Five Tips, Tricks and How To's for Facebook Marketing Success

Greetings everyone. Welcome to the Wednesday, July 8th, 2015 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook and I'm with WSI Internet Consulting where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and WSI online at www.poweredbywsi.com. With me this week is my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins. Jeff, say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world.

Hello everybody, this is Jeff Simpkins and I'm with Community Bank Consulting, Inc. You can learn more about me and Community Bank Consulting online at www.communitybankconsulting.com.

Actually, should I—

Go ahead, Eric.

What's that?

That's a cool picture in the meeting reminder.

In the meeting reminder. I'm trying to remember which one it was actually.

I think it was for this meeting. It must have pulled in Karen's picture from her profile on Facebook.

Oh, gotcha. Yes, we have a guest. I referred to in the email notice a newbie. Karen has not been with us before, but we've certainly talked a lot about Facebook over the years that we've been doing Free Webinar Wednesdays. So I'm really excited to be introducing her. But before we get started on that, wanted to do a quick check-in. How was your Independence Day holiday, Mr. Simpkins?

My Independence Day holiday was good. Yeah?

No digits lost or burns from fireworks or anything crazy like that? You behaved yourself?

I did. My chocolate lab is terrified of fireworks, so he got to go inside while my black lab and I sat on the dock and watched the fireworks.

I've seen a lot of— speaking of Facebook— a lot of friends that also have dogs, and they refer to the 4th of July as scare the hell out of your dog day, and that seemed to be the case for poor Ryder. We've got a 90-pound golden retriever that turns into a sobbing, shaking baby when fireworks come out, so I spent most of my evening indoors consoling him while everybody was out watching the fireworks, but it was all good.

That pretty much describes my Duke, my chocolate lab, as well. He weighs about the same, and fireworks and thunderstorms are not his friend the way I've figured out to calm him down when there's a thunderstorm is pretty much lay on top of him and put my arms around him, and that's how I can stop the trembling.

Yeah, I, uh, I've debated getting one of those, uh, snuggle vests or whatever that you put on the dog that cinches really tight and is supposed to comfort them, but I think I just end up with a really hairy snuggle vest that is on a dog that's shaking uncontrollably. So, but we'll see. So anyway, but happy 4th and happy birthday to the good old US of A. So it was a good holiday and enjoyed some time off, and it was nice to finally get sunshine and warm weather. So hopefully that means summer's here, at least for a month up in Michigan. So let's go ahead and we will get started. As a reminder, today's show and all shows for Free Webinar Wednesdays are recorded and made available at freewebinarwednesdays.com. So if you want to check the Go ahead and do so at our website. And if you have questions or comments or would like to just interject a thought or two, we encourage that. And you can go ahead and use the chat feature in your control panel. So just type it in. Jeff and I will keep an eye on those during today's conversation, and we will ask them when we have a little bit of a break in the action. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and work my GoToWebinar magic, and I'm going to send Karen the invitation to show her screen. And while that transfers, Hi, everyone. Just want to provide everybody a little bit of background. I met Karen a couple years ago through a private Facebook group that I joined after attending a webinar for Amy Porterfield on Facebook strategies. And Karen is kind of the, the queen bee moderator of the Facebook Influence Facebook group, and I frequently will go to that group when I have a Facebook question, something doesn't look quite right, and I'll post it there expecting a lot of the other people that are part of that group to interject. And she is almost all of the times the first person to respond and usually has got the right answer dead on and points me in the right direction. So I've used Karen as a resource for a while. And when we got to the point where we decided, you know, let's talk a little bit about Facebook and all the things that are going on and the changes that they're making and the challenges that that presents for businesses, I thought this was a great opportunity to bring Karen onto the show and introduce her to our Free Webinar Wednesday family and have her share some of her knowledge. So with that, Karen, welcome to Free Webinar Wednesdays. Thanks for being our guest today.

Thanks, Eric. So was I successful in getting my screen to show?

Yes, we actually saw several of your screens, but the one that is showing now is the presentation.

Perfect.

Yep, we see the big blue F and the title slide is there, so it looks like We are ready to go. So I know I'm looking forward to this, and as I alluded to in my intro of you, there's a lot of stuff, and you admitted you don't spend a lot of time on PowerPoint, but you spend a lot of time on Facebook. So I'm looking forward to that. I know looking at the list, there are several of my consultant friends and some other marketing folks from other businesses that are here, so hopefully we'll also have some good questions for you as well to answer what's going on over at Big Blue. With that, we'll let you go ahead and click through and get started.

