TABLE OF CONTENTS

Lesson 1: Welcome
Lesson 2: Social Media Marketing Basics
Lesson 3: Social Media Marketing Strategy
Lesson 4: Facebook Marketing
Lesson 5: Social Media Marketing Checklist
Copyright Information

Note: You can use the PDF Version for reference but it is highly recommended to
take the course using the online interface. Video content is not available in this
version.
 Lesson 1

Welcome

Introduction
It doesn’t matter if you run a blog, a small local shop or a big national company.
Social media is an essential piece of your digital marketing strategy.

Social platforms help you connect with your customers, increase awareness about
your brand, and boost your leads and sales.

With more than three billion people around the world using social media
every month, it’s no passing trend.

What you might not know is that you’re ready to get your company’s social media
off the ground right now. You don’t need to know every intimidating buzzword or
have the magic number of followers. You can get started immediately—and even
enjoy yourself in the process.

How to use this course

This course is for beginners to Social Media Marketing. It’s for people that don’t
know how to get started with social media and need a plan to help them prioritize
their activities.

When you go through the lessons, you’ll learn:

How to get started with Social Media

How to create a social media marketing strategy

How to run successful social media campaigns

 How to correctly use #hashtags

How to increase your Facebook followers

My recommendation is to use social media as a supporting channel and not as

your main sales or traffic channel.

In other words, your priority should be to build a strong website with great
content, optimized for search engines. Once you get this part under control, you
can then explore how to boost your online presence with social media marketing.

You can follow the lessons in the order they appear in the menu and use the
checklist as your to-do list.

Author Information

Alex Chris

I studied Computer Science and E-commerce and after spending several years
working in the IT industry, I realized that my true passion was in blogging and
SEO and since 2002 I am working online as a Digital Marketing consultant and
professional blogger.

Over the years, I did consulting and SEO work for companies in the most
competitive niches like travel, jewelry, education, fitness, forex, software (to
name a few), and had the opportunity to experiment and learn the hard way how
the Internet works.

In my spare time, I blog about SEO and Digital marketing and my work has been
referenced by leading industry websites like Forbes,
contentmarketinginstitute.com, thenextweb.com, neilpatel.com,
socialmediatoday.com, socialmediaexaminer.com, searchenginejournal.com,
kissmetricks.com, sitepronews.com, lifehack.org, problogger.net, jeffbullas.com,
entrepreneur.com, marketingland, quicksprout.com, and others.

The best way to contact me is by email at alex@reliablesoft.net

 Lesson 2

Social Media Marketing Basics

What is Social Media Marketing

In this topic, you’ll learn the fundamentals of social media marketing.

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is the process of building awareness about you, your
products or services through the various social media channels.

The ultimate goal of any social media marketing campaign is to drive traffic to a
website, increase the visibility of a product, gain more social media followers or
make more sales.

The most popular social media networks today for business purposes are
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, and Linkedin.

Why is social media marketing important?

Social Media Marketing is important because:

It’s the fastest way to spread the word about a new product, service or
news item – A tweet can go rival in minutes and spread a message around
the Word faster than TV or other traditional media

It’s a trend – Millions of people spend a fair amount of their time on social
media networks so if you ‘need them’ you know where to find them

It’s the new marketing – Back in the old days, marketers found out that
 many people spend time in their cars driving so they thought of the
billboards on the roads. Today, people are spending time on social media
so as a marketer you have to start thinking this way too.

It’s the new influencer – Recent studies show that social media is
becoming a great sales channel and more and more companies are stating
that they get customers from Facebook or Twitter.

KEY LEARNINGS

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with
your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic.
This involves publishing great content on your social media profiles and
running social media paid campaigns.

How to Get Started with Social Media

Marketing

In this topic, you’ll learn how to get started with Social Media Marketing.

To get started with Social Media Marketing, follow the steps below:

1. Decide which social media platform(s) to use

2. Optimize your social media profiles
3. Connect your website or blog with your social media pages
4. Add social media buttons on your website
5. Find and follow the influencers in your niche
6. Keep a balance between following and followers
7. Share interesting content (text, images, videos)
8. Post many times per day but don’t overdo it
9. Don’t forget to follow back
10. Follow the rules and be patient
 The visuals in this topic were created by Buffer. Buffer is the social media
marketing automation tool we use for scheduling posts on all social media
networks.

1. Decide which social media platform(s) to use

Choose your social media networks.

As a beginner to social media, you have to choose one or two social media
platforms and concentrate on those rather than trying to work on all platforms at
the same time.

This is a mistake that many beginners do and in the end, they quit without having
any benefit.

A nice way to find out which platform is best suited to your niche is to find
 the influencers and analyze where they have success.

For example, find out the leaders in your niche and check out the number of
Facebook fans, twitter followers, Pinterest followers, etc.

If they have 100,000 Facebook fans but only 1000 twitter followers then this is a
good indication that FB is more suitable for your niche than twitter.

