If you aren’t using Facebook for your business to grow your brand and increase sales, you are about 3 years behind. If you are treating your business FB business page like your personal page, you are wasting time and money.
The platform is incredibly sophisticated and powerful. Anyone can get on, and start up a business page and start pouring money into ads and boosting posts. Without learning how to do it, is like sitting in the cockpit of a Boeing 747 and thinking you can fly it.
In the beginning of the ad platform, many large businesses were reluctant to get behind social platforms because it was hard to measure the ROI of the ads or posts. The platform has evolved significantly and you can get more data than you could dream of. The problem is, even with ALL of that data, it can still be difficult to determine if the ads are helping or hurting.
From a business standpoint, all of the metrics that are available to us on the platform can really be smoke and mirrors. All of the views, and likes and shares are fun to receive but they can fill us with false validation. What are you trying to achieve in your business using your social networking sites?
Now there are ways to really dig into the data to see how your posts or ads are performing. That still is only half of it. You can see who is reacting to your posts, who is clicking on your posts, cost per click, average length of time each video is watched, cost per 10 seconds of video watched, cost per lead, cost per impression and plenty more.
All you should care about is are they leading to sales? Are they helping drive revenue? These are the only metrics that matter. You have a video with 482 likes and 28,000 views but did you make any sales on that video? Did it move the needle? Likes and views and clicks mean NOTHING!
Those metrics are great for brand awareness. For getting your name and your brand and your mission out in front of others to see. You can build a good branding strategy so others know that you are out there and help them understand what you do. You have to have a plan at some point, to convert those people into clients, into raving fans, into your sales team so they will refer to you.
It is crucial to throw out an ask every once in awhile. Gary Vaynerchuk wrote an entire book on this strategy called “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook”. The jabbing is the giving great value, educating people on the things you do well, teaching people things that they need to know from an expert who knows what they need to know. The right hook is the ask.
An entrepreneur I know, Heath Harmison who is a comic, had a video BLOW up and has recently achieved over 10 millions views on a 5 minutes video. We talked about it on my podcast called None of my Business and he had put actionable steps into place to take this event and capitalize on it.
He created tshirts to sell at his shows, he put them on his website and is taking the momentum of this hot piece of content and is doing something with it.
How are all of likes and views helping your bottom line? My agency uses an archaic but useful way of tracking this stuff. We keep a spreadsheet of every client that we earn. We have a line on the spreadsheet that tells us where they came from.
If they came from a social ad, we put “social ad” in the column. At the end of the month, we can see how much revenue was created from the ads. We then measure it up against how much we spent. If the revenue was higher than the cost, we keep running the ad. If the ad didn’t perform, we pivot and either adjust the ad or the targeting or scrap it and try something new.
Facebook and social sites like it, should no longer be pet project that your business tinkers with. They should be a part of your business strategy. It needs to be studied and learned and you should have a formal strategy to deploy. You have to ask yourself with every post or add you run, “How will this lead to a sale?” You need to have an answer to that question or you will be wasting your time and your money.