My Takeaways from Facebook’s Small Business Boost Event

As part of Facebook’s Small Business Boost program, members of the network’s Small and Medium Business Team from Austin spoke to business owners on Friday about effectively using Facebook to market their business. I had a chance to speak with Chris Herndon, Facebook Engineering Team, after the event. My key takeaways from the presentation and my questions and Chris’ answers are below.

The Presentation

Kati McGee of Facebook’s Austin office, told the told the audience that it is important for your business to ‘Be Discoverable’ by optimizing your Page for Graph Search and Nearby (mobile).

How Facebook Drives Local Business

Awareness – Users are made aware that your business exists
Consideration – Their friends like your business, you build relationship
Conversion – They purchase your product or service
Loyalty – They are repeat customers and brand advocates

By the Numbers (and they are pretty impressive!)

• Facebook has 1 billion registered users
• Average Internet user spends 40% of their online time on the News Feed
• Average Facebook user spend 6 hours per month on the network
• 3.2 billion posts are made each day
• 12 million daily users
• 1 billion searches performed daily within the platform
• 113 million check-ins every month
• 13 million local business Pages
• Facebook fans are 2 times more likely to become customers
• 3 million Page owners have downloaded the Pages Manager mobile app
• 150 million people finding and connecting to businesses on Facebook daily
• 680 million people log in to Facebook mobile at least once per month

With regard to Graph Search, it’s important to remember that your Page’s connections drive discovery. The place/Page that is connected to the searcher’s friends and connections will show up in the top Graph Search spot – of which there are 1 billion (searches) per day.

With the Nearby feature (on the mobile app) users can find places nearby. They can explore by category, connect with the business via their phone and check-in. Users can also rate and share recommendations. Obviously, the opinions and recommendations of friends is important to users looking for specific types of businesses.

Having an optimized Facebook Page with targeted connections gives your business – especially brick and mortar local businesses – an instant mobile marketing strategy. Encouraging and rewarding check-ins and recommendations from existing fans and customers will help their friends and connections find your business.

SEE ALSO: 5 Ways to Optimize Your Facebook Page for Graph Search

Facebook’s Advice to Page Owners

• Optimize your About section to ensure that your Page shows in Graph Search results and mobile Nearby results.
• Local businesses can encourage customers to like and check in with table tents and window stickers. You can get yours here: Table Tents and Stickers
• Start building your fan base with email contacts of your personal email.
• Invite subscribers of your email list (up to 5,000) to like your Page. On your Page, click Build Audience > Invite email contacts. Supported platforms are Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, Vertical Response, iCloud, Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo!, Outlook Express, Apple Mail, and more.

Author’s Note: Kati said this is limited to Pages with less than 5,000 fans, but when I looked at the feature it appears she meant that the email list had a 5,000 subscriber maximum.

• Build relationships with your fans because they may be current or future customers.
• Listen to your fans; they often provide personal and honest feedback and insight.
• Fans’ sharing, liking, and commenting, makes them instant brand advocates because these actions show in their News Feed and ticker, allowing their friends and connections to discover your business.

Facebook’s Best Practice Guides and Tutorials can be found here: Facebook for Business.

News Feed

The user always comes first at Facebook – and always will. Any changes or adjustments will always be done with user experience in mind. News Feed is always changing.

To create stronger relationships and engagement Page owners must know when their audience is online and post at those times. Using the post scheduler is the best way to be sure that your posts go out at optimum times for your fans.

Posting Guidelines

• Keep updates short and sweet (1-2 lines of text is optimal)
• Post at least 1-2 times per week
• Posting 3-5 times per week is recommended so that your Page isn’t considered spamming
• Be consistent with posting
• Post emotive, eye-catching photos/videos
• Content should be engaging, relevant, and timely
• Facebook’s filter “stacks” posts that are about popular topics. Posting about these topics can help your posts show in News Feed*
• Utilize Insights to determine what types of posts and post times are most successful and engaging to your audience
  
• Post photos with a bit[dot]ly (or other link shortener) link to drive traffic offsite

*Author’s note: I would add that while your posts will go into these topical stacks in News Feed, only the top two are visible. Others can only be seen when the user clicks the link at the bottom of the stack. For this reason, be cautious about using popular topics as a strategy to get your posts in the News Feed.

Promoted Posts

Promoted posts are pushed to fans and friends of fans, thereby giving you greater reach. Promote posts no more than once or twice a week. Over 300,000 Pages have promoted 2.5 million posts. If a customer posts a rave review on your Page, promote that post as a way to bring awareness.

Facebook Ad Campaigns Best Practices

Run three ads simultaneously. The example given was a local business with a $75 daily ad budget. Kati suggested creating three identical campaigns using identical ads (same image/same copy) with a $25 daily budget for each. Each ad would be targeted to a different audience:

Family Campaign: Fathers, age 28-48
Youth Campaign: Students, age 18-24
Health Campaign: Fitness minded, age 30-50

Once you’ve seen how the ads are performing (i.e. which demographic is responding best to the ad), cancel the other two campaigns and increase the daily budget for the highest performing campaign. You can set-up and monitor the performance of your campaigns from here: Ad Panel.

Connect your fans to your Facebook ads. The data reflects that there is a 1.6x lift in brand recall, 2x lift in message awareness, and a 4x lift in purchase intent when a friend is connected to an ad on Facebook.

My Questions

While I didn’t get to ask all of the questions I wanted, I was able to get a few in and also report some bugs!

Q1: Can Page owners expect more tutorials and expanded Help Center answers?
FB: Yes, we are working to expand these and add more tutorials in the near future.

Q2: You guys were encouraging the use of more photos, videos, and emotive images, however many Page owners (myself included) have seen a dramatic drop in reach for photos and videos. If you’re encouraging us to use these, does this mean that you’ll be working to increase the reach of these assets?
FB: That shouldn’t be happening. Photos and videos are encouraged because they are the most engaging. If you and others are seeing decreased reach on those posts, this is something I’ll take back to my people and we’ll check. (Of course, he also told me that “rumors” about changes to EdgeRank last year were false…but these changes were VERY well documented at the end of 2012. You can take a look at this Google Search for some articles on the subject.

Q3: Speaking of rumors, there’s a rumor circulating that, as of Monday, April 1^st, Facebook will start “check-pointing” Pages that are violating the 20% text rule. Is this true?
FB: That’s possible! I haven’t heard it, but it’s certainly possible.

Q4: Speaking of rules, will there come a time when Facebook is more diligent about cracking down on all of the illegal contests running rampant across the network?
FB: It’s very difficult to keep up with all of the small Pages running “like and share” contests, but we do our best and, of course, want Page owners to follow the rules. My suggestion to everyone is to follow those rules because if we do come across a Page running a contest that isn’t compliant, we will – and we do – shut them down. We also encourage users to report these contests to us in order to help us police these types of violations.

I suggested that they add the option of “illegal contest” to the reporting process. J

All in all, it was an informative event and I was able to meet Dana Williams of {PRO}motion Social Media, LLC in person, which was awesome! Always great to meet colleagues!

If you have any questions about any of the above or need help with your social media marketing, leave a comment below or send me a message here.