The closest thing we’ll get to a Dislike Button

This morning Facebook rolled out “Reactions” to all users worldwide on desktop and mobile. Beginning last October, Facebook was testing hundreds of different extensions of the like button, and then they settled on the six reactions you see today. After many focus groups, and months of testing Mark Zuckerburg seems to be pleased with the results. “Love is the most popular reaction so far, which feels about right to me!”(Mark Zuckerburg).  Think of these as the like button, but with more context. Now user’s can give a more detailed reaction to any post and not worry about “liking” a post about your friend getting a bad score on a test, or being worried that simply liking that status that your roommate got engaged wasn’t enough.

To use the feature on desktop, hover over the “like” button on any post. When hovering, six emoji will pop up and be animated. Available emoji are Like, Love, Haha, Sad, Angry, and Wow. On mobile, long press the like button and the same options will hover and animate themselves.

It will be very interesting to see how these can be used in a business sense. Now, rather than looking at raw engagement numbers, we can see sentiment towards each post. (Not yet really, but I can only imaging they will report these numbers soon to pages.) Suddenly it will be much more evident seeing if your following isn’t liking your direction of post. We for sure will love experimenting with this new feature as it matures, and we hope to see you too!

Facebook HATES it when you do this…

If you found this post on our Facebook page, consider yourself part of a lucky few! Facebook in the last week have been showing less link posts in feeds and pushing more people to video… Let me explain.

When you post to your business page on Facebook there are a few different types of posts, and believe it or not, Facebook also prefers certain types of posts over others.

Facebook Post Types

  • Text Post – Text posts are pretty self explanatory. Whenever you simply type into the status box (or just enter plain text into the Power Editor because you are cool) with no links, pictures, or any other types of media, it is a text post. On pages these rank the lowest by far as they simply are not intriguing. Please post in a bit more effort than a text post!
  • Picture Post – These posts are identical to a text post, except you are embedding an image directly into the post. This is NOT a link to any other site or image host. You uploaded the photo directly to Facebook.
  • Video Post – Videos are KILLING it right now. Facebook has its sights set on YouTube and are pushing videos to your feed like crazy in effort to keep people on their site longer. Keep in mind that these posts are NOT links to a YouTube video, but uploading the video directly to Facebook. Definitely jump on this if you haven’t already!
  • Link Post – That leaves us with link posts. If you ever link out to a video, picture, gif, article, blog (like how this article was on Facebook), or anything else. It is categorized as a “link post”, but Facebook for some reason doesn’t like these anymore lately.

Facebook obviously wants to keep people on their website, and constantly monitor usage and other analytics to make educated decisions when moderating their user’s news feeds. They absolutely do not show every post your business page posts to all of your followers every time. (Please stop making discount and “BUY NOW!” posts…) They want the user to see just what they want, and reward brands that do so. This is why the more people engage with your posts, the more of your followers will see it.

Right now people are simply highly engaged with videos, and so now they are pushing content creators and brand pages to start posting more of them to help all users on the site longer. Now while a good portion of you reading this right now might be fuming and feeling like ?, if you think about it, this is a great thing for everyone. The more value people find on Facebook, and the more time they spend on it, the more opportunities you have to sell your brand.

Because of this huge push for videos, link posts now suffer. They have been the most utilized post of any page, and this will be a hard pill to swallow, but it is time to think outside the box…

So what should I do?

Besides working on producing some video content, the easiest work around is to link to articles and other pages in the comments of the post. Try your best to use a video clip of some sort, or a picture in the main post, and then direct the viewer to look for the full link in the comments. This seems a little odd and messy, especially considering that highly commented threads now show posts based on “top comments” versus chronological order, but it is the best that we can recommend at the time of this post.

Don’t worry, we are monitoring this heavily and will let you all know how to best overcome this soon. If you have any creative ideas share them in the comments and let us know!

10 February Marketing Ideas

It’s the start of a new month and we’ve got some fresh marketing ideas for you to promote your business. There’s more to February than just hearts and candy! Here’s a list of 10 marketing and blog ideas for February.

