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17 Facebook Marketing Pitfalls You Must Look Out For!

 

You’re here because you’re aware of the importance of using Facebook to grow your business.

You know that it has a large user base of 1.44 Billion active users.
You realize that it can help you find new customers.

But being aware of Facebook’s significance as a social media giant and actually doing marketing on Facebook while avoiding all its pitfalls, is a completely different story.

Now: How about a little pocket guide to navigating Facebook?

You’re in luck: the psychics at TruConversion have read your mind.

In order to make your life easier, yet leading you to finally get the results you’ve been wishing for all along, we have compiled a list of all the Facebook marketing mistakes that hinder your success.

If you, and your business, are ready to make the big leap, following are the snags you MUST watch out for while drafting your Facebook marketing strategy.

Our recommendation, as observers of Marketing Science is: DON’T do any of these!

1. Hi, I’m On Facebook. Which Videos Will Make My Brand Go Viral?

There, you’ve shot yourself in the foot … well, almost.

Even before you set out to click Create Page for your business and aim to go viral, identify your Brand Identity. Your entire marketing plot depends on it.

In attempts to generate viral content, marketers often combine brand’s content creation with audience reach. However, chasing viral to the exclusion of everything else is a trick that seldom works.

… Because shock jock is NOT a marketing strategy!

130506.controversy-400x293Your Brand Identity is a sum of two factors:

1a. Audience Motivators

1b. Brand Purpose

1 a- Audience Motivators

When it comes to crafting strategy for your Facebook Page, it’s helpful to be aware why people are there in the first place. In order to optimize Fan acquisition strategy, your marketing team must be armed with an insight into what are the motivators for people to “Fan” or “Like” your brand on Facebook.

 49% of Consumers Like a Facebook Page to Support the Brand

According to a 2013 study from Syncapse, following are a few interesting stats.

Syncapse-Why-People-Like

 

Only when you’ve identified the ‘audience motivators’ or ‘fan-drivers’ – what is it that they’re hoping to get out of a Like, then you can devise the strategy that strengthens your relationship with your fans.

1 b- Brand Purpose

Facebook recently revealed that currently there are 40 million active small business Pages.

Standing out among a crowd this thick is a challenge that can only be met if your brand associates with a unique purpose passionate enough to cross every border.

Syl Saller’s insight shared at the Brand purpose session at 2015’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is especially relevant here:

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As the Brand’s prophet in the world of marketing, the most deadly sin a Facebook Marketer can make is: To not know what purpose is the brand’s gospel.

Remember: Never ignore why the brand exists and who you’re trying to serve.

 

2. How To Get More Likes?

Let us be the myth buster:

Using Like counts as a measurement of success is not only obsolete, it is misleading as well.

Following old school marketing philosophy, many brands place far more emphasis on new customer acquisition than on customer retention.

131125.acquisitionInterestingly, it costs five times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing customer. According to Bain, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%.

In a monumental strategy shift for business Pages, Facebook banned the practice of Like-Gating in the last quarter of 2014.

This ban is meant to minimize the artificial relationships between brands and users.

2015-07-12_22-16-45
Source: http://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2015/01/2015-facebook-marketing-success-kit-infographic.htmlReach, engagement and conversions are the real measurement of success for Facebook marketers who know what they’re doing.

Reach, engagement and conversions are the real measurement of success for Facebook marketers who know what they’re doing.

Remember: A Like does not mean a real connection.

A continuous interaction with customers and actual communication is how connections are made.

 

3. My Facebook Strategy Is Pretty Generic

Do you know what the blunder a marketer cannot afford is?

Answer: It is not recognizing your audience as unique, individual assets.

The very core of marketing, ESPECIALLY Facebook marketing lies in building relevance.

az-life-blog-dot-com-relevent-content-300x250Building relevance, get rid of your generic strategy by means of Segmentation – Targeting Your Audience.

Segmentation works over one simple principle: Try to reach people who are interested in your product.

Then tell your story.

Audience segmentation at Facebook lets you segment the population and target the right demographics based on geography, gender, interests, age and many other parameters.

As per Syl Saller, CMO, Diageo:

If we ignore cultural relevance & just go for scale with branded reach we risk falling into mass mediocrity.

Remember: As you refine your targeting, you’ll see how many people your post could potentially reach.

 

4. I Know The Success Secret 

Do you know that as a marketing wizard, what’s your magic wand?

No, BUY BUY BUY won’t work! And neither would ‘Sesame Open!

