BOOK

3

FacebookMarketing

Made Easy

10 Steps toMore Likes

ii

F A C E B O O K B U S I N E S S E S S E N T I A L S

10 Steps to More LikesFACEBOOK MARKETING MADE EASY

Social media marketing success is dependent upon social networks. In order to max-imize your company’s presence on Facebook, you need to build a community filled with people who both Like you and Like you enough to share your content with their network. To make this as easy as possible for you, we’ve broken down our best suggestions into 10 tips to drive targeted Facebook Likes to your business page. In this third installment of our Facebook Business Essentials series, we’ll give you 10 easy steps to more Facebook likes. This book will give you the basics in order to:

1. Get Started: Review

2. Engage Your Community

3. Evaluate Your Results

Onward!

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10 Steps to More Likes: Facebook Marketing Made Easy

You’ve set up your Facebook Page, you know how to use

Graph Search, and you’re ready to get out there and use

your Page for marketing.

So… now what?

Well, now you need fans who’ll spread the word about you

with their own networks. If you don’t have a community,

you don’t have anyone listening to you. If there’s no one

listening to you, your Facebook presence is pointless.

The goal of a good social media marketing program is to

spur word-of-mouth by engaging your followers to share

your content, thus leading to earned social media.

So how do you do it?

Here’s a tried-and-true 10-step process to growing your community on Facebook. If you’ve been

reading our Facebook Business Essentials education series (this being book 3 of it), you can skim or

skip the first three review tips.

GETTING STARTED - REVIEW

1. Complete your Facebook Business Page Profile

If you don’t know why this is important, please check out Book 1, “4 Steps to a Facebook Page for Business.”

2. Add Social Plugins to Your Website

Visitors on your website and other owned media should know that you have a Facebook Page. Our

best recommendation is to use Facebook’s Social Plugins to get more Facebook likes (our top 3 sug-

gestions are also in Book 1).

TIP: Quantity and quality both

matter: you need numbers to

increase your likelihood of a share,

but engagement is a lot more

important than a vanity metric. It’s

better to have a smaller, engaged

following than large numbers of

unqualified followers who aren’t

paying attention and don’t help

your business goals.

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3. Find out What Interests Your Community

With Facebook’s new Graph Search it’s really easy to find out what interests your target community,

and post relevant content to increase Facebook likes.

ENGAGING YOUR COMMUNITY

4. Ask Friends, Business Partners and Other Contacts to Like You on Facebook

Friends are like underpants. Some snap under pressure, some are a little twisted,

and some alternate between being clean and dirty - but there are always those

that’ll give you great support.

Still with us? Great – we just wanted to make sure that you’re paying

attention. ;)

When you first create a Facebook Page, invite the people in your network

to Like it. These initial Likes will give you higher social media credibility and

visibility. Don’t be shy: these are your friends, after all. If your friends won’t help

you in your business endavors, you might question whether you’ve outgrown

them.

For more on Graph Search, check out our second free book in Meltwater’s Facebook Business Essentials series..

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5. Use Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are another great way to increase Facebook Likes. To get the most out of your ads, you

can target by your community’s interests to find people similar to your current fans.

In the image below, you can see how we would use the information we gleaned from Graph Search

and to start an advertising campaign for our new pizza restaurant.

Experiment with different types of ads to see what works best for your organization, and make sure you choose the option that allows Facebook users to Like your page directly from the ad.

TIP: Facebook ads, being inexpensive

and hyper-targeted, are a solid test-

ing ground for more expensive and

labor-intensive advertising campaigns

on different channels.

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6. Run a contest

Contests have done very well for some companies, and not so well for others. First thing’s first: make

sure that your contest follows Facebook’s promotion guidelines. Your contest must use a Facebook

app: this allows you to create a fan gate, which means that the contest is only eligible for people who

Like your Page. Apps also have a unique URL, so you can promote your contest with a Facebook ad

(see tip above about Liking Pages directly from a Facebook ad).