It is also a sign that you are more likely to have success with FB than twitter, so
you can use your time more efficiently and engage more on FB rather than any
other platform.

2. Optimize your social media profiles

Optimize your Social Media Profiles.

Once you decide which social media tools you will use (at least for the beginning),
the next step is to optimize your profiles on those sites.

By optimizing your profiles you increase your chances of getting more

followers and it is also a good way to boost your SEO efforts.

Some general rules that apply to all sites are:

 Use a real photo, showing your face – avoid using animals, places or
anything that is not real. Social media is about connecting people and if
you want to have a trusted profile you need to get out of your cage and put
your face on the web!

Write a good description about yourself or your company – What is your

background or expertise? What are you proud of? Mention this is your
profile.

Give an indication to users what type of info you will share – Although this
is not necessary, I like to read in profiles what kind of info to expect from
the particular person. For example in my twitter profile, I wrote:
“..tweeting SEO, social media, internet marketing tips, and advice”.

Include a link to your website (where applicable) – On Facebook include a

link in the ‘About section’, on Twitter and Pinterest in the ‘Web site
Section’. In other words, do use your social media profiles for SEO
purposes as well.

3. Connect your website or blog with your social media pages

Once you have your social media profiles ready the next step is to connect your
website with your social media pages.

There is a certain procedure to follow for each platform and it is very important
that you do it correctly.

A correct binding between the two means that search engines and social media
websites know which website corresponds to which social media page.

For Facebook, you can follow these instructions

For Pinterest, you can verify your website using this procedure

For Twitter, you follow this

4. Add social media buttons on your website

Besides connecting your website with the respective business pages on social
media, you also need to add social media buttons on your website so that readers
can easily share your content.
Depending on the platform there are many ways and plugins to do that, I suggest
you search Google using “how to add social media buttons to xxxxxx” – replace
xxxxx with the platform your website is based.

For example, if you are using WordPress search google for “how to add social
media buttons to WordPress”.

As a general rule of thumb, keep the buttons above the fold to increase exposure
and have in mind that larger buttons get more clicks than smaller buttons.

5. Find and follow the influencers in your niche

So far we have selected the most appropriate social media tools for our niche,
optimized our social media profiles, connected our website with the social media
pages and added the buttons on our pages for more interaction.

The next obvious step is to find people to follow but most importantly to gradually
build our tribe of followers.

I would say that there are 5 basic steps to follow to get more followers and these
are described in points 6-10 below.

Before getting into that, you should first find and follow the influencers in your
niche.

It is almost certain that they will not follow you back because you have a new
account with no followers but doing so is important for 3 reasons:

Social media platforms will use this information to make suggestions on

who to follow so following popular people in your niche is like telling them
that you are also in that niche.

When you follow popular people who are likely to get followed by others
as well. A trick many people use is to follow the followers of a popular
person because they know that some will follow them back as well.

They will most probably share important and useful information about the
niche so you have a chance to learn something new and re-share that with
your followers.
6. Keep a balance between following and followers
Once you start following people you should always have in mind that it’s better to
keep a balance between the number of people you follow and the number of
people they follow you back.

This is important especially in Twitter and Pinterest and the reasons are a lot:

Software applications are using this ratio (followers/following) to make

suggestions on ‘who to follow’ so if you have a very high ratio you
minimize your chances of getting new quality followers.

It is a matter of trust – Who do you think has a trusted profile: someone

with 1000 followers but following 2500 or someone with 550 followers that
follows 510?

A balanced profile is better for SEO – SEO’s have been talking the last
couple of months about the importance of social media for SEO and how
things are changing and although it is not yet confirmed, it is more likely
that people with strong social media profiles are in a better position than
those with weak profiles.

A strong profile, in this case, is someone that has more followers than following
and someone that is followed by people who are considered influencers in the
niche.

7. Share interesting content (text, images, videos)

Videos get higher engagement than posts.

This is the foundation for having a successful social media marketing campaign.
When we talk about publishing content we always say that ‘content is king’ and
this true in social media as well.

If you share interesting and useful content you can get more re-shares, more
visitors to your website and under some conditions more customers as well.

What is interesting content? From my experience (and certain studies) this is a

combination off:

Articles/Stories/Pages related to your niche but not only from your own
website.

Interesting statistics about your niche

Motivational Quotes related to your niche or otherwise

Research studies

Images and Videos

 Funny stuff- whatever your niche, you can share once in a while a joke, a
funny image or video to make your followers smile.

Don’t forget about hashtags – hashtags (#) can make your content more
searchable so don’t forget to use hashtags in the networks that support it
(Twitter, Pinterest).

8. Post many times per day but don’t overdo it

Adjust your posting frequency.

A common question by people who are just beginning on social media is “how
many times should I post per day?”

The answer depends on the network.

There are many studies analyzing the effect of posting frequency and some best
practices are:

Facebook personal page: As many times as you want

Facebook business page: Between 8 – 15 per week

Twitter: 21- 70 per week.

Pinterest: 35-70 per week.

