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.
A few weeks back I ended up downloading John Chow’s E-book Ultimate Blog Profit Model by subscribing to his newsletter.
http://www.johnchow.com
In the e-book he talks about how to use Facebook to get more people to subscribe to a newsletter. I haven’t done it myself, but I thought it was quite well done in producing a “squeeze” page within Facebook.
The Landing Page…..GREAT IDEA! It has a much better first impression than the facebook generic homepage
Great tips. Interesting that you opted to delete many of your friends. I also like the idea of keeping the personal page more for friends and family, but not sure how to make that work. As a photographer, I post images of my clients and tag them, and they need to be a friend in order to tag them. So I request that clients “like” my page as well as friend me. Also, you don’t receive instant notifications when someone posts on your business page like you do with the personal page.
I have not started yet… but I will make a new facebook page right now for my web blog…. But I am worried about google organic search behaviour .. even a little change can put your website in sandbox…. first your website will go out from oast 24hr result … then pastweek and then forever…. welcome to sandbox
I’m not seeing much traffic from either Facebook or Twitter. I think Facebook has more long term potential though.
I will start using tip #1, I think asking more questions should engage readers more.
Yes, I would agree with you to a certain extent. Promoting blogs on Facebook is something that is almost impossible. When compared to Twitter.
First of all, thanks for really useful information. I have read lots of articles on FB marketing ideas, but this one gave me some really interesting tips, like about “Static FBML”. Well, as for me, I am rather new to FB and still looking for ways to use it. I have had rather bitter experience with that and got my account closed…just a hint, I was using FB’s live search ;)…. it was a good lesson for me :) for me that main problem is to find interested in my topic audience.. how do you do that?
Some really good info here that anyone can use to their business advantage. I too have found Facebook more useful than Twitter. Thanks
I’ve never really used Facebook to promote my blog but I’m about to do it now. :)
Thanks for the tips! Facebook has received a lot of negative response due to their changes in policies.I know many people create a profile on Facebook and then link back to their own blog posts.They use their profile as a remote blog only.
We see a lot of traffic (considering a small number of fans) on our blog from FB but there is almost 0 interaction. We recently added all our fans as friends and hope this will help us get them interacting at FB.
We will try the question stuff now. We hope it will work for us. Thank you for your suggestions.
Regards,
Team – Free Calls Hub
As said in a previous comment, I very much doubt the fan page will last long. I give it 6 months to a year tops before being altered or not offered at all.
I have noticed the exact same uplift in numbers over the past few months and to be honest you are not giving yourself enough creadit because mostly it is to do with some small sublte changes that Facebook have been making to the site. In short they are trying to make the site more open and the sharing of content a lot easier and more “real time”. Couple all those changes with the huge rise in numbers using Facebook and it all adds up to increased traffic back to your site and community. Apologies to linking back to my own article but just wrote this http://bit.ly/aTNJnJ which explains that 18.5% of our traffic now comes from Facebook.
People need to start thinking less of Facebook as a social network and more as a platform every bit as important as Google.
Nice article. We are still grappling with how to get social media to work for us. Getting it to drive substantial traffic is hard.
Hey Darren,
Facebook is one of the modern teqnique that proves it works to market our product,i like your post cause you had the same vision as me ,
It’s funny you mention the landing page…of course, I’ve seen this in practice…but I’m only putting two and two together now that this is something I could do myself!
Awesome post…you got my wheels turning…thanks!
Hi Darren,
Facebook fan page is where all the happenings? Communicate, personalized are the way to connect with real facebook fans and become your real for life friends. I really appreciate this post. I never thought personalized before. Now I do.
Way to go, bro.
And thanks a lot.
I am promoting my page and getting a huge traffic…
I use my Facebook Fan page as a way to syndicate content from our blog out to more people. We also use Facebook’s ad platform and have found it to be far more effective for our niche than Google Adwords. I think that Facebook is more effective in certain niches though, it’s not a universal fix. Our email list is definitely the power behind our business.
Thanks for these tips, it makes good reading and I hope to follow your advice soon. I’ve been stuck in a bit of a FB nightmare which is hard to explain but not dissimilar to your experiences unfollowing all the people on your personal account who you didn’t know. Thankfully mine involved lower numbers!
Anyway, I’ve got it sorted out now with a welcome page so all ready to start actioning some of your handy hints as outlined above.
Muchas Gracias Senor Rowsio:)
I don’t know why but these social networking sites does not work at all and i don’t get any traffic from them at all. After reading this post i think i am now gonna sort out this problem as it seems to be a doorway of driving a decent traffic.
Awesome post Darren.
I thought your idea to separate facebook profile for personal and Fans page like for each of blog is good. However, for some topic which not really working as usually, you may need to show off your personal branding instead to hanging on blog branding.
At least in Indonesia which not has online behave we need to combine online and offline marketing matter.
well,facebook is better than twitter.Facebook fan page landing page is an under used tool that most people do not use it.
Hi,
I need to start using facebook and twitter to drive traffic to my blog cause I’m currently in the process of creating content and getting ready to go live with my website http://thebloggersway.com hoping for it to take off with me adding great content.
PS. Great blog, love to read it….
Before my Facebook fan page I was using my personal Facebook page to promote my greeting cards and jewelry. The Facebook fan page has helped me separate fans from friends (though some fans are friends and vice-versa). Still, my personal Facebook page is more interactive than my Facebook fan page.
I gave up posting questions and hosting giveaways because no one would participate. So what are some tips to eliciting responses and reactions from the public?
Best regards,
Janay
Amazing, so many people are saying Facebook is the way to go.
Others are saying it is not that effective. Might have to find out for myself.
Regards,
Gary
http://www.performancereviewtemplate.com
Thanks. This is the best information on Facebook marketing that I have seen in two months of searching.
