4. “For a company like ours social media creates most value when it
challenges the way we think and interact. In fact, social media is a
mindset, a way of thinking and working together. It’s based on the
fact that we are social animals, and that means we can only benefit
from sharing our thoughts and ideas with each other.” ~Maersk Line
7. Townsville Barra Fun Park
• Used Contests and
incentives for optins
• Offer specials
through social media
• Grew from 100 to
10,000 Fans
• 100 to 2000 e-mails
• Population 180k
11. Damsel in Defense
• Online Legal Course for Entrepreneurs – legal documents, B2B
• Pre-launch involved several types of free materials
• Free webinars
• 3-part video course
• Use Facebook Ads to build awareness around free material
• Sold to warm market and through e-mail follow-up
• Used Affiliates to get in front of new, targeted audiences
• 6-Figure launch of the course
12.
13.
14.
15. Goorin Brothers
Name a Hat after you Contest
• $70 on Facebook Ads
• $30 on Heyo App
• Gave away 5 hats
8404 Email Entries!
Can we even say the word Winning without thinking of Charlie Sheen? When will that be over?
Now I’ve been talking with a lot of you throughout the course of the conference and I know many of you are ALREADY winning. Andrea Beaman – holistic health expert with 35,000 fans who uses social media to share her tips. The Charter k-12 school having amazing success having their students and families share on social media why they chose that school. The Wisconsin fun park using targeted Facebook ads to connect with potential vacationers. You are smart people and like Jason Falls said yesterday, you know this stuff. What I want you to take away from this is an idea or two to implement and test.
And as I was preparing this presentation. I got a little philosophical and reflective. And I thought that I’m an example of what is winning. Because let’s bring it back to me. 8 years ago, I would have never imagined that my blog and my social media presence could result in me writing 3 editions of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies, flying all over the world speaking and training, meeting all of you, and working with fabulous clients of all sizes.
We all know the news, Facebook Reach is declining, Google+ is breaking apart, Twitter is breaking the rules by talking about longer tweets – is there nothing we can depend on?
What is working now?
Yes, cats, dogs, and babies rule the internet. 17 million people watched this dog fall down the stairs. But there are other things working for companies and I will share 7 ways companies of all niches and all sizes are winning. And yes, humor does work so make sure you share some on social media.
Maersk is a B2B shipping company that you wouldn’t think would even be on social media let alone have these impressive numbers. They dove into social media in late 2011 just 4 years ago and have consistently used social media to just tell stories.
I love their Pinterest board titled Container Living – which tells the story of what it’s like to live in a container.
7,000 of Maersk’s 25,000 employees are seafarers and social media has become an important way for those employees to stay connected. So Maersk was looking to stay connected with them through their social sites.
Early on Maersk’s philosophy with every post was will our audience find this interesting? Would they share it? If the answer was no then they wouldn’t post it.
As you can see they post a range of beautiful images.
Lesson #1 is to use social media for the right reasons.
Our second example is from down under. Townsville Barra Fun Park and my friend Tracy Raierti is an advisor to this site. They are a small fun park in a smallish town with a population of 180,000 people. When she started working with them a few years ago they had 100 Facebook fans and a list of 100 e-mails. But they systematically used contests and special offers to grow their presence on social media but also being very mindful of growing their e-mail list at the same time. They regularly have great engagement on their sites.
Show what’s happening behind the scenes your audience loves this. This short video of moms or mums as they are known in Australian, riding a big banana has 2,500 views and lots of engagement. Videos uploaded directly to Facebook are getting much better reach and engagement then videos with a YouTube link. So you have to upload your video in both places - YouTube for search and directly to Facebook for Facebook engagement.
79 people shared the installation of the slip and slide. That’s awesome! But Barra Fun Park is not completely relying on Facebook’s crazy ever-changing algorithm to build their business – they are transferring their fans to their list – smart!
This a client of mine Genevieve Shingle Jaffe
Facebook ads were a big part of her strategy but she approached it from a very smart perspective focusing most of her ad budget on the prelaunch list building using several freebies to get people onto her list. She did webinars, a video course, and downloads. We did a variety of split testing on her ads to determine which image appealed to the audiences, which demographics and keywords converted best.
We used Conversion pixels and set up website tracking pixels to build an audience of people who had visited her site and this website retargeting helped us capture the audience who visited the website but maybe didn’t sign up for the e-mail.
As I mentioned we used a variety of images and text. The ad on the left is created in Power Editor. The ad on the right is a boosted post but I want to make very clear that we only targeted her boosted posts to her current Fans as a way to move them over to her list. One of the number one mistakes I see businesses make with Facebook ads is using Boosted Posts more than they should. You should use them only as a way to engage your current fans. If your true goal is to get website clicks, use the Ads Manager or Power Editor to create an ad optimized for that goal. You will find that you will usually get much cheaper website clicks that way.
On the left is a Boosted post sent only to her Facebook Fans to connect to her warm market. She also had promotional partners to help grow her list where she delivered the training to their audience.
Goorin Brothers launched a new Hat and decided to involve their audience by giving away the “name” of the hat to one lucky winner. In addition they would give away 5 custom hats to the runners up. They spent $70 on Facebook ads and $30 on the Heyo app. The contest got 8,404 emails entries.
Speaking of things people value, your product has to be something people value. No matter how practical you think eating a meal off your pants might be, no amount of tweeting is going to save the picnic pants. Come to social media with a good product.
The next example is The Chicken Chick.
I’ve followed the Chicken Chick for years and love her site. She gives tips about chickens, backyard chicken coops, sustainable living and more.
One thing that she does extremely well is ask questions that involve her audience. Have you hugged your chicken today? Tell me about the work you do got close to 1000 comments, 3,100 Likes, and 151 shares in less than one day. Who says Facebook Organic Reach is dead? You just have to ask the right questions.
Notice also that she follows up in her comments. That is important so that your audience knows it is heard. It’s not hard - if you are going to be on social media, you have to be social.
Another good lesson from The Chicken Chick is that she focuses more of her efforts on the sites that are working best for her. While she also does Twitter and Instagram (and her Instagram is growing), she knows where her audience is.
I have examples of lawyers and insurance because people say these fields are hard. Prudential does a great job not only with their content but in their hashtag strategy. They have a variety of types of content they share and customize it to that platform, uploading their video directly to Facebook or Instagram. They have people sharing picture of their grandmothers in the comments – make it about your audience!
They had 61 people retweet this time lapse video of their headquarters being built.
Use hashtags the right way. Do a little research about who else is using them and monitor the conversation with things like Hashtagify.me, Tagboard, Talkwalker, and RiteTag.
Hashtags are a great way to extend your reach.
My last example is about new technology. I’m a blabaholic. But it’s easy to get caught up in the shiny new thing and not have a strategy for how it’s going to bring you new business.
Mitch Jackson is the Streaming Lawyer and he tells you exactly what he’s going to deliver on each of the new platforms. He has brought his practice into the 7 figure realm and he credits that to social media. He feels that by addressing the elephant in the room that people don’t trust lawyers and being very accessible with streaming video that he is allowing people to get to know him. He shares things about his family and is very personal on his social sites. Now I know that sharing these things isn’t for everyone. But it’s still