 

1. Valentine’s Day Promotions

There are countless Valentine’s Day promotions that you can do this month:

  • Fitness centers: Host a special Valentine’s Day class for couples or a post-Valentine’s Day workout to burn off calories from candy and chocolate!
  • Massage Therapists and Spas: Valentine’s Day is the perfect time to run a special offer on massage services. Couples massages, a day at the spa, and a chocolate facial can all be used for Valentine’s Day promotions.
  • Restaurants: Valentine’s Day is on a Saturday this month and is the perfect time for a couples cooking class! Come up with a special menu of aphrodisiacs foods to ignite some romance in your budding chefs!
  • Flower shops: This is your time to shine! Think outside of the bouquet and offer customers something other than overpriced, out of season roses.
  • Gift and retail stores: Come up with a Valentine’s Day gift guide – it’s the perfect time to promote some new merchandise. Post gift guides on your blog or in an email blast to give customers ideas for what to buy their sweetheart.

2. Valentine’s Day Graphics

February 14 is Valentine’s Day – show your social media and email marketing some love with Valentine’s Day themed graphics. Hearts, candy, and love are good things to use to catch attention from customers! Use holiday graphics to spruce up your Facebook marketing and Twitter profiles but they’re even more useful when combined with Valentine’s Day promotions.

heartgraphic

Need some help with graphics? Contact us for help!

3. Heart Disease Awareness Month

It makes sense that the month of Valentine’s Day is also Heart Disease Awareness Month. If your business is focused on health and wellness, this is a great marketing opportunity for you. Fitness centers and gyms can partner with a local health center for heart disease awareness or screenings.

Host special classes focusing on cardiovascular activity or write informative blog posts about heart health and risk factors. Use this time to market your business by educating your customers to help them lead healthy lives. Any business can sponsor a Valentine’s Day race – there are usually fun runs or 5Ks going on around the holiday and sponsoring one will get your business name out in the community.

4. Black History Month

February is Black History Month and the perfect opportunity to highlight prominent leaders in your industry. Black lawyers, politicians, scientists, artists, educators, and athletes have shaped American society. Take some time to reflect on those who have shaped the your business industry.

5. Children’s Dental Health Month

Children’s Dental Health may sound like a boring topic but it can be a great month for marketing your small business. Dentists can certainly have a field day with this one, but other businesses can use this opportunity to teach parents and students about the importance of dental health. Daycares, fitness centers, and churches can host special classes with families about the importance of going to the dentist. Perhaps one of the parents is a dentist and would like to come to answer questions for kids.

This not only helps your business interact with the community, but it helps local dentists market themselves all while educating parents and children about dentistry. This is a word of mouth referral marketing technique that will give you something to smile about!

6. Ice Cream for Breakfast Day – February 7, 2016

In the middle of Children’s Dental Health Month is Ice Cream for Breakfast day! Everyone loves ice cream! Use this quirky holiday to market your business. Held on the first Saturday of February, this Ice Cream for Breakfast Day can be a fun marketing promotion for your bakery, ice cream shop, or restaurant! Although it is supposed to be on a Saturday, you can do this any day of the week. Invite customers to come in to eat ice cream for breakfast – it’s a fun way to interact with families and do something new to promote your business.

7. Grammy Awards – February 15, 2016

The 57th annual Grammy Awards will be held in February. This is a great opportunity for engaging with your customers on social media. You’ve seen the video of a police officer singing Taylor Swift – get your employees together for your favorite Grammy nominated song and share it on social media!

8. It’s a Leap Year! – February 29, 2016

Every four years is a leap year, and 2016 is one of those. February has an extra day in it, which makes it a great time to remind your followers to do something new and exciting since they have another day they didn’t plan on having…

9. President’s Day – February 15, 2016

President’s Day is famous for sales so use it to your advantage. Most schools are off for President’s Day which makes it a great day to hold a family friendly activity at your fitness center.

