@ianhamilton – Facebook is an interesting creature.  One of the things I have noticed is that many people have a “if I build it, they will come” mentality.  Yes – there are people out there making millions on Facebook… and yes – there are small businesses out there using Facebook for conversions and thus making money.  I have a local small business client who has had great success on Facebook with a very small fan base (about 125 fans).  They are loyal, they are committed, and they spend money in her store. (And she was successful before she brought me into the picture)

You did not mention how long you have had your Facebook page.  Social media is not instant – by any stretch of the imagination.  You need to look at a few key things to evaluate your “success” on Facebook.

Look at your Facebook insights.  What kind of interaction are you receiving on your page?  The people who have liked your page… are they in your target market?  The insights section can break down where your fans are located, their age, their gender, and more.

Also, when people first come to your page, do they instantly know what you do and how following your page can benefit them?  You have to provide a reason for them to click that like button.  90% of the people who like your page never come back to your page – they strictly follow your posts through your news feed.

Do a search in Facebook for companies like yours.  See what they are doing well.  See what they can improve on and learn from them.

I hope that information helps.  Don’t give up yet.

@ianhamilton – I did actually take a look at your Facebook page before I responded to your post.  I see that you have your blog posts auto-posting which is great.  However, it seems like the majority of your posts are your blogs.

I would suggest integrating some additional types of posts… mix it up.  Add some video clips, ask questions, anything to get the interaction.  And then watch to see what type of posts get the most interaction.

As for landing/welcome pages, I still recommend them.  When I first come to a Facebook page, I want to be able to tell immediately what the page is about.  Most of society has a severe case of ADHD these days and they don’t want to work for their information.

Your business looks like a relatively specialized business.  Even if you don’t do a Welcome page, create a customized banner that shows your logo or your tagline, so someone knows immediately what AlkaWay is.  I went and read your info tab (most people won’t) and since I don’t know what an alkaline diet is, I am still clueless.  Now that may take me out of your target market, but make sure your are not eliminating possible clients just because they don’t know what they do.

Does that help?

@ianhamilton tabsite offers a way to make a landing page that looks like a website @lisaschulteis Lisa, you are all over the place offering great advice, you go girl! I am with Ian, SHOW ME THE MONEY! Well, I did make money by using contacts on fb to direct them to my kickstarter project. So, I guess I did have a bit of success, short term.

@ianhamilton I hope this doesn’t come across wrong, but you’ve got to remember the “social” aspect of Social Marketing. 

The pages I spend time on (ok the main one is a client and I do monitor it for any opportunities to shine) are all conversation based. 

Whether it be tips/strategies or fun interaction.  We do small trivia type contests, complete the sentence posts, talk about events, how we can make the community (local community physical not the FB community) better, etc. 

Although I can respect that you want to see a ROI tied directly to sales, the ROI of social is the relationships and that’s not always seen in immediate dollar signs. 

In another thread, I referred to a Youtube video where someone asked Gary Vaynerchuk about Social Media ROI…it was a brutal response and NSFW so I won’t link here, but I found it to be the truth. 

Just my take on things

@ianhamilton My hubby & I have a mortgage & real estate biz and the majority of our leads on Facebook come from Engagement Ads. We target certain pages that are relevant to our industry for new clients and new members to our team. We lead them to our free webinars. My husband has been doing webinars for years but I’ve done all the Facebook ad testing and bring him 15 to 20 leads / week to his webinars. I also do the same for my social media marketing fan page. As I run more ads, I have fresh new people added to my page that are more interactive. The picture in your ad is a key factor. Then test, test, test and see which ads work best.

I hope that helps!

@naomitrower Hi, Naomi, let me get this right.

‘Engagement Ads’ are ads on FB? And you say you target certain pages. Web pages? Blog pages? FB pages? And then you lead them to your FB page or your webpage?