9. Don’t forget to follow back

Most people concentrate on how to get new followers but they forget to follow
back those who have already followed them.

Every day you should create the habit of viewing the people who are already
following you and decide who to follow back.

If you don’t do this on a regular basis then most likely some will un-follow you and
this is why you may sometimes notice a decrease in the number of followers.

10. Follow the rules and be patient

Social media networks have rules to keep spammers away. For example, there is
a limit on twitter on the number of people you can follow per day; Facebook has
its own rules, etc.

This means that it may take some time to build thousands of followers so you need
to be patient and not try to rush into results either by breaking the rules (your
account will be suspended) or by spending your money in ‘buying followers or
tweets’ or anything similar.

Try to spend your time in creating a great social media profile that will stand over
time and why not become one of the authoritative profiles in your niche.

KEY LEARNINGS

When it comes to social media there are 2 important pillars. The first one has
to do with the setup of your social media profiles and the second one is about
usage i.e. how you use your social media account.

For the first pillar, it is important to engage in the networks more suited to
your niche and to have a proper connection between your social media pages
and website.

For the second pillar, it is important to follow the right people, be followed
by the right people and share relevant and interesting content always by
adhering to the rules of the different social media networks.
Hashtags and How to Use Them

In this topic, you’ll learn what are hashtags and how to use them in various social
networks.

Hashtags are very easy to use and can make your social media postings
shareable and discoverable provided that you use them correctly.

There are specific guidelines to follow for each social network that we will help
you increase your overall social media traffic.

What is a hashtag?
Hashtags or hash-tagging is a way to add metadata to content you publish on
social media so that it is easier to be found, followed and understood by people
and social media sites.

A hashtag starts with the # symbol and is followed by a word or words without
spaces.

For example, here are some of the popular hashtags in the SEO industry: #SEO,
#digitalmarketing, #googleseo, #seotips.

Note that hashtags are not case sensitive so #hashtag is the same as #HashTag
and you can also use numbers with your tag so #10SEOTips is a valid hashtag.

Why use hashtags?

There are many reasons why you should use hashtags in your social media
campaigns. The most important are:

Users following the particular hashtag can see your messages even if they
don’t follow you. In other words, by using popular hashtags in your posts
you increase the potential audience.

It’s a way to add your own posts to an existing story. Let’s say that there is
a trending story on twitter and you want to add a respond, you can use the
 hashtag so that people following that story will also see your update.

Hashtags make it easier for social networks to categorize your updates

and this makes them more visible to their search functions. For example,
by adding the hashtag #SEO on a tweet, you give the indication to twitter
that your tweet is about SEO. This means that it will appear in the search
results when users search for SEO on twitter.

Studies show that hashtags increase engagement (see details below)

How to create your own hashtags?

You can create your own hashtags by adding a # sign and the words you want
(without spaces). For example, you can do this #myhashtag.

A hashtag becomes trending when a large number of people use it in their

messages.

This is a very powerful way for businesses to communicate with their clients and
get the conversation going.

For example, go to Twitter and search for #justdoit to see how Nike is using
hashtags for brand awareness and promotion.

How to use hashtags on Twitter

Twitter was the first platform to use hashtags, the first-ever tweet with a
hashtag was posted in 2007 by a former Google employee and since then
hashtags became very popular in Twitter but also in other social media
platforms.

Studies show that tweets with hashtags receive twice the engagement (tweets,
retweets, clicks, and replies) than tweets without hashtags.

The recommended number of hashtags for a tweet for maximum exposure

is 2.
Hashtag Best Practices for Twitter

This does not mean that if you use 1 or 3 is bad, it is simply a recommendation
based on research studies.

There are 3 things to know about using hashtags on twitter.

Hashtags on Twitter
View Trending hashtags

When you log in to your twitter account you will see on the left site the trending
hashtags. The results are tailored to your location but you can click CHANGE and
see what’s trending for other locations as well.

To view the tweets for a particular hashtag, just click on the hashtag link.

Follow a hashtag

To follow all tweets for a particular hashtag just enter the hashtag (with the #
sign) in the search box and hit enter. The timeline will now show the TOP tweets
containing your hashtag or ALL tweets.

You can click SAVE to save your search so that next time you click on the twitter
search box, you can choose to view your saved search.

Create a tweet with a hashtag

When you create a new tweet and enter the # symbol and start typing, twitter will
make recommendations on the hashtag to use. You can either select one from the
list or create your own.

How to use hashtags on Facebook

Facebook started supporting hashtags in 2013 and although it’s been a number of
years since then, Facebook users don’t use hashtags a lot.

They do have a page in their help center explaining what are hashtags and how to
use them but there is not much information there.

What you should know about using hashtags on Facebook are:

Same rules apply like twitter i.e.

no spaces

if a hashtag does not exist will be created

if you want to follow a hashtag just search for it using # in the search bar.

The recommended number of hashtags for a Facebook post is 1 or 2.

Hashtag Best Practices for Facebook

After 5 hashtags the interactions a post might receive, they start to decline.

