Hello. My name is Alex Branning, and you’re listening to the Alex Branning: Your Marketing Coach podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. I have some exciting stuff to talk about today. We’re going to be diving into Facebook pages, which is like the social media hub of your business, if you’re using it properly. I launched this podcast at the beginning of the year. This is only episode number five, and my audience has grown week after week, and I absolutely love it.
Thank you guys so much for listening every single week. And I said, “Man, I got to make a fun little jingle,” and so, I got together with my man Ryan, and he put that together, wrote the lyrics, got the full band involved and made it happen. So, Ryan, thank you for that. I love the jingle. It’s so much fun. It adds a hint of my personality. It’s upbeat rock and roll, it’s great. So, I want to talk about the Facebook page, the vaunted Facebook page. One of the things I hear a lot when I do my workshops and talk with clients is that Facebook isn’t working for them.
They look, and say, “Alex, I’m not getting anywhere. For real, I’m not getting any business from Facebook. I don’t understand what’s going on.” And diving in, most of the time, I’ll ask some standard questions, and if you’re not able to answer them, then I know a little bit about what’s going on. And that is, number one, how many people go to your Facebook page every month? If they say, “I don’t know,” they don’t really have a guess, then they’re probably not looking at the first tool that I want to talk about today, which is Insights.
Now, for those of you who aren’t really data geeks like I am, you may be ignoring that Insights tab. However, when you’re on Facebook, and maybe you’re in front of a computer right now. What I want you to do is I want you to click on that Insights tab on your page. So, go to your page as yourself. Make sure that you are an admin or editor on the page and click on Insights. You’ll see at a glance whether your numbers are going up and down on the page. And then, within the Insights tab, if you click on the posts sub-tab in there, you will see which one of your posts are performing the best.
Which is awesome, because that tells you what your audience wants from you, what they’re reading, what they’re liking, and just as importantly, what they are ignoring. When you get into those Insights and see that data and look at the numbers, the numbers don’t lie. A lot of times, we like to think we’re able to really put a peg on what our audience wants, but when we’re missing the boat, sometimes we just got to admit that we don’t know. So, diving into the Insights and going, “Okay, what’s working? What’s not working?” That’s going to tell us what our audience wants from us. Sometimes it’s not what we hoped it was, right?
For example, I remember a couple months ago, I wrote what I consider to be a killer Facebook post talking all about Facebook Messenger and the tools that we have in there. I thought I crushed it, and then I looked, and I said, “Okay, how many people are engaging with that? And how many people are looking at it? How many people are reading it? What’s going on?” The numbers were just abysmal. I was so bummed. But then, we did another post and right around that same time period, and in that post, I forget what we were talking about, but it was like, I think maybe one of the latest hashtag updates or something like that.
Something that didn’t require a lot of marketing brainpower, but it was educational. And that post, it went crazy. It got a whole bunch of shares. People loved it. We got messages thanking us for the content. I mean, it just went wild. So what did I learn? One of the things that I like to say is, in marketing, there are no wins and losses. There are wins and lessons. The lesson that I learned was my audience loves educational content. And so, I started going more in that direction. I got so far in that direction that I started my own podcast where I educate my audience on marketing.
So that’s how I took the data and I used it to grow my business. I said, “My audience wants to be educated. I am going to do more of that.” So the first tool that I highly recommend that you check out, if you’re not already diving into that data, is check out what’s on an Insights tab. The second thing that I want to talk about that you probably aren’t using yet is the power behind the Facebook Messenger. Now, Facebook has done a lot of cool stuff lately, and they’re really diving into the Facebook Messenger platform.
I’m going to talk more about that on episode eight where I dive into the Facebook Messenger. So, we’re just going to kind of skip over it, like, a stone going over the Whiskeytown Lake. I’m going to talk about three points here. The first thing about Facebook Messenger is, within your page, you can set up an autoresponder on your messenger. When somebody browses over to your page, the little messenger pops up and welcomes them to the page with a brief message. The second thing you can do is you can have a default reply.