Great. Welcome everybody. I'm excited to be here. I do, as Eric said, I spend most of my time either answering questions on Facebook or working on Facebook. Doing webinars is a slightly new thing for me but I'm excited. I like to do new things so here we go. You're in the right place today if you're using Facebook to market your business and you want to improve on your results. I think we all do want to improve on our results. If you are frustrated with Facebook's constant changes, I swear every time Mark Zuckerberg wakes up, he rolls off a different side of the bed and there's another change. You're in the right place if you have tried to increase your organic reach and it didn't work. If you want to know how to escape Facebook's Business Manager, I don't know how many of you got snookered into there when they made some changes recently, but I'm running into a lot of people who did. Just a little bit of background about me. I'm the founder and CEO of Your Go To Gals. It's an online digital marketing company. I have 30 years of starting and running businesses. I don't know how that's possible. I'm only 23.

Started when you were 12, right?

Yeah, must have started in the womb or something, I don't know. I provide digital marketing support for entrepreneurs and small businesses and I'm working with clients all over the world which is really super exciting to me that I'm not just limited to my local economy. I'm also the community manager, moderator and queen bee as they affectionately call me in the Facebook Influence members-only private Facebook group. In there I field questions from people all over the world on all sorts of Facebook topics. It's really a lot of fun. Here's what we're going to cover today. Tips for improving engagement. Insider tips on how to improve organic reach. There are some really interesting ones there. How to escape the Facebook Business Manager. Little-known tricks that will improve your Facebook ad results. I was really thrilled when I learned that one. Now that you can spend money on Facebook, or send money rather, how can you add some additional security so you don't accidentally send money when you didn't intend to? Make sure that you stay to the end because at the very end I'm going to give you some links where you can get some more insider's tips, checklists, and there are some resources. So my journey started when I was about 10 years old in business. This was my first business. I used to make incredible edibles, which were the precursor to gummy worms and gummy bears. And I used to make those and sell those to the neighborhood kids. So I started really young in business. And then if we skip forward 30 years, in 2007 when the economy went belly up, I was running a business that I called Glorified Gophers. It was a personal assistant concierge service. But in the space of just a couple of years, I got divorced, I went through foreclosure, and I lost my car because I was driving this really nice Mercedes SUV which I loved, not because it was a Mercedes but it was just a fabulous car. But the transmission imploded in it and that was a $5,000 nut that at the time I didn't have because the economy wasn't Wiped out the entire personal assistant concierge service in about 6 months when it went belly up. So it was time to start over. If I was going to have to start over, I wanted a business that I could work from a laptop, a cell phone, from anywhere in the world with a decent internet connection. So Your Go To Gals was born. It started out as a virtual assistant agency, but I don't know about anybody else on here that may be in virtual assistants or worked with virtual assistants, most people in my area thought that meant admin assistant, and that was not what I wanted. Then I narrowed my focus down to a passion just for helping entrepreneurs with marketing their businesses. And my big aha moment came from a former client from the personal assistant concierge service who kept trying to tell me about Twitter and how to use Twitter for business. I just did not get it until one moment I went, oh, the light went on. I got it. Then I went into education mode so there were a lot of webinars that I sat in on. I came across Facebook Influence and Amy Porterfield. Facebook Influence had a private Facebook group and this private Facebook group, Amy Porterfield was supposed to be present to answer questions. I thought, great, I'd love to get to know her better. Truth was, Amy Porterfield was rarely present in the group, so I stepped up and started to answer questions. Until one day Amy called me and said, how would you like to be the paid moderator for the Facebook Influence Group? I did develop that relationship with Amy, but I kind of backed into it. That kind of brings us to present day. I'm still the moderator for Facebook Influence. By the way, Amy has stepped out of Facebook Influence now. She's been replaced by Andrea Voll, who is now our lead trainer in there. Andrea also goes under the moniker Grandma Mary Social Edutainer, which is really a fun persona that she has. Sean Malarkey is the actual owner of Facebook Influence. Sean is a great marketer. Your Go To Gals now has a worldwide clientele. We provide digital marketing support, Facebook business page and marketing services, Facebook ads done for you, ad mentoring, one-on-one ad training, and something we're just launching today is Your Go To Gals Facebook Marketing Insider's Club. I'll tell you a little bit more about that later on. These are just some testimonials that I've snipped out of that Facebook group because there are 6,000 people in there from all over the world. Our questions range everything from how do I add an admin to my business page to really technical questions on Facebook ads. It's always something new. With 6,000 people, there's always something going on. Enough about me. Let's dive into why we're here today. Tips for improving engagement. Have a strategy and a plan. A lot of people, in fact most people, most Facebook business owners are just shooting from the hip and they have no strategy and no plan for their posting. It will make your life so much simpler if you have already a plan and a strategy. Post consistently and frequently. Use tools. You can use the Facebook scheduler in Facebook itself to schedule posts. You can also use tools like HootSuite. There's several others. I personally use Post Planner, and that works for the most part for me. I've used HootSuite in the past and I've moved away from it, but there are a lot of people who do use that. There are some other ones. Sprout Social has a tool. Be careful though which tools you use. You want to make sure that when you use scheduling tools that Facebook is not penalizing posts, reach on posts specifically, when you use a third-party tool. Post Planner is okay. Using the Facebook scheduler works just fine. Hey Karen.

