook does need to be engaging and quality. And so hopefully all of you are already posting engaging and quality content. So that just means posting and continuing to post that. And actually, even more important is making sure that whenever you're trying to incite conversations with the content you post, that you do it within Facebook. So sparking conversations, you know, sometimes that's hard. I mean, what, what would actually resonate with people? You know, I put this post up, but nothing, no one comments on it. I mean, that's gonna happen, and sometimes it's just, you know, testing different things out. But it might mean actually like trying to spark a conversation by asking questions, or even writing about something timely or relevant around that's happening that people would actually have a conversation to talk about. So sometimes it's just thinking about, you know, would a conversation actually happen from the post I'm posting, and what would that conversation look like? And having those conversations happen within Facebook is actually important. That's the way that Facebook can actually track whether you You are prompting social interaction with your posts. If you direct them outside of Facebook to have the conversation, I mean, you might increase your visibility on wherever you direct them outside of Facebook, but your Facebook metrics aren't gonna be impacted by those at all. So instead of— so that would be instead of sharing a link to a YouTube video. So instead of directing people to YouTube to watch the video. Upload the video into Facebook. Consider picking the videos you want to really keep in Facebook and uploading them within them so they have to watch them within Facebook. Definitely leveraging Facebook Live is a great strategy for this because the video capture happens in live right within Facebook. I'm going to talk more, like I said, about video. There's a lot of other tools like using polls to ask questions or get answers from. Your customer base, it just entices the conversation to happen within Facebook itself. Another great strategy is to pick out a couple of different specific niches as part of your content strategy. So to find specific topics that you know people might be collectively obsessed about and want to talk about. And so it could just be, you know, even though you may offer a broader range of services. It could be just narrowing in on something very specific on that just to have more conversation happen. So, you know, you could be, take example of a travel, travel site or a travel, a travel, a tourism company. Maybe it's talking specifically about a location or a type of travel. So maybe you wanna talk about people that are really interested in adventure travel. That's a specific niche within the travel industry. And there are people that are very passionate about doing adventure travel and doing that sort of stuff. And so those sorts of posts would probably incite more conversations than a generic post just on a location. Types of travel that you could do and listing all these various types. So sometimes it's hard to know what should my niche be. And a lot of people are using the Facebook poll feature to find that out as well from their, from their followers. So it could be as simple as asking some questions on what even people want to learn more about or what they're interested in and taking that information to kind of pull out a couple things. You don't have to do a whole bunch and maybe you just start with one that you're very comfortable with and, and see see what happens from there. And then in order to kind of engage with people in a setting that, you know, where they're very interested in a specific content or, or topic or vertical, you know, Facebook does have a group feature similar to LinkedIn. And so you could definitely be leveraging that. You could participate in other groups and just be the person talking and lending to the conversation within that group, or you could start your own group if you wanna, if you know what group you wanna create and have a conversation around, and, you know, just talk to people more in a community setting. So another great way to kinda get into the quality of content. And then this is a great image I kinda found because sometimes it's hard to understand, well, You know, how does Facebook actually judge my posts? Like, we talk about user engagement and, you know, what would they find actually a post being like that's really engaging? Like, what does that mean? And how can you understand what post is maybe more engaging over another? I mean, obviously there's metrics built within Facebook to find all of your post engagement. But if you wanted to have a general idea, this is a great kind of infographic just to kind of take a look at. So, and it just kind of shows you, you know, the different levels of interactions and how your user interacts with your post and basically what that actually tells Facebook. And so obviously sharing is something that Facebook highly regards from an engagement. Basically, you know, you don't share things with other people unless you really love it and you want more people to learn about it. And so that's kind of at the top end. Obviously commenting and adding your own 2 cents to a post is definitely showing that you're somewhat engaged. And then liking, of course, is at the lower end. And then you kind of get into the, you know, the things that really don't say anything about engagement. Like if someone's just not taking action, then, you know, it didn't really resonate with them. Yeah, there's things like people can hide your posts. I mean, that's never a good thing, but basically that just means, you know, I just don't care for this one that you, and I don't wanna see it again. And then there are definitely the very negative, which is the unfollow, which you don't wanna ever hopefully get into the process of. But if you're always trying to look to provide engaging contents to your user base, you shouldn't get into that as a worry. So when it comes to engagement with Facebook, it does, and any, actually any social network, it does need to be authentic, and it can't be really manufactured. So, and Facebook and all these other social networks are pretty smart in understanding what would be considered manufactured, or what