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How to use Sponsored Page Posts to reach your target audience in the News Feed

Despite Facebook’s News Feed algorithm (Often referred to as EdgeRank) that matches content with relevant users, plus the recent introduction of Page Post Targeting, it can still be challenging for Facebook Pages to reach their most important fans.

The definition of an “important” fan is different for every Page – for some, it’s the target demographic that is more likely to purchase the business’ product. For other Pages, like fashion and apparel brands, it might be the most influential consumers, whose tastes spread to a wider audience. These audiences can be defined by any parameters that are accessible in Facebook’s Self-serve advertising tool – demographics, precise interests, connections to other apps and pages, etc.

At PageLever we call these subsets of a Page’s audience the “target audience” – the portion of the Page’s audience that is most important to reach, because not all fans are created equal.

When a Page posts to all its fans, only a percentage of the total fans see the given post. Of these fans, an even smaller percentage are in the target audience. A post that reaches 10,000 fans might only be reaching a few hundred fans in the target audience. This is where many large Pages struggle to see ROI.

However, with a surprisingly small amount of money spent on Sponsored Page Post Stories, this is a completely solvable issue.

When used well, Sponsored Page Post Stories ensure that a Page’s content reaches fans in the target audience far more often than fans outside the target.

Let’s walk through how to create a Sponsored Page Post targeted to a specific subset of a Page’s audience:

1. Create a new Facebook Ad

Create a new ad, select the Page you want to promote, and select the radio button “A Specific Post on Your Page” – then, instead of selecting a specific post, check the box to “Keep my ad up-to date by automatically promoting my most recent post” – this ensures that the content that you’re promoting is current, and eliminates the complexity of creating a new ad for each post. Larger Pages, or those appealing to multiple target audiences may want to run individual ads for each post.

2. Select Targeting Parameters

Just like any other Facebook Ad, you’ll want to define who you’re targeting – here’s where you’ll define who is in your target audience. This could be defined simply by age and gender, or it could be focused around a set of precise or broad interests – maybe small business owners are your target, or maybe you want to target only your fans who like the Pages of your competitors, to ensure they don’t switch.

Fans in your target audience are likely to be friends with similar people, with similar interests – small business owners tend to know others small business owners. This creates a chain reaction – as the users you’re targeting engage with your content, their actions will make your post more likely to be seen organically by other fans in the target audience, because of how Facebook’s News Feed algorithms work.

Make sure to choose to show the ad only to users who already like your Page:

3. Use the Power Editor make your ads appear only in the News Feed

Facebook’s Power Editor is the secret weapon for making this happen. Only the Power Editor allows you to choose whether ads are displayed in the News Feed – this isn’t possible in the self-serve ad tool.

If you haven’t used the Power Editor before, make sure to read Facebook’s documentation – the process of downloading and uploading data is different from the Self-Serve Ad Tool.

Once you’ve downloaded data from your Account, click on the ad that you just created, and select the “Placements” tab. Here, you’ll be able to choose to show your ad in all placements, on Desktop Only (News Feed and elsewhere) or News Feed only:

4. Be patient and reap the benefits

The click-through-rate (CTR) of ads in the News Feed is significantly higher than elsewhere, particularly for Page Post Sponsored Stories (the type of ad you just created). However, there is less ad inventory in the News Feed than in the sidebar – if the target audience you’re trying to reach is just 10,000 people, don’t expect to reach them all in one week. We’ve found that Page Post Sponsored Stories work best as an “always-on” solution.

The beauty of Page Post Sponsored Stories is that they amplify the posts that you create – if you post great content that engages your target audience, your click-through-rate (CTR) will be high, and your CPC will be lower. Facebook ads, when used best, augment organic distribution of great content.

Questions? Already running Sponsored Page Post Ads? We’d love to hear from you, drop us a note in the comments section below.

How big brands use social media (and you can too)

June 23, 2011 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

Content originally written by Jonathan Strauss and published on the awe.sm blog

Greg Shove, CEO of Halogen Media, had a great post yesterday on the paid, earned, owned (PEO) media model. This framework for integrated marketing campaigns isn’t new: I saw it mentioned on Darren Herman’s blog recently; Fred Wilson was the first I noticed applying the earned media term to social media back in 2009 (part 1, part 2); and in a former life in electoral politics, I was first introduced to “earned media” (then applied purely to press coverage) way back in 2003.

Greg does a great job of discussing how a large brand can apply this integrated model by reallocating their substantial marketing budgets in ways that take better advantage of the amplification effect of earned media (see below chart from his post). And we’re actually working with Halogen right now to comprehensively measure the impact of the various components of an integrated PEO media campaign they’re planning for one of their brand-name clients. But what about everyone else?

