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Facebook 101How to master the most powerful advertising platform the world has ever seen
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About me• I graduated college in 2014 and started as an editorial intern at Contently
after road-tripping across the country for a couple months.
• I’m now an associate editor at Contently, where I write and edit for The Content Strategist (TCS) and manage The Freelancer.
• I’ve also been published in The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Pando, MediaShift, among others.
• I wrote a 6,500 word eBook about Facebook and cover the company regularly.
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What is Contently? Contently is a content marketing technology company that helps brands create content that works.
• Basically what that means is that we sell software and services to help brands, and sometimes publishers, create high quality content.
• The software includes features like a full-fledged editorial calendar and workflow tool, in-depth analytics built specifically for content marketing, and a 55,000 strong network of freelancers.
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What is TCS? The Content Strategist, Contently’s flagship publication, focuses on the intersection of media, marketing, and publishing.
• We publish two to three stories a day.
• We receive around 300,000 unique visitors a month.
• In 2015 we were nominated by Digiday for Best New Publisher.
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The First Global Network
• About one out of every five people in the world use Facebook. 1.59 billion people to be exact, as of December 2015.
• If Facebook’s monthly user base was a country, it would eclipse China as the most populous in the world.
• Of those users, approximately 90 percent are also monthly mobile users.
• 83.6 percent of daily active users come from outside the U.S. and Canada.
• 65.5 percent of global spend on social network advertising is spent on Facebook.
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The social giant drives 38.2 percent of all traffic to content sites, eclipsing even Google.
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Average monthly time spent among millennials almost quadruples the closest social media competitor, Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook.
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Suffice it to say, Facebook is already a dominant force in the marketing world. But tech analyst Ben Thompson believes that "the age of Facebook has only just begun."
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A Quick Outline
• In this webinar, we’ll run through four main topics.
• First, we’ll discuss Facebook’s rapid evolution to the dominant force it is today
• Then, we’ll go into detail about what kind of posts and advertisements work—and don’t work—on Facebook.
• Following that we’ll talk about Facebook’s critical—but often confusing—targeting and analytics features.
• And we’ll conclude by looking at the future of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation.
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I. The Evolution of Facebook
For most marketers over the age of 25, this is what their first Facebook experience probably looked like:
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Now, it looks something like this:
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What Happened in Between?
I chose that image for two reasons. For one, it shows Facebook on an iPhone. Secondly, the image features in-feed ads. These get at two of the biggest transformations happening at Facebook: the movement from organic to paid advertising, and the movement from desktop to mobile.
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From Organic to Paid
• Starting around April 2012, Facebook’s organic reach started to plateau at around 16 percent, a fact Facebook acknowledged in an update encouraging people to sponsor its posts. By 2014, Social@Ogilvy was publishing a white paper dramatically titled “Facebook Zero: Considering Life After the Demise of Organic Reach.”
• Simultaneously, Facebook started directly telling agencies and brands they’d have to pay for the same reach. Brands bristled, but Facebook had plenty of legitimate reasons for the move. The spam had gotten out of control, and as a social platform, Facebook had an obligation to optimize its News Feed to show content that people most wanted to see. Still, it was a hard pill for marketers to swallow.
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From Desktop to Mobile
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From Organic to Paid
“It seems to me that Facebook is the first place that properly cracked mobile,” said Deacon Webster, CCO at digital agency Walrus. “Mobile video on Facebook does incredibly well in terms of engagement. I don’t really see any other mobile ads doing the same sorts of things that Facebook ads do.”
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From Referral to Native
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Instant Articles and Facebook Video
• 8 billion views per day as of Q3 2015, which doubled the amount of views in April 2015.
• Instant Articles set to open to all publishers (including brands) this April.
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II. Facebook’s Role in the Marketing Universe Of course, Facebook is only one small—if rapidly growing—part of the marketing universe. How exactly Facebook will fit into your overall marketing strategy will vary greatly depending on your industry, your budget, and your brand.
According to Randy Parker, founder of Facebook marketing tech company PagePart, Facebook’s value to you and your business will depend on how much leverage you get from the social graph. In other words, as long as your business relies on building long-standing relationships with a reasonably large audience that you can target, Facebook ads are worth a try.
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Industry Concerns?
• At Contently we use Facebook for targeted paid distribution of our content—the specificity of the targeting and relatively low CPC allow us to reach potential leads and grow our audience effectively.
• MetLife has seen similar success on Facebook. According to Facebook’s case study, the insurance company saw a 2.4x increase in lead-to-sale ratio compared to the next best-performing channel, and a 49 decrease in cost per lead.
