5 Tips to Make Facebook Marketing Mobile-Friendly

According to Facebook’s fourth-quarter report, around 680 million of the company’s one billion monthly active users access Facebook from mobile devices.

It’s up to brands and businesses to make sure that any marketing efforts they add to Facebook are mobile-friendly, including custom apps, email, advertising, etc.

Here are five things you can do until Facebook fine-tunes its mobile experience:

#1: Target Sponsored Stories to Mobile Users

You can choose where your Facebook ads are seen. Facebook allows ad managers to place ads so they’re viewable on desktops, on desktops and mobile devices, or on mobile devices only.

The “mobile-only” ads are limited to Sponsored Stories, so when you have an important update on your Page, you can opt to pay for a Sponsored Story that will show up in your fans’ newsfeeds and networks on their mobile devices.

Sponsored Stories are a great way to reach Facebook’s mobile audience. The Sponsored Story appears in the newsfeed and says “Sponsored” on it.

If you’re not sure whether mobile or desktop Facebook ads perform best for your brand, test what works best for your business and do an A/B test so you can compare results. You don’t want to throw money at something that doesn’t perform.

#2: Make Sure Your Email Is Mobile-Friendly

Part of a running a good Facebook campaign is promoting it. So make sure your promotion efforts are easily viewable on mobile, including anything you send via email.

According to MailChimp, 40% of Americans who use mobile devices currently read email on them. A Forrester Research Email Marketing Forecast anticipates that by 2017, that number will jump to 78%. And according to a HubSpot survey, two-thirds of people under age 30 use a smartphone or cell phone to access email.

Collecting data through custom apps includes building your email list. If you’re building your email list through a custom app on Facebook, it’s important that the emails you send are mobile-friendly.

Why?

Because according to research put out last year by Econsultancy, when people receive email that isn’t optimized for mobile, they close it immediately. You don’t want to be the sender of that kind of email.

MailChimp makes it easy to create mobile-friendly emails with mobile-friendly templates.

With MailChimp you can see what your email will look like to mobile users.

Make sure your subject lines are always short and sweet.

Since your mobile users are probably multitasking (i.e., distracted and not giving your email the full attention it might deserve), use a direct call to action.

For example, “50% off for today only!” or “Here are our top 10 bookmarks from this week.”

If possible include special offers that are only available to mobile users.According to e-Dialog, 18% of consumers who opt in to mobile marketing messages do it to access special deals.

#3: Integrate Mobile With Your Other Efforts

If you have a brick-and-mortar business, you want to make sure that customers have an experience that’s consistent with their online experiences.

To integrate mobile with brick-and-mortar, consider creating table tents or signs that have QR codes that will take customers to your Facebook Page.

Using QR codes at your business can lead customers to your Facebook Page for exclusive promotions and giveaways.

From there they can like your Page; sign up for coupons, special events and newsletters; and gain access to Facebook coupons and deals, including whisper codes.

Whisper codes are special offers that are given in Facebook status updates to friends/followers of a business who later can “whisper” the offer they read about to the cashier or server to redeem it.

You can also incentivize check-ins at your store or restaurant by offering an instant discount or a coupon for a future visit. Bonus: Whenever someone checks into your place of business, the announcement appears in their friends’ news feeds, making check-ins great word-of-mouth marketing.

Encourage your users to share whenever possible!

#4: Make Sure Your Facebook Apps Have Mobile Capability

What good is a Facebook contest—or any other Facebook app for that matter—if your users can’t access it from their phones and tablets?

If you want to prevent frustration for your users, when you choose a third-party app,make sure that it has mobile capabilities.

Generosity Day 2013 made their custom Facebook app mobile-friendly so desktop and mobile users could pledge their acts of kindness.

This is important because some apps created for Facebook won’t work on mobile unless the developer uses “smart” URLs that detect whether the user is on a mobile device or a desktop.

Smart URLs adjust the content accordingly so it’s easy to see, read and use.

#5: Test Everything!

Facebook’s mobile experience can be inconsistent, so make sure you test your apps and ads from a few different devices.

In the image below for AMD, when the website link is clicked the visitor is led to a mobile-friendly version of their website.

On their Facebook timeline, AMD links out to their website.

Do your images load quickly? Do all of your links work? The last thing you want is for your users to bail because they have to scroll and scroll and scroll to read your message or they have to wait too long for images to load.

The best way to be sure that everything works as you expect is to test everything on multiple mobile platforms.

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How to Improve Your Social Media Marketing With Blogging

#1: Share Your Blog Posts in Your Social Status Updates

Not sure what to post on your Facebook wall or Twitter profile? How about links to your blog posts?

The rule of thumb is to have a 80/20 split with 80% of your updates not self-promotional and 20% self-promotional. If you use the 20% self-promotional updates to share links to your blog content, you’ll give your followers something more valuable to read than a product or service sales page.

Notice how Social Media Examiner linked to their latest post in this Facebook update.