10. Mardi Gras – February 9, 2016

Mardi Gras marks the beginning of Lent but down in New Orleans it’s party time! Host a Fat Tuesday party or sale at your business. Get customers in on the fun by giving a discount to anyone who comes in wearing a mask or beads!

Do you have any other good marketing ideas for February? Share them in the comments below!

#Hashtag

The pound sign. The number sign. Tic-tac-toe board. The “#” symbol has gone by many names throughout its 50+ year tenure, admired from afar as an arbitrary button on antique touch tone phones. As useless as it has been since its humble beginnings, the hashtag has recently solidified itself in pop culture and social media as an interactive tool to microscopically view the vast, infinite regions of the internet.

When Chris Messina, a simple Twitter user, suggested in 2007 on the website: “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp (msg)”, the game was changed. Trends and news stories would skyrocket across the World Wide Web in record time, reaching audiences at the very moment that a story would break. It took a simple search of a hashtag to view its analytical results on engagement of fellow tweeters. Although Twitter founder Evan Williams thought it was too technical, he was quickly proven wrong as users found a way to create a more personal conversation on an impersonal platform.

Today, the hashtag ranks among social media professionals’ list of most religious symbols, right behind the holy cross and breadsticks. Marketers and advertisers intend to take advantage of this trend within a trend, as corny hashtags appear across every major television network as a plot twist strikes (ie. #WhoIsA, #OhNoJonSnow, #TrumpSomehowLeadsGOP).

A simple Instagram post proves the importance of the all-praised hashtag. With only just reaching double digits on Instagram, our account cannot be viewed as “Insta-famous,” the phrase self-coined by Instagrammers with 10+K followers on the app who live relatively normal lives but filter their lives with “Lo-Fi” or “Mayfair” or “Perpetua.” No one jumps at the chance to look at what a marketing firm does unless you’re creating provocative ads for Nike. However, the point is that we don’t pride ourselves in the number of followers we have, yet.

But with only 10+ followers on the platform, we turned over 60 likes on a single post. “But how?!” you ask, “I somehow skipped over the rest of this blog post so I have no idea how that could be possible!” One word: hashtags.

Eliix Chicago Instagram Test m
Ah, Chicago, she’s a beaut!

On top of simply being a perfectly edited and snapped picture taken by yours truly (#humblebrag) , this photo contains multiple hashtags that people across the country, NAY, the world would be interested in searching on the application. #Chicago, #WillisTower, #SearsTower, and #Business are all hashtags that garner interest among different groups of people. When people look them up, they see a colorful image that they then click on, enjoy so much, and go on to like it.

The most evident and important thing here is that knowing your audience is key. Understand what they want to see, show them exactly that, and engage with them afterward. These likes turned into several follows which grows that slowly moving presence and leads to better interactions down the road.

Similarly, though, it is necessary to mention that sometimes less is more. You don’t need 10,000 likes if only half of them care about your product or service, whether it be on a personal or professional account. Take the cut and market to the 5,000 who care because then you will have real relationships on a site that we sometimes try to sell something that isn’t truly there.

How to make $60k in two weeks with Facebook Ads

People always ask me, “Do Facebook Ads actually work?” and I always reply with a resounding “YES!” But it requires proper strategy, implementation, and testing. Facebook has the best advertising platform out there right now at the time of this writing. But let’s face it you want to know how to make $60k in two weeks through Facebook because you clicked that link said you can do it, and want to see how this works.

coverphoto1

This past spring Eliix was contacted by a bull riding event who was stopping in Chicago for a show at a large 7000 person venue. So there was quite a bit of work to be done. Tickets for the event were about $20-60 per ticket, and throughout the entire campaign we had to be in constant contact with the box office to double check out numbers with actual ticket sales. It was found that ~75% of people who clicked the ads on Facebook went through and bought a ticket, and at the end of this campaign we helped to sell 3000 tickets through Facebook ads (Hence the $60k).

How we did it

Before attempting to push out a large campaign like this you must plan everything out. Don’t just boost some random posts or promote an event page by throwing some money behind it. Facebook has a full arsenal of tools and a pile of information that is just waiting to be tapped into that most people do not even realize!