When you create a post with a hashtag and share it with everyone (public), your
post will appear when people search for the particular hashtag (provided that you
allow people to follow you).

When used without exaggerations, hashtags are also a great way to increase your
Facebook followers.

How to use hashtags on Instagram

Instagram is all about photos and hashtags. If you like using hashtags then create
an account on Instagram and start tagging!

The recommended number of hashtags for an Instagram post is 11!

Hashtag Best Practices for Instagram

Interaction with a post jumps to high levels when 10+ hashtags are used in a
post. The maximum number of hashtags allowed by Instagram is 30.

You can use numbers but no spaces or other special characters when tagging (like
$ or %) and you can click on a hashtag so see other posts that share the same tag.

You can read the official Instagram guidelines here.

How to use hashtags on Pinterest

Hashtags are also supported on Pinterest. You can read the official guide here.

You can use the # sign followed by letters without spaces to tag your pins. When
you do so they become links and when clicked they show related pins.

The pins with the most interactions (likes, comments, re-pins) will show first when
you search for a particular hashtag on Pinterest.

The recommended number of hashtags for a Pin is 3.

This is just a recommendation and not official from Pinterest.

How to use hashtags on LinkedIn
Hashtags are back on Linkedin and supported. The same rules apply similarly to
other networks.

Hashtags Best Practices – Linkedin

The recommended number of hashtags for a Linkedin post is 2.

KEY LEARNINGS

Hashtags are easy to use and have many advantages to offer. In-proper use
of hashtags can sometimes be considered as a form of spam that’s why it’s
important to follow the simple rules outlined above when using hashtags in
your social media postings.

The recommended number of hashtags per network are:

Twitter: 2
Facebook: 2
Instagram: 11
Pinterest: 3
Linkedin: 2
 Lesson 3

Social Media Marketing Strategy

How to Create a Social Media Marketing

Strategy

In this topic, you’ll learn how to create a social media marketing strategy.

Having a social media marketing strategy is no longer optional but it’s necessary
for social media success. For maximum social media exposure, every social media
campaign you execute should be part of your overall social media marketing
strategy.

The word ‘strategy’ may sound a bit sophisticated but in reality, there is
some sort of strategy involved in all our online activities even if we don’t
realize it.

What a formal social media marketing strategy will do is put everything in the
correct order with the ultimate goal of getting better results.

What is a social media marketing strategy?

A social media marketing strategy is nothing but a clearly defined plan with
milestones and targets on how to use social media networks for your benefit,
whether this is promoting your personal brand or business.

A strategy will tell you which social networks to use, how to use them, what to
expect as a return from each network and how to measure progress.
Why do you need a social media strategy?
A few years ago when the social media buzz started it was easy to get into the
social media wagon. All you have to do was to create a Facebook page and a
Twitter account and start following people by sharing your personal or business
posts. The more people you followed, the more followers you would get and the
more exposure your updates would receive.

Today things are different. There are more social networks that matter (think
Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn) and the competition is so big that it takes a lot
more effort to get attention.

Facebook has changed its algorithm in such a way that reduces the organic
exposure of a post (in other words fewer people that follow your page will see
your updates), Twitter is going in the same direction and Pinterest has become
oversaturated which makes it more difficult to get good results.

That’s why it is time to stop for a moment and think about your social media
strategy as a whole. Identify what are your social media goals and the best ways
to achieve them without breaking the bank and without losing more time than
needed in posting, tweeting and pinning.

How to create a social media marketing strategy?

Identify your social media goals

Associate social media goals with business goals

Identify your target audience

Choose your weapons

Take a sneak peek at your main competitors

You need content, a lot of content

And yet, it’s not only about content

You do have to create a plan

1. Identify your social media goals

The first step in creating a social media marketing strategy has to do with
identifying your goals. A successful social media marketing campaign has a
number of benefits to offer to your brand or business. The most common goals
are:

To get more followers to your business pages – Facebook, LinkedIn, and

Pinterest allows you to create social media pages for your business and naturally
one of your goals would be to have more people following your pages.

To get more visits to your website – Most businesses use social networks as a
way to get more visitors to their websites. In theory, there are millions of users on
social media and you want to get a portion of them (in many cases a very tiny one)
to visit your website.

To increase sales – Social networks can be used as a sales channel. You can
increase your sales by either selling directly on the social network or through
your website.

To raise brand awareness – This is perhaps one of the most efficient ways to
utilize social networks. You can raise brand awareness by positioning your brand
in front of your target audience either through organic methods or through
advertising.

To boost your SEO – While there are no direct SEO benefits from social media
there are a lot of indirect benefits that can positively impact SEO. As a simple
example, pages shared through social media networks are more visible to Google
and other search engines and this has a positive effect on your overall SEO.

2. Associate social media goals with business goals

The second step is to associate social media goals with business goals. Assuming
that you are not using social media for the sole purpose of connecting with friends
or reading all sorts of news, you need to connect your goals with business
objectives.

