Facebook Promoted Posts is a relatively new feature introduced by the social media giant, with the intention of helping Facebook page owners reach more of their fans through the regular status update posts. The users of this new feature are required to pay in order to promote their posts, something that has brought about confusion between this new feature and the typical Facebook advertising.

So, does Facebook now require page owners to pay so that their posts are visible to their fans? Well, a straight forward answer to that question is “No”. You can still have a free page and make free posts visible to the people who like your page. However, we need to get a bit more detailed in order to understand what Facebook Promoted Posts are and how they can benefit you.

Let us start by explaining an algorithm that Facebook uses to display posts on people’s newsfeed. If you did not know, what you see in your Facebook’s newsfeed is not absolutely everything that is posted by each of your friends or pages you like. That content is determined by Facebook based on the number of times you interacted with the page or person who posted it, what type of a post it is and how recently it was posted. Facebook calls this algorithm EdgeRank.

So how does EdgeRank link up with Facebook Promoted Posts?

As Facebook increases its users, which has been at terrific speeds, the competition for space on the social media’s newsfeed also increases at the same rate. Currently, it is estimated that an average of only 16% of the fans of any page get to see each of its posts. You can actually see the number of people who were reached by your post, thanks to Facebook’s real time post analytics.

So what Facebook Promoted Posts does is that it gives you the option to pay for a given post so that it is pushed into the newsfeeds of more of your fans. You don’t need to worry about costs because Facebook only charges you based on the number of extra people they were able to display your post to. You are also allowed to set a budget beyond which they won’t charge you.

2 important things to note about Facebook Promoted Posts

1. You do not have to use this feature and pay for all the posts you make. However, occasionally promoting your posts would increase the number of people who see your posts and interact with your page. This will in turn improve the EdgeRank score of your page and boost your Facebook advertising efforts.
2. The social media rule of posting relevant, interactive and useful content and avoiding messages that sound like a commercial still apply. If you break it, you should not expect that Facebook Promoted Posts will work for you.

We’ve talked about the benefits of inbound marketing in regards to generating leads, but there are several ways to use inbound marketing to retain your leads.  It costs 5-10 times more to obtain a new customer than to retain an existing one.  With that in mind, it is definitely important to explore different ways to keep your existing customers happy!

Below are 4 ways to use inbound marketing to retain customers:

1)      Educate Customers- one of the best ways to keep your customers engaged is to provide them with educational materials to help them learn more about your industry and your product.  You can create educational auto-responders, update your blog, or even host an informational webinar to teach customers about your product.

2)      Use Social Media- Social media is a great way to build and maintain customer relationships.  You can social media platforms answer customer questions and provide a continuous stream of industry and product updates.

3)      Create a Forum- Customer support is crucial in retaining customers, but can undoubtedly be time consuming and expensive.  Letting your customers talk to each other is like having built-in free customer support. Who better to answer customer questions (aside from you) than other customers?   People like sharing their experiences with others and creating a forum is a great way to do that!  IMRC members have good things to say about How to Start a Forum (A- rating, 295 grades).

4)      Ask for Feedback- An often overlooked option, obtaining customer feedback is a great way to stay “in the know” about what your customers like, don’t like, want to see more of, etc.  Simple ways to obtain feedback include surveys, blog posts or via social media platforms.

Posted March 14th 2011 to Blogging,Inbound Marketing,Internet Marketing,Social Media • Comments (1)

Earlier this week we touched upon a few points to keep in mind for optimizing your Facebook page for business.  The last point we made stated that the news feed is one of the most important tools to utilize when promoting your business on Facebook and building up your Facebook presence.

There are only so many posts that make it onto the top news feed, so what determines which posts get displayed?

1) The number of times two people have interacted.   It is important to build up relationships with your followers and post content that people respond to (either via a comment or a “like”).

2) The number of times users have interacted with the content.  So, if you post something that gets a good response from some of your followers, it is more likely to show up on your other followers news feeds as well.

