How to Create a Facebook Business Video in 6 Easy Steps

Facebook's actively encouraging its users to create more video content on its service, but creating compelling video content - whether live or pre-recorded - is perceived as a challenge by many business owners, especially SMBs, who typically lack marketing resources or access to agency talent.

Fortunately, Facebook has a tool called “Your Business Story” that lets SMBs create videos highlighting their unique selling propositions in a simple and effective way. The tool's easy to use, and the results  - while hardly Hollywood-grade - are attractive enough to convey an effective message.

We did a quick test of “Your Business Story” to see how much time was required to crank out a simple “Business Story” video. Fifteen minutes after we started, the video was on our Page, performing as well  - in fact better -– than much of the other content there.

Interested in doing the same? Just perform the following 6 steps:

STEP 1: VISIT YOURBUSINESSSTORY.FB.COM

Facebook will prompt you to log on if you’re not logged on already. You need to be an authorized Administrator for a Facebook page in order to proceed further. If you’re an Admin for more than one page, choose the page you want to create this business video for.

STEP 2: UPLOAD AND/OR CHOOSE YOUR PHOTOS 

Facebook “Business Story” videos are simple sequences that dissolve between images you upload. The tool lets you easily select and sequence your photos so that they provide the movement required to tell a story. If you haven’t yet uploaded 8 photos, Facebook will prompt you to do so.

Confirm your photo selections and proceed to the next page.

STEP 3: BRIEFLY TELL YOUR STORY

Facebook only gives you 90 characters to express your business saga, so you’ll need to think carefully about a short statement that describes your business. Your 90 character statement will appear after Facebook’s canned text (“We’re in the business of…”), so choose a statement that makes sense in this context. Once you’re happy with this text, choose “Confirm Your Story.”

STEP 4: CHOOSE YOUR MUSIC

You’re not going to find a lot of musical choices here, nor do you have any options to upload your own sound track. Your selections are limited to “rock”, “synth”, “electronica”, and “percussion", and all of the offered tracks sound pretty innocuous (which was probably Facebook’s intent). Still, they’re pretty adequate, especially for SMBs who don’t want to make profound statements.

STEP 5: AGREE WITH FACEBOOK’S TERMS

Facebook wants you to agree to some additional, boilerplate language beyond its standard TOS. These added terms grant it a worldwide, non-exclusive right to display your video around the world. Unless you have an objection to these terms, click “I Agree” and you’re done.

Step 6: Wait about 10 minutes

Facebook processes these videos very quickly: our test video was live on the intended page within about 10 minutes. The video, when it appears, will be formatted in a square (1:1) aspect ratio – which is quickly becoming the standard aspect ratio for social video. You’ll also notice that Facebook has added a gentle, Ken Burns-like “zoom out” effect to your image sequence.

Facebook’s Business video tool won’t please you if your business requires sophisticated video effects or custom audio. But for many SMBs – especially those who want to cultivate a homegrown, “authentic” feel, the attractive, albeit low-tech results are probably more than adequate. Yes, the music is a tad cheesy, but no more so than what you’d hear over the PA of a typical retail store. Best of all – and it’s an important consideration for budg­et-challenged SMBS – not a dime needs to be spent on production (provided that you have at least 8 good-looking photos). And equally important, you can be up and running in less than a quarter of an hour.

Source

Read More

The Great Debate: Does Social Media Engagement Matter?

Engagement has been a major piece of social marketing ever since we were tallying Likes, comments, and shares manually. It’s a staple because it’s a constant. It’s been what we could measure since social was new, so it became the baseline for our entire measurement practice.

But CMOs and business leaders don’t care about engagement. They care about overall results. Are we limiting ourselves as marketers by focusing so intently on it?

When I was a kid, I was an outfielder on our little league team. One weekend when our catcher was on vacation, our coach told me to gear up because I’d be playing catcher that day.

“But coach,” I protested. “I’m an outfielder!”

“No, you’re not,” he said. “You’re a baseball player.”

Turns out, I was way better as a catcher than I was as an outfielder, which I’d have never known if I hadn’t been forced out of my comfort zone. In the end, baseball wasn’t really my game at all so I became a sports writer instead, but the metaphor still works so stop judging me.

Breaking Out of the Comfort Zone

Social marketing is around the same age I was when I had that conversation with my coach.