I've got a question for you on that. I told you that I would ask questions now that I've got you for an hour.

Okay.

I use a service occasionally called Buffer, and I really, really like it. But one of the things that I noticed when buffering posts, it's added a new section specifically for Facebook to address some API changes that Facebook allegedly has made that requires third-party tools to not automate content and send stuff without the user's involvement. So when I post and it goes to LinkedIn or Twitter, it will automatically just grab the title and send it. But then when I post it to my Facebook profile, it actually requires me to type some information in there, I suspect because other third-party tools were just robotically automatically posting stuff, and Facebook wants to have a little bit more evidence of human involvement. I don't know if that's a valid issue, if that's something that's just being applied to Buffer or if it's being rolled out into other platforms as well. But I did see that there are actually some functionality that's been removed from Facebook in HootSuite recently. So since you mentioned tools, do you have anything, any insight on that?

I have not heard about that happening before. That's a first so far for me. I have not run into it with PostPlanner. I know that Facebook did have an issue with some of those third-party tools being used by people that were spamming their pages and spamming in groups. That's one of the reasons why Facebook really cracked down on using third-party tools to post to groups, to do scheduled posts to groups. You may have noticed a slight reduction in all of the Oakley sunglass spamming that was going around. I have not seen what you're describing happen from Buffer. There's always something new going on.

Exactly. Alright, we'll let you continue. Thanks.

You bet. Put more of you into your posts and your page. I've got to be honest, this is one that I struggle with. I tend to just be very focused and it's all business. I forget to back up and go, oh, I've got to add a little bit of me in there. We'll talk about some ways to do that. Use a variety of post types— videos, images, links. You want to mix it up. You don't want to be just doing all images all the time or all links. Or all videos. You want to mix up the different types of content that you're using and also the different topics. Let's talk about the variety. One of the things, you'll see that there's a mix, a certain mix that I recommend. The first one is inspire. I know that Facebook periodically says, we're going to penalize memes. Meaning these images that go viral, except that everybody likes them. If you can find some that are congruent with your niche, with your business, with your page, then use them by all means. I'm going to show you another way to use these in just a little while that will actually expand their usefulness. I recommend that you post these inspirational quotes. Entertain. You want to inspire and then you want to entertain. People come to Facebook because they want to be entertained. They want to connect with their friends and family and they want to be entertained. If you can give them things that they think are funny that are still relevant to your business, I personally anyway try to keep them relevant to what I'm doing with my messaging. Every once in a while there's just something that's funny that's not relevant. That's fine too, but just make sure that it still is not going to send your fans running for the hills. Entertain. You'll notice that on mine I always put some branding on there. You'll see— well, I wouldn't say always, but let's say 90% of the time I'll put a link to my Facebook page and my logo so that when this gets shared, people can find me even if it does not get forwarded with a link back to my page. Educate. There's all sorts of different ways to educate. You can use links. In this case, I pulled in a link from somebody else's content. I thought this was important information, so I'm trying to educate not just on my business but also on things that I think that my fans need to know. That's always a good way to go on your page. If it's not always about you on your page, even better, because that gives you more credibility. Here's where you can show the— bring in more of you. Do behind the scenes in your business and your life. This is one of my clients. She sells quilling paper, which is a handcraft. She was reorganizing her office. She has a pretty good-sized business and a pretty large fan page. She got a lot of comments and feedback on this when she opens up and you kind of let people see a peek behind the curtain. You'll notice if you go to somebody's page like Amy Porterfield or Mari Smith or Andrea Voll, they oftentimes will give you a peek behind the curtain. You'll see Amy's cocker spaniel or her son on the beach or little snippets. Do it though where it's congruent with your page and with the personality that you have on your page. Let people in. Then sprinkle in your marketing messages. You want to have about 1 marketing message for every at least 10 other types of posts. You don't want, if you're doing all marketing messages, again, your fans are going to be running for the hills. So if you want to improve your engagement, use this mix of inspire, entertain, educate, behind the scenes, so put more of you in there, and then sprinkle in your marketing messages. So before we move on, Eric, are there any questions about that?

Looking over the question queue, it looks like it is empty. I am starting to use More of the memes, like quotes. I know Jeff typically shares a lot of good quotes. I don't know where you find them, Jeff, but I always like reading them when you post them out to Facebook. I don't know if you've got a source that you recommend for getting those inspirational quotes. I know again, going back to Buffer, it seems like I'm kind of a Buffer fan, but they have a service as part of the Buffer service that will take some basic background images and quotations, and you can go ahead and create some memes through that. That worked pretty good. I've done that on occasion. Jeff, where do you get your quotes from?

I have various sources. I've been posting quotes for so many years. I just sign up for some and have my favorites and each morning check out the posts that are coming in and copy and paste the ones that I like.