they call engagement bots. Bait rather than what's an actual authentic conversation that's happening on a post. So you definitely wanna stay away, and hopefully no one has ever used any of these types of posts, but I think we've all seen them for sure in our newsfeeds, and these are the types of posts that Facebook's newsfeed change is trying to really crack down on. Like when they're talking about the public content from publishers that just isn't engaging any meaningful conversations, it's these engagement based in these spammy posts that they're really looking to try and take out of people's newsfeeds, because we don't really do anything and it doesn't really leave us feeling any better about coming into Facebook than when we left. And so here are some of the 5 main ones. Hopefully, like I said, none of you guys have ever participated in posting these, but you've probably seen them. So one is definitely vote baiting. I mean, essentially that means having people vote using reactions or by commenting, or sharing to actually engage with the post. So you can see from this image here, you know, it's asking like, vote on your 2018 goals, and using a specific emotion or reaction to the post to do that. And like I said, that's one of the elements. So reactions is one of the elements Facebook looks at from an engagement standpoint. But this is what they would consider something that's trying to do it in an engagement bait format. React baiting, that's very similar in that Facebook reactions, and hopefully everyone knows what I mean, which is like the love, the like, the laugh, the sad, the angry, all those emotions you can leave on a post. And they were created as a way for us to portray how a post makes us feel. But Facebook doesn't want us to force people to comment with a specific reaction on a post. So they don't want to say, hey, like this if you are something. This example says, like this if you are Aries, or love this if you are Leo. I mean, that would be an example of doing it in a manufactured way. Sharebaiting is basically asking your friends and followers to share a post so they can win a contest or receive some type reward, or all of that is considered engagement baiting. You know, it's fine. That doesn't mean you can't ask people and your audience to share content that is related to your business and provide values, but don't do it in any sort of way that means that it's a giveaway or that's your call to action for them to actually participate in something. Tag baiting. This is basically when you're able to tag Someone within a post to share it. So, you know, this one, for example, is, you know, tag if this girl looks like, looks like me. I mean, tagging a person or physical image in your post is great when you want to identify people that you're friends with in a photo you shared, but it is not meant to tag like 47 people or hundreds of people in a post. And so Basically asking people to tag your friends in a post message or in the comments is a big no-no and considered engagement bait from Facebook's end. And then the last one would be comment baiting. So asking people to comment specific answers or emojis, if it's spammy in nature for sure. So comment yes if you love rock and roll as much as I do is the example it shows. Well, I mean that, a yes, a comment yes on this post really doesn't, isn't, a great level of social interaction on the post at all. And so again, this definitely in the old days would have probably, all of these would have enhanced the visibility of the posts in people's newsfeeds, but with the new changes, these are the sorts of things that Facebook will make sure that are showing less and less. Just bringing my— so 4th one is, I mean, I think it's not just about posting in Facebook, but leveraging Facebook as much as you can from a marketing standpoint. And so I don't think we can forget the fact that Facebook is a huge advertising platform as well, and it has this big advertising platform built within it. And I mean, I think we can all agree, I mean, when it comes down to some of these changes in the newsfeed where it, It's kind of going to hit publishers and business on their newsfeeds posts. I don't think it's a coincidence that Facebook and Facebook's experts are talking to marketers about, well, increase your ad spend in Facebook instead to get your posts reached. I mean, obviously Facebook still wants to make money, but Facebook ads actually have a lot of different capability to really target audiences across all stages of the buying cycle. And so for most businesses, this is actually a great opportunity. One that's actually still quite cost-effective because, I mean, this was a staggering stat I pulled out. Of the 60 million businesses with Facebook pages, only 4 million of those do any sort of advertising on Facebook. So, and that's only, so that's only 6.7% of businesses on Facebook actually doing any form of advertising. So there's still lots of room for opportunity to maximize your efforts on Facebook. And Facebook has great tracking and remarketing capabilities that allows you to maximize your efforts on that front. So you don't just connect with people the first time they hit your ad, but you can reconnect, reconnect with them ongoingly because they saw your ad. So I did want to kind of just go through a little bit so everyone kind of has an idea to take a look at what it means to advertise on Facebook and how the very various options they have. So, it does mean that, you know, on the advertising front, that it's, you know, a little bit of time for us to just go back to our basic marketing principles of moving and taking customers through a purchase funnel. So, from top to bottom and interacting with them specifically based on where they're at. So, that means going from awareness, which is, you know, reaching people who are more likely to pay attention to your ads and increase the awareness of your brand overall. So these are like people that you're trying to just get to know your brand. You're trying to get your brand out there to generate a larger audience for your brand. It also means connecting with people at the consideration level who are at the point of time when they're really considering what their options are around your, your product or service. They may not be considering