Benefits of Social Media (and Some Disadvantages)

From Twitter to LinkedIn to Instagram to Facebook, the world of social media can quickly become intimidating and leave you feeling overwhelmed. But once you relax and poke around the sites, you will soon see that there are many benefits to using social media both for personal use and for your business. Here we will go over some ways of using social media that will benefit you (and also a few that might cause some harm). Ready to jump into the realm of social media? Lets go.

Worldwide Connections

Whether you are promoting a small business or looking up old friends from way back, there is no better way to get either of these things accomplished than by using a social media site. With sites like Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Facebook, you can easily make new friends, connect with old ones, and build business networks. These connections can really help you with a lot of things, from locating assistance for a problem to seeking out new employment. It is also a great way to get quick and personal feedback, such as career or personal advice.

A great benefit of social media as a world connection is the ability to quickly find a group of people who share a common interest with you. If you love a certain author or playing board games, there are groups on all social media platforms that you can reach out to for great discussions. Pinterest is a great platform for this, as users can look up a new hobby or decorating idea and come up with hundreds of websites or blogs from people that have done or want to do the same thing. The possibilities for connections you can make around the world for anything you may be looking for is endless with social media.

Getting Your Business Started

Another benefit of social media is that it has a treasure box of benefits that can help you start up a business and help it grow. By using social media, you can learn more about your customers, engage with an audience at any time of day, and extend how far your brand reaches others. If you want more information on using social media for your business, check out Virtual Market Advantage’s other blogs. This one goes over how to generate high-quality leads for your business online, and this one shows how to promote your content through social media.

Targeted Advertising

If you are promoting your own business or a non-profit group that you are working with, one benefit of social media is that your message can be placed in front of millions of people 24 hours a day. Social media can be used to spread your message for free, but there are also advertisement options available for a small fee. This is best if you want to deliver your content to the people with the most potential interest in what you are promoting. Depending on the social media platform you use, there are different tools open to you that help maximize your targeted reach without paying a maximum fee. As the saying goes, sometimes you have to spend money to make more money, and this is true for social media advertising.

Running these targeted ads allows you to specifically target your demographic with everything from a person’s location to interests and even their online behavior and connections. If you opt for this fee-based advertising, another benefit is that most of the platforms allow you to track and measure the performance of your ads, so you know if the money you spent is working or not.

In 2015, a study done by the research institute by MH Global showed that world-class companies rated the use of social media as the most effective way to identify new business opportunities. Nearly 75% of companies that used the benefit of social media for sales reported a noticeable increase in sales within 12 months.

Geo-Targeting

Geo-targeting is another aspect of social media marketing where not only can you reach a target audience that would be interested in your product, but you can target your audience based on location. The benefit of this tool on sites such as Twitter and Facebook is that it allows you to communicate the right content to your audience. Using tools like Hootsuite, you can also target specific Twitter messages to followers in specific countries or send messages from LinkedIn and Facebook company pages to specific groups based on demographics. Hootsuite also allows you to use geo-targeting to find conversations that are relevant to your brand.

Increasing Your Brand Awareness

Another great benefit of social media is the endless ways to increase the spread of your brand and awareness of it to your customer base. Social media makes it easier for potential customers to find and share your business with others. One study showed that that 53% of Americans that follow brands on social media platforms are more loyal to those brands when making purchases.

Gaining Valuable Customer Insight

Another benefit of social media is the huge amount of data you can collect about your customers in real time. In a single day, there are over 500 million tweets, 4.5 billion likes on Facebook, and 95 million photos and/or videos uploaded to Instagram. These are staggering numbers, but there is a huge amount of information about your customers hidden within those numbers. If you use the right analytics tools, you can gather data about who your customers are and how they feel about your brand.

With daily active engagement, you can gather relevant data from your customer base that can lead to helping you make better business decisions in the future.

The Disadvantages of Social Media

With the good there always lurks the bad, and while most businesses can find and correctly use the tools to help their companies grow, there are a few things that will make the use of social media a headache for you and your business.

Backlash

When any potentially offensive content is posted online, there can be excessive and brutal feedback. This can be especially true with highly opinionated subjects like religion and politics. If you are going to post things like this on a private social media account, be careful if you want to connect your personal and business page. Also keep in mind that even subjects that don’t seem offensive to you can be sensitive topics for many other people.

Risks of Fraud or Identity Theft

No matter how secure the information is that you put out there on the Internet, it is available to anyone smart enough to access it. If this person is successful in stealing your information and identity, it could be costly to you and your business and make your life a nightmare. Be diligent and careful about what you put online, even if you think you are just sharing with friends. Once it is out there, it is nearly impossible to erase.