For example, you may set a social media goal to get more visitors from Facebook
and a business goal to convert those visitors into newsletter subscribers. If you
have set up your Google Analytics correctly you will also be able to see the
number of visits and conversion rates and track your progress over time.

If you want to take it a step further, you can calculate how much it costs you to
get a new newsletter subscriber from Facebook and determine if this is profitable
for your business or not.

3. Identify your target audience

There are millions of active users in social media networks right now but for
business purposes, you want to target specific audiences. Depending on your type
of business you may want people that live in a particular area, are of a certain age
and have other specific demographic characteristics.

If for example, you are promoting a kindergarten school in Ontario, you want only
the people that live close to your area to see your posts or ads and not everybody.

For example, if you are using Facebook ads to promote your business or products,
you can choose specific locations that will see your ads and people that satisfy
certain criteria.

4. Choose your weapons

How can you reach your target audience faster? Is it through Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn or any other social network? Should you work on all networks at once or
is it better to concentrate on only a few?

To answer the last question first, it all depends on time and budget. Social media
management is a time-consuming process. Trying to work on all networks at once
will take a lot of your time (if you plan to do this yourself) or budget (if you plan to
outsource this to a digital marketing agency).

A better approach is to start with a few networks first that are more likely to work
for your business and then if time and budget permits to move on to the rest.
Instead of trying to do a bit of everything, it’s better to put more effort into the
ones that can work better.

There are a lot of studies that show the characteristics of each network. The chart
below can give you a good indication.
Social Media Platforms Demographics.

5. Take a sneak peek at your main competitors

While you are working defining all the bits and pieces of your social media
strategy, take a break and see what your competitors are doing.

Visit their Facebook page, Twitter account, etc and notice how often they post,
how many followers they have (and if that number grows over time), what kind of
content do they post and generally try to understand how they are using social
media.

Maybe you get an idea or two and find out something about your competitors that
you didn’t know before.

A great way to spy on your competitors when it comes to Facebook Paid

Advertising is to go to the Facebook Ads Library and enter the name of a
competitor.

Facebook, will give you more details about the current or past paid advertising
campaigns.

Facebook Ads Library

6. You need content, a lot of content

Users in social media networks are looking for one thing: interesting content.
Whether this is an image, text or video, users want to see interesting content in
their timelines. This means that you should forget about over-promotional posts,
but rather you need to think about what kind of content your target audience
would like to see without getting bored.

For example, if you are selling sports shoes, you won’t post all the time about how
good your shoes are but you should try and make your posts more interesting.
How about posting running tips, or how shoes can affect your sports performance
or tips on how to run longer, etc.

These are the kind of posts that will make a user follow your page and build trust
in your brand which has a lot more benefits than making a single sale.

7. And yet, it’s not only about content

Yes, you do need a lot of good content but content alone will not get you followers
or sales. As I said in the beginning organic reach is getting lower and lower
(especially with Facebook) so you need more than just good content to get
exposure and interaction.

To bypass this problem you can either hire professionals to manage your account
and increase your following (and I am not talking about buying followers) or use
the advertising platforms of each network.

For example, you can use Facebook ads to get more likes for your business page
or promoted accounts to get more Twitter followers.

From experience, this part of exploring other ways of promoting and managing a
social media account is a common item missing from social media marketing
strategies.

8. You do have to create a plan

A social media strategy is not complete without a plan. A well-thought plan should
include all the above but also specific details, KPIs and targets about each
network.

In your plan you should include:

Which networks to use

The goals (both social and business) for each network

How to measure results (which reports from Google Analytics to use) and
 what KPIs are important.

A detail description of your target audience (location, demographic

characteristics, interests)

A content marketing plan that includes the exact content to be published

and when (specific date and time)

The budget available to use for outsourcing account management

The budget available to use on advertising platforms

The role of each person (in case of a team). For example, in a typical
scenario, you will need a content producer, a content publisher, an
account manager, and a social media manager (responsible to monitor the
overall social media presence of a company).

Monitoring and control – a plan needs to also have a monitoring and

control system. It does not have to be complicated but it should stay how
often the progress should be monitored and what happens in the case that
the initial targets are not met.

KEY LEARNINGS

All kinds of businesses, either online, local or multinational have something

to gain from social media.

If you don’t approach the whole process as a ‘real’ project most probably you
will end up with disappointment and believe that social media does not work
as advertised.

From my experience and as shown by many studies, social media has become
a great communication and sales channel that deserves your attention both
in terms of time and budget.

A carefully designed social media marketing strategy will help everybody in

your company understand why you are doing the social network game and
what to expect from it.
Running Social Media Campaigns

In this topic, you’ll learn how to run social media marketing campaigns.

When thinking about social media marketing campaigns, the first thing you
should do even before setting up a campaign is to set your targets and goals.

By targets, we mean to identify what you want to achieve from your campaigns
(goals) and how to measure the ROI.

Your goals depend on your business and marketing objectives (increase brand
awareness, make more sales, increase customer loyalty, etc.) but in general, they
fall into one of these categories.