There are two crucially significant insights into Facebook marketing philosophy:

– People join social media to connect and build bonds.

– 82% of people think Facebook is a good place to interact with brands. [Source: Verticalresponse]

Herein lies your cue:

Use this need for connection as the basic ingredient of your Facebook marketing strategy.

A successful marketing strategy is neither about the message nor the messenger, but about why the brand cares!

Optimize your content for your target audience by following the 3 P’s of posting on Facebook:

– Personal

– Purpose

– Promotion

Remember: Your brand Page’s content resonating with its audience is the only talisman of lasting success.

 

5. Marketing As A Broadcaster

People use social media to make conversation and connections. Being a broadcaster at a platform people use to ENGAGE is the worst Facebook marketing mistake you can make.

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Quoting Jason Rosenthal, who comprehensively expressed the need for a fundamental shift in the way businesses use social media:

People want more. They want real connections. They want to meet up (…) with like-minded individuals to pursue and share their passions, start meaningful conversations, and collaborate to take action on issues important to them.

As a Facebook marketer, you must be extremely conscious of the following features of your brand communications:

– Vocabulary

– Tonality

– Digital body language

– Audience

These all are the factors that determine the quality of connections your brand is capable to build with your Facebook audience.

In brand conversations, power is shifting to the people. In order to ENGAGE (yes, that is the magic word here) capitalize on social buzz. Use Facebook conversations to inform your overall business strategy.

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– Employ social listening to find marketing insights and sharable content that resonates with your audience

– Find actionable competitive intelligence on Facebook to steer new campaigns or product development

– Share insights with everyone in the organization to align your strategy and win with Facebook marketing.

 

Remember: If content is the king, the kingdom is conversation.

 

6. Long Posts Are Impressive

Wrong.

Thanks to a recent survey conducted by Buffer, we can see that the optimal length of a Facebook post is 40 characters.

Infographic-panel-1

 

You’re actually pitched against time.

Believe it or not, your current struggle is to figure out: What’s your biggest idea in five seconds?

Keith Weed, CMO at Unilever shared the following interesting insight at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, 2015. The drop of attention span of the modern consumer from 12 seconds [in year 2000] to 8 seconds [in year 2015] is STEEP.

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Let us offer you a few facts and see if these impact your marketing plan:

– Posts with fewer than 80 characters received 66% more engagement than lengthier counterparts.

– Question posts have 92% higher comment rates than non-question posts.

– Posts that have a question located at the end have a 15% higher overall interaction rate and a 2x higher comment rate than those asked in the middle of a post.

[Source: Verticalresponse]

Remember to chew on it for a bit.

 

7. More Is Less

No!

Nothing is farther from truth.

Research shows that brands that post just once or twice a day get 73% more comments and 32% more Likes than those who post three or more times.

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It is interesting to note that Facebook uses a bunch of smart algorithms to prevent and avoid any violations of their users’ privacy. Spam Score is one such means to ensure that pages making spammy posts have significantly lower page reach and sometimes the post or the page is even taken down.

According to a survey conducted by Komfo, among 9000 brand pages 7% of all posts published on Facebook are considered spammy.

With a dynamic, customizable Newsfeed your Facebook fan comes with an unprecedented power to “Hide” your page posts.

Do you know what this means?

This means muting you at a channel where $234 million dollars in virtual goods & gifts were purchased only in Q2 of 2014.

You do not want to lose at this game, right?

Remember: The number one reason 73% of social media users “unliked” a brand on Facebook was because the brand posted too frequently. [Source: Verticalresponse]

 

8. Too Lazy To Keep Up With Facebook Updates

The following image taken from an infographic developed by Crowdly illustrates the most impactful changes Facebook made for brands in 2014, as well as, breaks down the most important updates.

2015-07-12_22-56-18
Source: http://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2015/01/2015-facebook-marketing-success-kit-infographic.html

The advertising & marketing world has long had to adjust to technological advancements and changes in human behavior and culture. But with Facebook ever active developers’ team on the helm, now the changes are happening more often – and more rapidly.

Now:

– How many of these facebook developments have you been keeping up with?

– How many of these features changes have you utilized for your brand’s benefit?

 – 90% ofFacebook’s 44 billion users access the social network from their phones. How are you drafting your Page for the mobile user?

Remember: Brands must still tell great stories, but the canvases, tools and materials have changed along with the way audiences experience them.

9. Should I Boost All The Page Posts?

Have you seen Facebook pages that pay to boost every post?

They boost every post hoping their content reaches every fan every time.