Cool. I actually have an interest list that I've started I actually use interest lists a lot, but I have one that's just for inspirational quotes. So when I find a page that is posting some really good inspirational quotes, I just add them to that interest list, and then I'll follow their page so that I'm seeing those in my newsfeed, and that makes it real easy for me to source those.

Cool.

Alright, so let's move on to some insider tips for improving organic reach. This is always a hotly debated topic. Several years ago when Facebook took away the ability to designate a default landing page, we started to see the writing on the wall that Facebook was moving towards having to monetize their platform. We knew that eventually businesses were going to have to pay to play on Facebook. We've watched it for probably about the last 7 years as Facebook kept ratcheting down the organic reach. And so we keep going, we say, okay, Facebook moves the cheese so we have to go find it. So I've given up arguing with them about the organic reach because where else can you go and reach this many people? When you market your business you always have to pay Either with your time or with money. When Facebook makes a change, I go find out what's the solution. Let's not focus on debating what the issue is, let's just go solve it. In fact, here's a Karenism for you. The only value to the word can't is to define the starting point of can. So let's always focus on the solution. So here's one: when appropriate, share posts from your page to your personal profile. You can see on here that both of these I had originally posted on my page and then I shared them to my personal profile. That expands my reach and then it allows my friends and family and business associates that are on my— as friends on my page to further share those things. So they may not be following my page closely, maybe they're following my profile closely. This expands that reach. This one here, this meme— oops, clicked the wrong button, sorry about that— went viral on me. So this one got thousands and thousands of likes and comments and shares on it because I shared it to my personal profile. This one we're going to come back and talk about in a second because this talks about what you need to do now that you can send money through Facebook Messenger. This one was broadly applicable to everyone on Facebook using Facebook, so I also shared that to my profile, and that just gets it out in the newsfeed more. When I do this, I've noticed that my reach will go up on my page by 100% to 400%. If you want to bump up your organic reach, share these types of posts to your personal profile. Here's one—

Karen, one quick comment on that. One of the things— Jeff and I both deal a lot in the banking industry, which is heavily regulated and compliance-driven. Social media sometimes makes bankers cringe a little bit, especially when you start talking about allowing employees to participate. It's usually the case where there's one or two people in an organization like a bank that have gotten authority. But very much to your point, what we're trying to encourage those organizations to do is not necessarily give their employees the ability to post on behalf of the bank, but when the bank does make a post, because organic reach is being throttled so much by Facebook unless you're willing to pay for it, If you can encourage your employees to go out and share those posts and get them in front of their friends, that's in many instances way more effective than paying $20, $30 to Facebook to boost it. Because one, you are not having to spend the money, and 2, you are getting it in front of an audience that is somewhat familiar because they are one degree separated from the page because it is an employee that is sharing that update. So for organizations that have staff, if you can suggest— I don't think you can require from a legalities perspective— but if you can suggest and empower your staff to be able to go ahead and share those posts to their friends and connections, I think you'll see a much better return on your Facebook efforts as more people get an opportunity to see what it is that you are talking about and sharing.

Absolutely. And that's true in the financial niche. Financial industry niche. It's also true in the health and wellness niche, you know, there's— and in the network marketing niche. You know, those are 3 areas where Facebook really has ratcheted down some pretty tight controls. So you can definitely use this strategy. Okay, so this next one will double, triple, or quadruple your organic reach. We've been testing this with a couple of our clients And on my own page. This was something that I just kind of tripped across out in the Facebook world. We went to test it and we were really pretty amazed. You know, Eric, how Facebook talked about they were going to start cutting back on overly salesy posts getting any organic reach? This is kind of the antithesis of that. So there are some keywords that you can use, like congratulations. So we want to congratulate so-and-so for such-and-such. You know, it doesn't have to be— it doesn't necessarily even have to make sense. Congratulations on reaching Wednesday. You know, successfully reaching Wednesday. That would probably even do better. Here's another one or a couple more. Happy Monday. Happy Tuesday. Happy Thursday. Happy Friday. Let's celebrate Friday. Have a happy and safe 4th of July. We're just stunned at how these are working so effectively. It's Friday, time to do the Friday happy dance. This one goes crazy. So excited. Let's go back just a second. What we've seen is that when we use these keywords in the text of a post, when we're posting it, that we're seeing it double, triple, or quadruple the organic reach that that post gets. I've been looking If anybody has noticed this also and has other keywords, please send them to me because I'm putting together a list of these. We're kind of keeping it on the download because we don't want Facebook to know that we're gaming the organic reach algorithm. When we use these inside of the text of a post, as long as we're not also including salesy type language, These posts are actually doubling, tripling, quadrupling on the organic reach. Had you heard about that, Eric?

I had not.

