I was always a doubter when it came to using Facebook to promote a blog. I’m not sure why – but despite my best efforts I couldn’t seem to get Facebook to ‘work’ as well as I could with Twitter when it came to engaging readers, driving traffic and building community.
However in the last few months things have changed – Facebook has become HOT for me, at on my photography blog.
I’m pretty sure it’s more about how I’m using Facebook than any particular change at Facebook but I’ve started to see it become a lot more useful in a few ways including driving traffic (see chart below), increasing reader engagement and building brand. Here’s the traffic from facebook over the last 13 months (click to enlarge):
There were always a few days of spiked traffic (usually when we did a post that went a little viral) but the last 6 or so weeks we’ve seen a nice up swing in traffic).
All the action happens on the Digital Photography School Facebook page where the bulk of what happens is simply us pulling in new posts from the blog as status updates using the ‘Networked Blogs’ application – however in the last few months we’ve also started to try a little more reader engagement. Here’s what’s worked:
1. We Ask Questions
The best thing that we do (and I have my forum administrator help with dPS facebook page so it literally is a ‘we’) is simply asking questions of those who ‘like’ us on Facebook. Every day or two we pose a simple question that asks readers either for
- their opinion on some aspect of photography
- to share an experience that they’ve had
- to tell us something about the photography gear that they use
- to do something fun
These simple questions go crazy. Some examples include:
- What was the focal length of your last shot?
- Behind Every Good PHotographer there’s…..
- What did you photograph this weekend?
Interestingly when we ask the same questions on Twitter (where we have 1000 more followers than we have ‘likes’ on Facebook) we only get 10 or so answers to our questions where on Facebook we get hundreds (we’ve had as many as 700). The fact that Facebook allows our followers to see each others responses and that it’s less fleeting than Twitter is an advantage for this type of thing.
2. Promoted ‘Hot Facebook Status Updates”
When we have one of these question status updates/discussion going on Facebook we try to get more traffic to it from other sources. This largely happens in two ways:
- Weekly Newsletter – in our weekly email newsletter we’ve been linking to one facebook discussion a week as a ‘hot on facebook’ link.
- Twitter – because the ‘conversational aspect of facebook’ is so great I’ve started to tweet when there’s a good discussion going. It might seem odd to promote one social media account on another but it’s led to significant increases in interaction.
The benefit of highlighting what’s going on on our Facebook page has been two fold – firstly it boosts the numbers of responses to the questions we ask significantly.
Secondly it’s led to a big increase in the number of people who ‘like’ our pages. We’ve gone from several thousand connections on our facebook page to over 27,000 in a couple of months.
3. Reader Involvement in Shaping the Site
Every Friday morning as I’m scheduling posts on the blog for the weekend I ask the same question on Facebook. The question asks readers to suggest a theme for our weekend photography challenge (something we run each week on the blog where we name a theme and everyone goes away and takes a picture to come back and share relating to the theme).
We get a lot of great suggestions in this weekly thread of conversation and the added bonus is that it builds a little anticipation for the challenge itself.
Another thing I did last week was create a survey for our facebook friends that asked them some questions about the content that they’d like to see on dPS. Over 600 people took the survey from facebook giving us some amazing insights into topics for future posts.
4. Promotions
We recently launched a Travel Photography eBook on dPS and saw some really positive response from our promotional efforts on Facebook. I’ve never seen much success with ‘selling’ on Facebook before but this time around we built some pre-launch buzz on the facebook page and released it to our facebook community before anyone else.
Our best conversions did come from email promotion but Facebook was probably our 2nd most effective place of promotion this time around. We did some status updates about it but also sent direct messages to all of those who have ‘liked’ our page.
5. Landing Page
This is very new – but I’ve recently added a ‘welcome’ landing tab for those arriving on our page who have not been there before and ‘liked’ it (I’ve also added it to the ProBlogger Facebook Page).
The idea here is to create a tab (using the FBML application) which is a customized greeting page for new people to your page. The page directs people to the ‘like’ button and sells benefits of making the connection. Next time they arrive on the page they are taken to the ‘wall’ tab and don’t see the welcome (Facebook allow you to set this up in the ‘page’ settings.
It’s too soon to tell what impact it is having but in talking to a few other web publishers this has seen significant increases in connections.