We’ve gotten complacent with the role social plays, but only because we haven’t tried anything else, and today, I’d like to challenge you to think bigger. What other positions can social play?

Marketing is only successful when each channel fills a specific role, but when all channels share a common goal.

In baseball, the team in the field has a finite number of players, and a shared goal of getting three outs before the other team can score. There are dozens and dozens of ways to stop them from scoring, but only one end goal: a goose egg on the scoreboard. You do this by placing the players in strategic places that maximize your ability to reach that goal.

As a social marketer, do you know what your team’s end-goal is? Because this is where you need to start. Once you have that locked in, you can zero in on the ways to get there.

What Position Does Social Play on Your Team?

First of all, I apologize for the continued baseball metaphor…I’m really sticking with this one.

It’s important to identify where social can make the biggest impact for your team. How does your social media program support broader marketing goals, and how does it move potential customers from one stage of the buyer’s journey to the next?

The above map is something you’ll see constantly if you read the Simply Measured blog, and that’s because it’s central to our philosophy both as marketers, and also as an analytics software company.

Social media can drive engagement, but it can also drive awareness, sales, retention, and advocacy. It all depends on your industry, social strategy, and end goals.

By mapping your goals back to your KPIs, you may realize that engagement isn’t a proxy for success, and you may decide it is. Either way, you need to know what you’re trying to accomplish before you can measure your progress.

The Case for Engagement

While the debate rages on over engagement, one thing is for sure; no other marketing channel has a metric like engagement. This is one of social media’s great powers.

Engagement gives us a stronger link to which content works, which resonates with our potential customers, and which doesn’t. While engagement may not correlate to conversions and direct ROI, it can provide support along the way.

When Is Engagement Valuable?

As you saw in the social metrics map above, engagement is valuable as a KPI in a couple of ways. Let’s stay within the context of the buyer’s journey:

1. In the awareness phase, where impressions and reach are critical to spreading your message to potential buyers, engagement works as a secondary KPI, enabling greater reach.
2. In the consideration phase, engagement is incredibly valuable. This is why so many brands use social for this purpose. When you want your audience to start thinking about your product as an option, social is a great way to get your message in front of them in an organic way. Engagement is the best KPI here because it lets you know that tactic is working, and you’re convincing people to take an action (even if it’s passive, like a “Like”) with your branded content.
3. In the adoption phase, where the focus is on keeping customers, and keeping them happy. Social media can be a great tool to do this, by interacting in a more casual setting than the aisles of your store, chat window of your ecommerce site, or via email. Engagement with customers allows you to understand how happy they are, or how likely they are to churn and never buy from you again.
4. In the advocacy phase, earned engagement can be a KPI you focus on. By identifying the earned mentions your brand is generating, you can measure and improve brand perception and affinity.

So, while engagement can’t be your sole metric, it can be valuable in many ways.

To go back to the baseball metaphor, if the goal is to stop a run from scoring, not every player will get the third out. Some may stop a base runner from stealing second, or hold the runner at third on a pop fly.

Social media is complex, and our activities as marketers can holistically support any stage of the buyer’s journey, as long as we have them playing the right position.

Source

Read More

Solving the 10 Most Common Social Media Marketing Challenges

Today, there are 2.307 billion active social media users around the world. That’s nearly one-third of our planet’s total population of 7.125 billion!

As social media marketing professionals, we’re lucky to reach even .000001% of that population with any one of our posts. This can feel a bit underwhelming for businesses and marketers looking to demonstrate the true value and ROI of social media.

Everywhere we look it appears that brands and companies have it all figured outon social media. With each new post to Facebook, Instagram or Twitter comes thousands of likes, comments, and shares.

Even Grumpy Cat has earned more than $100 million dollars since 2012!

This leaves the rest of us wondering, “What are we not doing right on social media?”

We’ve experimented, made mistakes, and even learned a little bit in the process. From that, we’ve put together a playbook on solving the 10 most common social media marketing challenges.

Let’s jump in!

1. Authentic connection with the audience

We’ve been seeing a massive shift in what it means to be effective on social media over the last few years. One challenge that marketers are facing in this new era of social media marketing is connecting with audiences on an individual and personal level.

Connecting with your audience helps to humanize your brand and build real, authentic relationships.

Solving this challenge: 

Connect with your audience by utilizing free or low-cost brand monitoring tools such as Respond, Mention, or TweetDeck and respond to every single comment on Twitter.