Time Waster

If you are using a social media platform to promote your business or yourself, be careful to not get sucked into the black hole that is social media. Make sure you stay focused and on course for your end goal. It is easy to get stuck looking at friends’ family vacation photos or watching that new cat video that popped up on your news feed.

No matter how you use these tools, there is much to be gained from the benefits of social media. From targeted paid advertising to knowing how to use each platform to reach your target market, social media can help you grow your business fast. Stay focused, pay attention to your audience, get some ads running, and reap the benefits!

How to Use Facebook Insights

So you have your business page set up on Facebook, and now you want to see just exactly how well that page is doing. How do you do that, and what is the best way to use that information? That tool is called Facebook insights. Let’s go over all the ins and outs right now!

Why Should You Check Facebook Stats?

This is a great question. Facebook does block a large number of posts from Google, meaning that you have to login to Facebook to see much of the content. If the post is public, however, Google indexes it. Google will notice the number of links you have coming from Facebook to your website.

So what you must remember is, when people talk about you or your page on social media, you (or your pages) need to be relevant for a certain topic. If your page gets a lot of links to it, Google can favorably read that page on your website. By knowing about this and really digging into your Facebook engagement with your followers by using Facebook Insights, you can drastically improve your reach online for your business.

Facebook Insights Requirements

Get 30 Likes - You will not be able to access Facebook Insights if your page has fewer than 30 likes on it. You could buy promotions from Facebook to get to those 30 likes, but it is often just as easy to promote your business page on your personal Facebook page, website, and/or actual store to reach 30 likes that way (and don't forget family and friends!) Within a couple of hours after getting to that 30th like, the Facebook Insights page will be available to access at the top of your Facebook page.

Historic Data - Facebook stores information about visitors for 180 days. If you want to keep track of the historic data past this cutoff, you need to be sure and export it now and then using the export function in the main Insights menu at the top of your stats.

Time Zone – Unless otherwise stated, Pacific Time Zone is what is used to calculate the data for Page Insights, so you want to make sure to translate that time to your own time zone if necessary.

Glossary - There is a glossary page on Facebook that will help you with all the terms it uses. Some of them can easily trip you up if you are new to all of the Facebook jargon that comes with a business page.

Facebook Page Insights

It is easiest when using the Insights page to open it up in a second tab, so you are able to check all of the stats on your own page. This Insights page will give you a lot of information about your visitors, and it may be more info than you are expecting. Most people voluntarily enter all kinds of details about themselves onto their social media sites. Facebook uses this info to target ads and lead users towards things they are interested in.

Having this information out there is a valuable thing for you and your Facebook page. The Insights page will tell you which posts had the most engagement from your followers and at what times of day most of your targeted audience is active on the social media platform.

Facebook Insights Dashboard

As you click on the Facebook Insights at the top of your page, you will see a set of graphs. These graphs tell you how effective your reach and engagement has been on your page. Just below these graphs, there should be a nice overview of your last five posts. If you are running a campaign, this overview will give you quick information This overview will include:

• The post type (whether it was a video, link, or an image).
• If you are targeting a specific audience.
• The post reach (how many people saw it).
• The engagement (how many click or likes it got).

If you want even more specifics than this, let's go section by section.

Likes

The Likes graph shows all your likes and will tell you if your fan base has grown or not. Here Facebook Insights will tell you not only the likes you have gained, but also the likes you have lost. Losses can be due to people not liking your page anymore, or Facebook could just be cleaning up their database.

Facebook does periodic purges because they want to make sure all the members of the network are human, not bots. It is suggested that you make a business page rather than using a profile, since this affects these cleanups. That way when they do a database clean up, you get the most accurate likes for your page.

This page will also tell you the number of paid likes you received. If you want to grow your target audience and the likes on your page, you can buy Facebook ads. These are worth the money, as they allow you to further target and promote to the audience of your choice and can be adjusted per promotion.

Reach

The Reach section is similar to the likes section but will tell you about the number of people who may have seen your post. This means it counts viewers who opened a page from your post rather than just scrolling past it.

Within this page there is a graph overview of Hide, Report Spam, and Unlike actions. This graph can tell you which posts triggered people to move away from your page. This allows you to see how you need to adjust your posts to your audience and if your promoted posts are working.