I’ve also seen others add other things in such a page including welcome videos, email newsletter subscription forms and other things that help them achieve some kind of ‘conversion’. The FBML application lets you add pretty much any html to the tab. I’ve so far just used an image file but hope to convert it to live html with links in it in the coming weeks.
Update: due to many people asking for more information on how I created my landing pages – I’ve just written an update of this post looking at how to create a facebook landing page for your blog.
What are You Doing that is Working on Facebook?
I feel like I’m still finding my way with the use of Facebook and am still experimenting with different aspects of it. We have a ‘tab’ for our eBooks which I’m not sure is overly effective, I want to find a way to get our readers sharing photos better and I’m sure I could be promoting our newsletter better – but it’s one of those things where I find experimenting with one thing at a time is best.
What are you doing with facebook that is working (or that isn’t)?
PS: I’m pretty sure that facebook is not a site that will work for every topic. For example on the ProBlogger facebook page we’ve not seen the same sorts of results – for ProBlogger Twitter seems better. I’ve heard from a few other bloggers mixed results including some amazing stories of increases in traffic.
Also worth noting is that earlier this year I made a significant change in the way that I used Facebook when I defriended around 4800 friends and made my personal facebook profile purely for personal friends and family and concentrated all of my facebook efforts on creating ‘fan pages’/’pages’ for each of my blogs. This was the best thing I’ve done on facebook and released me to develop the pages and use my personal account to build friendships and connections with real life friends.
Update: I’ve just written an update of this post looking at how to create a facebook landing page for your blog.
Darren,
There has been a huge upswing in these types of pages in the last month and I think that almost evey small business will be switching to a Fan page with a welcome screen relatively soon.
I think that everyone has finally found the way to make Facebook work for them, but unfortunately, by showing that the questions work, there is going to be such a rediculous amount of spam in people’s Facebook inboxes, I dread that this will not last very long.
It’s a shame that all of the fly-by-night scam artists ruin things for people, but that is the speed of the internet at work.
-Joshua Black
The Underdog Millionaire
Hey Darren,
Another awesome Post. I used Facebook to drive traffic but not got good results.
Those are some awesome ways to get traffic from facebook.
I think facebook is best for promoting landing pages.
Thanks for sharing this great post man.
~Dev
I have a Facebook page for my Army family site. It works really well. I ask a new question about Army life every day and typically get at least 50 responses to it. It keeps people engaged and gives me great ideas for articles to add to the site.
I have also incorporated my Cafepress store with Army designs into one of the tabs and created a page with information about each of my Army related sites.
For my writing business, I don’t think it would work as well but for the Army side, it is great.
I think the Facebook fan page landing page is an under used tool that many small businesses don’t know about
Great post Darren.
I’d love to hear a follow up on your welcome landing page (#5 above), after you’ve had some time to compile some stats to see if it’s working better or not. On another e-comm site I run I was considering adding a custom welcome landing page and then decided not to. My target audience for the e-comm site is college age, young professional. I hesitated because of the stats I found on a study of college students. See this post, about half way down the page: http://erraticblog.com/2010/06/adding-custom-tabs-to-a-facebook-page/
You’ll see the study was of 900+ college and Univ. FB pages and the growth was much better when the landing page was the normal “wall”.
I know each audience is different, and your audience may prefer the welcome landing page, so if you ever do a follow up on this I’d love to hear about it and I could post the results for you on my blog.
http://erraticblog.com
@erraticblog
I believe facebook is the kind of application which can bring traffic for specific niches only. If the niche is related to humor or fun or less technical, the response can be great whereas for other niches it might not work that well. Inviting responses by asking question is definitely great way. I haven’t experimented much with the facebook, but for some of my posts facebook was phenomenal success (mostly for how-to posts)
Hey Darren,
Facebook is one of the top 3 traffic generation method that I use. Fan Pages are popular today. However Tribe pages is where it’s at!
Chat with you later…
Josh
That’s the way to go on FB – have a personal page for real friends and have a site/fan page for your site. Facebook simply becomes pretty unusable when you have too many friends, and when they are people you don’t really know, what’s the point? You just have to make sure to engage a little on your fan page.
Interesting information. It’s also neat to see how you’ve had slow and steady upticks to your dps site. I like the asking for feedback tips on FB.