Monitor all additional social media channels and respond to each comment in an authentic way. You can do this by asking questions, linking to other blog posts, providing insights, or offering help with a problem.

You may also consider creating and growing a niche forum or group on Facebook or LinkedIn, or even creating your own dedicated community site similar to inbound.org or GrowthHackers – this gives you the opportunity to engage with users as well as let them indulge their passions and connect with like-minded people.

2. Creating a social media marketing strategy

You may know what you want to accomplish and why, but without a social media marketing strategy, you won’t have a specific plan on how to get there.

Think of your social media plan as a roadmap to your goals – Sure, you can stop off and check out landmarks along the way (experimentation), but you’ll want to return to the road that gets you to your destination in the shortest time and distance (goals).

Solving this challenge: 

Creating a solid social media marketing strategy doesn’t have to take weeks to put together. For me, it helps to have 3 key things written down on paper:

• Why we’re on social: Simply being active of social media channels for the sake of being there is one of the quickest ways to burn valuable time and resources. First, answer the question of ‘why’  your business is on social and what you would like to accomplish.
• How we’re going to succeed: Next is to ask the question of how. This can be specific social channels, paid advertising budget, video or image creation, partnering with influencers.
• How we’ll measure success: Key Metrics, Goals or OKRs that you would like to accomplish broken down into days, weeks, months, and the year. Breaking it down like this will allow you to focus on day-to-day activities while also keeping the big picture in mind.

3. A dramatic drop in organic reach

What worked in 2012 when organic reach on social was booming vs. what’s working now with the decline of organic reach has many social media managers scrambling to find tactics that work, including myself.

If growing your organic reach doesn’t seem to be working, there may be another solution.Solving this challenge: 

Marketers can overcome this obstacle by looking at the decline of organic reach as an opportunity in disguise. That opportunity is paid social media advertising.

Even if you only have $5 to spend on boosting a Facebook post or promoting a Tweet, putting a few dollars behind the content you’ve worked hard to create will effectively get that content in front of hundreds potential customers. Look for posts with high engagement but low reach as a good barometer for potential success.

Use a combination of Facebook Audience Insights and Twitter Audience Insights to learn about your audience and create personas. Once you have an idea of who they are, use those insights to create highly-targeted ads that will resonate with users.

4. Coming up with consistently good content

We completely understand. Managing social media is extremely time-consuming, and can become a full-time job. Which is why staying creative and original is one of the toughest social media marketing challenges to overcome.

The social media manager checklist seems to go on forever: curate, create, schedule, monitor, respond, update, and reuse content across several different social profiles.

That’s why it’s important for social media marketers to find little hacks to optimize their time.

Solving this challenge: 

Besides basic content curation and idea generation tactics like monitoring Facebook pages or scouring Buzzsumo and Quora for content, there are other less time-consuming tactics you can experiment with today.

Openness & Transparency: Some of our most popular content and social media posts are ones that feature an inside look into Buffer’s culture.

People love knowing that there is a “real person” behind the social media profile and by giving them a look into your company or brand you will evoke real human interaction.

Original graphics: We’ve also generated some excellent buzz by creating original graphics in Pablo or Canva and posting them to our social channels. This image, for example, received more than 100 retweets on our Twitter account in less than an hour.

To create it, we pulled stats from around the web and put them into a simple graphic, which only took about 30 minutes to create.

5. Content quantity over quality

For some brands, the way to cut through all of the noise on social media is to simply post more. While this tactic may work for some, for many it has the tendency to irritate followers.

The Next Web posts 30-40 times per day on Facebook due to the high amount of new content they’re putting out online. But many businesses who are creating less content may struggle to show value from more frequent posting.

Solving this challenge: 

An excellent way to think about the quantity vs. quality is to treat every piece of content—every tweet, every Facebook post, every CTA, every press outreach email—with the utmost care, as Leo explains in our Buffer marketing manifesto.

People will naturally follow your brand over time from posting great content, not posting more content.

Marketers can benefit from embracing the “everything matters” mentality when generating content for their blog, graphics for social media, and forums for connecting.

6. Getting content to a large social audience

Now that you have all of this great content for your blog and social media channels, people will surely follow, right?

As marketers know, this isn’t always the case. Promoting content, partnering with brands and influencers, and capturing audiences’ attention is a whole new social media challenge in itself.

