ProBlogger: How to Squeeze the Most out of Your Facebook Posts

---

How to Squeeze the Most out of Your Facebook Posts Posted: 24 Apr 2016 06:00 AM PDT This is a guest contribution from Nick Stillman. Facebook is an unbelievably potent marketing tool when used correctly. It is the largest social network in the world, with almost 1.60 billion active users every months  – that’s nearly 20% of the entire global population. Squeezing The Most out of Your Facebook Posts Many of these people spend more than an hour a day on Facebook – more than any other social network. This is because it relies heavily on input from other sources and most of the users on Facebook are actively seeking out for external content. This is why it could be the most powerful tool on the web for driving traffic to your blog. Facebook is an unbelievably potent marketing tool, however there are a few key things to remember to ensure its full potential is reached. Your content will thank you for it. It’s All About Timing When you make a post on your Facebook account, only those who ‘like’ your page will see it, but not all of them. Only a certain number of those who ‘like’ your page will see your post and this will depend on what is called your ‘organic reach’ – there are many different factors that can affect this. One of these is how many other posts your post has to compete with, and this is why timing is everything. While the engagement that your posts usually get is very important in growing your organic reach, timing your posts correctly is crucial in making sure as many people see what you’re sharing as possible. Your Facebook feed can only show a limited amount of content, which means that if you are trying to post when there is a high volume of ‘competition’ on your audiences’ feed, there is a lower chance that your own post will make it on there. While it may seem that the best time to post is when the most users are online, it’s actually when the least amount of posts are being made that you will actually get the most engagement. This means that during the daytime, when more users are posting online, there is too much ‘competition’ on Facebook feeds. In reality, the best time to post to get a greater organic reach is between 9pm and 11pm. Picking Your Days Though you need to be posting regularly (everyday preferably), you still need to pick days to deliver your key content when they are likely to be engaged with the most. Contrary to popular belief, weekdays are not the best days to post. In fact, weekdays yield significantly lower interactions that weekends. Sundays are the best days to post, with Saturdays not trailing far behind. This could be for a number of reasons, including people’s attitudes on weekends, the time they spend on social media and the time they have free to engage with content. There is also likely to be less competition on weekends, seeing as most businesses post more during the week. Though you need to keep a constant flow of activity on Facebook, it’s a good idea to pick your most powerful, engaging or most important content and save those for the weekend. Upload Your Videos Videos are powerful tools on Facebook – they are engaging, easy to digest, easy to access and promote sharing between users. However, a recent study from Buzzsumo revealed that videos that were uploaded directly to Facebook from your computer – rather than an embedded link from third party sites such as YouTube or Vimeo – yielding significantly better results. This might mean that if your business is creating video content is it best to upload directly to Facebook as well as a third-party site such as YouTube, ensuring higher social media engagement and a wider reach. Thinking About The Best Type of Content Facebook is an extremely fleeting stimulus source. This means that your content has to be engaging and, most of all, eye-catching. The types of posts that you can make to Facebook can be broken up into 6 categories: questions (text), images, videos, links, giveaways, coupons/discounts. Studies have shows that questions are an extremely effective way to both catch the eye of an audience, and also invite a response. However, questions on their own perform the worst out of all 6 categories. These kinds of posts are the most potent when coupled with engaging imagery or a video, and tend to be commented on, liked and shared the most. Don’t Be Too Wordy The length of your Facebook posts need to be as carefully considered as any other facet of your social media outreach. Seeing as the majority of text posts will be coupled with a link, image or video (as they are they most effective types of posts), there is little need for lengthy, superfluous text in your Facebook posts. Overall, the shorter the post, the better. Posts with under 100 characters tend to be the most effective (5-20 words – that’s the sweet spot). Anything over 300 characters is too much. We understand you need words to grab your audience, but they key is to inform in the most concise and enticing manner possible. The more words you use, the quicker you’ll lose your audience. Consider Your Use of Hashtags Hashtags have become an incredibly powerful social networking tool throughout a number of platforms. They are excellent means for directing traffic to a post (blog post, Tweet, Instagram post – you name it), honing in on a very specific audience. On many different platforms posts without any hashtags lose a lot of impact and visibility, however, on Facebook, they tend to be quite detrimental to your posts’ engagement. Facebook isn’t a particularly ‘hashtag friendly’ platform – not in the way Instagram or Tumblr is – and as a consequence, they can actually damage the appeal of your posts to the general Facebook audience. Unless they have a purpose (i.e. irony, or a hashtag campaign) they tend to be viewed as superfluous and even unprofessional, so save them for your ‘hashtag-friendly’ platforms. Using External Tools To Post To Facebook The power of social media lies in its connectivity. Most networks rely on the ability to share between different platforms, because the majority understand that most users spend time on multiple platforms each day. When it comes to Facebook, there are a number of different ways to post content onto your feed. One of these is through external sources such as Instagram and Twitter. While both of these platforms are popular external platforms, Instagram is far more effective in engaging audiences. When it comes to posting images, doing so via Instagram’s post to Facebook option can be a very powerful tool for inviting interaction. In fact, a study by Buzzsumo revealed that it was even more effective than posting to Facebook itself when it comes to boosting likes on a post. There is no ‘correct’ way to manage a Facebook account. However, there are a few simple rules to ensure you are harnessing the full potential of its incredible capabilities as a marketing tool – otherwise you are really just shooting yourself in the foot. The guide above is a great starting point to make sure your Facebook activity is as optimised as possible. They are by no means strict rules as such, but are more like fundamentals that should be at the back of your mind when using the platform. There are countless variables which will affect how you conduct yourself on Facebook, and some of the guidelines above may be utterly useless in what you are trying to achieve. However, following even just a few of them will ensure you are boosting the unprecedented potential that Facebook has as a crucial way to drive traffic to your blog. Nick Stillman is a strategist and copywriter at If You Build It – Sydney-based digital strategy and content marketing wizards. The post How to Squeeze the Most out of Your Facebook Posts appeared first on ProBlogger.         Related Stories Reading Roundup: What’s New in Blogging Lately? Seven Steps to Combat Blog Content Thieves How to Create a Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan for Your WordPress Blog