I did some advertising for a workshop on Facebook and got like 20,000 impressions, and 12 clicks.
The next time I advertised I got hundreds of impressions instead using the same keywords.
Other than a dramatic increase in price of the ad, $1 more per click. I don’t know what happened. I am thinking a lot of people left facebook due to privacy.
Would someone point me to a guide how to use FBML. I clicked on a link provided in the article, but it is all in Turkish.
Please help me make my site’s FB fan page more useful.
Thank you
Facebook groups are awesome.. By posting content regularly (around 10 times per day), mine went from 1000 to 70K members in less than 3 months and is bringing around 10K visits to my site every day. And since a lot of facebook users are on twitter as well, I’ve seen a good increase in traffic from twitter as well.
“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.”
To be honest, I was in the same boat until I read your article. I am yet to apply your tips, but overall I have now gained confidence that I cab get traffic from FC just as I do from Twitter. Thanks for taking the time for posting this informative article!
Very good idea. I thought in this way. But i didn’t get traffic.
Good post! I’m always struggling to make the numbers useful in both my FB fanpage and personal page. The integration of blog, FB and other social media sites is going to be critical and I will be looking forward to more useful posts on this.
I’m an old dog chewing on a very new bone in the sense that my background is in executive search (more finding then sharing information) but I am curious about your thoughts on Facebook as opposed to twitter (or a “professional” site like LinkedIn). My question is this: In your opinion does the inclusion of elements like Farmville and Mafiawars impact overall performance?
My wife, daughter (and to some degree my son) are all addicts of one kind or another and a very noticeable upswing in interaction is apparent to me as a 3rd party observer. I think that the ever increasing ability to keep community online is driving an ever increasing “usability” index.
From my limited but growing experience in SEO related matters I think that a landing page optimized for Facebook (or any other social media aspect) is a great idea….and as a 25 year+ recruiter I can certainly tell you that genuine (vs self serving) questions are the key to building relationships…
Great post, very glad I found you blog…
All the Best
Dave R
Thanks for all this info. Just a novice at using social media and your comments help.
can it show the RSS Feed from the blog on FaceBook too?
Hello Darren,
Nice idea and thoughts for those blogger who wants traffic for their sites and yet social media is one of the answer. i therefore conclude that i have this list of domain name for availability for less cost yet efficient. looking forward for more clicks and tweets on you, hope you’ll have another post for generating the best name and its SEO.
cool dude!
Lots of corporate IT departments are asking themselves whether or not to block social media (aka Enterprise 2.0) applications like Facebook, Twitter, Skype, etc. What they often don’t realize is that they can safely enable these applications through the use of smart policies. That way employees can take advantage of the benefits of these powerful platforms, while risky or counterproductive features can be selectively blocked! Palo Alto Networks has put together a great whitepaper to help you understand how this new firewall technology works. It’s called “To Block or Not. Is That the Question?” and you can find it here: http://bit.ly/d2NZRp.
I’ve been tracking the hits and responses to my fan page (http://wfapm.com/buQp1L) and noticed that I get hits back to my blog but it’s hard getting responses back from the fans. I do ask questions just no responses back. Any ideas?
As a small online busines facebook is good to allow us to connect more closely with our customers, but we have found it slow to develop participation and grow our fan/like base.
We have found it good to put out news and product updates aswell.
Not so business orientated posts and photos seem to have more reaction and interest. I guess hearing what a business is doing isn’t necessarily all that interesting!
I think the Facebook fan page landing page is an under used tool that many small businesses don’t know about
Is great to have people like you who share their knowledge with rookies like myself. However i still can’t use Facebook, for me it is complicated, useless, and just a waste of time.
Does really facebook works to get visitors? Still I think that facebook users are little bit lazy to leave the facebook without any reason.
Great tips and tricks, but the most important factor is to have already a bunch o people that “Likes” your blog. Otherwise your Facebook page will be full with your friends (like my case), which I don’t want or can’t involve all the time in my topics.
After you gain some popularity, then you can do whatever you desire. You know what’s saying out there “first million is harder, then it become natural”
I think when everyone realizes that Face Book is now to advertising what Steve Jobs was to the record industry, they’ll get on board with it. Besides, what is better then word of mouth advertising for social proofing?
I like the idea of engaging readers to get people involved. I think we all fall into the habit of just talking TO people instead of with them, especially with digital media.
I really like the idea of a finish this sentence… That should open it up to a pretty fun discussion.
I like the idea of engaging readers to get people involved. I think we all fall into the habit of just talking TO people instead of with them, especially with digital media.
I really like the idea of a finish this sentence… That should open it up to a pretty fun discussion.
I find being involved on other people’s walls and on their fan pages helps to get more traffic back to your page. In this way you get traffic from sources beyond your online social circle.
Excellent Post on driving traffic from Facbook.
What i feel is social media is more effective when you use it as Social Engagement tool. For this integrating your multiple accounts on different social media is a good practice. like you had stated integrating Twitter acoount on facebook.
Thanks for these tips.
Hi Darren,
You’ve inspired me to do a little experimenting myself. I do like this article. I have <a href="http://connectbloggers.wordpress.com" a site for bloggers, where they can “dump” any ole article, post, thought. It’s in a starting phase, but I wanted to take this facebook-experiment with it.
Facebook is the place where people are. You want people on your site? Give them a reason to go to your site and they will go. That sums it up right?
It’s the ‘reason’-part that’s hard to figure out, depending on subject, audience type, seasons…
This is a great post.
Must say I need to look into using Facebook more.
Currently I’m just using twitter which is great, but obviously the larger you can grow the better.
Cheers for the post,
Mark
Yeah. Facebook advert very easy to use, but low CTR.