3) How recent the post is.  To keep an engaged audience, it is important to provide regular updates- just don’t bombard people with too many posts!

4) The type of content in the post.  Videos, links and images all draw more attention than standard text-based updates.

Posted March 04th 2011 to Inbound Marketing,Internet Marketing,Social Media • Comments (2)

Social media is quickly becoming the norm in online marketing and business plans.  Facebook is a great channel for sharing your content with a large, active audience.  There are many things you can do to take advantage of this free and valuable social media platform and below are a few of ideas get you started:

1)   Search engines index content from Business pages on Facebook.  Take that opportunity to incorporate keywords into your status updates.

2)   Include images to create a more eye catching post.  Did you know that updates with an image get 54% higher clicks?

3)  The news feed is one of, if not the most valuable asset you have on Facebook.  Because it only displays about the top 1% of content, you need to do everything you can to get your updates posted in users’ news feeds.

Later on this week, we’ll detail more Facebook optimization ideas including how to increase your chances of ranking in user’s news feeds, so be sure to stay tuned!

Most people are familiar with the term social bookmarking, but many are still not sure what it is or why it’s important.  Just as you would bookmark a favorite site on your computer, you can use social bookmarking to share the pages you like on a public website.

Social bookmarking can be a great way to generate traffic to your site.  People browsing the social sites can come across your site/link and click if it looks interesting.  When an article on your site is bookmarked and links back to your website (inbound links) that helps increase your Page Rank.  Extending that idea further, the higher your PR is, the easier it is for people to come across your website in search engine results.

I’m sure you’ve seen the following buttons on various websites:

To make it easy for others to “social bookmark” your site, it is a good idea to add bookmarking buttons to you site, so your visitors can easily “digg”, “like”, “tweet”  your articles.  Try to be selective with which buttons you choose to add.  You can use Google Analytics to determine your traffic sources.  If there is a decent amount of traffic from Digg, it may be a good idea to link back there!  Also, consider which countries most of your traffic come from.  Facebook is popular in Australia and India, while Orkut and Twitter are big in Brazil.

Inbound marketing consists of using tools such as blogs, eBooks, webinars, videos and social media (to name a few), to organically attract targeted customers to your site.  When executed properly, inbound marketing can be highly effective and profitable.

Below are 3 Excellent Benefits of Inbound Marketing:

1)      Cost- Methods such as blogging, Twitter and Facebook cost nothing to start.  Inbound marketing campaigns costs less to execute than their outbound counterparts, resulting in lower average cost per lead and higher ROI.

2)      Targeting- The beauty of inbound marketing is that the customers attracted to your site are ones who have actively sought out information relating to your product, making them high quality leads.  Outbound marketing methods, which are “interruption-based” (e-mail blasts, cold calling, TV and print advertising, etc.) are generally created to reach the masses and notoriously poorly targeted.

3)      Effectiveness – These days, the average customer is flooded with about 2,000 outbound marketing ads per day (that’s a lot of noise!).  They also now have more power to bypass outbound marketing campaigns by changing the channel during TV commercials, filtering spam, and using caller ID.

Posted December 29th 2010 to Inbound Marketing,Internet Marketing • Comments (4)

I recently read an article that compared outbound marketing  to finding a needle in a haystack.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to waste time or money locating this aforementioned needle!  That is why it is imperative that internet marketers today shift to an inbound approach.

Inbound Marketing focuses on using and taking advantage of resources that are already available at your fingertips.  It is more efficient, more cost effective, and just down right easier than its counterpart (i.e. outbound marketing).  Utilize your existing website as a “hub”- a  place where people who already share a common interest can gather, inform, and influence each other.  Instead of targeting the masses (which includes people who are likely strongly opposed to your cause), target the people who are naturally attracted to you and your hub.

Use inbound marketing to create a group of people who will work for free.  Once you make them happy they will use their word of mouth (arguably the most powerful influence) as a free means of advertising for you.

Posted September 02nd 2010 to Inbound Marketing,Internet Marketing • Comments (2)