I love this idea, but I just lost over an hour of my life trying to figure out how to do this. Is there any chance you might walk us through adding the Networked Blogs widget to our blogs and, more importantly, streaming our blog updates on our Facebook wall?
You’ve got some great ideas here, and maybe if I use some of those things will tick up in terms of facebook activity. Right now it’s a total snooze. Twitter interaction and activity in the blog comment section are both high, so I don’t know what the difference is. I’ve had a notion to indulge my inner minimalist and ditch the page, but I’ll likely put some serious effort into improving it instead.
My experience is if you have people who are passionate about what you offer, and give them great content they will interact on Facebook and even twitter. But remember when you post on either Twitter or Facebook your lucky if 10% of your fans or followers actually see the post or tweet. Just due to the high volume of info in the data streams.
I also look at major brands that have half a billion customers and almost a million fans, yet are lucky to get 50 comments from a Facebook post.
So your tactics are very important. If you bore people they won’t care to participate. You happen to have a subject people are very passionate about. You not a cracker or shoe brand….yawn. Your blogging about something that people who are into photography seek those who are also as passionate.
I disagree though that the commenting is a real conversation. Often people read a list of comments make a post and walk away. If your getting more than that Bravo to you!
I do tend to draw more visitors from Facebook than Twitter though my blog is set to tweet every post I publish automatically.
Or is it because of the fact that most of my contacts on Twitter are bloggers who are subscribed to my RSS feed whilst the ones on my Facebook account are college friends, classmates and teachers who mostly are non-bloggers unfamiliar with feeds and feed readers.
We’ve had success buying ads on Facebook and linking those ads to our opt-in page on Facebook internally.
We never saw many opt-ins when we linked to our own website, but something about keeping Facebook users within Facebook using the ad is working nicely.
I blogged about it here:
http://www.membercon.com/facebook-opt-in-page-with-facebook-ads-pointing-to-it/
will check that out MemberCon – I’ve often wondered about whether I should experiment with that too. I know people who use facebook ads to make money by selling products or doing affiliate marketing but have not seen too many use it well to increase fan numbers. Nice work.
As a brand new blog we’re finding that starting out with Facebook integration is a great way to kick-start the visitors, especially since we’re locally-focused and our personal friends tend to in the Chicago area.
We’re a ways out from fine tuning our efforts for maximum growth, but as an early move to get the word on the streets I think Facebook is a no-brainer.
I’ve seen some HUGE traffic increases this year from blog posts from my fireworks site sent to the fan page, plus liberal use of the like button. I think I’m also sending people to your fireworks photography page as well.
thanks netmeg – fireworks is great to for traffic – particularly this time of year :-)
I’ve been moving in the same direction, keep it clean and simple and the traffic floods in from questions and viral posts!…
:]
Some say that Facebook gets more traffic than Google.
For me, I usually just create a fan page, add a logo and let it sit there. I think I will tinker with it for the next few days and see what my results are.
a new method i’m trying out is asking questions related to older blog posts i’ve written to multitask getting more interaction and repromoting old content. it seems to be working pretty well so far.
i also added a facebook like gadget to my sidebar and that has significantly increased the number of people liking my facebook page. they can like without ever leaving my site.
Carrie – I like the idea of using it to bolster old posts. I do a similar thing occasionally with Twitter and think it’d certainly work well on Facebook too.
Darren, there’s a lot of great info here on what you can do when you have a huge following like your Facebook page does, but what about those people who are looking to grow their FB communities? I’m the community manager for two pages, and both are under 100 likes.
@GoodPost – it’s not easy in the early days but I think most of what I’ve written here can work with smaller numbers. You might not get as many responses to questions but keep asking and keep trying to drive people to the questions via your blog, twitter account, newsletter etc. Once people start to see your page is active they’ll be more likely to check it out.
Thank you for the suggestions. I’m looking for ways to start using Facebook to promote my web content writing business.
I have a FB account but not a fan page, and I almost never post to it, or even check in. I like the idea of using a fan page to post questions that get feedback from the community while driving traffic to my main site.
Thanks again.
Hi Darren,
I know there was potential in social media marketing, just need someone to prove it ha ha.
My face book fan page is little pathetic right now, but here’s hoping it groooooows.