you specifically yet, but you offer a service that they're interested in and that they, they know that they need more details on. It's also consideration of just other things like you're increasing your awareness and your consumers, even at the app download level. So if you're looking to get more people to download your app or watch your videos or drive more site visits or actually fill out lead forms within Facebook itself, which is available too, That all can be done under this umbrella of consideration. And then on the conversion front, I mean, that's really getting to people who are ready to take an action and purchase your product, and either moving that to your website or app to have that happen, and/or to, you know, use things like the Events app to actually have event signups. It doesn't just have to be a purchase of a physical product or a product of any sort. It could be for event registration as well, and to track your conversions on that front. This is a screenshot. So when we take all that away, this is the actual screenshot in the back of the Business Manager for Facebook. So if you're running Facebook ads and you are using Business Manager, here's a quick look at what it looks like. So they're really trying to help marketers and businesses focus in on what they're trying to achieve. By choosing an objective. And so you can see here the various elements under awareness, under consideration, and under conversion that you have available to you. And based on that, you can really hone in on your messaging of your ad and really get targeted with your audience. The higher your engagement level or your relevancy level on your Facebook ads, the actual So the more you can be contextual, the less you end up spending on your Facebook ads. So Facebook wants to show the most relevant ads to their audiences possible. And so this allows you to kind of pick different tactics that can help you really reach the target audience that's going to interact with your ad the most. Last but not least, it is all about getting on board with video. Very shareable content medium. And if you haven't incorporated video yet in your content strategy, it may be the time to consider doing this. Video is actually the format that converts the most on social media channels right now. And Facebook in particular is favoring live video in its algorithm. So it's definitely something to consider. I mean, it's not for everyone, but there's definitely things that you can be doing here. So I mean, I guess if there's any one content takeaway from this, it's that old-school Facebook content like dropping all these, sharing all these various links in your news feed or your business page and all that sort of stuff and just trying to direct people out to get to your website, it's kind of the old way of doing things. And you need to really be focusing on creating content that is going to engage people within Facebook. And so they are really taking a look at Facebook Live interactions if you're sharing those and the video components. So something to consider. A couple quick stats just in case you were wondering. Facebook Live videos are actually watched 3 times longer than videos that aren't live anymore. User comments on Facebook Live Facebook Live videos, sorry, users comment on Facebook Live videos at 10 times the rate than on regular videos. So a lot more engagement happening. Right now, 1 in every 5 videos on Facebook is actually a live video. And actually, this one was a staggering one. The average time spent for video on desktop is 34.5 minutes for live video versus 2.6 minutes for regular videos. Minutes for video on demand. So again, just a lot of engagement happening on that. And, you know, I know it can be hard to commit to doing live video, but something to talk to your digital marketing consultant about on doing that sort of stuff. And some of the ways that people actually do live video is actually using influencer marketing. So not necessarily you being the person in the video, but connecting with influencers that produce the videos and share your, your products and services. for you. I think we have seen a lot of that sort of stuff happening on Facebook too. So definitely something to take a look at if that's available to you. And then also it's about creating video content across all the buying cycle stages. And so really at the awareness level, it's telling the why, the why you do what you do, which is actually a very engaging point of telling a story. And then on consideration, it would be telling people how you do what you do. And then what you're actually doing or what you're selling. So there's different points, different types of videos you can be creating. I wanted to share one bonus tip because it's hard to talk about Facebook nowadays without actually talking about Instagram, because actually Facebook owns Instagram. When you do a lot of posting or advertising on Facebook, posting and advertising on Facebook, Instagram is also an option available. So I would say my bonus tip is to don't overlook Instagram. Maybe start looking at it if you haven't even looked at it at all. But it is the 2nd largest social media network in the world next to Facebook. And a lot of industry experts are saying they haven't seen any other social site grow as fast with marketers as Instagram. A lot of different opportunities here. You can use Instagram as a photo blog. To share content. You can have takeovers of your account with influencers as well. You can share live stories, make your business feel a little bit more humanized with sharing behind-the-scenes processes on how maybe how a product gets created, or even your interoffice culture and how that looks. But it is something to take a look at and maybe to try out and talk to you know, your marketing team or a digital marketing consultant about if you're interested in. So that's kind of it. That's all I wanted to talk to you about today. Those are the, the 5 plus the bonus. So again, it's all about encouraging the customers to still follow you on Facebook, post engaging content, don't fall into those engagement-based traps, take a look at Facebook ads and maybe take a look at what you can do there. And Test out some video and then also try out Instagram and see what that can do for your business as well.

