Well the boot camp has been on through Australia for the month or and Tuesday the 20th it was Brisbane's turn. The morning started with an overview of the day as shown in agenda below:
Some key topics were discussed and also introduction was made of what is Facebook Marketing by the wonderful Nick Bowditch, who used to be a small business owner but is now working for Facebook.
We were told that the main focus of Facebook Marketing should be storytelling...sharing content is key!
"Less engagement means you are less engaging"
They also made sure we were made aware that "Edge Rank" does not exist in Facebook term, but was created by a blogger...not that I knew what it was to begin with.
The crowd was mainly divided into people who had no idea what a Facebook page was to those who were a little bit more savvy.
The 4 main points of the morning session were:
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| Image Source: facebook.com/business |
Some points of interests were:
- Find other companies in similar field to market their products in your cover photo.
- Your "Talking About" should be 25% of your Likes.
- Use Page Insights to optimise your page posts.
- Publish visually engaging page posts.
- Plan the story telling of your business using story arcs.
- Create a content calendar...
- Facebook is about narrow-casting not broadcasting.
That last two comments definitely started me thinking that I have been doing a lot of broadcasting so it might be a good idea to change my post contents and frequency of the posts.
- Your cover photo should from now on be void of any text such as email, website, or telling people to like your page If that is the case your page will be deleted by Facebook after three warnings.
You can find more detailed information at the Facebook Business Page. As the morning sessions ended there was a break for morning tea.
The next session was about "Facebook Insights", what dreadful but important words. What it really is, is the measure of how your page is performing. It can be found at the top of your page in the Admin Panel:
It opens up to give you details such as demographics of your likes and the reach and also the number of people talking about your page. You should find the balance between LIKES and PTAT.
The next sessions was about creating Ads for your business. This was the part I was most interested in. They are introducing this new thing called Targeted Marketing. Now you can choose a grouping of people to send your ad to, be it mums to engaged couples, to married couples, to university students based on the product you are providing and also the market you want to cater to. The thing is the narrower the number of your target audience the better coverage of your ad. Here is an example of an ad I created just yesterday:
Other new features coming up would be Promoted Posts, Facebook Offers, Facebook Gifts, and Custom Audiences which will allow you to advertise to Offline audiences. All the new features can be accessed from the following page.
Facebook Apps was the next topic of discussion. The 5 main apps that each page should have are Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram. Other apps of interest are Fan of the Week, shopping carts such as Etsy, Pavement or Equid, others are Handmade Australia, RSS Graffiti. The main focus was on the app created by the presenter Donna Hamer. The app is Fanpage Competitions, and it is used to run competitions for all your likers or get new fans of your page by offering them a prize.
Then it was time for lunch..
The afternoon was a bit more laid back, we were shown pages of big brands and how they got it right or wrong and how we can use some of the techniques they've used to make our pages more appealing to our fans. After all the reason we are doing this is for people who like our stuff to let us know.
Pages of Interest
Disney Australia
Facebook
Fanta - (Edgy)
Oreo - (Awesome)
M&M
Skittles
Humans of New York
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Overall the day was a great success for me and it has definitely made me become more aware of the content that I create and also the best methods and practices that I can implement to get the best out of my page...so for 2013 I will have to come up with a much more engaging page...back to the drawing board.
I hope this account has been informative and will encourage those without a page to start thinking of one and those with one to start thinking of ways to make it better.
I thank you for joining me and ciao for now.
Fran....