Other quick tips on contests:

• Make sure the contest app works on mobile

• Think about what sort of content will be the most engaging for your audience

• Make it easy and to participate and share the contest

• Encourage users to share participation and other aspects of the contests on Facebook

• Sweepstakes are, legally and functionally, a lot easier to manage than contests of skill

7. Like and Engage with Other Companies

Did you know that you can

engage with other company

pages as your Business Page

on Facebook? This sort of

engagement is a great way

to build awareness among

like-minded companies and

their followers.  To do this, visit

your Facebook Page, click on

“Edit Page” in your Admin Pan-

el and select “Use Facebook as

YourPage.”

Finding companies to like and interact with is easy. Use Graph search and search for companies, Pag-

es, and places that of interest to your company, and Like these Pages (you can’t Like personal profiles

as a business Page, which is good: that would be weird).

After you have liked some Pages, you can view your company’s Newsfeed and engage with the pages

you like. Not only is the company likely to follow you back, but their engagement with your page will

help you increase Facebook likes amongst their followers as well.

Find other companies to interact with and build your community with conversations and interaction.

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8. Publish Engaging Content

Here’s a little Content Marketing 101: It’s important

to publish engaging, entertaining and interesting

posts on a regular basis, and to keep an eye out for

the posts that get the most engagement. Images

are among the best types of post for driving engage-

ment, so make sure you publish images your follow-

ers can relate to and will like. You may also want to

include calls to action in some of your posts, asking

followers to like, comment or share your content, or

ask your community a question.

9. Be Active

How often should you post? There is no magic number, but there are best practices and analytics to

guide you. Some tips:

• Post at least one status update per day

• Experiment with the timing of your posts to see when the majority of your followers are ac-

tive.

• People are unlikely to like your Facebook page if you don’t post regularly – Facebook rewards

activity

EVALUATING YOUR RESULTS

10. Measure, Analyze and Learn

Use Facebook Insights to find useful metrics on your page performance. You can see things like Reach

(how many users are seeing your posts), En-

gaged Users (how many users engage with

your posts) and new Likes (when and why

do you get new followers). These metrics will

help you understand what’s driving engage-

ment.

If you want to get a quick snapshot of how

successful your Facebook Page is, or want

TIP: finding Groups doesn’t mean that

you should bust in and advertise: that is

SPAM. Social media is a community and

dialogue marketing discipline. You must

be part of the community by providing

something of value before you try to sell

something.

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recommendations for improvement, try out our free Facebook analytics tool, LikeAlyzer.

CASE STUDY

Baked may not seem like a product that would inspire a viral social media post. But British super-

market ASDA saw potential in those tiny legumes, and their faith in these wee, unassuming legumes

wasn’t misplaced. Baked beans were the star in ASDA’s most successful social media post to date:

ASDA got more than 24,000 likes, 5,000 comments, and hundreds of shares from this one conver-

sation. By buillding their social community with engagement, they later earned 45,000 entries and

15,000 shares on a Facebook contest.

The simple question, “Nom or wrong?” teaches us a few things about Facebook engagement and

what it means for business.

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Talk About What Interests Your Audience

As a grocer, household staples like baked beans are central to the ASDA brand. With the majority of

ASDA customers in the demographic target being mums aged 25-35 years old, presenting them with

what was essentially a “thumbs up / thumbs down” vote on comfort food was a great way to spur

engagement.

Go Mobile

As per Facebook’s own publicly filed SEC documents, one in six people access Facebook solely from

their smartphone. This is a growing trend globally, and the third world – Africa, in particular - is skip-

ping the PC altogether and going straight to smartphones.

With the market trend of mobile replacing the PC as

a customer’s primary internet gateway, it raises the

question as to whether marketers should prioritse

mobile first, then move towards the website, rather

than the other way around. Says Dom Burch, head of

Social Media for the ASDA, “Websites are simply a com-

fort blanket,” he argued, “I feel I am having the same

conversation now about websites that I did about hard

press advertising five years ago.”