So I recommend doing something like this. When as soon as somebody sends a message to your page for the first time, let them know that it’s a chat box. Say, “Hey, this is the Alex Branning Automated Customer Service Bot. I wanted to let you know that I got your message. I’m here for you. If you would like to talk to the support team at the Branning Group, email us here. If you would like to set up a call with Alex, you can do that here.” So it’s a very powerful tool that lets my audience to know, especially the person that just sent me a message.
It lets them know that I’m not here, but I do have ways for them to get in touch with my team or schedule a call with me. Now, some of the people that fill that out, they want to have a conversation with me over messenger, so they’ll just wait for me to jump in, and that’s totally fine. But I also give them the option, which is really powerful. That wasn’t available six months ago. So, it’s a really cool tool. I highly recommend you take advantage of it. Especially those of you that are advertising, you’re getting a lot of people that are just checking out your page for the first time. The messenger tool is awesome.
The third thing about messenger that is somewhat new is that you can actually plug in a third-party software system into your messenger so that you can keep track of your subscribers, so you can actually use messenger to send a broadcast. In the same way that you send out an email newsletter, you can send out a quick message over your Facebook messenger. Now, be careful with that though, because some people really don’t want you to send spam. So, make sure that you do it right. And then, the messenger stuff that’s going on right now, it’s like the Wild Wild West. I mean, it’s just crazy how fast things are changing.
Again, I’m going to spend a full episode of talking about it, so wait for episode eight, I’m going to dive in. So, my first main point was the tools you’re probably not using. That is the Insights and the messenger stuff, so make sure that you dive in and check those out, get them set up. The second thing that I want to talk about today is that your page can now actually be a hub for your business. It’s so much more than just a brochure where you post stuff that you hope gets read. There’s so many new tools now.
On my Facebook page, you’ll be seeing some changes. Look me up. Go to Alex Branning and then look for my Facebook page. You’ll see my profile in my page. Like my page. I’m doing a lot of fun stuff there. On my page, I’m going to be actually adding in my products. I have my messenger, which will automatically say hello to people who jump on my page. I have my auto reply bot set up so that I can give you options on how to contact me, and I’m going to have my products. I’m going to have a full ecommerce store on my Facebook page. That’s wild, you guys. That’s just crazy.
You could actually pay me for a product right from my Facebook page, comment, send me a message from my Facebook page, with your address, and then get the product in the mail. Like, “Whoa.” It’s just wild. Just wild. I love it. So many cool things are happening on that front. It’s just crazy. Another thing that’s really cool about your Facebook page and how it could be a hub for your business is within your page, you can create separate tabs on the left. For example, for those of us that use ClickFunnels, we can actually create a Facebook tab on the left for people to get one of our lead magnets, one of our opt-ins.
Like a free report, you could have a tab on the left-hand side of your page that says, “Free report.” That’s just so cool. You can customize your page for what you want to do. I just love it. It’s got so many cool features. One of the things to look at, if you’re going, “Okay, I don’t want to add products, and I don’t know how to add a tab, but I don’t really care. What else you got?” Make sure that you dive into your settings. If you click on the Edit Page button, make sure that you filled in all those fields because there’s actually a lot that you can tell your audience.
You can leave your phone number, website, location, your bio description. There’s a lot of stuff in there that you can put. I’ve seen many businesses either leave it blank, or under their About page they’ll just be like, “The best real estate agent in L.A.” Like come on, tell me your story. The third main point that I want to cover is that Facebook has made some significant changes lately and there’s a lot of people freaking out about it. They’re freaking out about it for all the right reasons. I mean, it’s scary. Facebook is a platform we don’t control, right?
So now what? Facebook makes a change, it greatly impacts our business, and we’re going, “Okay. How do I respond? What are the changes? How do I fix this?” I got good news for you. Facebook always loves engagement. That means that if you have your audience responding to you with comments, reactions to your posts like likes or loves, if they’re responding to you, you’re getting engagement. Facebook loves that and they will never punish that. You have to focus on getting engagement. How do you do that? How do you get your audience to respond to you? Well sometimes it’s really as simple as just asking people to comment or respond.
