Facebook Week: Putting it All Together

It has been an action-packed Theme Week here at ProBlogger as we delved into making Facebook work for you. We’ve been hearing for a long time now that bloggers and small business owners are both confused and frustrated with the platform – where they once enjoyed using it to interact with their audience, they now faced algorithms that meant they needed to work harder to be seen by everyone who had signed up to receive their updates. It has left a lot of people dissatisfied.

Organic Vs Paid

But all is not lost. As Darren mentioned at the start of the week, he has seen both organic and paid reach still holding strong with his Facebook pages, with a little behind-the-scenes strategy. He shared some of the things he was trying (and had seen success with) and came to the conclusion that his winning formula was: be useful, be visual, be interactive, be inspriational, and experiment to see what works. He also mentioned the decision to wade into the world of paid Facebook advertising, and that their return on investment well exceeded what was expected.

Popular Pages Successful Strategies

Tuesday saw a rundown of five popular pages on Facebook, and an overview of their interactions. We saw what got the most traction was visual content – both video and images – but also a focus on what people as humans can relate to. Their interests, heartwarming stories, educational content, and things that inspired seemed to be the most useful types of interaction for best engagement.

Which Posts get Higher Organic Reach?

After sifting through hundreds of Facebook pages, it became clear: whatever works on your Facebook page depends upon your own audience. While we discussed each type of Facebook post and how popular they are for inspiring engagement, (video and images again appear to be the most useful), it really does come down to monitoring your own Insights page to see when your audience is online, and what kinds of posts they’ve been interacting with the most. While images come up trumps for most bloggers, my own Facebook page ranked them last. So it’s definitely important to tailor your output to what your audience has been enjoying the most, not just taking blind advice.

So Tell Me About Facebook Advertising

Jon Loomer stopped by to give us his insights on Facebook advertising and marketing, and making it work for you. The ability to ailor the audience of your ads is incredibly specific, and he helpfully explains that while also breaks down the Boost Post myth, and the debate about which is more useful – that or Power Editor? (hot tip: it’s Power Editor). He also discusses what makes a great ad, and how to decide what needs to be seen in the newsfeed. The full webinar is packed with easy-to-understand information (but you do need to be a member of problogger.com to see it).

Darren’s Facebook Advertising Success

Our marketing guru Shayne Tilley gave us a detailed rundown on the experiments he’s been running with paid content on Facebook, outlining how to create the ads, what kinds of ads he’s been running (and which ones work the best), how much he’s spending, and what he needs to explore more. It shouldn’t be missed by anyone who is doubtful about giving Facebook their money, or are utterly confused about where to start.

We’d love to hear, though – what advice has been more useful to you? What else would you like to know?

Thanks for being around, we’ve had a lot of fun this week.