So, how do brands manage to build a community of

die-hard fans who will circulate all their offers and

catapult shares on Facebook? According to Burch the

answer is simple – get to know your audience and to

stay true to what you do. If you combine those two

elements, you’ll build credit in the bank and soon be

the brand that got the beans (or an expression that

rhymes with that).

One in six people access Facebook solely from their

smartphone.

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Where is the ROI in Getting Shares on Facebook? In social media marketing, when the Board is screaming for ROI, it can be hard to imagine why anyone would focus on getting shares on Facebook. You’d be right to question whether it’s a worthy business goal; it’s not! It’s a marketing tactic. Every marketing campaign should have a business goal, e.g. to increase sales.

A marketing goal might be to attract new customers and a marketing tactic might be to start a dialogue on Facebook to gain fans among a target group who could become new customers. You’d be forgiven for wondering whether initiating conversations about baked beans is the best use of a brand’s time on social media until you saw it as part of a larger marketing strate-gy. Here’s how it works: gaining shares on Facebook is a marketing tactic that can lead to the marketing goal of increasing fans who be-come customers whose purchases deliver the business goal of increased sales delivering the ROI the Board wants.

For more on finding the ROI, feel free to skip to Chapter 7: Measuring Success.

But, back to the beans…

In the case of ASDA, Burch says, “We re-cently ran a competition on both TV and Facebook where the prize was to win a 12-month supply of nappies. Interestingly, zero people entered the competition from the TV campaign - and 45,000 entered on Facebook. Out of this, we received 15,000 shares on Facebook from fans to those they knew would like to know about the competition – our key target audience.”

Burch continues, “brands can’t pay for this level of endorsement, and you can’t achieve this unless you start the ball rolling with ten conversations about beans on toast.”

You’d be right to question whether it’s a worthy business goal; it’s not! It’s a marketing tactic.

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Conclusion & Resources

After reading this book, you should be well-prepared to get on out there and garner some new Likes from enthusiastic followers. Your next step in our 7-book Facebook Business Essentials Series is understanding the basics of Facebook content marketing: when, how and why to post content.

The book you just read is part 3 of a Facebook marketing education series that provides the essentials for marketers from beginning to advanced levels, so – even if you’re not interested in learning about Facebook content marketing timing - be sure to check out our other Facebook marketing guides.

If you’re interested in checking out how a good social marketing tool can help you get the most out of your Facebook efforts, check out Meltwater Buzz:

If you’d like to stay up to date on the latest tips and tricks from the digital marketing world, please subscribe to our social media blog.

About the AuthorsIt takes a village to write a Facebook marketing series of this breadth and depth. Here are the folks who contributed to this book:

Robert Rydefalk, Contributing AuthorFounder of Facebookskolan

Robert is a Product Manager at Meltwater who loves big data, building tools for social media mar-keting, and blogging about all the business pos-sibilities Facebook offers. Robert is the founder of Sweden’s largest blog about Facebook, Face-bookskolan.se, and LikeAlyzer.com, a free Facebook analytics tool.

Follow Robert on LinkedIn

Leslie Nuccio, Editor & Contributing Author

Leslie Nuccio is a marketer and writer who started work-ing in digital marketing before the first millennium Inter-

net bust, and has been working in social media mar-keting since the dinosaur ages of 2008. Leslie is on staff at Meltwater to wax poetic about all the social media marketing topics she can think of that will help fellow marketing types utilize the power of social media marketing. You can find her at the Meltwater

social media blog, or off on a trail with a dog.

Follow Leslie on Twitter

Heidi Myers, Contributing Author

Heidi runs PR & Marcom across the Central EMEA region for Meltwater. She has been with Meltwater for eight years, and previously worked for various advertising agencies in London. She is a London dweller, post-wine philosopher, and lover of baked beans