Get more followers

Get more shares

Get more likes, pins, tweets

Drive more traffic to your website

Generate more conversions

Regardless of what you want to achieve from social media, there are some
guidelines or tips you can follow to increase your chances of running a successful
social media campaign.

Run a Pilot Campaign first

Make your campaigns targeted and not general

Don’t forget about the ‘Call to Action’

Track the results

People don’t want to see your ads

Know when to stop

Follow up on what people say about your campaign

1. Run a pilot campaign first
Before you start with your main campaign, it is better to run a pilot campaign for
a few days or a couple of weeks. During the pilot phase, you can test different
ads, targeting options and messages. You can use these findings to fine-tune your
main campaign.

For the pilot campaign, you can allocate a portion of your overall budget (we
usually go with 20%) for 2 weeks.

For example, if you plan on running a campaign on Facebook to promote your

products, you can first run a pilot campaign for two weeks testing 2-3 images for
the ads and different targeting options and at the end of the pilot period, you can
start your main campaign with the winners (ads with the best CTR).

2. Make your campaigns targeted and not general

Social media networks have a lot of information about users and that includes
demographics, interests, likes/dislikes and many more.

When running campaigns on social media take advantage of all these data and
make your campaigns targeted to specific groups of people (based on their
demographics, location, and interests) and you will get better results (higher
engagement at a lower cost).

3. Don’t forget about the ‘Call to Action’

When running a campaign on Facebook or Twitter it’s easy to get carried out and
forget about the ‘call to action’.

In simple terms, this is the part where you will ask users to do something i.e. visit
your website, register to your newsletter, view your products or services.

In each and every ad or promoted post (or tweet) make sure that there is a clear
indication of what users should do when they see your ads.

Here is a very nice example from Udemy on Facebook.

Facebook ad with a clear call-to-action message.

4. Track the results

It may sound obvious but this is probably the number one mistake that people
make when they set up social media campaigns.

It is true that all networks will give you statistics about your campaign (numbers
of views, clicks on your ad, costs, etc.) but you also need to set up your Google
Analytics goals and conversion tracking to know which of the users performed an
action that is important to you.

The statistics are fine but you need more data to determine if the campaign was a
success or a failure.

The Google Analytics Course explains how to create goals and track events
 in Google Analytics.

For example, when you run a Facebook campaign you need to set up Facebook
conversion tracking so as to track which visits from Facebook generated a
conversion.

5. People don’t want to see your ads

If you try and push it too hard by over-promoting your business without giving
incentives or benefits to the social media user, you will fail.

It’s better to keep in mind that users don’t want to see your ads and try to find
ways and incentives to make them engage with your message.

One of the best ways to do this is through discounts or special offers.

See for example how Amazon is promoting ‘Todays Deals’.

Offering incentives to users via Facebook Ads.

6. Know when to stop
Social media is an effective way to get more customers and make more sales but
this is not always the case for all businesses in all niches.

There are cases where social media is not the right medium to reach new
customers and it may be better to stop your campaigns instead of throwing your
money without a return.

Let’s say that you are running a campaign for 3 weeks and already reached
thousands of people with good CTR and you have not made any sales.

What do you do? Keep running the campaign and spend more money or stop it?

There is no simple answer but the best approach is to examine if there is a way to
optimize the campaign further either by changing your targeting options or
optimizing your landing page.

If you think that both of these are already optimized, then maybe the best
approach is to stop the campaign and allocate your budget on other channels
(PPC campaigns, SEO, etc).

7. Follow up on what people say about your campaign

It’s not unusual to get bad comments about your company or products. There are
many reasons as to why this is happening but it’s a fact you cannot avoid 100%.

It’s important that during the time you run your campaigns you also monitor your
brand mentions (the simplest way is to search for your brand name on Facebook,
Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) or use tools like SEMRUSH and see what people are
saying about it.

You can then try to reverse any bad comments or critiques by providing honest
answers or solutions to their comments or questions.

KEY LEARNINGS

Social media marketing in a trending channel but it’s not necessarily a

suitable channel for all businesses. The best way to find out if this is a
channel you can use profitably is to run pilot campaigns on your preferred
networks.

Test different ads, targeting options and messages and analyze the results. If
the outcome is positive you have less risk in losing money and more chances
of running successful social media campaigns.
 Lesson 4

Facebook Marketing

How to Get More Facebook Followers

In this topic, you’ll learn how to get more followers on Facebook.

Facebook is the king of social networks with more than 2.5 billion active
users per month.

It is used by more than 60% of Internet users worldwide and it is a great channel
for promoting a product or service, finding new customers or gaining more loyal
readers (followers).

To take advantage of this for business purposes, you need to have a lot of fans
(followers) on your Facebook business page.

Let’s see below why having many Facebook fans is important.

Why it’s important to grow your Facebook followers?

It indicates popularity – It goes without saying that the number of fans reveals
how popular a website/business is.

A Facebook business page with 100,000 followers is more popular than a page
with 1,000 fans and this creates a number of other benefits (described below).