You are subscribed to email updates from ProBlogger. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States

Top Social Media Content Marketing Tips - DailyBlogTips

---

Top Social Media Content Marketing Tips Posted: 24 Apr 2016 03:32 AM PDT Great content and social media marketing isn’t terribly unlike chemistry: the slightest alterations to the ingredients can produce either amazing results… or painfully disastrous ones. So we’ve scoured available research and collected some of the best ways to increase your blog’s social media engagement and strengthen your content marketing across social media. Share Images on Twitter to Increase Your Retweets Twitter’s new image capabilities allow twitter accounts to share images alongside links, not unlike Facebook. And there’s a significant uptick in retweets when you share links which have images. Don’t expect a major change in CTR; but those retweets offer notable SEO benefits! In fact, Moz theorizes that page-level social metrics like retweets comprise a notable portion of a specific page’s ranking power. Share Your Content More than Once If your blog is trying to gain traffic from multiple time zones, consider sharing your content more than once! This increases the likelihood that you’ll net visitors from different time zones. Ideally, this should be staggered to occur on different days; for example, if you share one post at 8am on Wednesday, consider sharing it again two or three hours later on Friday. This is especially useful for extending the shelf-life of high-performing articles or blogs. Don’t hesitate to do this for blogs that are weeks or months old; links to deeper content can be another positive signal to search engines, and of course increases the amount of benefit you can get from each post. Where possible, develop a ‘sharing timeline’ that includes posts the day a blog is published, weeks after it is published, and months after it is published. Larger blogs might consider enlisting the help of marketing experts to help develop optimized content posting calendars. Don’t Let Your Posts Get Stale Do you ever feel that you’re repeating yourself on social media? It’s an easy trap to fall into, and one that’s best avoided: because if you notice it, so will your followers. Look to other high-profile blogs or news outlets to see how they mix up the framing of their posts (the words and images they use) to keep similar content feeling fresh. This is especially important when you’re re-posting the same articles! A good rule of thumb is to mix up the style and type of images you highlight in your social media posts, and to draw potential readers in with questions in the text, rather than statements. Use Sharing Data To Guide Your Content What’s the most-shared and liked content in your blog’s niche? The best blogs always keep track of what’s trending, and use that information to guide their content marketing. It’s relatively easy to set up free news alerts for your niche keywords, and there are plenty of free tools which allow you to analyze the top content for specific keywords. Buzzsumo, Ruzzit, and Social Count are all good examples! Being aware of trending subjects can help you pin down the formula for going viral. Use Social Media Targeting Opportunities Most social media outlets allow you to target your audience when you’re promoting posts and information. Always take advantage of this option! Doing so will help ensure that the people most likely to engage in your content are the ones who see it. It’s widely understood that using Facebook’s ‘life events’ parameters can have dramatically positive effects. You can target individuals who land new jobs, new relationships, are recently married or engaged, have children, start college… and the best part is that there’s almost certainly one of these ‘life events’ which can indicate likely readers for your blog. The Bottom Line Social media marketing isn’t rocket science; but it can be very difficult to measure the ROI from your efforts, or to tell which tricks you’ve used have had the best effect. After all, the process you use successfully for one kind of content might not work as well for another! The most important tool you can give yourself for successfully engaging in content marketing and social media outreach is to collect data and analytics on your successes… and your failures. Understanding how they happened will help you avoid them in the future! Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