Why is sharing your blog content on your social media profiles a good thing? For starters, you’ll bring people from social media sites back to your blog.

Sharing your blog content on your social sites also helps you demonstrate your business’s knowledge in your industry. This positions you as an informational leader. Becoming known as an authority in your industry can lead to speaking and even publishing opportunities that will ultimately boost your business’s exposure—and your revenue generation.

Here are some best practices to follow.

In order to receive the best exposure for your content, you will want to determine when the majority of your audience is online. Buffer offers great analytics to track tweet statistics. And Facebook Insights can help you with timing your Facebook posts.

The advantage of Twitter is that you can reformat your tweets to share content with your Twitter updates multiple times.

For example, you can use the title of the post in the first update, create a variation of the title for a second update and then ask a question related to the post in the third update. This helps you reach your audience across multiple time zones.

If you want to get more engagement when you share your content, use different ways of posting your status updates.

For example, on Facebook, post a photo to your wall and link to your content in the text of the post, since photo posts tend to get higher engagement than posts with just a link in them. See what works best for your audience.

When you mention specific people, products or businesses in your blog content, be sure to mention them again in your social updates when you share your post on social media. You can use @usernames in tweets and tag relevant people on Facebook and Google+. This increases the likelihood that these people will also share your content with their audience, potentially increasing your business’s exposure with a new audience.

Mention people, products and businesses in social shares of your content.

#2: Make Social Sharing Effortless

A great way to drive even more traffic to your blog posts is to allow your audience to share content for you.

Why do you want visitors sharing your content? One of the best reasons is to gain social proof for the content your business publishes. You’ll also start to gain more readers and subscribers from followers of those who share your content.

Your content may even be featured in LinkedIn Today, LinkedIn’s news section based on blog content that has been shared often on LinkedIn.

The top story on LinkedIn Today for Marketing and Advertising.

Here are some best practices to follow.

The best way to encourage others to share your content is to include social sharing buttons on your blog, preferably at the top and bottom of your blog posts.

Plugins that can help you achieve this include Add This (multiple blogging platforms),Share This, Sociable (WordPress self-hosted) and Digg Digg.

Social Media Examiner uses Digg Digg for social sharing buttons.

Another great way to encourage sharing is to ask visitors to share your content. Consider it a great call to action to add to all of your posts. You can even include tweetable nuggets throughout your blog posts by using the Clicktotweet tool.

A tweetable quote using Clicktotweet on the Analyze Facebook Insights to see ad performance.

#3: Grow Your Social Followers Through Your Blogging

Do you want more Twitter followers, Facebook fans and Google+ followers? Blogging gives you a platform and provides opportunities where you can encourage readers to connect with you on social media.

Why do you want to build relevant followers through your blogging? These will be some of the best social followers for your business as they will be the ones most interested in your industry and in your content.

A relevant and targeted audience can ultimately turn into more leads and conversions for your business through social media. As you grow your targeted following on social media, you can also expect to receive more engagement when you share your content on your social profiles.

Here are some best practices to follow.

If you want to grow your Twitter following, be sure to use the official Twitter retweet button. This allows you to add your @username to the tweet and encourages people to follow your Twitter account after they tweet your posts.

Gain new Twitter followers when people tweet your content.

Include a call to action at the end of your posts to the effect of “If you enjoyed this post, please follow us on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.” This also helps increase your social following. But only promote your main social media accounts. Giving too many options may lead people to choose not to follow any of them.

Since your business blog’s design will likely feature a sidebar, include follow buttons so visitors can easily follow you on the top social networks.

Social Media Examiner uses these social buttons in the blog sidebar to grow followers on Twitter and Google+.

Also, be sure to set up Google+ authorship on your blog. Your photo and Google+ profile will show up with content you author in Google’s search results, which could lead to more Google+ followers (and click-throughs back to your posts).

#4: Send Social Advertising Links to Your Blog Content

If you find that the social advertising you have pointing directly to your landing pages, product pages and service pages is not getting traffic, you may want to look at advertising links to your blog content instead. If your content is valuable enough and written toward your targeted customer base, you could generate conversions from the blog posts you advertise.

Market your blog posts through social advertising.

Why share blog content in your social advertising? People who are not familiar with your business are more likely to click on an informational link vs. links to a sales page.

If your goal is engagement, blog content typically gets more likes, comments and shares than sales pages. This will make your Promoted Posts and Sponsored Stories on Facebook more impressive. Facebook Ads in particular can also lead to boosting your number of fans on Facebook.

Here are some best practices to follow.

To create a great ad, start with a strong title, description and image from your blog post. Also try making variations of your ad (such as LinkedIn advertising allows) to test your audience’s response and engagement using different images, titles and descriptions for your blog posts.

To ensure that your ads are affecting your bottom line in a positive way, make sure to end each blog post with a strong call to action related to your products or services. This will give your ads more potential to lead to conversions and sales.