It indicates trust – In today’s World a successful business, website or blog needs

to have a lot of Facebook fans. Five Years ago this did not make any difference
but in the 21st century, social proof is important.
More fans, more visits – The more fans you have, the greater is the number of
people that will see your posts in their timeline and possibly visit your website.

While this is true, it should be noted that not all your fans will see your posts.

With the recent changes to the Facebook algorithm, only a small percentage of
your followers (no more than 4 %) will see your status updates.

This number can vary, but what is important to understand now, is that if you
have 10,000 fans and you post a new update, it will be seen organically by a max
of 300-400 people.

It’s good for SEO as well – Although officially Google does not admit that social
media is a ranking factor, many studies show that popular websites on Facebook
are more likely to perform better in search, than not so popular websites (other
factors being equal).

How to go from 0 to 10,000 Facebook fans

Let’s see step-by-step how to go from 0 to 10,000 fans.

Step 1: First things first – you need to have a Facebook business

page
It may sound silly for the experienced but for beginners to social media this may
be something new: A personal Facebook page is different from a business page.

If you want to have friends on Facebook to share your holiday photos then you
need to create a personal page.

If you want to have fans and followers for your website or business then you need
to create a Facebook business page.

So, the first step is to ensure that you create a Facebook business page and the
second step is to make sure that your page is properly optimized.

Step 2: Optimize your Facebook business page

When we talk about Facebook business page optimization we mean choosing a
friendly page title (username), writing a catchy description (in the short
description field), providing accurate information for long description, company
overview, mission (see screenshot below) and of course, posting interesting
content – this is the most important optimization tip of all.

Facebook Business Page Optimization Tips

Step 3: Take advantage of your personal Facebook account

I mentioned in step 1 above that you need to have a business page and not a
personal page, but you still need to have an active personal Facebook account.

Here is why:

After you post an update on your business page, one of the ways to increase
exposure and likes is to share that post on your personal page as well.

People you have as friends on your personal page are more likely to ‘like’ and
‘interact’ with the post shared from your business page and this will increase the
engagement factor of your posts.

As a result, Facebook will show your posts to more fans (organically).

So, one of the ways to increase the number of people that view your posts and go
past the 4% of your fan base is to share and promote the post on your personal
page.

It goes without saying that the greater the number of friends the bigger will be
the visibility of the post.

Also, make sure that you invite all your existing friends (and new ones) to like
your Facebook business page. Do that every time you gain a new ‘friend’.

Step 4: Add the Facebook Like box on your website

This is again social media marketing 101 but you need to have the Facebook like
box on your website for 3 reasons:

1 – It’s a way to associate your website with the Facebook business page. In other
words, it is a way to ‘tell’ search engines that this is your official Facebook
business page.

2 – When you get a lot of fans, this is something you should be proud of and
something to show to your users (as explained above this means popularity, trust,
and social proof).

3 – It’s a good way to grow your fan base organically. Your readers can follow
your website by clicking the LIKE button without having to go to Facebook.

Step 5: Follow these tips to increase post engagement

So far, we have created an optimized Facebook business page, added friends to
our personal Facebook page and placed the like box in a prominent position on
our website.

The next natural step is to start sharing content to keep your fans happy and
maybe manage to convert them from fans > web site visitors > customers.

Some simple rules to follow that will increase the user engagement with your
Facebook business page:

1 – Share relevant content

Share content that your fans expect to see on your page.

For example, if your website is about Social media, share content related to social
media and not about sports or anything else you might like.

If your users want to read sports news, they know where to find them.

2 – Keep it business

Don’t forget that they follow your business page to get updates about your
website (and niche) and not about your social gatherings.

If you want to get social, then use your personal Facebook page, your business
page is about your website.

As a rule thumb, I use my business page to share content from my niche only, if I
need to share something which is not related to my niche, I use my personal page.

3 – Don’t be too promotional

Sharing promotional content (all the time) on your Facebook page will drive your
fans away.

When you have a promotion to share or something that might benefit your fans,
you can do so but don’t overdo it.

Try to post interesting, shareable content that is related to your niche, even
if this does not come directly from your website. Keep a balance between
promotional and content that your followers might want to read.
Step 6: Share interesting and high-quality content (not just links)
I made some tests regarding the impact of descriptions when doing a Facebook
update and found out that Facebook posts with ‘lists’ get more likes than posts
with just links.

Let me give you an example to understand what I mean.

When you want to share a post from your website on Facebook, you go to
Facebook status updates and enter the webpage URL. It looks something like
this:

Example of Facebook Post

You can share this post without adding any additional information. If your title
and images are good, you will get a number of likes depending on the time you
make the post, number of fans, etc.

If one the other hand, you enrich your post by adding more information and
particularly a list, then other things being equal, you are more likely to gain
more likes and shares.
Example of Optimized Facebook Post

For me, this makes sense because people that see a title and image in their
timeline may not ‘Like It’ since it provides no value to them (don’t forget that the
average user is presented with hundreds of postings in their timeline every time
they log in to Facebook).