So.. you are targeting using FB ads, and demographics of FB users. Ok that’s kool and 15-20 leads a week is also good steady feed for the mill. So your FB page gets more Likes and visits because you are driving them to your FB page to get them to sign on the hubby’s webinar.

Have I got it right?

Just a little thing about headshot videos that you may like to know. You must use a zoom to do these sorts of videos. A basic lens video such as a webcam does 2 things:
(a) It makes your face ‘fatten’ and 
(b) It identifies you as an amateur, and sad but true, any amateurishness on the web = lost sales even if the amateurishness has nothing to do with what you are selling. 

You are a good ‘presenter’ visually but the upclose shot does not do you or your business justice. Hope that helps. It’s all i can think of to give back to you.

@ianhamilton When I refer to engagement ads there are several different kinds that we have done.

For my social media page – it’s an ad that directs them to my fan page targetting specific mortgage & real estate facebook pages

For our webinars – it leads them to the webinar sign up page targetting FB pages that are relevant to our webinar topic

I’m sorry but you lost me on the 2nd part about headshot videos. I’m not sure what you are referring to.

@ianhamilton Oh ok, thanks for the constructive criticism. My hubby is the video king in our household. I don’t view video marketing as my strength. My strength is blogging and using social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn to grow our business. Those strengths are where people connect with me the most.

Yes the ads are within Facebook and are created in the Advertising section.

@ianhamilton I think you need a full strategic plan to use your SM accounts to your advantage. The main reasons to have the SM accounts are to spread the word about what you have to offer, higher SE rankings, and garner more contacts to turn into affiliates or your brand evangelists. Instead of you doing all of the work, you get others to do it for you if your service or product is worthy enough.

So, what is it that you have to offer that everyone should be interested in? From that, you then develop your plan. Your website or blog is like the main trunk of a tree and your SM accounts act as branches with squeeze pages, ads, RSS, etc. as the leaves. They all work together to support an overall strategy even though they may doing different tasks.

You can break it down to Exposure–>Attention–>Motivation. In that order. You need to build up your brand and reputation via exposure which eventually leads to getting attention, which eventually you will need to have your followers feel some kind of motivation to do something which you need to make clear or steer it.

I feel you are stuck at motivation or social calls to action and are frustrated with time spent on SM accounts. Or am I way off here?

A good, steady approach, Daniel. I note you haven’t swallowed the getrichquick stuff at all with it. Foe Christmas I received a little box full of tiny magnetic balls. They nare real fun making long strings, because if the polarity is wrong, they don’t want to join, actively turning away from the string.

It reminded me of the string theory of marketing (just invented that) which says there has to be strong ‘string’ holding together all points in the sale. So I look at SM as a part of the string but not the whole string. The start of the string has to be a contact and the end of the string has to be the sale, and I still don’t think that SM is the beginning of the string. I really think that a media mix including traditional media, blogs, articles, offers.. all driving leads to SM (perhaps) will provide more flexible and broadreaching effect. I have a book on my bookshelf about blitzing local advertising that I haven’t even read it. Why wouldn’t I total sledge my town and then use it as a model for expanded marketing? WE are all grabbing at the size of FB, but as you said, it only comes down to who regularly visits you.

The other variable that is a bit of an elephant in the room is time. What value dor you put on your time? How much could you make if you WEREN’T messing around on FB trying to attract Likes? Are you taking your eye off the main game, which is actually working on your present sales funnel? What would it cost (in comparison to FB time) to actually create a really good offer delivered to every letterbox in your town? Do you realise that with email, FB etc, a good maildrop is now a rare and appreciated event with far more conversion ability than before Web?

anSummarizing, I wat to know how to monetize FB but I want to know how it ‘fits’ with an integrated marketing program.

Does that make sense?

@abigailgorton great suggestion Abigail.

@ianhamilton I guess you need to keep the gloves off and put the creative hat on.

As @abigailgorton mentioned, re-think your FB page interaction. Polls, questions, “OMG, I didn’t know that” stats on soft drinks to grab attention with charts and graphs. Dr. OZ does a good job of this on his show and his FB page might be a good place to get ideas on posts as well as tab apps or tab content.