Thanks for sharing some honest stats with us.
Sally :)
Hi Darren,
that is an amazing post. I like your approach, especially asking questions to your fans and involve your readers. And yes, of course, Facebook fan pages are the future. I get traffic on Facebook mainly actively participating in syndication tribes.
Thanks for your sharing your ideas.
Take care
Oliver
This is some great info!
I have definitely had success with asking questions to the Facebook followers, many times from a negative comment I make about something that irritates me. What is great is that the comments that come from that are usually positive and often solutions to whatever that problem might be.
As for cross promotion of the social media networks, this is something I am definitely going to give a try, it seems like a great strategy.
Thanks for the knowledge :)
Thanks for sharing your findings Darren. I’m just planning a new FB strategy to promote Queeried at the moment and your practise of frequently asking questions is definitely something I’m going to try out!
Darren,
Thanks for sharing what is working on Facebook for you. I have not done anything on Facebook yet. But I will book mark this post and return soon.
For what it is worth. I truly appreciate your sharing this sort of info. This post, like most of your posts, are truly useful.
In contrast to your blog, recently I have read so much email junk updates from other bloggers where they is little value just a promo for something. Yes, my mistake, I (like many people I guess) sign up for a video or ebook and I am bombarded with buy this buy that and no more quality after the first ‘hook’.
Keep up your excellent work your are inspiring many to keep offering quality.
David
http://www.TheWonderTechnique.com
Darren, my facebook efforts have been dismal. I really can’t assess my success as I have done it well, so I am going to take this post as a call to action to get to work on it.
My input has lead to the output I’ve seen.
Now, I only have about 20 likes on my page but it’s come in a short time. I write a food blog and adding recipes to the facebook page has helped get almost all those likes. I promote the new recipe on Twitter. Also asking questions has generated some discussion. I will continue with questions as I like to have a community sharing page rather than a me adding links page.
Hi Darren,
I love the idea of getting users (perhaps even outside of your subscribers) to be shaping the blog.
People love to be acknowledged and this could turn interested people into committed readers.
Another aspect I would like to mention is that a friend of mine compared ad campaigns promoting her page on facebook and on Google. She got significantly more bang for her buck with facebook because she could target her demographic and this got her targeted traffic – much more than was sent from Google.
Great idea! Thanks
D
I like the conversations I have on Facebook. It is better communication and readers of my blog like it.
Another great tips for me. I used the service of networkblogs of which they gave me an option to publicly announce my current post under my profile as well as an option to autotweet it.
Your suggestions may give me a great help instead, I’ll just need to practice it.
Thanks Darren
Asking questions and getting your readers involved in shaping the site are great ways to attract FB readers to your site.. That nice landing page doesn’t hurt either :)
Facebook is great for pictures I think its half the reason anyone even goes onto the site. Twitter is less interesting for me in that way. creating albums is the best thing you can do for a photo blog
Darren,
I have been growing a fan base on facebook but realize it takes more than that. If everyone following me is trying to sell something they may not be the right audience.
The new FBML landing pages really are not my cup of tea. I have run into a group who all are doing them BUT I am realizing they are network marketing by selling services on building but not really providing a product of substantial value. When I come across one now, it makes me dubious of the person using them. It SHOUTS marketing. It takes it out of the person mode.
Ebay did this to themselves too. At one time it was like a fleamarket for people but then got taken over by big business or businesses and then the pricing went up and most people left except businesses.
Just another opinion – I have read your book problogger and searching sites and found your 31 days to a better blog. That seems to be a lot for established bloggers although some things can be done while growing.
Thanks for all you share. I have also been following Gary which you mention in top bloggers. He is a powerful speaker.
I will be putting my blogs on my hosted site soon and then go from there.
Thanks Eileen
This is a great article because people will know that Facebook is not only for posting pictures, communication with family and friends, games and knowing new people. This article will show a lot of readers that they will be able to earn money by driving traffic to their sites, advertising and promoting. This strategy is highly effective because there are a lot of unknown brands in the market that is already know to a lot of people today because of Facebook.
Thanks for sharing this!
Alex
I am also using Facebook as a place to inform people about new post on my blog,
Especially for someone that blog from a small country like Cambodia,
I find many Facebook user from Cambodia.