The encouraging news is that if your content is enjoyed by a few people on your blog, then the chances are that people on social media will enjoy it as well. The challenge is getting it to those people.

Solving this challenge:

Just like in investing, the “Compound Effect” is a powerful idea that works with social media promotion as well.

Let’s say every one person on Twitter has 100 friends that follow them, and those 100 friends have 100 friends that follow them. Even if only 5% of the total friends share your content, that’s still a massive amount of shares and impressions.

The key is not to sit back and hope that people share your content, but toactively seek out people that you know will benefit from it. A few ideas to get you started:

• Email your friends, family, and coworkers
• Direct message influencers–in a genuine way–on social media
• Join LinkedIn groups or online forums in your niche market
• Syndicate your content (A complete guide from Neil Patel)
• Republish content to Medium
• Ask questions and respond to comments on Quora

7. Finding ways to encourage sharing on social

One thing that is particularly challenging on social media is finding ways to avoid what I like to call a “creative rut.” A creative rut is when social media managers find a tactic that works a few times and then continually go back to them over and over, even though the results may be even or declining.

Only posting blog links on Facebook, quotes on Instagram, or links to your own articles on Twitter are examples of content that is good, but could maybe use a creative boost.

Solving this challenge: 

Think “share first” by getting inside the mind of your audience. Before posting ask, “Is this something that I would like, comment on, read, or share on social media?” If the answer is “no” that may be a sign to look for other types of content.

The New York Times once published an excellent study on the psychology of sharing. It boiled down to the fact that sharing on social media is all about relationships. The study indicated that 49% of respondents said they share to bring valuable and entertaining content to others.

Jeff Bullas shared an excellent list of 10 ways to create contagious content with some fun ideas including:

• Telling Great Stories
• Making Your Audience Look Smart & Classy
• Using Emotional Appeal

8. Using data to back intuition

How many of us wing it when tracking data in order to guide our social media strategy? I know I’ve been guilty of this a few times!

Previously, social media data was hard to access, difficult to understand, and seemingly useless. But these days, there are so many amazing tools out there that accessing data is a must-do for marketers looking to take their social to the next level.

Solving this challenge: 

Start by creating a simple Excel spreadsheet with each of the social media channels that you’re managing on the left and the most important stats you would like to track across the top.

Here’s a quick snapshot of the sheet I use: (Download the full Social Media Metrics Dashboard):

Tracking metrics week-to-week and month-to-month helps me to visualize if my intuition is working. That way I can quickly implement experiments, track the data, and pivot to another tactic if things aren’t on the rise.

Check out the entire Buffer Social Media Strategy to see how we pulled the data from each network so that you can start tracking your own.

9. Creating quality visuals and graphics

Visuals and graphics are the second most important factor for success on social media right behind the quality content. But creating quality visuals and graphics are another challenge on their own, regarding skill level and time it takes to create them.

Seeing as how visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content, there’s never been a better time to invest in visuals of your own.

Solving this challenge:

Two of our favorite go-to sources of great visuals are high-quality stock photos and original images created by our team.

For high-quality stock photos, we’ve put together a massive list of 53+ free image sources. For original images, we suggest either Pablo or Canva. Each is fun, easy to use, and allow marketers to customize each image size based on the targeted social media channel.

A few design rules of thumb:

• Avoid overused stock photos
• Ensure each image is properly sized for specific networks
• Use best-practices with text overlay
• Design with consistent brand colors, palettes, and logos

*Infographic created by Ethos3 

10. Focusing on the things that matter most

A common thought in the social media sphere is that there’s a silver bullet of growth and engagement. The truth is that it takes a lot of work to create a community of engaged followers and brand advocates.

Growth and engagement are a result of a variety of factors, but figuring out which activities to focus on is an important challenge in social media marketing.

Solving this challenge:

When putting first things first, it’s helpful for me to refer to Brian Balfour’sGrowth Machine. Brian points out that a lot of marketers focus on tactics first, rather than creating a growth process.

Tactics first is putting the cart before the horse.  You need a process that will help you build a scalable, predictable, and repeatable growth machine.

– Brian Balfour

The most important part is having one growth process and sticking to it no matter what.

Know your channels, your audience, and your market inside and out and make strategic experiment decisions based on those learnings. Doing so will help to focus on the things that matter most.

Over to you!

Thanks for reading! What challenges do you often face when it comes to social media? We’d love to hear from you below!

Source

Read More