Cool. Good stuff. I've heard it before, but I like hearing it again. And you actually tossed a couple of new things in there, which was pretty good too. So it's a moving target, that's for sure, when you take a look at anything with regards to social media. So as a reminder, if you are attending live, you're more than welcome to go ahead and type a question into the chat box, and we'll keep an eye on those, and we'll take a look. So let's see, we do have one question. So my good friend Jared— hello, Jared, thanks for joining us— outside of the See First option, what are other tips That you have for businesses to increase followers?

Yeah, so go ahead.

Yep, go ahead. No, go ahead.

No, I was just gonna say, so the See First option really only works once you have the follower, um, right? So once they're following your page, so that's kind of like the secondary. To increase followers, it is, it is talking, it's just kind of sharing your Facebook page with people at any point in time so that they follow follow you. So it can be about as simple as when, depending on what you're doing, it's hard what you offer, but at a product level, if someone was purchasing your product, on any of your messages or thank you messages or stuff, you could encourage people to connect with you on Facebook to learn more. You could even like talk to them specifically about the type of content that you're going to share on there, especially if it's content that's going to be relevant to them post-purchase. So if they were going to learn about stuff to help with the product that they purchased or to learn more about the product that they purchased or even additional things that you could offer that's related to that, those are all good ways to kind of connect with them. It's as simple as making sure you kind of plaster it everywhere you can. I know Eric does a lot of speaking engagements and stuff like that. I'm sure he has ways that he's building his following, just even when he's talking to people on a regular basis. You know, as a digital marketer, how are you doing it at your end to build your own following, Eric?

Well, the— and first off, yeah, when I go around, I'm spending a lot more time building my personal brand. We do have the WSI Facebook page, but it is woefully underutilized. So this is do as I say, not as I do. We use it more as a test bed than anything else, but I won't say that our WSI Facebook page has a ton of followers. But I do have a lot of friends and a lot of people that I've connected to on my personal account, which is why I wanted to mention this, the follow first, because I typically will then friend them. We'll get connected, and then I can, you know, make sure that I pay attention to when they're sharing stuff on Facebook. I do think plastering it all over the place, making sure that it's visible, including it with your email. tagline. You know, you could have staff that would say, you know, don't forget us on Facebook. I think it's important to have a clear understanding of what you are sharing in Facebook and why somebody would want to dial that in. And, you know, well, why would I want to follow you versus anybody else? And, you know, we work in the banking space, so it's not like you're following Red Bull where they're you know, taking videos of people jumping from outer space with parachutes or spacemen circling the Earth in roadsters or anything like that, like Elon Musk. You mentioned also the paid search options advertising. If you wanted to really go after followers to get people to like your page, because that was really a 2-step process, you get them to like your page so that they know you exist, And then you follow up with the see first to give them some idea and say, great, now that you followed us, here's how you can make sure that you don't miss an update. You could leverage paid advertising in Facebook. You could create an audience of non-fans that reside in your immediate market area that have probably heard of your business if you're local. And you could advertise to those people and try to drive them back to your Facebook page in order to get them to follow you. And then at that point, your goal is then to get them to turn on the follow first. Um, you only can follow first at this point 50 accounts, and that's a combination of people and businesses. And I've reached my limit. I've, I got to my 50. I tried to follow another and they said, you reached your limit. So, so I'm having to go back through and seeing which ones of those I no longer need to follow first and prioritize. You would think 50 is a lot, but when you follow a bunch of businesses and you wanna make sure you're paying attention to your customers and hot prospects. As a business strategy, you know, 50 gets burnt through pretty quickly. So I don't know if they'll increase that, but that's the follow first is really the secondary item.

