Building Relationships Through Facebook (Part Two — Facebook Ads)

Building Relationships Through Facebook (Part Two — Facebook Ads)

OK, right off the bat, you're probably thinking, "Derek, what's up with the Kanye West picture on the left?"

And the answer is that this was the ad I used to kick-start my DriveTheLine Fan Page on Facebook.

I obviously had some fun with it and I suggest you do the same.

Take a look at virtually any commercial on T.V. and you will see that they never sell the actual product!

They sell happiness.

They sell being cool.

They sell hanging out with bikini-clad girls at the beach (at least in the case of beer commercials ;)

But they hardly ever say, "Join ABC Fan Page because it will do this, this, and that for you." (Except for drug commercials and all their scary side effects -- YEESH!)

B - O - R - I - N - G

(As a side note, you probably DON'T want to use this method for Google Adwords -- make sure they know exactly what they will be getting when you use Adwords, or you'll make the "Google Saurus Rex" very angry)

But Social Media is about having fun, right?

Let your personality shine through!

This is Network Marketing after all -- it's all about you and your personality and you don't have to worry about some corporate suit looking over your shoulder (at least that's one of the things I LOVE about working for myself).

Think about why people get on Social Media sites.

A lot of times, they are at work bored to death -- dreaming of doing something, ANYTHING else (I'm talking about you, Jeremiah ;)

Don't worry about offending people (unless you have political aspirations ;) -- you're only looking for people who are looking for you. If you spend your time trying to please everybody, you'll never have time for anything else.

I'm not saying to go out and offend people on purpose, I'm just saying to be 100% yourself.

I know I'm doing something right when I tick some people off.

Think this doesn't work? Go ask Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh.

The last thing people want to do is hang out with some dry, boring, "professional" on a Social Media site -- no matter how successful you are.

(Here's another little tidbit -- don't TALK about your success (YAWN) -- hint at it through personal and professional photos, through all the comments you get from your "entourage," etc.)

Develop your online persona. I'm not saying be fake, but self-edit -- show your BEST self.

Think of yourself as the PR person for a famous celebrity, because that is what you will become, in a sense, the more successful you become.

Also, think about who you are targeting with your ad.

If you look at my example, the first thing you might think of is younger people -- they have to know who Kanye West is to get it, right?

I was also capitalizing on the buzz around "The Taylor Swift Incident" at the time.

Even the president was talking about it!

I probably attracted a lot of Rap and Kanye West fans, as well -- even though I didn't necessarily try to. (BTW, I have all of his albums -- sorry Taylor :(

Heck, I probably attracted some people who like to laugh, too -- welcome aboard!

Now onto some more technical stuff.

I'm going to give you a case study of what can be accomplished with very little (and in a relatively short period of time) with a Facebook Fan Page and $50.

Don't have $50? No problem, log into your GoDaddy account and see if you have a $50 Facebook Ads Credit.

That's what I did because I was still unsure of what getting people to a Fan Page could do for me.

For example, I originally tried to pay for ads on Facebook that advertise this website.

To my surprise, my ads were rejected because of a Facebook policy against advertising home-based businesses.

Well, even though DriveTheLine.com doesn’t actually do that (as you already know, it is designed to help people currently in a home based business become successful), it was still rejected on these grounds.

So I found a way around this – I advertised our DriveTheLine Fan Page, instead. (Facebook found this perfectly acceptable.)

Here's how to get your Facebook Ad Credits:

• Login to GoDaddy>Click 'My Account'>Click 'Advertising Credits'
• Then sign up for your credits and save the coupon code to use for your Facebook Ad

Now go to Facebook to Redeem those credits! (I'm assuming you already set up your Fan Page)

• To create an ad, go to your Fan Page and click on 'Promote with an Ad' at the top left of the page

• 
• Now you will see 'Step 1 -- Design Your Ad'

• The first 2 fields will be filled in for you
• Then you will need to fill in the 'Body Text' section

Make sure you use some copywriting principles because you are limited to 135 characters.

(For example, I wrote, "In Network Marketing lingo, "driving the line" is what happens when a distributor is doing so well that they. . .")

I made them click the ad to continue reading.