I know that we used to be able to encourage likes or share if you agree to try to encourage engagement. Facebook saw that as a little bit on the trickery side. actually will penalize you if you're overly asking for clicks and shares and likes, which is why we're seeing a lot of those share to vote yes and like to vote no. We're not seeing that as much, but I've not heard of, you know, these different types of words or phrases. So that's interesting. We'll have to play around with some of that.

Right. You know, Facebook and, you know, the newsfeed used to be full of that, you know, please comment, share, Or like. People used to request that. You're right, Facebook did start to penalize posts with that. There are some other little things that you can do to do something similar. You could say, if you think this would be of value, please tell your friends. That's different than saying share this, but same effect.

Right.

Yep.

You can also use the thumbs up symbol. If you like this, then do the thumbs up symbol. There are ways that you can get around some of that penalization on those posts, but it's not as effective as using the actual text request used to be. Try this. I'd be curious for people to try this and see if it works on their pages as well. So far it's working on 100% of the pages we're testing it on. Let's move on into how to escape the Facebook Business Manager. This spring Facebook did away with what they called shared logins, but they were the standalone business pages that somebody set up that were not associated with a personal profile. When they made that change, They required that you connect those pages to a personal profile or you would lose access to the page. However, the kind of sneaky thing that they did when they made this change was the instructions that they gave were heavily weighted towards driving people into using Facebook Business Manager. Unless you were aware that there are some issues with Facebook Business Manager because it's As I say, it's not ready for prime time yet. There are a lot of features that don't work well inside of Facebook Business Manager. You lose access or easy access to some of the features you're used to having on your Facebook page. For most businesses, if you only have one page, you do not need to be using Facebook Business Manager. If you get into— if you were sucked into Facebook Business Manager inadvertently or unadvisedly, Facebook will tell you that there's no way to get out of it, but that's not true. There is, and we're going to talk about how to do that. The first thing you want to do is you log into your Facebook account as you usually do, and then in the little blue dropdown arrow in the top right of your top navigation bar in Facebook, the blue one, you click to go into Business Manager. Then when you're in Business Manager, you want to go to the Pages tab on the left. When you're in the Pages tab, then you want to go and create a new business page. There's a little button in there that says Create New Page. You'll create a new business page within Business Manager. This will not work if you create a page outside of Business Manager. It has to be done within Business Manager. This is a business page that you have no intention of ever using, the one that you're going to create. Then you're going to go back into the info section in that left navigation bar and you're going to make that new page the primary page. Then you're going to go back into that pages tab and you're going to click to remove the pages, page or pages that you want to free from the Business Manager. Then next you want to go back into the info section and there's a little link that says delete Business Manager or delete account. You want to click to delete. It's going to pop up a warning that says you're going to lose everything, it can't be undone. Yeah, okay, that's fine. Click to delete that. Then you're free of Facebook Business Manager. Here's the caveat. When you have added Facebook Business Manager, it has created a new ad account for you. If you've created any ads inside of that Business Manager ad account, you may, in quotation marks, you may lose those ads. You'd want to make sure that you've collected whatever information you want out of those Before you do this. Now, I haven't seen it delete those yet, but I want to make sure that we put that caveat out there. It also says in that warning that you will lose that Ads account. I haven't found that to be true yet either. So once you have clicked delete, you're now free of Business Manager. It's gone. Your page is free. The page that you created That you had to leave in there, the first page that you created in this set of instructions, that page is gone also. You've now extricated yourself from Facebook Business Manager. Now when you go back into your Facebook Ads Manager, you may see that you now have 2 ads accounts. This is what I saw with the last person that I extricated from Facebook Business Manager. They still have— They now have 2 ad accounts. I actually left both ad accounts. One is the one that they'll use, but one is a backup. I think it's always a great thing to have more than one Facebook Ads account just in case Facebook gets cranky with you and they take one away. Have you run into this, Eric, where you've got people in Facebook Business Manager?

I'm multitasking here while you're talking just to see if I can find it. I click on the little arrow and I don't even see a reference of the Business Manager. And I don't know if others are kind of following along as well. I'd be curious.

Yeah.

If I don't see Business Manager anywhere in my dropdown, and I manage a ton of pages— I'm admin for a lot of banks and clients— what does that mean? Does it mean it hasn't rolled out to me yet, or I was never susceptible to it, or I escaped it without even knowing I escaped it? I'm a little confused, I'll admit.

It means you escaped it because it's something that you would have had to have chosen to go into. They didn't automatically put you into it.

Okay, now let me ask you this. Would this be kind of like old school when somebody went to create a page for their business and they didn't want to associate it with their personal profile as an administrator? They just created it and it It's set up with a separate user ID and a password?

Correct.

Is that what the business manager is?

Well, those are the pages that might have inadvertently gotten people sucked into Facebook business manager.