We first discussed the target market. Not only those who currently attends the shows, but also who they WANTED to attend the shows? Our client had two tiers of tickets. One for VIP and one for general admission, but when we learned that there is a high latino attendance for the event we broke down the target into three target markets. Higher income people who live in more affluent suburbs in the area who are horse people, frequently attend events like this, and have higher than average spending habits will see an ad for the VIP passes. Middle class income from broader neighborhoods, who have an interest in horses, rodeo, country music, who speak US english (There is a difference in Facebook targeting over UK english!), and a few other things saw the general admission ads. And finally we took the general admission ads and switched out the language to Spanish, moved the target location to a different area where this audience frequently came from, as well as replace some of the terms with their Spanish counterpart to target the latino audience for general admission sales.

One of the biggest things that discourages people who run Facebook ads is they never see the return they want. “I put $20 behind an ad and nothing happened!” Well Mr./Mrs. Theoretical, you only ran one ad for the campaign? You must ALWAYS be testing!

Here are all the ads we ran just for the VIP tickets:

VIPadNumbers

Notice that for just this one ad set (audience) we ran 23 individual ads. Throughout the entire campaign we were switching out photos, titles, descriptions, locations, and call to action buttons in a ton of different combinations to test and see what worked and what didn’t. If something wasn’t working (you can see quite a few didn’t receive any clicks) we stopped giving that particular ad money and tried something new. Here are the results of the 15 other ads we used for both Spanish and General admission.

Spanish Ad Results

SpanishadNumbers

General Admission Ad Results

GAadsNumbers

[Quick Review!]


Reach = Number of individuals who view ad
Frequency = How many times those individuals viewed that ad
Impressions = Total number of views on ad
Clicks = Clicks on the ad in total (includes multiple clicks by one person)
Unique clicks = Clicks on ad (excludes multiple clicks by one person)
Click Through Rate (CTR) = Clicks/Impressions*100
Unique Click Through Rate (uCTR) = Unique Clicks/Reach*100
Spent = Total spent on ad
CPC = Cost per click
CPuC = Cost per unique click

But wait… you ran more ads for VIP than GA and Spanish combined?!

If you notice there were a lot of iteration of the VIP ad that failed and returned no results, so we had to run more iterations of the ad to ensure success whereas the GA and Spanish ads performed just fine on their own.

How to I make this work for my business?

When running Facebook ad campaigns there are a things you should always remember…

  • Know your customer! Facebook sits on one of the largest piles of information on the public and you should not be afraid to use it. Know where your customer lives, know their age, know their marital situation, know their occupation, education, income, food preferences, drink preferences, vacationing habits, etc…
  • Don’t be a used car salesman. Facebook is a place people go to to check up on their friend’s and family’s day. They don’t plan on going there to buy something. So your ads should never say “BUY NOW!” or “SALE THIS WEEKEND ONLY!” Generate some sort of value, and give people a reason to follow through with your goal. For the rodeo, we ran ads promoting a family fun weekend, and a unique experience. Something beyond “BUY TICKETS!”
  • Build a funnel of value! Pull your customers through your brand by beginning with an ad and ending with a sale. Provide humor, emotion, or education on your Facebook wall, Twitter feed, and other channels to keep people coming back to your brand.
  • Be consistent. You cannot just launch a campaign and expect it to work without any extra effort. Be sure to engage with your fans on all channels at all times.
  • Use ads to reach outside your audience. So many people use ads for just their followers on their page and don’t realize that ads can reach anyone on Facebook. Use that to your advantage.
  • Research! Look at how much it would cost to reach your goals. For the rodeo we worked with a $2000 ad budget.
  • TARGET! Do not be afraid to break your target market into smaller ad sets. We broke the rodeo target into three ad sets and I wouldn’t doubt you couldn’t do the same for your product/service.
  • Test… test… and test some more! Be sure that your money is being used effectively and do not be afraid to run as many as 14 ads for something as simple as gaining likes on your page!