• Lastly, you can upload an image. (Remember Kanye? This is the time to upload him to the ad)

Here's an example of what my first ad looked like:

Now you want to make sure and target your ad (Narrow it down as specific as possible):

• First, choose your location (I'm going to go ahead and stick with the United States for now)
• Then you can choose what age you want to target (I'm going with 18 to 'Any' -- working age people)
• You can even choose to target people on their birthdays or even narrow your target by gender (In this case these choices are not applicable to what I am looking for, so I'll leave them alone)
• Now it's time to choose some keywords.

You can choose some general terms (Networking, MLM, Network Marketing, Home Business, Entrepreneur, etc.).

Or some specific companies (NuSkin, Xango, Zrii, etc.).

You might even want to "think outside the box" and target some different professions that can use your knowledge and expertise (but you also might want to try a different ad that will appeal to different groups of people).

As you're typing these in, Facebook will even start to suggest some keywords for you (so make sure and take a look at the suggestions).

• Then you can choose to target people based on their education level, workplaces, relationship status, and who they are interested in dating (None of which really applies to what I'm looking for at the moment, so I'll leave these fields alone, as well)
• Language is important, however, so I'll choose 'English (US)'
• You can even target users who are connected to certain Pages, Events, Groups, or Applications (I'll leave this alone for now, but this is a way to target, say, fans of industry "Gurus," companies, or products)
• Then you can make sure that people who are already fans of your Page won't see the ad by entering the name of your Fan or Group Page into the next box (So I'll enter 'DriveTheLine.com' and 'Drive The Line' here)
• Lastly, you can use some social proof by targeting users whose friends are already connected to your Fan Page or Group -- this will show up in the ad by saying something like, "Derek Alvarez is a fan." My friends would then see this and think to themselves, "Well, if Derek is a fan, then it MUST be cool." (But I'll go ahead and leave this alone for now, as well)

Here's a cool feature, Facebook will tell you how many people you could potentially reach as you are typing these things in:

In this case, I can reach 217, 020 people with my ad. Even if they don't click, I'm increasing my brand awareness.

Finally, you're going to want to set a budget:

• Create a new campaign name or choose an existing one
• Set a daily budget (Hey, why not see if you can spend your $50 in one day)

But in all seriousness, set your budget to whatever is comfortable to you (In my case, I set it to $50 and it took me 2 days to spend it).

• To make sure you don't overspend your budget, click 'Run my ad only during specified dates' and choose a specified time period
• They will ask if you want to 'Pay for Impressions (CPM)' or 'Pay for Clicks (CPC)'

Paying for impressions would be good if you just want to increase brand awareness and it will cost you less per impression.

But I prefer to get people to click on my ad and actually go to my Fan Page, so I'll choose that.

• They will give you a suggested bid based on your competition and I usually go on the low end of the suggestions (or at least somewhere in the middle)
• Finally, they will give you an estimate of how many clicks you can get in a day if all goes well

• Click 'Create' and it will take you to a page where you can complete your order (Don't forget yo enter your coupon first)

Now for the results! Remember that $50 budget? Well, here is what happened:

As you can see, I went a little over (by $2.66 -- please forgive me).

I got 165,523 impressions.

Of those impressions, 78 people clicked on my ad.

Which resulted in a 0.047% CTR (Click Through Rate).

(At this point, Google Adwords pros are probably like "WTF!" But I don't think people on Facebook click ads very much -- I know I sure don't.)

And my average CPC (Cost Per Click) was 68 cents.

(Try to see if you can get that kind of CPC as a beginner on Adwords -- it's hard to do unless you do some really good keyword research.)

Of the 78 people who clicked, 56 became fans -- at a 72% rate.

Now for the ROI, or, How I Turned a $50 advertising budget into over $10,000 in sales over 3 months:

I'm not sure if these are exactly "typical" results, but they are our results. (Go visit our disclosure page if you get any funny get-rich quick ideas.)

Here's how we did it:

• We accomplished this by building relationships with our fans and continually marketing to them through our autoresponder and Fan Page.
• We've also invited fans in the Tucson area to our Meetups.
• We've updated our Nerve Center daily.
• We've updated the Fan Page daily.
• We've worked a lot but we've seen a nice return on our investment and some of those sales are monthly subscriptions.

But the really cool part about this whole thing is that our Fan Page has grown through word-of-mouth (friends of friends see it and join).

What do you think? Have any Facebook success you would like to share? Think I'm full of baloney? Let me know in the comments below:

P.S. Make sure to hit the "Retweet" button at the top the page to let your friends know about this.

Building Relationships Through Facebook (Part Two — Facebook Ads) is a post from: DriveTheLine.com

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