Okay, yeah, because I know one of the fears that I've talked to several page admins on, not so much recently but a year or so ago, is people were reluctant to put their personal profile on as an administrator because I think there was that fear that they would be publicly identified as part of the page and that their posts would share to the business's page. And they didn't want to. They wanted to separate that. So there was some education required that as an admin, your information is not shared with the page. Nobody knows you're an admin, and the page doesn't kind of cross-pollinate streams. So there's really— there's no threat there. And I think once people have agreed To do that and connect their personal, it makes it nice because they don't have to log out and log back in to manage their pages. So I think the cleanup process around that, you're right, is very cumbersome. But fortunately I dodged that bullet. One of the few times I chose the zig when I should have zigged instead of zagged. I can't say I've been so lucky with some Google Analytics efforts in the past.

No.

But that's a whole other story.

It was very sly the way Facebook made this change on those. It really mostly has affected people that had those standalone pages in the past. Anyway, I'm looking at the time. We probably better move on on this and we can come back and answer questions if people have more.

Yep.

Also, if you want step-by-step instructions with screenshots, those will be available through my Facebook Marketing Insiders Club. I'll give you more information about that at the end. We're going to fly through these next ones a little bit just in the interest of time. Here's a little-known trick that will improve your Facebook ad results. If you go into your Ads Manager and you click on Audience Insights, it will bring up— first it will bring up this pop-up box. It doesn't really matter which of these you choose. Probably start with everyone on Facebook depending on your page. Then you'll want to come in and you want to put in— and I'm assuming that most— this works, let's say, not assuming, this works best with people, with fans that are located in the United States. I usually put in the United States as my search parameter here. Then you can put in your age and gender. In this case, we're looking at women 18 and older. In the US. Then this was for one of my health and wellness clients. Then we put in the names of some pages in the interests area. We put in some competitors and some ancillary pages into the interests. Then we also put in her page and then some other pages that I'm connected with that are in the same relative niche, broad niche. What happens here then is you get to see on Facebook how many people are interested in those pages or in those interests. The pages here and the pages here. You can see that your ads for this niche should be pretty much, the bulk of them should be women 35 to 54. Now you know what your demographics are. Then you want to click over to pages or page likes. That wouldn't necessarily be intuitive, right? What happens is it brings up the top categories. It's going to tell you, hey, this one is a top category. Here's the top news and media, publishing, health and beauty. These are all pages. That are within these broad categories, the top ones. So there may be some ones that you wouldn't have thought about, like NutriBullet. I wouldn't necessarily think to use that in my targeting. But when you come down, here's where the magic happens. When you come down to page likes, you can look at their audience on Facebook. So this is how large their page is. And then here's what you really want to pay attention to, is this affinity score. Because people that are fans of Coach Mindy weight loss are 25.1 times more likely to click on an ad than people that are in NutriBullet, for example. NutriBullet people are 5.8 times more likely. times more likely to click on an ad. Whereas if you put in just your page, you may have a -5. If you take these top ones here, Coach Mindy Weight Loss, Weight Not, Eat Fit Fuel, you take these ones that have large pages and their affinity score is high. and you use those in your targeting, you'll see your click-through rate on your ads go up significantly. I did this for a client that I have in the health and wellness industry, and for a weight loss— a very carefully worded weight loss opt-in landing page and a very carefully worded ad in that niche, we're getting between a 2.8% and a 4.8% click-through rate day in and day out, and we're getting a very high number of opt-ins, and that is a niche that's pretty hard to tap.

In case people aren't familiar with what a good click-through rate typically is, if you can get to about a 1% click-through rate, you're usually doing pretty good. So the fact that you've been able to pull over 2% to over 4%, You know, even though 4% doesn't seem like a huge number, when you look at it as an industry standard, you're kind of crushing it there.

Right.

So being much more relevant certainly is a very powerful way of doing that. I've not really gone into this area in the Ads Manager, so this is— I'm making some mental notes and some written notes myself.

Yeah, this is something that doesn't get talked about a lot, and it was something that I, you know, not that long ago was not aware of. But when I did this, my relevancy score on my ads went up, way up in this particular niche that I tested it in. It was off the charts on relevancy score and the click-through rate. Facebook actually says the average click-through rate on an ad on Facebook is 0.05%.

Oh wow.

If you can get— let's see, not 0.05, let's say it's 0.5.

Okay, yeah, half a percent.