Then analyze the data from each social network’s advertising analytics, as well as your blog’s Google Analytics, to make sure your ads are receiving click-throughs, and that your blog content is turning visitors into conversions.

Analyze Facebook Insights to see ad performance.

In Conclusion

If you are not seeing the results you’d like with your social media marketing, employ some of these tips to integrate your blogging into your social media marketing tactics. Be sure to let us know how it works for your business.

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How to Make Your Facebook Contests Stand Out

Why Facebook Contests?

Facebook contests are a popular way for you to get your audience engaged and excited about your brand. More and more companies have adopted the use of Facebook contests to better track participation and engagement.

Contests are a popular marketing tactic for businesses on Facebook.

With so many companies using contests, it can be hard to differentiate yourself. Your Facebook fans are pummeled with tons of advertisements and other promotions. So it’s important to stand out against your competitors.

Simply giving out a free iPad or a gift card isn’t enough to attract the attention of social followers.

Here are 4 ways to make your next Facebook contest unique so it gets the attention and engagement you are looking for.

#1: Connect Your Facebook Contest to Other Social Platforms

When you plan your next Facebook contest, consider all the other channels you could use as part of the contest. Don’t limit your promotions to just Facebook, and don’t limit the activities for the contest just to Facebook.

HuHot Mongolian Grill held an annual contest where fans submitted their favorite recipes. A winner from each location was selected, and then they competed nationally against the other franchises.

The contest was published to their corporate Facebook Page.

Then HuHot decided to promote the contest by creating a Pinterest board dedicated to the recipe contest showing prizes, how to enter and past winning recipes.

HuHot’s Pinterest board.

By using multiple social media platforms, you will be able to reach a much larger audience. Utilize the strengths of different social channels and you will have higher engagement and reach more people.

For example, Pinterest is a great place to incorporate pictures into your contest. Twitter is a great way to give quick, short updates about the contest.

#2: Use Location-Based Services in Your Contest

One feature that is often underutilized by brand Pages is the ability to check into a location on Facebook.

However, using this feature for a contest can ensure that people are not only thinking about your brand, they are also physically going to a location to interact directly with your brand.

If you are able to convince your followers that your company is worthy of them taking their time to go to your location, you are closer to converting them into a customer.

Southwest Airlines hosted a promotion where they asked their fans to check into their physical locations at airports, and they would donate $1 per check-in to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Not only did they make a lot of money for a charitable cause, they also increased the number of followers of their Facebook Page from 991,200 to 1.2 million.

Southwest Airlines’ Facebook contest.

Not everyone incorporates location-based services into their Facebook campaigns. However, using them can differentiate your company and the contest from all of the other Facebook contests.

Even if it isn’t incorporating check-ins into your contest, think about ways to get your followers to directly engage with your brand. Location-based services are a great option, but there are others out there to explore.

#3: Include Your Followers When Choosing the Winner

Interactive contests are vital to maintain engagement and keep your followers coming back for more.

When you have a contest where one person is randomly selected for liking your photo, it doesn’t give your followers a reason to keep checking back on your Page.

On the other hand, when you run a contest based on what your fans want, this will give people a bigger reason to keep checking your Facebook Page to see who wins.

When Zipcar hosts contests, they typically involve their social media followers to help pick the winner.

Last June, they hosted the Ultimate Ziptrip contest, inviting members of their social media community to tell them in under 750 characters why they wanted to take a vacation to one of Zipcar’s cities.

Zipcar narrowed down the entries to 50 people who were then asked to create a video about why they wanted to take a trip. The finalists were posted to Zipcar’s Facebook Page where 1,000 fan votes chose the ultimate winner.

During the contest, the Facebook contest Page was viewed over 53,000 times and shared by over 2,500 people. Zipcar also gained 9,200 more Facebook likes.

Zipcar’s Ultimate Ziptrip contest.

When hosting a contest on Facebook, including your Facebook fans is important. If you have a community on a social platform, you’ll want to consider making your contest part of the social experience.

When you include your fans as a core part of the contest, it leads to increased engagement, because your fans will feel an attachment to the person they vote for.

#4: Use Other Parts of Facebook to Promote Your Contest

Editor’s note: We have removed portions of this section that are not in compliance with Facebook promotional guidelines.

You can promote contests creatively within Facebook.  Please make sure you follow Facebook Guidelines.

Some companies host contests by asking viewers to upload pictures of themselves interacting with the brand or company to become eligible to win prizes (using a third-party app). Other contests may be promoted through Facebook’s Sponsored Stories, whether within the news feed or in the sidebar.

When creating your contest, think about how it can spread on Facebook, whether by posting on others’ walls or seeing it in your news feed.

By using other Facebook features, you are promoting the Facebook contest throughout the entire Facebook experience. Users who are comfortable with Facebook and not other platforms may find it easier to participate in the contest by using the Facebook tools they are already familiar with.

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