The PEO media model for the rest of us

What got big brands looking at social media to begin with were the early examples of exceptional success by independent marketers — Fred’s original earned media post was about @kogibbq, hardly a big brand. And what originally inspired us to tackle performance marketing for social media was its efficiency (what we call the word-of-mouth superconductor). We believe this efficiency is potentially even more disruptive than SEM in democratizing online marketing, because — at its best — social media enables small marketers to reach the right audience with the right message in the right way at minimal costs.

So, how does a smaller business that may not even have a robust website, let alone a microsite or a display advertising budget, take advantage of the potential power of the PEO media model? First, you have to redefine what each of the terms mean (in order of importance for smaller businesses):

Owned Media: There are 3 basic components of your owned media presence: blogging; email; and social media. The blog should be the center of your online universe — email and social media are essential in syndicating your content to wherever your audience lives and interacting with them when they engage with your brand there, but you always want the source of the content to be on the site you control. And you should be trying to turn every new visitor to your blog into a subscriber (and ultimately an evangelist) with a prominent Twitter Follow Button, Facebook Like Box, and email subscribe form.
Earned Media: This is basically how the ‘evangelist’ segment of your audience is sharing your message with their friends, and it’s the levelest part of the playing field because earned social media basically works the same regardless of the size of your brand or your budget. And the smaller your audience, the more intimate (and thus stronger) your relationships with your evangelists can be — they are helping their friends discover something new that they love, capitalize on their passion. The basic value of syndicating your content to Twitter and Facebook is not so people can see it (because of the real-time Twitter stream and automatic Facebook newsfeed optimization, an email or RSS subscriber is much more likely to see a given piece of new content than a Twitter follower or Facebook fan), it’s so the people who do see it there engage with and share it in those contexts (i.e. reply/retweet on Twitter and comment/like on Facebook). You also want to give every site visitor the opportunity to be an evangelist by adding appropriate sharing calls-to-action to your blog.
Paid Media: For a lot of smaller marketers, this isn’t necessarily a must-have as long as you’re creative with your audience-building efforts through owned and earned media. Some relatively straightforward examples include: exclusive deals for Facebook fans; one-off contests and promotions to drive your existing audience to turn their friends into fans and followers; and adding more systematic recognition and rewards for your most effective evangelists (aka gamification). If you are going to buy ads, use Facebook’s engagement ad formats and experiment with their robust targeting to get the most bang for your buck. But keep in mind it’s not the quantity of fans that counts the most here, it’s the quality of fans you acquire. So don’t just optimize for acquiring the cheapest fans, try to figure out ways to quantify the LTV of the fans you acquire in terms of the effectiveness of their evangelism rather than just their own engagement.

Optimizing your PEO media funnel

As a smaller marketer, it’s all about performance — you can’t afford to waste your precious time and possibly money on anything that doesn’t have a positive ROI. I always find the best way to think about performance as a funnel, so let’s use the following funnel analogy to talk about the PEO media model in performance terms. You fill the top of your funnel with Visitors through interesting content on your blog (owned media), which helps with SEO, and is possibly augmented with some very targeted paid search (paid media). Your site is designed with clear calls-to-action and possibly incentives to become Subscribers in the form of Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and/or email subscribers (owned media), and you can potentially directly acquire Twitter followers and/or Facebook fans with ads (paid media). You activate those Subscribers to become Evangelists by syndicating your content to the places they share and through community management (owned media). And those Evangelists start helping you fill the funnel with new Visitors and Subscribers as they share your content and brand with their friends (earned media).

The key to all of this is obviously the earned media component. As Greg says in his post:

“Earned media isn’t new, but nowadays it’s scalable, sustainable, and influential. Maintaining this earned media presence requires budget allocation, but it’s more ‘management’ than buying: creating an editorial calendar, monitoring the conversation starters, and consistent measurement (over months, not days).”

If I can get 1,000 evangelists to share my message with the right 10 of their friends, that is the most effective way possible for me to reach those 10,000 people. The key for a smaller marketer is making sure it’s also an efficient way to do so. And that takes data.

As Greg says at the end of that quote, the PEO media model is a marathon not a sprint. It’s about ongoing optimization of chronic marketing efforts, not trying to maximize the impact of a single acute campaign. The narrative nature of the human mind means we love looking for that one tweet by an influencer that gets 100 retweets and 1,000 clicks, but the reality is much less glamorous — success is built from a broad base of passionate evangelists who are likely only influential with their core network. So, the challenge ends up being more like how do you go from an ongoing average of 10 clicks per tweet by 100 evangelists to an average of 12 clicks per tweet by 150 evangelists rather than how do you get someone with 10,000 followers to tweet your link once.

