If you’re planning to use social media for your business, there is one essential ingredient that will either make or break the results: an audience. If no one is listening to you talk, is it worth talking? (Don’t answer that out loud)
As a firm believer in content marketing, I tell my clients that they need to be sharing blogs, comments, company updates, videos and lots of images on Facebook. That great mix of media gives folks a reason to want to come back to your pages, give it a thumbs-up, comment or share it themselves. The problem is, if there is no one following you page, you’re talking to no one.
There are two ways to remedy this!
1) Invite people you know to like the page!
This is free and lets you invite people you know
2) Run A Like Campaign: “Promote Your Page”
I’ve been running a social sharing campaign for one of my clients. They have a dozen locations around the country that have their own Facebook pages. When I began the social sharing program, it was evident that some of the pages had been used frequently and effectively by those local offices, and it showed. Those locations all had between 300-1800 likes and follows. When I dug into their website analytics, people were regularly interacting with posts on those Facebook pages and then going to the main company website to look for a job.
On the flip side, there were (are) several locations that had south of 50 likes (some with under 20). When content was shared no one was liking, commenting or sharing any content, and in most cases, 0 traffic to the website from the location page.
The numbers speak for themselves. The client asked what we should do to ignite some traffic flow through those pages and the answer was clear. We needed an audience.
After running a like campaign for one month, each of the pages received between 30 and 50 new likes to the page. When I went back into Google Analytics to look at the numbers of folks coming from Facebook to the website, the numbers, again, told the story. Instead of the usual 0 visitors coming from those locations, each of them was sending 40+ contacts to the site. Modest, but it was an improvement!
The real icing on the cake was revealed when I took a look at other stats for the website. The graph below shows total Facebook traffic to the site.
While I can’t say for certain that the huge boost in traffic is only from the “like” campaign, there hasn’t been a change in ad spend other than this one during that period.
To put it in percentages, the site saw a 120% increase in Facebook traffic. Facebook even decided that the ads should get pushed out to Instagram and there was a 240% increase in traffic from that source as well over that 3 month period.
As an added bonus, check out the increase in traffic during that same time-period across the entire website!
The Buy-In
It is important to note that this client has bought into content marketing. They publish 12 blogs optimized to get noticed by search engines per month and send out monthly emails in which they share blog those blogs. They then shared every blog across a network of business AND PERSONAL social media accounts. They also budget a consistent amount of ad spend on Facebook per month to get their brand in front of new audiences.
A sustainable marketing plan, one that has lasting effects, is multi-faceted, and this company is seeing the fruit of their investments.
The lesson:
A good marketing strategy doesn’t rely on one large initiative to drive success, but manageable, measurable tactics along the way. How do you move a mountain? One shovel full at a time. Or, as we say in Buffalo, NY. How do you shovel your driveway faster?
Buy a snow blower.