Yeah, half of a percent, so 0.5%. On the ads that I run, I consider that an ad is not working if it's anything less than 1.5%. If it's less than 1.5%, I'm not happy. I'm still looking on how to tweak it. Most of my ads are up in the 1.5% to as high as 12% click-through rate. If you learn some of these little insider tricks, it can really improve your ad results. This is a quick one. Here's how you can send money. Or now that you can send money, rather, how you can add some additional security. You want to go into your settings. So in that, again, in that dropdown arrow, you want to go to settings. So this is in your personal settings, and then you want to go over to payments. And then in your account settings, you want to go down and click on password. So you want to enter your Facebook password before sending money. You want to click that to the on position. That way in Facebook Messenger where you now see the little money icon, when you click on that, you're going to send money to somebody, it will require you to enter your Facebook password before it actually sends the money. If you're just playing around with it or you have a change of heart, you have at least a few more moments to save yourself before you actually have sent money to someone. I hope that you have picked up at least one useful and actionable idea today. I tried to give you some good meat in here. If you would like more of these types of things, because we only did 5 today and there are lots of these insider type of tips. If you'd like more, I have actually just started and we just launched it today, especially in front of this webinar. I really pushed to have it ready to launch. We're going to have a Your Go To Gals Facebook Marketing Insiders Club. It will be a members-only group with a growing library of reports and step-by-step tutorials. Checklists, cheat sheets, video tutorials. We'll have the Facebook Insider's Club with those things in it. Then private Facebook group. This is probably going to be worth the price of admission. I know it is for Facebook Influence members. This private Facebook group is where a lot of the magic is going to happen. There will be heads-up alerts in there when Facebook— new Facebook changes come out that are going to be affecting you. You can come in there and get your perplexing Facebook questions answered. You know, those questions that you can't find an answer on Facebook and nobody seems to know. You'll be able to come in there and get those things answered. Also help with your Facebook marketing challenges. You know, we see in the Facebook Influence Group a lot of people coming in and they have some pretty complex types of questions. They're wondering why their ad's not working, but when you dig into it, their image isn't working, their text isn't working, their targeting isn't working, and then their landing page is not working. So we can only cover so much of that inside of Facebook Influence. That's really geared towards your Facebook 101 marketers, and we don't go into landing pages and autoresponders, things that are kind of ancillary to Facebook marketing. But in the Facebook Insiders Marketing Club, we will be able to go into those things. You'll also be able to sign up for email alerts and updates so that if you're not monitoring that group on a regular basis, that you'll be notified by email when things come up that you need to be aware of. Coming soon, we're going to be adding some video trainings and digital marketing topics. There'll be a growing library of on-demand video trainings I have a lot more planned for this so it's going to be crazy, crazy effective. We just opened the doors today as I said and we're going to be charging $27 a month to be a member of the club. You have of course the members-only library of checklists, cheat sheets, video tutorials, step-by-step tutorials, reports, the private Facebook group, the email alerts and updates and Even though we're going to be charging $27 a month, for the first 50 founding members, they're going to be locked in or grandfathered in for only $17 a month. We really want to encourage people to jump in and give it a try. There's no long-term contracts, nothing like that. It's month to month. If you come in and you try us and you don't like it, you don't think it was worth $17, and trust me, it will be worth much, much more than $17 a month. Then you can try us for 1 month and not come back for the next month. For the first 50 people, it'll only be $17 a month. I'll be honest, I have a waiting list of people that have been waiting for me to get this launched and I have not— because I was preparing for this webinar, I've not had a chance to let them in on the fact that I've opened the doors today. Those first 50 spots are going to go pretty fast. So if you're—

first crack, because that's what you're saying, right? Because you've made a big announcement here on Free Webinar Wednesdays.

That's right, you guys are getting first crack. And I think my friend from Facebook Influence, Jory Holness, is probably on the video, on the webinar, so he's probably over there signing up now.

So, too funny. Well, I know you had mentioned that when we originally had the conversation a few weeks ago when I originally brought this idea to you. Like I said, you've been a big help over on the Facebook Influence side. I think the big lesson here, and not that I want to discourage anybody from joining yours because I think that would be obviously great, but having some sort of a resource that you can go to. What I've found is when you pay for the resource, the quality goes up significantly because there's more value to it. If it's not this and you already have one, great. If you don't, then this is definitely one that I would encourage you to check out because you've got people that have a vested interest other than just posting content and blogging to answer your questions and to be there if you've got— That's good.

There are going to be people in there that I have handpicked that are also experts in areas like websites and landing pages and strategy, full Facebook strategies, posting engagement strategies. There are going to be a lot of different experts in there besides me that will also be answering questions. You're absolutely right, Eric. I belong to a number of Facebook groups and the free ones are oftentimes worth what you've paid for them. Which of course is nothing. I see in a lot of those, people will ask a question and then the answers are either wrong or totally irrelevant. This is one place where you can go where you absolutely will always get a correct, relevant answer. Let's open it up to questions.

Sure.

It looks like you already have one joiner. I won't name names but it looks like I see a done, I joined, I was the first to sign up, go Karen! With exclamation points. There you go, you got your first conversion, customer number 1.

How about that?

I'm excited. I'm really working on creating some training programs This is kind of a first step in that direction. This group, the Facebook Insiders Club, will be the first people to— well, they'll be the first people I answer questions for. They're going to get answers ahead of the Facebook Influence people.

Yes.

They're going to be the first people to get alerts. They're going to be the first people to know when additional training and those types of things become available. I'm really super excited to develop that.