The most valuable ways we see performance-focused marketers using data to optimize their efforts within the PEO media model are:

Optimizing your owned media: When it comes to producing and syndicating content on a regular basis, what your sharing, with whom you’re sharing it, and when you share it all combine to play a role in how it’s received and ultimately the results it drives. Only over time and repeated attempts will you be able to start seeing the patterns in the data that can distinguish the impact of each of those factors (think multi-variate testing). And because your fan and follower counts change over time (hopefully up :D ), we offer a metric we call ‘Efficacy’ that shows the results per 100 fans/followers at the time of the post so you can compare apples-to-apples. Other products that can help you with this specific use-case include Timely (powered by awe.sm :D ) and CrowdBooster.
Motivating earned media: The steps to building good game mechanics are deceptively simple: design the rules to channel individual motivation into the common goal; make the rules clear to all the players; and publicize the leaderboard. Whatever metrics you’re trying to drive through earned media, whether they’re visits, pageviews, new fans/followers, or signups and sales, you need to tie any recognition and rewards as closely to those results as possible. That’s why we offer trackable share buttons (including FB Like buttons) tied toreal conversion tracking.
Quantifying the value of your earned media: If you really want to close the loop, you need to be able to measure your CPA, which could be in time as much or more than money, of an evangelist against their LTV, which has to include the referrals they drive not just direct purchases. So it is important to tie any programmatic sharing by your evangelists to their identities where possible. Many of our customers make use of the ability to tag the shares of their registered users to be able to see the aggregate results each user drives (for example, that’s how we built VIPLi.st on top of the data we track for Plancast).

Why the agencies get the big bucks

Unfortunately for smaller marketers, social media marketing in general and the online PEO media model specifically are still so young that there are no turn-key easy answers on how to put these concepts to work. There are so many emerging use-cases that coming up with the right strategy with optimal ROI for your business is a hard and often times iterative process (and that’s why the services agencies like Halogen provide are so valuable to the clients who can afford them). But we believe data is the great equalizer in marketing and we’ve built awe.sm as a platform that can be tailored to understand the effectiveness of a wide variety of social media use-cases in the terms that matter to your business.

So if you’re interested in discussing your ideas on how to harness social media for your or your clients’ needs, drop us a line to info@awe.sm. And please follow @Unified on Twitter so we can practice what we preach .

10 Smart Brands using Social Media

February 7, 2009 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

Content originally written by Jonathan Strauss and published on the awe.sm blog

I just read a great post over on Mashable, that I wanted to share here:

Presenting: 10 of the Smartest Big Brands in Social Media

While this is ostensibly a post about large national/global brands, I found the underlying lessons from these examples to be potentially useful to *anyone* seeking to use social media to build brand equity. You should definitely go read the original post for the full details on each campaign, but here’s my take on the important lessons from each one:

Blendtec Blends it on YouTube – Creativity is king; advertising is just content someone is willing to pay for you to watch, it doesn’t *have* to be annoying and uninteresting
Burger King and the Sacrifice Facebook Application – People like to have fun
Starbucks Asks for Your Advice – Making your customers feel like they’re part of the process builds brand loyalty through a sense of co-ownership
Sun Microsystems and the CEO blog – Kill them with transparency (a variation on my dad’s old adage: ‘kill them with kindness’); disarm your critics by giving them a voice and answering them back
IBM With Lots of Blogs – Content = Authority; as long as it’s quality content (and on-brand), more *is* better on the Internet — it gives you higher search engine ranking and it doesn’t hurt to be the first thing a prospective customer finds when they do research on your area of interest/expertise (what do you think this blog is all about? )
Zappos on Twitter – A company (not just a brand) can have a personality in the Internet age, and it is defined by its employees; being accessible and relatable reminds your customers that there are real people behind your brand, and that tends to make them like you more (unless those real people really suck )
Comcast on Twitter too – Empower your community manager to address customers needs; Frank from Comcast doesn’t just spew marketing platitudes into the Twittersphere, he actually helps customers in need (Corollary: if you have an unempowered community manager fronting for your brand, he/she is bound to get slaughtered and likely do more harm to brand equity than good)
Ford and Social Media PR – Bad press doesn’t go away on the Internet; it’s not like the conventional media world in which all you need to do is weather *this* news cycle – that disparaging blog post will be popping up in searches for your brand for the rest of your life and beyond, so you’d better get out there and address it
Graco Uses Pictures on Flickr – *Every* customer should be writing a testimonial; make it so easy and fun for your customers to show their brand loyalty that it’s a no-brainer for them
Dell Doing it Everywhere – Social media isn’t media; this isn’t an ad buy you make selectively based on demographics and vertical content, it’s a horizontal platform for customer engagement comprised of many different elements — you may not have the time or resources to be everywhere, but take the time to craft a campaign in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts

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