Visits

When you look at the Visits tab in Facebook Insights, it will tell you which tabs on your page have been visited the most. This can be on your timeline, info tab, or videos tab. Most of the time it will show the visits to your timeline, but it can be nice and helpful to see that other tabs on your page are visited as well. You will want to make sure that there is enough content or information on these tabs in case they receive visitors.

There is a second graph on this page that tells you the referrals to your Facebook page. This is nice to know if you want to see if your visitors are coming from your website or other places. Monitoring this from time to time is helpful, as it will start to show you if you are getting visitors from Google or other locations. This is a great way to see if your advertising campaign outside of Facebook is working.

Posts

The Posts section of the Facebook Insights page is all about your content. It is not only about what content you post, but also includes an overview of how many visits you get in an hour.

This page is also set in the Pacific Time Zone, so you will need to adjust accordingly for calculating peak times for visitors to know when to post based on your location. This Insight also gives you impression counts per post, which allows you to analyze what type of post works best for your audience.

With all of these options to look at on the backside of your Facebook business page, you can see what is working and what needs altering. It is also a great way to take the guessing game out of some of the inner workings of social media. Facebook Insights is like having a marketing person in your back pocket! Speaking of which, if you want more Facebook marketing tips from Virtual Market Advantage, check out this blog that goes over the best way to write and design Facebook ads!

Guide for Writing Facebook Ads

You have just started promoting your business online, and you want to get your name and logo out there. It’s a good idea to get business recognition in the world of social media. With Facebook on pace to have over 2 billion users by the end of 2017, it’s a good idea to start there. But how do you write a Facebook ad, and what is the best way to get it done? We will go over the best and simplest ways to write Facebook ad copy and get your brand visible to the nearly 2 billion users ASAP!

Criteria for Successful Facebook Ads

It is visual. If you are going to market to Facebook, you need to remember that no matter what kind of ad you create, the image you use needs to have good visual appeal. A visual ad is more likely to be shared and remembered than purely written content.

It is relevant. You must remember that you are spending money to get clicks and views for your ad. If your ad is not relevant to your target audience, then you are wasting your money. As you create the ad, it is best to keep your audience and goals in mind before you put it out there.

It has enticing value. Giving the reader a reason for clicking on the ad to learn more about your product is key. You need to tell them why your product is different and why they should click on your ad. Your proposition to the reader needs to be believable and reasonable for you to follow through with, like offering 20% off a product or purchase.

It has a clear call to action. Having a good visual ad that is relevant is great, but with no clear call to action for your audience, they may not know what they need to do next. A good example of a call to action (or CTA) might be “Buy now to save 20%!” This adds a sense of urgency to the viewer of your ad and will encourage them to click on it right now.

Placement of Your Text Within the Ad

Where you place your text within your ad matters. You want your important messages where they will be best seen. If your audience is looking at the image, it only makes sense to put your key message on that image.

Having text within an image creates a great direct message to your audience, but Facebook will not let you publish or use an image where text copy takes up more than 20% of it. This includes not only what you have placed over your image, but also text-based logos and watermarks, as well as text in your video thumbnails.

Where you place the text on the ad matters too. Facebook uses gridlines for their ads, and if your text falls over those gridlines, it is possible that Facebook could misread your image as full of text when determining that 20% rule. You can save yourself the trouble my testing your image with this tool before you submit your ad.

Facebook suggests that you feature just one product in your image or use a plain blurred background. Also keep in mind that they will not allow you to use any “before and after” photos.

Keep Your Text Copy Simple

There is no need to be over the top and wordy on your Facebook ad. You will lose your audience if there is too much to read. You want to catch their attention with a clear call to action and relevant image; one that they will stop and click on as they are scrolling through their Facebook feed on their lunch break.

As you are creating that eye-catching call to action, do not be afraid to say something that may seem a little over the top. Also, sometimes people need instructions. It is fine to include something like, “Click here to sign up!”

Facebook likes you to keep your text copy at 90 characters or less. This should be easy, because this is a quick ad to get your audience’s attention anyway. Once they click on your ad, then you can give them more detailed information. This needs to be a quick “Hey! Look at me!” type of thing. Remember as you are creating your short simple text that it needs to be relevant to your audience.

Creating Facebook ad copy can seem overwhelming at first, but the key is to keep it simple with a great call to action and a great image. This is the fast-paced world of social media after all. Think of what would make you stop scrolling and click on something. Make it personal to you and relevant to your customers and the audience will follow.

If you want more information on using social media, check out Virtual Market Advantages blog about generating high-quality leads!