Yeah.

So yeah.

And I think like Eric said, I think for sure sometimes even if it's trying to build up with your existing database, I think it's important to tell people what you will be sharing and what kind of information will they get. I think people do need a reason as to why they follow. You know, people just don't hit follow all the time. So it could be just show— it could be actually taking one of your posts and even sending an email to your existing database and say, here, we just posted this great post on Facebook. Thought you'd be interested. If you want to read more posts like this, be sure to follow us on Facebook. All those types of things can work to help build your following. Even getting involved and talking in on different groups that are related to your product or service or your industry. Because if you're, if you're lending to conversations and people are interested in what you're saying, they're gonna probably check you out and see where you came from. And so that's a good way too. So sometimes it is being active and staying engaged within the platform itself and just talking a lot about how people can follow you also.

Yeah. Yeah. One other question that I have for you, and I have my opinion, but I'm curious on yours first. Used to be businesses would do little contests to grow their fan base, and when they reached a certain amount, they would make a donation or, you know, follow us for a chance to win an iPad. And when people were really focusing on growing their followers, they were giving stuff away. Have you seen a continuation in contests and promotions for, for these types of things, or have you seen that slowing down or going away?

Yeah, I, you know what, like just my own interaction in Facebook and my newsfeed, I actually, I don't know if I see as much of that in my newsfeed, and I don't know if that's just the changes of the algorithm or how that's happening. I do know people do, I think, still use that approach. You kind of got to be I think you have to be really careful now when they're cracking down on some of this different engagement stuff that you make sure that you're asking them to do the thing appropriately.

Yeah.

Sometimes I see it more used in a possibly, like, I don't know if I've seen it so much as to build the following recently, but maybe more to direct people off of Facebook. to increase engagement on an external site or that way. So pointing people out to fill out something, I guess, to capture the data elsewhere. Although I'd be interested to see now that with the paid options in Facebook and you can do, you can actually capture lead details within Facebook itself. Like you can generate a lead form within Facebook now. I'd be interested to see—

Yeah.

How much more maybe that that pops up, um, more on the contact capturing, maybe less on the following, but more on the contact capturing.

Yeah, we've, we've seen a decrease, and I used to see articles all the time about contests and promotions, and back in the day we've even done a couple for customers giving away iPads because growing their fan base. But I think one of the things that the, the update from Mark, uh, shows is quality over quantity, and I think a lot of people got caught with the fact that you were getting a bunch of people that discovered contests and were liking pages just because they wanted to win an iPad, not because they gave a rip about your content or your business. And, and that's really, you know, the number of fans that you have isn't as important as maybe what once people thought, because the engagement rates of those people— I'd rather have 100 people that are super engaged and read everything I post than 1,000 people that only showed up just to try to win an iPad and then they never do anything.

For sure. And I think that almost equates down to every level of marketing. I mean, when you even look at generating leads, I mean, it isn't necessarily the— I mean, you can generate a lot of leads, but if those leads never convert into any meaningful conversations, I mean, what does that even matter? But if you have— if you're very targeted in how you capture those leads and you have fewer more meaningful conversations or things that lead to actual deals and conversions, well, that fewer number is a lot more beneficial and worth a lot more money to you than the ones that are just this whole long list of leads. I mean, I think all companies kind of, I mean, it's kind of an old mentality of marketing, the more the better.