Currently we also have around 680 facebook subscribers and hoping to increase our subscriber base in the near future to 5k as soon as possible.
Yeah i was also doing little same as you described and i get 1700 plus Fans with in the launch of Facebok Page 15 days i did’nt used any illegal technique but facebook banned my account.
Wow, I literally just wrote a smaller post on this in problogger.com yesterday –
https://www.problogger.com/forum/showthread.php?p=32537
(Members only! – there’s some cross selling for you ;-)
There are a couple of FBML tricks you can do with the landing pages (they absolutely work, I get 50% conversion on the “Like”) which I’m happy to share – you can see mine in action here:
http://facebook.com/reallyusefulwebapps
First is an FBML tag , which lets you show content to people ONCE they’ve liked the page. I use this to run an “ethical bribe” for people who like the page, then a list sign up (simple HTML).
Second you can put an “Invite Friends” box in to coax folks into spreading the word. Here’s the code, just replace my page references ….
To all you folks who are uncomfortable with this – it converts very well, and I’m not getting any dropped members yet, so it’s working ….
Erk, the FBML tags got stripped from my last comment. Look up fb:visible-to-connection and fb:request-form on Facebook’s developer wiki and you can see the details.
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Fb:visible-to-connection
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Fb:request-form
If enough folks are interested I’ll link to the full example code …
These are all good and I’m personally doing a lot more on Facebook and Twitter now. If you’re smart and actually care about doing the right thing, amazing things can definitely happen.
Though I launched with both in place, my blog is still new so it remains to be seen which will be more effective.
I’ve noticed that a few people have started welcome pages, though I’ve not gotten around to googling that yet for myself. If you’d care to make a brief tutorial about that, I’d enjoy not having to google for it. :)
This is really good content. A lot of people are just using facebook for fun. Your thoughts and ideas are pretty impressive and I am sure it will help a lot of readers out there to get more traffic in their website.
Darren,
You are right about facebook drawing in so much traffic. My fan page on facebook book is still new but am seeing some positive results and i believe over time traffic will increase.
Thanks for the great tips. I need to engage my readers more through facebook interaction.
As a young employee I can’t imagine working long hours without the use of social media. On the other hand, spending hours a day on facebook or twitter is unproductive and there are also security risks that come from using social media. The problem with blocking these applications is that we are seeing more and more benefits to social media use. That’s why I believe some wasteful parts of social media should be blocked and some parts of social media should be accessible. There is a whitepaper written by Palo Alto Networks, and they have a new software that does exactly this. Here’s a link to it: http://bit.ly/d2NZRp Enjoy!
I’ve long neglected both Twitter and Facebook as sources of traffic. It takes a lot of time to get over the initial phase of a dead FB page.
One of my friends has been more active in this regard. He’s no Darren Rowse, but he does have 1600 FB fans and 60k twitter followers. Just last week he started helping me promote both of my accounts/website. What happened? My server got overloaded from the traffic spike. Traffic at my humble blog went up 5x over the four days. I quadrupled my own Facebook fan number. It’s taken me a week to fix my hosting issues though.
Bottom line: It never hurts to get a little help from your friends.
I believe facebook is the kind of application which can bring traffic for specific niches only. If the niche is related to humor or fun or less technical, the response can be great whereas for other niches it might not work that well. Inviting responses by asking question is definitely great way. I haven’t experimented much with the facebook, but for some of my posts facebook was phenomenal success (mostly for how-to posts)
You made some great points. Facebook is definitely a medium that works well with certain niches but not necessarily all. Facebook has definitely become friendlier to business users lately with the creation of different types of pages such as “fan” pages, as opposed to personal profile pages. All in all, your point about reader involvement is key, Facebook is a means of generating a friendly relationship with your consumers, and should be utilized to build that.
http://www.blogs.vbpoutsourcing.com
A big drawback to Fan Pages is that the comment notification system doesn’t work with them. I wonder why not? It would surely increase interaction.
Also, I think sending the link to the individual Fan Page post to twitter is a good idea. I’m not sure how to find that link though? It would be better if a person landed from Twitter on the post you’re talking about not the wall because then they might have to search for it.
-Jason
This facebook fan page guide is outstanding. Thanks for sharing your real world experiences and lessons from your photography fan page.