Boosted Posts, cheap and convenient, are reach based, not objective based. 

Despite its convenience of application, boosting your posts on Facebook is a combination of bad targeting and bad ad units, which ultimately clobbers the perceived value of advertising on Facebook.

missed_target

Where boosted posts offer a quick fix to reaching more people, promoting Facebook posts properly in Ads Manager and test targeting will allow you to maximize your total return on ad spend (ROAS).

Remember: The targeting that Facebook offers is its biggest strength.

 

10. Poor Facebook Ads

The last thing you want to do when you’ve tracked down your audience is NOT present to them an appealing, clickable story.

Consider this from a customer’s stand point …
How many ads and commercials do you get bombarded with every day in magazines, newspapers, on TV and on the Web?

Ever considered how many of these lead to a purchase?

Now,
It’s in this buzz you need to make your ads stand out!

Be sure that you’re aware of the type of ad you’re investing in to expand your reach:

   Desktop Newsfeed: Great for engagement and generating sales & leads. Supports longer copy and link description.
   Desktop Right Column: Less effective but cheaper. Images are smaller and text is less readable.
   Mobile Newsfeed: Great for engagement & Mobile app installs. Copy is shorter, discovery is great and conversion rates come with a lag.

Remember: Test multiple types of ads with different content and optimize your results.

 

11. Not Using Power Editor

The typical advertiser promotes a post or creates an ad and accepts Facebook’s automated optimization.
Facebook will typically optimize promotion of a post for engagement—surfacing your ad to people most likely to click within your ad.

However, With Power Editor Facebook optimizes your promotion of a specific Facebook post for any of the following as per your preference:

– CommentPower Editor

– Post Like

– Link Click

– Photo View

– Share

– Post Engagement

– Post Story

– Claim Offer

– Video Play

Power Editor is a tool designed for larger advertisers who need precise control of their campaigns to optimize their Facebook Ads for an intended action.

Remember: Use Facebook’s Power Editor to optimize your ads for the specific actions relevant to your business goals.

 

12. Fake is Fab. (NOT!)

The Wall Street Journal quoted Ivan Bart, senior vice president and managing director of IMG Models:

When you walk into a brand and you say ‘what about her, what about him?’ they now ask ‘how many followers do they have?’

Click farms and fake accounts generate tones of Facebook LIKES for any brand willing to pay. However, contrary to what your fan count size may suggest, buying phony followers and likes is a horrible idea!

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… because:

– They will never become real customers.

 – They will weaken your brand by hurting engagement.

 – Social networks are getting smarter each day and taking action against accounts that have fake followers.

Remember: Unauthentic is undeserved.

 

13. Not Utilizing The Inbuilt Page Resources

Resources-For-Entrepreneurs

 

While using Facebook Page as your brand’s “social home” on the web, it would be a gross overlook on your part to not include one of the most interesting features of Page Tabs on your page. Creating customized Facebook tabs enable your app to be used within the context of a Facebook Page.

Custom tabs are valuable to your social media marketing strategy because they let you create a much richer user experience on Facebook and control the content your visitors and followers see when they come to your page. You can use these custom tabs to:

– Organize your content like you do on your website.
– Promote the links of specific tabs rather than complete page.
– Use several apps, as required and suitable, for promoting your business.

An excellent example of this kind of integration is on the Coca-Cola Page.

Another great customization tool at Facebook is the Post Scheduling.

2015-07-12_9-19-04

 

Scheduling the posts is especially useful when you can’t be online 24/7.

Remember: Harness the power of Facebook customization.

 

14. Not being Insight-ful

How do you do that?

Answer: By not keeping a keen eye on the trends reflected by your Page Insights and Audience Insights.

Metrics are what marketers use to measure the effectiveness of something – in this case, the effectiveness of your Facebook marketing. To make the best use of Facebook Insights, some key performance metrics should be chosen to pay attention to. By determining ahead of time what will measure the success of your Facebook Page, all the noise on Facebook Insights can be cut through and the numbers that matter most can be focused upon.

The key metrics from Page Insights to keep in focus are:

Page Likes: The total Page likes for each day, over a 28-day period
Post Reach: The number of people your post was served to, broken down by paid and organic reach
Engagement: Total number of unique people who engaged with your Page, as well as different engagement types
Types of Posts: Displays the success of different post types based on average reach and engagement
Where Your Page Likes Happened: The number of times your Page was liked, broken down by where it happened
When Your Fans Are Online: Shows you when the people who like your Page are on Facebook.