Yep.

And people still kind of struggle with moving away from that because, I mean, even with changes with With, um, with Google, I mean, quality just came— became a lot more important. And that's sort of kind of when it's, when, you know, it started with, okay, it's not about, you know, all of like how much, but how, how well am I, are, are, am I doing and how much engagement am I getting from these, from these followers?

Exactly.

Yeah. I'm not sure like an arbitrary number of followers really indicates level, how engaged people are anymore on your, on your network, or how well you're even doing on your network.

Yeah, the only other item that I would mention is once you have a clear definition of what people are going to get out of your Facebook page and why they would want to become a fan, leverage any of the other social networking platforms that you're currently using. So if you've got employees that are participating in LinkedIn or Twitter, or you've got other employees that are on Facebook and you can get them to share information, you know, maybe, maybe produce a piece of content or a blog post that says top 5 reasons why you should like our Facebook page. And not that you're just going to be pushing products and services, but that's where important announcements break first. That's where you can build a community if you decide to go down the avenue of live streaming video, if you decide to build a group that gives a private conversation so there's a sense of ownership. We talked to one credit union a couple of years ago that started a private group for their travel club. And so a lot of financial institutions will have a special travel program that they'll offer through a checking account, and they get typically older customers that— or in this case, members— but they'll get older customers or members that'll be part of that program that will go on trips together, and then when they come back, they're part of that group. They're sharing pictures, they're talking about what they did, and that gets other people that are part of that group that maybe didn't go on that trip to have a sense of, boy, I really should have hit that one. I need to make sure that I'm on the next one. And so, you know, coming up with that— why would somebody want to be a fan of your page— I think is really going to be what you should focus on first. and then develop some strategies around building awareness and creating invitations. And then you get to the follow first for the engagement so that they keep seeing what you're posting. But great question. And if we have one more of those, we're gonna go over our time, but I'm fine with that. So, Jeff, I wanted to put the little lock on my lips and give you a moment to get a word in edgewise, which I know is sometimes difficult here on Free Webinar Wednesdays. I'm just taking it all in, learning some things, uh, finding it very interesting. I absolutely agree with quality over quantity when it comes to, uh, number of followers. Yep. So one of the things that I'm also following right now— quote-unquote, haha, joke joke— but I'm, I'm, I'm paying attention to Is the rising increase of chatbots, and in particular Facebook Messenger, because that seems to be— I know Facebook right now, in case people that are listening are aware, that in a beta environment right now where businesses can put the Facebook Messenger on their own website, so they don't even need to go to Facebook. But if you're on the web and you're browsing around and you're logged into Facebook, That carries over to you so that if you go to a business that's going to be using the Messenger or maybe other chatbots that have integration, the conversational capabilities that exist and Messenger being part of the Facebook community, do you have any insight on how that can be leveraged to help with the conversation and the engagement for businesses down the road?

Yeah, well, I actually— well, I mean, it's actually one of the things you can Do from under the consideration for advertising in Facebook and even leverage from that way. But a lot of businesses are continuing conversations with people in the Messenger format and actually using it from a lead generation standpoint. So directing people over to have further conversations on Messenger itself. And I don't know if you've— so like Eric mentioned, and I don't know if people have seen it, but there are a lot more like call to actions on like talk to us in Messenger. Or message us and stuff like that. And people are having full-out conversations. And equally now with chatbots, you can kind of organize those, help, help yourself and kind of create some standard streams of conversations to kind of have the conversation happen and gather information and answer questions for them. So it's really interesting. There is a monetization with it on Facebook. Facebook's end for sure. And I think you're gonna see that it's going to be leveraged a lot more simply because it's within their advertising platform. They've obviously got some sort of ideas and priorities around how people can use this more effectively for businesses. But it is one of the tools that marketers are paying attention to a lot more on Facebook on how they can leverage that a bit, a bit better as well. Like Messenger in general is gonna, I think, I think it's just gonna maybe change a little bit of how we converse with people through Facebook and, and do it more in that format than maybe necessarily in our newsfeed and through comments like we did before.