When you’re talking with someone, let’s say you’re in a group setting and one of the people there is just talking, and talking, and talking, and not taking a breath to let anybody else jump in. What’s going to end up happening is the people that are around in that group that want to talk back and want to be a part of the conversation will simply leave because they don’t want to be lectured to, right? In the same way, on Facebook, a lot of times, if you just talk, you don’t ask for input, your audience will not respond to you, because they don’t think that you really want it. They just think that you’re there to talk at them and not with them.
And so, engagement is key. Ask for the engagement. I’ll give you a couple tips to really spur some engagement on. Number one, have a fun comment-to-win contest. I love these. Here’s some examples. You can do a trivia fill-in-the-blank contest. For example, I could say, “Fill in the blank. The first correct comment wins a $5 Starbucks gift card. How many characters can you use in a Facebook status update? Now what happens when people fill that in? Number one, most people probably don’t know. You’re going to get a lot of fun guesses with that.
Number two, people are going to go, “Oh gosh. I want to guess. I want to see if I can win.” And the people that know the answer, they’re going to type it in because they want to win the gift card. You’re going to get a lot of fun engagement on the post. It’s going to be great. Another way to get engagement from your audience is a caption contest. Do a fun little caption contest where people drop a photo and the one with the most likes wins. Have fun with it. The best thing to do in those situations is let that contest go for a couple days, so that the participants have an opportunity to share your caption contest posts and encourage their audience to like their post that they win, because then you get more people involved.
The last thing, when you’re posting and you want to be engaging, one of the big ways to do it is to actually use video, because we really connect with video, right? I mean, when you’re on Facebook scrolling down, how powerful is it to see someone’s face staring back at you, talking to you? Now if you don’t know that person, you don’t care. But if you do, you’ll stop for just a second, just long enough for them to give you a quick inkling of what they want to talk about, and if that’s a good topic, you may watch the video or at least listen for the subtitles, right? So, just to see what’s going on.
So, video is a great way to engage your audience, ask a question, maybe share a thought, but people love it and Facebook loves videos, so it’s a double whammy. To recap, my first main point was Facebook has so many tools that you’re probably not using. Check out the Insights tab and the messenger tools. Second main point, your page can now be a hub for your business. There’s so many tools that are available. It’s so much fun. My third main point, Facebook pages really rely on engagement for growth. They really do. So I want to make you an offer right now.
If you go to my page, alexbranning.com/episode5, I have a special offer for you to get Power Engagement Marketing. Now Power Engagement Marketing is my at home, done-for-you course where you can learn all the tips and strategies that we use at the Branning Group to drive engagement. We talk about Facebook. We give you seven different strategies to grow your Facebook audience through engagement. I gave you one idea, the contest idea. We have six more. I also share some mistakes that you make, some myths that you’ve probably heard that aren’t true, and I give you various specific examples of what type of posts to make.
Now if you decide to buy Power Engagement Marketing, you also have an opportunity to join me for a live Facebook workshop where you and I will actually go over your Facebook page together. It’s virtual, so you can do it from the comfort of your home or your office, and we’re going to go over some of the stuff that we learned in the Power Engagement Marketing Course, and we will dive in to do a fun Facebook workshop. So, go and grab that at alexbranning.com/episode5 and join me on the Power Engagement Marketing Course and the Facebook workshop. It’s going to be fun.
If you would like to talk with me, and say, “Alex, I just need help,” I highly recommend that you jump on that Facebook workshop, because then we can spend hours together. It’s a four-hour long thing. It’s really good. But if you just want to talk to me for just a minute, I want to make myself available to you. Go to alexbranning.com/call and grab an open time slot on my calendar for us to have a quick little free 30-minute consultation. Let me see how I can help you out. Thank you guys so much for being a part of my Podcast. I hope you loved my fun little jingle, and I look forward to catching you on Facebook.
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