We do have a question. This individual asks, do you have any advice for someone just launching their business, pitfalls in Facebook marketing to avoid possibly? So maybe to paraphrase, maybe what's the biggest mistake that you see business owners doing in Facebook when they go out and You know, they just start their business, they're really excited, I gotta be on Facebook because that's where the billions of people are across the world, and then they jump into Facebook and they put their foot in their mouth or they do something bad. What's typically the case that somebody does, or what's the most common mistake that you've seen in your group management and other Facebook endeavors?

Sure, I'd say probably the biggest thing is not having An understanding of how Facebook works and how the difference between your personal profile and your business page and how the posting works and the newsfeed works. I know that that can be confusing and perplexing, but if they can get somebody that can walk them through that so that they get to a point of understanding, that will be very helpful.

Yeah.

I see a lot of times brand new people will post to their page as themselves instead of posting as their page. Then their posts are ending up in the left column under posts by others instead of on their page where they intended. I see a lot of that.

I've seen more than I care to admit. Sometimes I don't even have a vested interest other than the fact that I know they're They're doing it wrong. They'll create a business page under a personal profile, so you won't have the ability to like. You'll have to send a friend request. They'll have a business as an individual that will have friends instead of followers and fans. They're limiting themselves because when you have a personal profile, one, per Facebook's guidelines, it really needs to be a carbon-based life form, i.e., a human, not an organization or an entity. But when you put your business in as a personal profile, you don't get to advertise. You don't get the Facebook Insights. You don't get the statistics that are there. It may be easier to create a profile instead of a page, but it's very much worth creating an actual page so that you can take advantage of those other business functions down the road. And then as Karen mentioned earlier, when your business posts to the business page, then you share it individually. So you kind of do double duty. So you've got 2 presences presences on Facebook where you've got your business page but then you as the owner are also promoting it with your personal profile.

Right. Sometimes I give business owners the visual of changing hats.

Yeah.

So when you're at home, you have your dad hat on, for example. When you're at work, you have your work hat on. So it's similar. You're actually changing roles when you're shifting from your personal profile and your page. I wanted to touch back, Eric, you mentioned something that's really critically important. When people inadvertently set up a personal profile as a business page, A, it's against Facebook's terms of service. Business pages must be set up as a business page. You put all of your hard work at risk because Facebook can and will remove those pages. There are some of us in the industry where we see somebody who's blatantly violating that, that we will give Facebook a heads up because that's not right. It's not effective for you.

Right.

Facebook, by the way, I've watched this and Facebook will remove those usually within an hour of them being reported. There's no notice and no taking it back. You put all of your efforts at risk. Plus there's this misconception that a personal profile gets better reach than a business page. That's actually not accurate. They both get the same amount of reach. It's an inaccuracy there. Then as you mentioned, there's tons of functionality that's not available on personal profiles that is available on a business page. I always advise business owners to set up a business page. Set it up so that you've got a solid structure, solid foundation to build upon. That means a good professional-looking cover image, your About section fully filled in. Make sure that it's not all about you. When you're marketing, you've got to remember it's about them. It's about the people that you're serving. It's not about you. So those are the primary things that I see.

Yeah. Well, we are at the top of the hour. I told you that 60 minutes would go by very quickly, and 5, I think, was the right number, so we allowed some good time for questions. So I'll keep an eye. If there's any last-minute questions, feel free to throw them in there. Otherwise, Jeff, I don't know if you've got any closing thoughts or observations you'd like to share before we go ahead and conclude this week's session, but I'll let you, if not, say goodbye.

Thanks, Karen. It was a fact-filled hour, lots of information.

Absolutely.

Well, it was my pleasure, and if there are any questions that come in later, you know, feel free to forward those to me by email. I'll be happy to still answer those.

Perfect.

Good, good, good, good. Well, thanks again, Karen, for being our guest. Some great information, and And as I alluded to, I even learned a couple of things. Not that I profess to know everything there is to know about Facebook, but just as we said at the beginning, before you know it, things change. And it depends on what side of the bed Mr. Zuckerberg wakes up on as to what that change is going to be and whether you find out about it before or after it happens. But this has been really good, and I appreciate everybody's participation. Thanks for the great questions.

Thank you.

Congratulations on your first of what I hope are many, many more subscribers to your Marketing Insiders Club. So great resource and would encourage everybody to check it out. So that concludes this week's episode. I do want to let everybody know, however, we are not going to be having a show next week. I am actually going to be on the road headed to the great state of Pennsylvania where I'm instructing at the Pennsylvania Bankers Advanced School of Banking. So I'm going to be making a little bit of a road trip next week and Jeff is off-site. But we are planning on being back the week after that with a show, and we will see you at that point. But until then, have a great week everyone. Check out the recording at freewebinarwednesdays.com, and make sure to like our page and support Karen. So with that, have a good week. Take care everybody.

Bye-bye.

Bye.