Yeah, that's kind of what I'm thinking. I, I'm gonna be joining One of our WSI colleagues in San Diego next week at Social Media Marketing World with Social Media Examiner, and I've been paying attention to some of the pre-promotional material that's going on. And of course, the Facebook newsfeed algorithm is all the topic du jour. But I think there's going to be at least 8 or 9 different sessions out there talking about chatbots and Messenger and conversation.

Mm-hmm.

So I'm, I'm pretty excited. I think that's going to be a tremendous— yeah, it's going to be a giant, giant fire hose stuck in my mouth, and I'll probably be fighting to have water coming out of my nose and everything, but it's going to be good. So I think we'll be, we'll be seeing more on chat technology.

I think that's funny. I mean, that doesn't surprise me that they're talking about more at this conference, Social Media World, because I watched the keynote from last year. And they were talking about it there and just saying watch out for Messenger, that it is gonna be the future, and that, you know, we're still trying to figure it out, I think, even on the marketing end. So it's very interesting and telling that they're gonna be talking a lot more about it this year at the conference.

Yeah, yep. So I think if you've not seen it, WSI is part of our Digital Minds book. We've produced a subway map that has all of the different types of digital marketing strategies overlaid on top of one another. I think that's going to get further complicated and complex— I'll make a word up here— complexified in 2018 with all these different ways. And it kind of goes back to the question of how do you get followers to be increased? There's going to be other channels that you're going to have to use to find them, and it's not just going to be SEO and paid search. You've got video, you've got chat, you've got email, you've got lead gen, you've got marketing automation. It's looking at all those different areas and what's gonna be the right fit for your organization and where your customers and the people that you want to influence are hanging out and spending their time. It's like anything else. If everybody's at the coffee shop, that's where you want to go and you want to hang out and share interesting stuff, and then they'll invite you back and then you'll become part of the little coffee clutch.

Yeah.

And that, that's really what we're trying to do here.

So Yeah, and I mean, obviously we talked just about Facebook today because of the nature of the update, but Facebook should just be— it's just one tool in the toolbox of tactics in your strategy. So a lot, a lot of different stuff to plug into.

Cool, good. Well, I looked at the clock and we are at the 60-minute mark. So Cheryl, anything in closing that you wanted to say? Just as a farewell, keep in mind?

I mean, overall, I think it just is, you know, in case you came into this webinar thinking that all was going to be over with Facebook because of these changes, I mean, I think it's pretty clear that there's still a lot that you can do on Facebook to kind of really maximize your strategy there. There's a lot of different tools available, not just paid. their groups, their live video. There's a lot of different things that you can do. So sometimes it's just plugging into those and understanding what's going to work best for your business. But I hope everyone takes some of this information and is able to implement a little bit of it within their businesses. And just an overall thanks for having me on, Eric. Cool.

Well, our pleasure, and you knocked it out of the park as I knew you would. So thank you, thank you, thank you.

Thank you.

Cool. Good, good. Well, next week I alluded to the fact that I will be in San Diego, and I just confirmed on my calendar I will be in the air during our regularly scheduled show. And still haven't gotten around to figuring out how we can prerecord a session and have it, quote, go live even though we're not live. So we will not have a show next week. However, it looks like the schedule is clear For Wednesday the 7th, and with any luck, I will try to organize my brain to a certain extent and maybe share a little recap of high-level observations and cool little nuggets of wisdom that we're bringing back from Social Media Marketing World 2018. So we'll hopefully see everybody back here on Wednesday the 7th of March. Until then, Jeff. I know I didn't let you talk a whole lot, but it's good to be back with you, my friend. Sounds good. Have a great trip to San Diego, one of my favorite places.

Yep.

I'm looking forward to a little bit of sunshine. So it'll be, it'll be nice. So everybody have an awesome couple of weeks. We will see you at freewebinarwednesdays.com. The video recording of today's session will be posted shortly. And that is all. Signing off. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

Bye.