4 Easy Steps to Implement a Facebook Marketing Strategy
Do you have a Facebook marketing strategy?
Is your Facebook marketing is working?
If you don’t have a strategy with goals in place for your Facebook Page, you won’t know if you are getting a return on your social media efforts!
Your Facebook marketing strategy shouldn’t live in a vacuum—it needs to be integrated with your overall marketing plan.
What You Need to Get Started
Before you start marketing on Facebook, you should have these things in place:
- A good website: Your website is the hub of your business and should look professional and showcase what you have to offer your customers.
- A clear business model and plan: How are you making money? This sounds obvious, but many entrepreneurs don’t have a solid business plan and don’t understand things like the cost of goods or how much money they can (and should) allocate toward marketing.
- An email marketing delivery service: Some large consumer products may not need an email delivery system, but most businesses still need to use email marketing as part of their overall marketing strategy. Email is not dead and is your best chance of being seen by the bulk of your current and potential customers. There are many email providers out there to choose from, including Constant Contact, AWeber, iContact, Infusionsoft, MailChimp, Office Autopilot and more. Find one that fits your needs and budget.
- An optimized Facebook Page: Before you start marketing on Facebook, get the basic elements of a good Facebook Page in place.
Once you have done these things, you can begin to integrate your Facebook marketing with your overall marketing plan. 
How to Ensure Your Facebook Contests Attract Genuine Fans
Are you thinking of running a contest on Facebook?
Have you run a contest and had little success with retaining fans past the award date?
One goal of a successful Facebook contest should be to recruit fans who are genuinely interested in you, while avoiding the cheaters and faux fans who are only interested in material gain.
In this article you’ll discover five tips to help ensure that your contests attract genuine fans.
#1: Award Appropriate Prizes
Don’t offer attractive prizes that have nothing to do with your brand.
Everyone wants an iPad—not just your potential customers. A free vacation will not just attract fans who are interested in your beauty products, but pretty much anyone who sees the contest.
An appropriate award deflects the prize-hunters who hide your posts or unlike your Page as soon as the prizes have been awarded.
Offer a prize that interests your current or future customers. If your contest attracts entries from people who have no reason to become your customer, change it.
Lord & Taylor, an online fashion retailer for women, is awarding fashion accessories from its website.
How to Convince Your Skeptical Boss That Facebook Marketing Works
Is your business on Facebook?
Do you need to convince your boss—or a client—that Facebook is a worthy marketing investment?
In this article I’ll show you 7 things you can do to convince decision-makers of the value Facebook.
#1: Assess Your Goals
Before you can convince anyone that they need to be on Facebook, you’ll need to understand what they want to accomplish.
Remember that not every business needs to be on Facebook.
If you are in a B2B that sells concrete to two or three huge companies, LinkedIn might be a better fit.
Not all businesses need to be on Facebook. Assess your business goals first. Image source: iStockPhoto.
How to Track Your Facebook Ad Conversions
Do you know how to measure your return on investment (ROI) on Facebook ads?
Do you know how to tell if your Facebook ad is accomplishing your objective?
In this article, I’ll cover what Facebook conversion tracking and offsite pixels are, why they matter and how to start tracking the conversions of your Facebook ads today.
Facebook Ad ROI?
You’ve probably heard the refrain that you can’t measure ROI on Facebook.
Let me be clear—measuring the ROI of all of your Facebook efforts is dangerous. You are performing more than just a sales role—one of customer service as well.
And you absolutely can measure the ROI of your Facebook advertising efforts, particularly when you’re looking to drive an action that can be assigned a value. This is done with conversion tracking and offsite pixels.
Return on investment is when you consider profits in relation to capital invested. Image: iStockPhoto
11 Checks to Ensure Your Facebook Page is Up-to-Date
How long has it been since you’ve reviewed your Facebook Page?
Are you taking advantage of the latest Facebook features?
It’s critical that Facebook Page managers take time to regularly audit their Page and ensure that they are not missing out on new features.
This Facebook Page audit guide outlines 11 key items to review to help maximize your Page’s potential.
Facebook changes often—audit your Page to keep up!
How to Compare Your Facebook Page With the Competition
Are you wondering how your Facebook Page compares to competitors?
What can you do to improve your performance?
Insights into how your competitors are using Facebook can help you better understand your audience on Facebook and how they use Facebook.
In this article, I’ll review 5 different tools that can be used to help you compare your Facebook Page against competitors and identify tactics to help you improve your Facebook marketing.
#1: Compare Your Statistics With AgoraPulse Barometer
AgoraPulse provides a free tool called the AgoraPulse Barometer, which performs an analysis of your Facebook Page and compares it against other companies’ Pages (that also used this tool) that have a similar number of fans.
The Barometer calculates the average percentage for several criteria based on your last 50 posts. The resulting report shows the score for your Page in black compared with the average score in red for other Pages that ran this assessment.
The table gives an assessment of your Page compared to other Pages with a similar fan count.
Information provided in the chart above includes:
Fans Reached. This is the average number of fans who receive your content. Facebook generally shares your content with a small percentage of fans unless you have a very engaged community. The key to increasing this figure is having a community that comments, likes or shares your posts.
How Your Business Can Use the New Facebook Cover Photos
Are you familiar with the new Facebook cover photo rules? You are now able to put calls to action and your website or address information in your Facebook cover photo, but there are still text restrictions.
Would you like some inspiration for what your business can do with a cover photo?
Many people have not updated their cover photos to be in compliance.
In this article I’ll tell you what’s changed and show you 9 examples and how you can leverage the new rules to boost your business.
Facebook’s New Rules
As of March 6, Facebook’s rules state that cover photos may not include more than 20% text. But the previous restrictions that were in place were removed (i.e., no calls to action, no websites and no address information).
The maximum 20% text rule also applies to any photo in a Facebook ad as well, so keep that in mind with your next ad campaign.
There was some initial confusion about how the 20% text area was measured, so Facebook came out with a post that clarified how this area was calculated and what was acceptable.
Check your Facebook cover photo with the Cover Compliance Tool.