• This is true for B2C companies as well. Banana Republic (retail), Zynga (gaming), and Verizon (telecommunications) have all seen success. Your industry shouldn’t determine Facebook’s place within your larger marketing universe.
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Within a Larger Marketing Mix
• Even though it’s effective across industries, Facebook shouldn’t be your only channel. Using it in chorus with the rest of your marketing repertoire is critical for success.
• Ubisoft, the Montreal-based gaming company, took this to heart in a recent campaign to increase the reach of a TV ad for the launch of its new game. Because its core user base, 18- to 34-year-old males, tends to be less active on TV, Ubisoft used Facebook to extend the effectiveness of its expensive TV ads to the digital sphere.
• Brad Goldberg, vice president of of advertising operations at OrionCKB, sees Facebook as “top two” in terms of digital importance for marketers, but it’s not necessarily more important than that other behemoth, Google.
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III. Crushing It on Facebook: A How-To
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The Power of the Page
• Pages first appeared on Facebook in 2007, when “over 100,000” brand pages launched with the first version of Facebook’s ad network. Facebook declared it a “new era for advertising,” which, for once in the history of public relations, turned out not to be hyperbole.
• Some, such as Randy Parker, believe that Facebook pages are replacing websites for many businesses:“There are a lot of businesses now that even use their Facebook page as sort of their main, almost like a website substitute,” Parker said.
• All of which is to say: Get a Facebook page, and take it as seriously as you would any website. Facebook’s closed ecosystem means that pretty much anyone can set up a page—most of the work is simply filling in information forms—but taking particular care with the copywriting and design (i.e., your profile picture and cover photo) should be a top priority.
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Content vs. Advertising
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Content vs. Advertising
• For many marketers, particularly content marketers, Facebook is an excellent place to post your publication’s latest article and boost it to bring it traffic. That’s what we do here at Contently, and it works quite well.
• But for a lot of marketers, Facebook is more of a traditional advertising platform. It’s where you post videos, in-feed ads, and right-rail ads with more traditional CTAs and KPIs. You create some sort of creative, target an audience, and put money behind it to get it seen, much like a traditional web display ad.
• If you want to promote a piece of content, make it a timeline post and then promote it. You want it to fit naturally within the context of a user’s News Feed. To serve more traditional display ads, use an in-feed ad or right-rail ad.
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In-feed vs. Right Rail
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In-feed vs. Right Rail
• In-feed ads look like posts, but slightly offset from your normal updates from friends and pages and with a small “Suggested Post” disclaimer in the top left. They show up in the News Feed as you scroll, and once you scroll past them it’s likely you’ll never see them again.
• Right-rail ads, on the other hand, scroll with the News Feed, though their placement makes them easy to ignore: Only ads appear there, so most people have probably trained their eyes to ignore that section of the site entirely. Facebook revamped them last year in order to make them fit in better with the rest of the News Feed, while decreasing their frequency—and caused right-rail ad rates to jump considerably.
• The big problem with right rail is that the ads don’t show up on mobile. Considering that about 40 percent of monthly Facebook users access the social network solely on mobile, that’s a problem.
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Image vs. Video
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In-feed vs. Right Rail
• For images versus video, there’s a clear winner: video.
• For example, Deacon Webster, CCO at digital agency Walrus, says “Our engagement rates on a good post, on a good static image post are, let’s say, three or four percent. On a video post, it’s like nine to twelve. We’re doubling and tripling engagement on posts just by being videos. If we do good ones, which we like to think we do, you can see the video completes, we get ninety percent of our views watching the whole thing. It’s kind of amazing.”
• Video is expensive, however, and if you don’t do it right it can backfire.
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Targeting
• Targeting, or the use of customer data to advertise to a desired audience, is what makes Facebook such a unique and powerful ad platform for marketers.
• Randy Parker told me something about targeting that has become one of my favorite quotes: “No question, it is a big deal,” he said. “Google knows what you want, but Facebook knows who you are.”
• You can target by age, gender, location, job (very useful for B2B marketing), page likes (similarly useful), and so on. Every expert has their favorite restriction to target by, and the campaign itself will largely determine the parameters you set up. If you’re marketing a CPG product, specific targeting is less necessary, while lead-gen campaigns require a great deal of targeting—though there are exceptions in either case.
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Two Key Tricks
• Lookalike audiences: Deacon Webster points out that modeling an audience on that of a closely related competitor—say, Pepsi modeling Coke’s audience—can be a winning tactic. Simply target that company’s fans, and you have an audience pretty much guaranteed to be interested in your product.
• You can also upload your top customers’ data through their emails. Brad Goldberg recommends using the top 10 percent of your audience in terms of engagement, and then creating a “lookalike” audience similar to that set of people.
