This blog post was first published back in 2011. Compare the stats below with the current top 15 social media sites
It’s interesting to see how things have changed. Lots of these didn’t make it! And nobody really says “social networking” anymore. Now it’s “social media” or even “socials.”
ORIGINAL 2011 ARTICLE
Facebook on its way out? I don’t think so.
MySpace dead? Plenty of people seem to still be using it.
Google+ on the rise. They’re doing well considering they’ve only recently moved away from their invitation only registrations, but they still have a loooong way to go to catch up to Facebook.
These are the 15 Most Popular Social Networking Sites as derived from eBizMBA Rank which is a constantly updated average of each website’s Alexa Global Traffic Rank, and U.S. Traffic Rank from both Compete and Quantcast. “*#*” Denotes an estimate for sites with limited Compete or Quantcast data. Last Updated: October 5, 2011
The name of the game when creating a Facebook advert is to make it fun and easy. Facebook users are in a curious, fun state of mind. They won’t have patience for a complex form or too much to text to read.
If you want Facebook ads to work, like with any advertising, you need a clear idea of the objective.
Decide on a clear objective
Do you want more email newsletter signups, likes, traffic to a squeeze page, traffic to a website, etc?
Decide on your target audience
Use your imagination to create a campaign that will motivate that group to take action.
Set up your Facebook Advertising Campaign
Create several similar campaigns with slight variations in wording, images, etc to test what gets the best results.
Monitor the results
Keep going if it’s getting results. Stop if it’s not.
‘What has been your experience with boosting the posts? Are you familiar with it and optimizing things as time goes on? How does it compare with running Facebook ads itself?’
I have run ads on both the Ads manager and boosting posts. Boosting posts is much easier to do. From my experience, if you are running a very simple ad with simple targeting like targeting one specific location, the results are the same whether you set it up in the ads manager or boost it from your page. There are some more advanced options that you just can’t access without the ads manager, but if you just want to run some local ads or simple ads like parents in your local area, you’ll be ok boosting. To sum up, you can still do some pretty cool targeting when you boost posts, and it takes a lot less time to implement. I’m all for boosting!
Regarding your question about optimizing as time goes on, I think it’s important to test with a small budget first. If you’re just getting impressions and no likes, either the content is wrong, the targeting is wrong, or it’s a combination of both. Sometimes it’s just not where your target audience wants to engage. For example, we tested Facebook ads for a graduate job vacancy at a Tech recruitment firm in London that we’ve been working with for years. We tried different ad versions with different targeting, including a brain teaser competition with a prize to capture contact details. We had low engagement for everything we tried. Sometimes you just hit a dead end with Facebook ads. Facebook will take your money all day long, whether it adds value to your business or not, so it’s important to test small and be ready to throw in the towel if it’s not working for you.
What I will say about advertising on Facebook, business to business can be harder to get right. Let me give you an example, we do social for a company that has several swim schools in Canada. Locally targeted ads result in people sending us private messages on Facebook asking us for prices or specific questions about swimming lessons. These are parents who have seen the boosted ad on their Facebook timeline and fire off a quick message to get more info.
Now, imagine you’re a business owner on Facebook checking out what your friends are up to. If you get an ad targeted to you, it has to be pretty interesting to get you to move away from your personal mindset to thinking about your business. That conversion is harder to make happen.
If you do boost posts, when someone likes or comments on your post, Facebook allows you to invite them to like your page. If they accept the invitation, they are more likely to see your future posts, and you can also target ads to people who have liked your page.
One of my client’s recently asked me how to make someone an admin of a Facebook group.
It’s super easy once you know how.
1. Go to your Facebook Group
2. Click on ‘Members’
3. Find the person you want to make an admin
4. Click the settings icon near their name
5. Click ‘Make Admin’
Handy to remember this is how you also remove members from your group. Be warned spammers and scammers. Anyone who has read my blog can now remove you from their Facebook groups.
Do you want to learn how to tag a person in a post or comment?
When you are sharing some great content you found or making a comment that one of you don’t want your friends to miss, you want to tag them. By ‘tagging’ your Facebook friends in any post, they will get a notification. This is the best way to make sure that your friend or friends see your post without having to make the message private in messenger.
To be technical and geeky about it, Facebook actually calls this a mention, not a tag.
Do you want to learn learn how to mention a person on Facebook?
To mention a person in a post or comment:
Type the person’s name with a capitalized first letter.
Please note that some business pages prevent you from tagging them in their settings. Also, it’s worth noting that if you mention or tag a private group only the private group members will see your message.
There’s always rumours and talk of how much or how little Facebook include posts in the Timeline from Pages.
You may have seen a recent rumour posted on your Facebook Page.
IMPORTANT: Not seeing our posts in your news feed? Apparently since FaceBook wants page owners to pay to “promote” their pages, only 10% of subscribers are actually getting the news feed. To see our posts, subscribers need to hover over the “like” and then click “show in news feed”.
And
Facebook has a new policy whereby only a third of you will actually get to see our newly posted updates and pictures, even though you have liked us!
This message is not ‘important’ and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Below is Facebook’s current info about Pages and their audience ‘Reach’.
Reach is the number of people who have seen your post. Figures are for the first 28 days after a post’s publication and include people viewing your post on both desktop and mobile. Your post counts as having reached someone when it is loaded and shown in news feed. Note that data from before July 2, 2012 only includes people viewing your post on desktop.
To sort your Page’s posts by how many people have seen them, click Reach in the Page Posts section of your insights overview.
Unfortunately, this type of false message warning Facebook users can cause people who are new to Social Media Marketing to worry that their efforts will not be worthwhile. Remember, as long as you are building connections and interacting with people and companies who matter to your business, you really can’t go wrong. Social Media tools like Facebook are communication tools.
Facebook is unlikely to ever announce a policy that was so damaging to Facebook Page owners. They can’t afford to upset their only revenue stream!
2 | Twitter
3 | LinkedIn
4 | MySpace
5 | Ning
6 | Google Plus+
7 | Tagged
8 | orkut
9 | hi5
10 | myyearbook
11 | Meetup
12 | Badoo
13 | bebo
14 | mylife
15 | friendster
