The 3 Steps Behind Being Successful In Facebook

Are traditional advertising costs burning a hole in your company’s budget? It may be time to turn to a more affordable, yet effective alternative: social media.

Businesses tend to overlook the value that social media has in various aspects from sales and marketing to customer service. There are several ways that everyone can use social media to their benefit, one being by running a Facebook deal or promotion.

Being a serial entrepreneur, I’ve had my share of successes and failures. From my experiences, I’ve discovered that in order to be successful in Facebook, you must take the following steps:

Step Behind Being Successful In Facebook #1: Examine the 3 Qs™ of Your Facebook Fan Base

Most people tend to have “the more the merrier” approach in terms of Facebook fans. A lot of them don’t realize that NOT all fans are the same.

By examining the 3 Qs™ of your Facebook fan base, you’ll discover why some fans can provide more value for your business page than others. You can categorize your audience by factoring in: Quality, Quantity and Qualified.

• Quality: One way to determine if you have quality fans is by taking a look at the number of friends they have. Certainly, a fan with 3,000+ friends will have a wider reach when sharing your content vs. a fan with 100+ friends. The more friends your fans have, the more potential promotional value they hold.
• Engagement also plays a huge role. Do your fans actively engage on Facebook or do they have outdated profile pics from 2012? If they are not actively posting or engaging, then it isn’t likely they’re doing anything to interact with your business either.
• Do your fans receive 3–5 likes per post or 100s of likes per post? The number of likes they receive shows how engaged they are with their friends. Imagine what could be accomplished if quality fans share a post about your business vs. a photo of what they had for breakfast?

• Quantity: Next, you want to think about quantity. The old-time saying “Quality over Quantity” rings true even on Facebook. However, over time your goal should be to acquire more quality fans, resulting in a higher quantity of quality fans.
• Ex: Let’s say you publish a contest on your Facebook page and you have 1,000 fans. Maybe 300 of your fans enter and share your contest with their 200+ friends (per fan), thus, now you have 300 entries with the potential for more.

However, these fans typically get around 6–10 likes per post and don’t really interact with their friends. Because of their lack of engagement, their posts most likely don’t end up on their friends’ news feeds due to Facebook’s plummeting organic reach. Therefore, your contest entries pretty much end at 300.

Now let’s say instead of 300 fans entering, you have 100 quality fans participate. They then share your contest with their 1,000+ friends each.

These quality fans actively engage on social media. They interact with their friends and have a high organic reach. They receive hundreds if not thousands of likes per post and are strong influencers amongst their social media community. In short, they are more successful in Facebook.

These are the fans that will help your promotion go viral.

• Qualified: A qualified fan will take certain actions to interact with your Page. These actions can include liking, checking in, commenting and sharing. If fans like your Page, but never interact with it in any way, it’s unlikely that they will ever see your posts again.

You want to engage with fans and entice them to come back whether it’s by means of a deal, sweepstakes or other promotional incentives.

Step Behind Being Successful In Facebook #2: Create a Deal or Promotion

The goal is to run an aggressive marketing campaign that motivates fans to act now! Ways in which you can accomplish this is by taking the following into consideration:

Create a promotion around trending topics. This will raise excitement amongst your fans. Make sure the topic is relevant to your target audience.

Ex: Perhaps you own a sports equipment retail store. You could create a contest for fans to: “Guess the final scores for the World Cup!”

Time-sensitive campaigns are ideal because you don’t want to leave the window of opportunity open for too long.

Ex: If you create a contest and accept entries for two months, you’ll increase chances of procrastination and thereby run the risk of fans forgetting about your contest altogether. If you narrow the contest down to one or two weeks, it’ll push your audience to act fast before they miss out.

Whether you’re running a deal or giving away a prize, you want to make sure your audience finds value in participating.

Ex: If you’re promoting a deal, a $100 value offered at 15% off is not as appealing as say a $100 value offered at 60% off. Give your fans a reason to purchase this particular deal because the offer is too good to pass up.

You want your prize or deal to be something that’s in demand for your target audience. Give the people what they want. Offering a hot commodity will increase participation.

Step Behind Being Successful In Facebook #3: Take Friction Out of the Equation

Too much friction is the key cause behind your campaign’s high bounce rate. Try to shed some of that friction by doing these three things:

• If participants are being forced to give up personal information, answer 10 survey questions and then complete a short essay, no one will enter. Simple as that.
• A Step 1, Step 2, Step 3 followed by a “Good luck and thanks for participating!” usually does the trick to simplify the process.

• Don’t give long, elaborate instructions. Reading them is time-consuming and so they may cause confusion if worded incorrectly. Give clear instructions by summing everything up to one concise sentence per step.
• Run some tests before pushing your promotion to the public to ensure that you provide a flawless experience. Check that no error pages pop up when clicking hyperlinks and ensure everything is functioning properly.

By taking these three key factors into account for every Facebook promotion you run, you’ll maximize your chances for social media success.

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