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Two Key Tricks
• Location targeting: Facebook has geolocation parameters that allow marketers to target by location.
• Salesforce took advantage of both of these features to promote its Dreamforce conference. For lookalike audiences, Salesforce used keynote speakers from the event, such as Arianna Huffington and will.i.am. For location targeting, it limited the ads to a constricted 30-mile radius of the Bay Area. By the end, Salesforce had reached its goal with 40 percent less money than it’d predicted.
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A/B Testing
A/B testing on Facebook goes something like this: 1) Create a campaign with a target audience and upload multiple versions of the same ad (with different images, headlines, etc.).
2) Run the campaign.
3) Let Facebook automatically optimize your ad based on its effectiveness.
Some marketers think Facebook’s A/B testing is mediocre, and use outside products to take a more manual approach.
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What Tool(s) Should I Use?
• You can sort of think of Facebook’s built-in tools like a cake. On the surface, there are the easy-to-use tools made accessible on your brands page: the “Boost Post” option, the “Insights” tab, and the “Publishing Tools” tab, among others. Below that layer is the Ads Manager, and below that layer is the aforementioned Power Editor. And if you want to add even more layers, there are plenty of external tools some Facebook marketers swear by.
• If you plan to use Facebook only as a publishing platform, and/or only put money behind it sparingly, the surface-level tools can do the job.
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Insights
My personal favorite feature is “Pages to Watch.” Pages to Watch allows you to add competitors’ Facebook pages to Insights, and then compares your performance with theirs.
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The Power Editor
Power Editor allows you to customize the UI using filters, customize the metrics you see, and further customize your posts and campaigns. The Power Editor is also where you can create audiences, an integral part of Facebook’s targeting features, as well as where you’ll do sophisticated A/B testing.
The Power Editor runs more like a piece of software, à la Microsoft Excel, than the Ads Manager or the front-end tools. That means more time and effort spent learning its ins and outs, but ultimately a bigger payoff.
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Helpful External Tools
Nanigans: A Facebook Marketing Partner that’s very expensive, but probably worth it if you can afford it. It’s almost entirely focused on Facebook. It also a super weird name.
Kenshoo: Like Naningans, but it works across basically every social advertising channel. Still really expensive.
Buffer: What we use to schedule posts. A simple, widely used tool that can scale its utility depending on whether you’re a one-person business or a full-fledged agency. Prices scale as well.
Smartly.io: A Facebook and Instagram Marketing Partner that automates and optimizes your posts. Fee is based on your Facebook spend.
BuzzSumo: A social analytics tools that follows competitors and identifies influencers. Particularly helpful for content-driven marketing operations—we use it regularly—and at a defensible price.
Naytev: An A/B testing and optimization tool that supplements Facebook’s mediocre functionality in that arena. More useful for content than advertising, and somewhat expensive for large operations.
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IV. Facebook in the future
Ben Thompson argues that in the coming “mobile epoch,” Facebook is uniquely positioned to dominate user attention—and advertising spend.
“This, then, is why I think Facebook is underrated: a company’s potential is first and foremost measured by its market, and Facebook’s potential market is, when you consider both sheer numbers and time spent, an order of magnitude greater than the PC-based Internet market ever was. Then, on top of that, you increasingly have brand advertising dollars—also an order of magnitude more than direct response dollars—looking for somewhere to go other than TV, and it just so happens that Facebook is the perfect brand advertising platform.”
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Instagram and Messenger
• Facebook’s prescient focus on its mobile app and its messenger app Facebook Messenger—as well as its purchases of mobile platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram—means that it can control practically every form of communication and networking on mobile.
• And here’s the kicker: Facebook can make all these networks work in tandem, as it has begun to do with Instagram’s recent API opening. More networks, more profiles, more data, more money.
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VR and E-commerce
• Facebook has also invested in virtual reality with Oculus, which, according to many experts, is set to explode in 2016. Virtual reality could be the next frontier of browsing, and it just might replace desktop in the process.
• E-commerce is yet another big focus, as Facebook plans to roll out a shopping section with select retail partners.
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The Facebook Era
All these product innovations are pointing in one direction: Facebook as the dominate hub for our mobile, connected lives. Zuckerberg’s creation may seem powerful now, but if all these innovations come to fruition, Facebook’s dominance in our our digital lives will reach unprecedented levels—for marketers, even more so.
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Questions?
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Contact Me!• If you ever have any questions or want to talk Facebook, my email
• I’m also on Twitter @dillonmbaker
• You can subscribe to our email by clicking here or visiting us at www.contently.com/strategist
Thank you.
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