Stream Of Social Shares Followed by Email Leads, Here is How I Do it Posted: 23 Apr 2016 09:53 AM PDT Ranking higher in search engine results and building up a targeted email subscribers list, who doesn't like it. The problem is, things aren't as simple as they are told to be. Methods of doing these things can be found on Guru Internet Marketer blogs but they become so common that they lose their effectiveness. In such cases, adding your own twists to these methods can get you awesome results. What you are going to read here is also not very simple but when done correctly, gets awesome results. I saw a sudden surge of social shares on my blog posts that I did this experiment on. Four of my posts were shared 43, 71, 64 and 80 times in a few hours after following these exact steps. I know these are nothing when compared with those who get thousands of shares. But, they are super famous people with a very huge follower base. I am a starter, a newbie who can only spend a few hours on his blog each week. I am somebody who started with zero investment. And when it comes to convincing people to subscribe to your list, this methods rocks. I saw a conversion rate of 20+ percent. In this post I will tell you my exact strategy of building up social signals to a post and then start gathering email subscribers from it. First let's have a look at what all is required to make this happen. Tools required 1. A very lucrative and relevant freebie that your target audience craves 2. Social share locker plugin 3. Email content locker plugin 4. Email marketing service subscription 5. Access to targeted groups on social networks and relevant forums I know some people don't like the very concept of locking downloads but this is how things work in Internet Marketing. They give you their email addresses; you give them something they really want. Step 1: Choosing The Freebie Choosing the right freebie to giveaway is very important. It must be something that your audience really craves for. It should be a problem solver for them. You cannot rehash something that is already available on the internet and expect people to sign up for that. Your freebie should be unique and something that can't easily be found. I blog mostly about internet marketing and SEO. I came up with a few very lucrative freebies that my target audience really craves for. In the SEO audience there are people who use many black hat SEO tools to rank their sites. GSA SER is one of those tools. The tool requires you to have a very good and huge list of websites where it can submit your backlinks. Scraping huge lists of websites that also have good metrics is another technical and tedious task. Most GSA SER owners are not good at it. I paid somebody to scrape me such a list and I offered it as freebie on my blog. Guess what? People loved it and were ready to share my post and subscribe in order to get the download. Step 2: Posting On Your Blog Post your giveaway with a very catchy title. What is in the freebie should be clearly explained in the title. Sense of urgency needs to be created. Write some lines and paragraphs but preferably keep it short. Our aim is to take them to the download as soon as possible. Create a download button or link for the downloadable file and lock it behind a social locker. Social locker is basically a plugin that locks the content behind itself and one has to share the website on social networks to unlock the download. You can search on google to find many free and paid ones but I use Bizpanda. Bizpanda has both social and email locker features and is very easy to use. Clearly explain that they have to unlock the download by sharing it using social media sites available on the locker. Step 3: Getting some initial traffic Find social media groups and pages relevant to your freebie and submit your blog post link to all of them. Comment on relevant blog posts and question answer sites. Also exploit forums and post there wisely. If people love what you have to offer, they will surely come and share your post to get the download. This will result in more social shares and subsequently more traffic. Social signals will increase referral traffic from social media sites as well as give some positive SERP push. Due to my keyword being easy to rank, I hit first page with so many social shares coming from real people. Once you start getting traffic you will notice numbers increasing in share counters after a few hours. Step 4: Capturing Leads Getting social shares is good. But we want laser targeted leads too. Once you get some decent amount of shares, replace your social locker with email locker. The traffic is already pouring in from all the social shares. Now people will have to subscribe to your list to get the download. And they will surely do. Once you feel the traffic is dying, post in social media groups and pages again. The Next Time You Repeat The Process I got really good results from my first attempt. After sometime I decided to come up with a new freebie and do it all over again. Guess what? This time step 3 was even easier for me. I already had list of laser targeted subscribers to send the offer. After going through step 2 I emailed my subscribers about the freebie I was offering. They came running after it and my post saw 40+ social shares in a few hours. Click through rate in most of these emails was well above 4% mark. In one of my email campaigns the click rate was a whopping 7.2%. This number is well above the industry average. The more you do it, the better you get at it. But the key point here is "How good your freebie is". Believe me, people who own GSA SER love New and Fresh Links Lists. I found the weakness of my audience and I am exploiting it. Hope you do it too. About the author: Nabeel Shamshad is a blog scientist and writes about SEO, Internet Marketing, Blogging, online money making ideas and many other things related to the Internet. He is dedicated to showing others what he learns and experiments in his blogging life. To know more about what he is up to, please visit his blog: www.imnabeel.com Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

You are subscribed to email updates from Daily Blog Tips. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States