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Chad Huggins, Owner, The Social Route has been quoted by Facebook as:

Facebook Insights has helped us determine the tastes and interests of our customer demographics.

Using Audience Insights, you can get aggregate and anonymous information such as:

Demographics: Age and gender, lifestyle, education, relationship status, job role and household size
Page likes: The top Pages people like in different categories, like women’s apparel or sports
Location and language: Where do people live, and what languages do they speak
Facebook usage: How frequently are people in your target audience logging onto Facebook and what device(s) they are using when they log on
Purchases activity: Past purchase behavior (i.e. heavy buyers of women’s apparel) and purchase methods (i.e., in-store, online)

And you can view this information for three different groups of people:

– People on Facebook (the general Facebook audience)
– People connected to your Page or event
– People in Custom Audiences you’ve already created (an audience made up of your current customers)

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Facebook Audience Insights, a new tool designed to help marketers learn more about their target audiences, including aggregate information about geography, demographics, purchase behavior and more.
– Facebook

Audience Insights is different from Page Insights because it looks at trends about your current or potential customers across Facebook, whereas Page Insights looks at the interactions with your Page and helps you understand the most engaged audience on your Page.

Remember: If you can’t score it, you are not doing it well.

 

15. Ignoring the Call to Action

Booby-TrapCall To Action – CTA, is one of the most important aspects of Facebook marketing. It convinces people to click and take action, enhances your impact, broadens your reach, and eventually increases conversions.

Always keep in mind that every successful marketing campaign is built upon a goal – something useful to you and to your audience.
It may seem trivial but explicitly telling your users what they’re expected to do in response to your post:

– Like,

– Comment,

– Share,

– Post,

– Tag,

– Use App,

– Play Game,

– Watch Video,

– Invite,

– Check in, etc.

translates in an exponential growth of your sphere of influence.

You must also make use of Facebook’s Create Call to Action tab on your business page and reap the benefits of social customization.

2015-07-12_23-55-21Remember: You know what you want them to do, better let them know as well.


 

16. Being the Sole Content Creator

Now, working at social media you can’t afford to keep that kind of one-way creative stream.

Right?

If there’s any short cut to success of creativity campaigns, it is adopting and incorporating a collaborative approach a.k.a User Generated Content – UGC.

An integral part of modern content strategies, User-generated content gives you the benefit of leveraging a stream of content from fans who are constantly consuming – and sharing about – your brand. Nothing showcases the value of your brand better than content shared by your community.

2015-07-12_23-58-54

Remember: An audience propelled content participation is essential because:

– How long do your fans spend on stories will affect which posts show up in their news feeds.

– Frequent engagement matters. The more your fans engage with your page posts, the more they, and their friends, will see your content in their home feeds.

 

17. Multimedia Content Isn’t Really My Thing!

Well …

Guess what?

NOT appearing in the dynamic, customizable online channel of News Feed with engaging multimedia is a Facebook marketing mistake you CANNOT afford.
If they don’t see you, they can’t engage with you. Pause.

2015-07-13_0-03-29
Source: http://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2015/01/2015-facebook-marketing-success-kit-infographic.html

On any given day, instead of a block of text Visual storytelling’s ‘show, don’t tell’ approach results in greater engagement, traffic, and sales.

Use this fact sheet:

– Photos and images are the most important element in optimizing social media posts. [Source: Engage]

– Facebook users view 4 billion videos per day. [Source: Forbes]

  93 percent of the most engaging Facebook posts include images [Source: socialbakers]

  75% of users visit the marketer’s website after viewing a video. [Source: Jeffbullas]

2015-07-13_0-08-13

At the Fourth Facebook Awards Mark D’Arcy, chief creative officer of the Facebook Creative Shop talked about the award winning ad submissions:

Seventy percent of submissions this year involved video as an essential component of how they were building a brand story.

Remember: To take Ogilvy’s content marketing top tip for story telling across key video platforms:

2015-07-13_0-09-13

Conclusion

Facebook Marketing has its own set of pitfalls which, ONLY when successfully avoided, cause to bring forth sales drives escalating business revenues. Kelly Maclean, leader of Facebook’s emerging markets ad products, stresses over the adoption of an uncompromised Facebook Marketing strategy for a substantial quantified success:

 Facebook continues to see significant business growth internationally … More businesses are connecting with the right people in ways that are unprecedented.

Are you ready to keep your marketing strategy up to date for the continuously evolving social media giant? Let us know of your tips and tricks. Let’s grow together!

 

 

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