On the other hand, when you give them valuable, high quality and easy to read
the information (like a list), they will click the LIKE button because they read
something useful without having to leave their timeline.

Note: It is a known fact that people have a tendency of LIKING a post

without reading it so give them reasons to do so; your website visits may not
increase but the engagement factor of your posts will rise.

Step 7: Share images, videos, and emotions

If you take a look at some of the most popular Facebook pages, you will notice
that they tend to share images, videos, infographics, charts, etc, along with their
usual text-only postings.
This type of content gets more likes and shares and as a result, the page gets
more fans and followers.

In a recent study by Buzzsumo, they identified that the most shared and liked
content on Facebook, has the following characteristics:

Facebook Popular Content Types

Step 8: Provide incentives to get more fans & followers

Why should someone follow your Facebook business page?

You need to give incentives to Facebook users to follow your page. A few ideas to
consider:

Quality updates

This is the best incentive you can give your users. Before posting anything on
your page, you need to make sure that it provides value to your audience.

When you do this consistently, your existing followers will share it with their
friends and this will attract more users.

Run a contest

Many websites run contests on Facebook and giveaway different gifts. The ‘price’
for joining the content is to LIKE the page first.

There are various tools to do that but have in mind that if you don’t have a known
brand this may not be so successful.

Content upgrades
If you have a blog, you can use ask users to LIKE your page to get an updated
version of your post.

This requires extra tools but it is something worth testing out.

Step 9: You need to promote your own content and page

When you create your business page don’t expect that it will magically get
thousands of fans.

Besides the tips outlined above, you also have to promote your business page in
places other than Facebook.

A few ideas to consider that worked for my case:

Promote in other social media networks

If you have accounts with other social media channels e.g. Pinterest etc. you can
periodically ask your followers to join you on Facebook as well.

Be polite and explain to them the benefits of doing so.

Promote in Twitter

Besides posting about your Facebook page on other social media networks, you
can take advantage of twitter’s interactive features.

When you get a new twitter follower, send them a private (personalized) message
and ask them to follow you on Facebook (both your personal and business pages).

This method although it is time-consuming, (I did it manually and not using any
tools) it can produce really good results.

Promote in your newsletter

If you have a newsletter or if you communicate with your readers via email, make
sure that you ask them to follow your Facebook page.

Do not just write the FB URL below your signature but ASK them politely to LIKE
your business page.
Step 10: Facebook ads are a must

Facebook Options for Paid Ads

This is the easiest and most effective way to increase your Facebook fans but it’s
not free.

Facebook offers a self-service ad platform that you can use to either increase your
fan base (promote your page), boost your posts, get more leads, increase
conversions or perform a number of other actions (as shown in the image above).

The procedure is pretty simple and straightforward. Basically you select a page
you own, select your goal (promote your page), select your audience (based on
country, age, other demographics, and interests) and then set your daily budget
and duration.

The cost per campaign depends on a number of factors. The best way to assess if
Facebook ads are a good solution to increase your fan base is to run a pilot
campaign for a couple of days.

Spend $10-$20 dollars per day and run the campaigns for a fixed duration (at
least a week).

In the end, you can decide if the cost per like is something you are willing to pay
for.

I had great results with Facebook ads both for my websites and for client
websites and I run campaigns every month (for a few days) to boost my Facebook
likes.

It should be noted that with Facebook ads you don’t buy likes but views.
Many people believe that what you pay for is Facebook likes but in reality,
you pay Facebook to show your ad to more Facebook users.

If what you are advertising is interesting, then more people will hit the like button
so spend some time and think about the message you want to display in your ad
as well as the image to use.

KEY LEARNINGS

Having a decent number of Facebook fans on your business page is very

important for credibility and social promotion purposes. If this wasn’t
important in the first place, then nobody would care and the US State
Department wouldn’t have to spend $630 thousand for Facebook campaigns
(in a year).

Once you do the necessary optimizations to your business page (steps 1 and
2 above), then the easiest way to get more followers is to use Facebook ads.

With a bit of A/B testing, you can get to 10,000 fans with no more than
$1,000 (spread into a period of months).
 Lesson 5

Social Media Marketing Checklist

Social Media Marketing Checklist

This is your social media marketing checklist.

Decide which social media platform(s) to use

Optimize your social media profiles

Connect your website or blog with your social media pages

Add social media buttons on your website

Create a social media strategy

Find and follow the influencers in your niche

Keep a balance between following and followers

Create a social media marketing plan

Share interesting content (text, images, videos)

Post many times per day but don’t overdo it (follow the guidelines per network)

Don’t forget to follow back

Learn how to use #hashtags in your social media postings

Prioritize your social media campaigns

Start by increasing the number of FB followers on your business page

Set up goals and events in Google Analytics to track the effectiveness of your social media campaigns
 Copyright Information

Copyright © 2020 by Alex Chris (Reliablesoft.Net)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or

transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or
other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of
the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews
and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.