Isn’t Facebook a weird way to build you business?
There’s something called a Facebook page, and there’s something called the Newsfeed, and people have these things called profiles, and some how you can use all of that to make money.
I think that’s sort of odd.
Bloomberg reported that the average American spends 40 minutes per day on the Facebook newsfeed.
Which is more than they spend:
taking care of their pets
checking personal email
checking paper mail
58% of Americans have Facebook, and 40% use it every day.
The bottom line is that most of the people you want to do business with are probably on Facebook.
Yet your average business owner has no clue what they’re doing on Facebook and isn’t driving sales with it.
In fact, many businesses are hurting themselves on Facebook with poorly set up pages.
Even businesses with proper Facebook pages aren’t driving much business with it.
I encounter people with nice looking pages posting regular content. Barely anybody comments on or likes their posts.
At best, the page is something for people already interested in their business to see, rather than a means of attracting new prospects. That has its value, but Facebook can do a lot more. Facebook is an opportunity to create a whole new stream of profits.
But most people aren’t getting that much benefit from it.
The simple reason for this Facebook only gives a little bit of promotion to content posted by pages.
You could have 3,000 people like your page, post your best content, and find that only 20 people saw it.
You know why? The main attraction on Facebook is the Newsfeed. That’s where you go when you log onto Facebook. It’s the place where you see content posted by your friends, as well as groups, advertisers and sometimes pages.
For your page to get real estate on the Newsfeed, Facebook has to choose your post over content from all those other sources.
Let’s face it: are you more interested in your friends pictures, or in your barber’s latest comment?
Facebook wants to create the most interaction on its website that it can. It does not want to waste precious viewer attention on business page content.
So what’s a business owner to do?
Naturally, Facebook has a solution for you: paid ads.
You can pay Facebook to promote your content, or to promote your ads.
And you know what? It works.
If you know what you’re doing, at least.
The trick to Facebook is targeting. People give Facebook insane amounts of information about themselves- demographic data, interests, hobbies, beliefs and more.
The Facebook advertising system gives you a certain amount of access to this information to create highly targeted ads.
For example, lets say you offer legal services in a certain area of Atlanta. You can deliver ads to people in the zip codes you serve, to the age group you usually help, with relationship status typical of your client base (for example, “married).
Or lets say you sell art supplies. You can choose people who are interested in art.
This can mean big business for you.
Still, the Facebook Ads system leaves much to be desired. For example, you can’t advertise to people who like just any page, or are members of just any group.
I’ve seen lots of situations where Facebook has dozens of groups relevant to a product or service, but you can only access the members of a few of them.
So at Reputation Elevation, we go one step further with Facebook. We can collect data from just about any Facebook group, page, or even event, and then advertise through Facebook specifically to people with the exact interests that are best for the client. This is called creating a custom audience.
The results can be astounding. If your Facebook ad is costing you $0.80/click, that can be great.
Let’s say you are using Facebook ads to build your email list, and the average yearly value of a subscriber is $35 (including people who never buy from you). If you spend $0.80/click, and 1 in 3 of those clicks turns into an email subscriber, then you’re spending $2.40 to make $35.
Warren Buffet needs a few decades to make that happen. With Facebook you can do it in a year. Pretty good, right?
Or let’s say you offer a high end B2B service, and your typical client pays you $10,000 per year. If just 1 in 500 clicks turns into a client, you are spending $400 to secure a $10,000 client. That’s a no-brainer.
With custom audiences, we’ve seen clicks under $0.15. When you’re getting $0.15/click for highly targeted traffic, for people who have already indicated they want or need or are interested in what you have to offer, then all of a sudden Facebook is sort of like your personal ATM.
If you really want Facebook to work for you in 2015, figure out how to advertise there. It can transform your business.