For example, I know most people don’t understand alkalinity and PH-levels, so you could have a tab with dedicated info on just this information. One full tab with info they can come back to and possibly a interactive measurement of how many soft drinks they drink per day and what that does to promote weight gain and the changes in alkalinity and PH-levels. So, you start with why we should care, then end it with the “so where are you” kind of interactive form.

You could also make it an elaborate form with more details they need to fill in and send the results via email so you can capture emails at the same time or this could be a tab of its own for those who want to get a more in-depth analysis.

Being acidic is dangerous and wreaks havoc on your body. You should be screaming about this fact and how to correct it. From there, you can sell products or be an affiliate to clean organic products you endorse.

Okay, there, the gloves were off, now go take charge!

The greatest difficult it appears, is to determine the strategy that gets your quality product into the attention span of the user. I have oftened struggled with the means to portray, (pun there), to potential clients the value of my artwork. I could feel the level of expertise that I had put into sample portraits. My challenge, as always, is to overcome the bound and determine of the clientel to, “get me”, . All jokes aside, it is the greatest challenge of any producer. To have the consumer answer the question; is this worthy of support? In other words; do you see, utility or value in this product. My level of skill has made this widget worth a great deal of money; (in the case of great artworks.), will you agree that the value is what I’ve determined?’ Artists have struggled with this situation for eons. The “starving artist syndrome is a product of this delimna. However, if we are diligent and determined we can make the world see that our products are worthy; so I have consoled myself. 

@seancookceo-salyrisstudios Yo Sean, I neglected to mention webinars but I have run them.  My overall impression was high hours/cost for a small event, and that’s why i agree that auto webinars is the only way to go.
I should say that a couple of weeks ago I hired a lady to investigate HubSpot for me. I had been receiving ther excellent stream of white papers for at least a year and so i know they were very competent at inbound marketing. I had also downloaded  Marcus Shridan’s excellent rave on IB.

She did a great job. Her brief was to see if HS  fitted with what we had and did. We already run an active Infusionsoft email system, we have a 3000+ email list, we keep it hot with lots of offers, we ran a whole series of webinars (average attendance 5).. you get the idea.

We looked hard at what they had to offer us and came to our own conclusion that if we could cherrypick their apps it would be good, but we couldn’t. We had to take the whole deal. Then Aveline, my investigator, emailed Marcus Sheridan from Sales Lion to ask his opinion. Marcus is impressive because he used Hubspot’s IM support to drag his swim pool business  out of the industry doldrums and into mega sales.

Marcus doesn’t worry about pools any more. he’s too busy selling IM, and so naturally expected him to say yes, by all means HS is for you. I was pleasantly surprised when he said that we were beyond the market that HS supplies. (90% newby) and should do it on our own.

I recently ordered FB Webinars to satisfy the possibility of repeat webinars. It seems a good system for 2 reasons; it overcomes the problem of high promotion and low attendances, and if your content and offer is good enough, it can viralise an offer. I am still working on using it to save http://www.waterforlife.com 

Looking at (listening as I speak) to Mike Filsiame. he’s quite a trooper and has graced my inbox so much it permanently smells of his aftershave.That’s an excellent video;( I think I may have viewed it before) and if there’s one word to sum up his many great concepts it would have to be measurement.

Re Radian 6: looks great as a capture device for trends. I’m discovering Topsy.com which shows all posts for the last 7 days for any keyword. Cheap. good, free.

Sean, I’d still love to share the subject with more people so we could hopefully develop input on the general matrixes we all need for measurement. I may begin a new subject and see who comes in the door. 

BTW Happy New Year!

Very nice stuff, Sean and others. A great assist. Didn’t want to muddy the waters with Google+ but… gotta go with the flow. can’t hide from the tide.

And, that waterforlife site isn’t ours. Ours is alkastream.com and alkaway.com.au