Maximizing ROI in Social Media | Facebook & Instagram done right.

The rate at which social media has evolved and grown in the past 10 years has been both fun to watch and at times a bit scary. Both in how it began as a tool and how it has evolved and what it’s used for. This blog is going to focus more on the branding and marketing side of Facebook and Instagram.

What we still see a lot of these days when it comes to social media branding and marketing is many people still view social media as somewhat of a sales tool, when it’s really more of a relationship tool. Understanding and buying into this reality can be the difference between success and failure in your social media campaigns.

Breaking down problems and providing solutions.

Today I’m going to talk about six or seven things that we see happening within social media. For many clients these are problems that are resolved by helping them to understand, so they can better manage their processes.

I’m going to try and provide some deep insight without divulging the process as a whole. I’ll touch a little bit about why we use social media and the whole Business Manager side of ownership, pages and controlling the permissions. Also, understanding the social ecosystem and the power of audiences. Scratch the service of successful funnels and saying bye bye to the post and pray methodology. The power in pixels and finally bringing it all together.

So let’s start with Why social media?

This is actually a pretty broad question with answers that could go on for days due to the many different pieces associated with social media.

Let’s start with why brands use social media. Social media is really about building relationships, your brand and establishing a trust through your presence. Working towards that goal of moving them through the funnel and converting on your site or shop.

Again, I will reiterate that understanding this concept will change how you balance your messaging.

Social media is a large part of what you should be using as a tool but it’s really a small part in the overall ecosystem of digital presence. It’s just a part of the overall strategy that typically involves SEM, SEO, inbound marketing and other forms of media.

Is social media a sales tool?

An easy way to break all of this down is to look at how people use social media to communicate, learn and shop for brands. Patterns and data show us that social media is building relationships through answering questions, brand recognition and engaging consumers with content that relates to their needs. Businesses that are getting this right are building trust in diverse, relevant and balanced messaging.

Understanding the social media ecosystem.

For most social media users it’s pretty clear how it’s typically used. We’re posting, we’re engaging, commenting and reacting. Sharing our STORIES… this is a key word, because in the end, it all comes down to storytelling. The most engaging content typically has the best storytelling in some form.

As a brand when you begin to develop ideas about awareness and how to build relationships and ultimately get conversions. Strategizing the best tools to use in the social media ecosystem is a really important step. The social ecosystem is quite diverse and much bigger than most people understand I believe.

When you put in perspective how many options we have between boosted posts, Ads Manager the various types of campaigns and ads that can be created. Mix in the power of custom audiences and how to use them in our ad groups and apply a balance to ad delivery that creates a kind of conditional logic.

Investing dollars wisely to deliver ads to specific people based on the engagement, actions or another form of interaction with your business.

What are custom audiences?

Creating custom audiences provides the ability to create buckets of individuals based on how they’re engaging with your brand. Audiences allow these buckets to fill based on website visits, specific page visits, button clicks and other events. Simply having audiences at your disposal is just scratching the surface.

Audiences become extremely powerful when used to create touch points in any marketing funnel. Optimizing not just who is seeing specific messaging based on certain engagement, but also to exclude serving ads based on engagement.

Of course none of this is possible unless you have the a Facebook pixel installed on your website so that you can you track the IP addresses that are engaging with your brand. Audiences are the foundation to social media marketing funnels.

Understanding social media marketing funnels.

Social media marketing funnels are just a part of your overall marketing funnily or digital phone. It’s just another entry point to bring people into your process and build that relationship and ultimately move them to a conversion. A successful social media final typically it is strategize to around data some research and really understanding the messaging you trying to deliver and the overall goal you’re trying to achieve. So social media funnels really can ranged from having to to sometimes 2 to 5 varying touch points throughout the process.

A successful social media funnel begins with a strategy that revolves around insights and data research. This defines the messaging and creative you’ll deliver to achieve your overall goals. Establishing various touch points that maintain top of mind awareness while moving potential leads through the process to becoming a conversion.

All of this work really is about finding that balance between audiences, events and how you’re going to set those up between boosted posts and Ads Manager campaigns.

Bringing it all together.

Clearly we can see there’s a lot of power in social media advertising and particularly Facebook. Bringing it all together with a solid strategy and great campaign messaging increases the ability to maximize your budget and prevent you from throwing good money after bad.

What is the best recommended process for managing my social media?

In 2014 Facebook launched their Business Manager platform. Business Manager didn’t change the way that we posted or ran ads. Business manager was designed to create an admin interface where we could do a few things.

One of the key pieces of functionality is removing the personal connection between businesses and individuals. We manage connections, admin and editor roles all through the admin panel. To reiterate, the bonus to all of this we’re not using personal connections, we’re using work related email addresses

The Business Manager dashboard makes adding, removing and changing roles as simple as a few clicks. We can link ad accounts, share assets, manage pixels and much more. This creates ease in scaleability along with security assigning ownership. by an individual typically a manager of a business or an owner of a business and there may be one other admin which is recommended and these admins can just go in and basically select who uses white and it’s a very simple user friendly interface that makes managing the process of admins and pages much simpler much quicker.