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People buy from those they know like and trust OR …
If people like you they will listen to you, but if they trust you they´ll do business with you – Zig Ziglar
How do you get to that point?
Well shouting at people is not going to help, but, that’s what so many Page owners seem to do on a regular basis – SHOUT [bctt tweet=”Think more like a screenwriter not a buy my stuff copywriter” username=”fionacatchpowle”]
How about a conversation and not a confrontation?
Tell me about you, your service and product and let me make an informed decision about whether you (and/or service product etc) will be of benefit and add value to my life. If not I will move on to the next person until I find someone who will.
Someone who will tell me why I should pick them.
Someone who will engage me in conversation and tell me what I need to know.
Mari Smith recently hosted a Facebook Business Briefing – — what marketers need to know about the future of Facebook this year and beyond.
During this event she shared a slide which said – Think more like a screenwriter not a buy my stuff copywriter
This is not rocket science my friends.
Experts like Mari and other online marketers have advocated this approach for as long as I can remember and it’s one I support my Facebook #CyberHeros with regularly.
However all too often business owners are trying to take the short-cut, fastest route possible to the finishing line ... before they have even worked out where and what the finishing line is!
Facebook is a tool to communicate with your target audience, so try communicating first and foremost and the rest will follow.[bctt tweet=”Take people on a journey with Conversation Commerce” username=”fionacatchpowle”]
The January 11th Facebook-aggedon announcements will not affect you if you just take it step by step and start storytelling rather than selling.
Top tips
Grab 3 pieces of paper and write the names of the next 3 months at the top and sub divide into 4 weeks on each page.
On the last piece write a statement of achievement – e.g. I have 3 new clients, I have sold XYZ more widgets
What journey do you need to take your clients on to make that happen?
What topics do you need to talk about to inform and educate them to make the right decision? (with the ‘right’ decision being to pick you.)
Write those topics on the first and second pieces of paper. One topic per week
Just look at those topics now and make sure they are in the right order, so the conversation flows and the decision to pick you feels perfectly natural.
What you have now is a simple, repeatable system to help you plan your ‘story’ in 5 minutes.
Look at the ideas/stories you have now generated for the next quarter aka chapter one. How can you make the next chapter blend seamlessly and so on, so that by month two they are ready to buy and by month three, well they are so in love with you they can’t imagine life without you?
People will easily get to know, like and trust you with well thought out content that has an intention.
If you’d like some guidance on your own content strategy so it feels more like a screenwriter than a sell/my/stuff copywriter get in contact with me via email – fiona@fionacatchpowle.com
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What are you trying to achieve with your Facebook presence?
Is it sales, leads, website visits? Do you really know what you want out of Facebook?
If you don’t know what your expectation’s are, how do you know if it’s working or not.
Over the last few years I have noticed how grumpy more and more people are getting over the effectiveness of Facebook. But I just can’t figure out why!
Facebook is just one of the business tools you should be using to communicate with your clients.
If you know who you target audience is, what you want them to know, then it makes sense to me that is an easy plan to follow.
People complain about reach, engagement, how bad their adverts perform and then of course the algorithm.
However, the one thing they all seem to have in common is a lack of intention aka STRATEGY
There may be multiple levels to your plan, but the one thing you cannot do with Facebook if you want to get results, is just plod along and throw things up at the last moment.
Here are 3 major things to consider when you are using Facebook to get results
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Have a specific goal?
To connect with your target audience you first need to establish who they are and are they on Facebook.
Just because it is the most ubiquitous platform doesn’t mean your clients are using it.
Assuming the people you want to connect with are on Facebook what do you want to achieve from the connection
- Sales
- Brand Awareness
- Website visits
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Know the message …
… that you want to send out. Be clear in your story.
In other words, how are you going to fulfill your goal with your carefully crafted content. What have you promised your tribe and how are you going to fulfill that promise?
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Tune in to your tribe
Write the right words for the right people at the right time. Learn how to have the conversation your tribe expect to hear, but be prepared to adapt the style to suit them, not you.
Once you have determined the objective you can make a plan. Make the content count and lead the way to the target.
Communicating is key. Have a conversation and not a confrontation.
Blog
News feed is the fundamental hear beat of Facebook
“News Feed is the constantly updating list of stories in the middle of your home page. News Feed includes status updates, photos, videos, links, app activity and likes from people, Pages and groups that you follow on Facebook.”
On desktop it is the big wide column that shows a changing stream of content and on mobile it’s the first thing you see on the screen.
The title comes from the fact it should be a selection of news-worthy items, from people, places and things that you care about, starting with your friends and family. The clue is in the title “news feed” – is yours full of newsworthy items? And likewise do you post and share items worthy of the news feed on your page?
What you see is also influenced by your activity on Facebook as well as the direct connections you have made with people, groups and pages.
When someone in your personal tribe reacts to a piece of news you may well see their activity as well if Facebook considers it would be meaningful to you.
So it really is a dynamic situation and there is no ‘one size fits all’ as to what happens in your news feed. Each News feed is unique. All 2.1 billion of them!
You can view your news as ‘most recent’ or ‘top stories’. In addition you can set your new feed preferences – see here https://www.facebook.com/help/371675846332829?helpref=faq_content
See First and Unfollow are the key points in this area.
As well as your personal news feed there is also a Pages Feed, where you can view in one easy place all the Pages you have liked who have posted recently. It’s not chronological but you will see more of what’s important to you than waiting for it to pop up
https://www.facebook.com/pages/feed
Then there is the new Explore feed which is a feed of Pages you haven’t liked yet but based on your interests FB thinks you might like to https://www.facebook.com/explore/
Watch the video below to see the steps you can take to fill your news feed with the things you really want to read
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Why do you see the word ‘story’ on Facebook?
‘Story’ is the soft and fluffy approach to describing your content that you post on your page. Each ‘story’ that appears in the news feed will be given a relevance score to each user and dictates how/when/if your content is sent out into Facebook Land.
(not to be confused with ‘stories’ which are image/video based clips shown on mobile format)
Recently Facebook changed the name of the section called About on the front screen to say ‘Our Story’ (in a Note format I hasten to add)
By using the word Story Facebook are trying to encourage content creators like you and me to be creative. Facebook have tried intensely and even more so recently with words like Meaningful, Relevant, & Conversation to make you sit up and pay attention to how you should be crafting your content. Facebook have been, not just hinting, but really slapping you about the face with a Roald Dahl book to encourage you to talk in story format. Hands-up if you have been paying attention?
We live by stories. We learn by stories. History is made by stories. Get the picture?
We are not talking Jackanory on each and every post as such, but let’s start writing in such as way that it is like a story. Let’s list the qualities and values of a story
- They are naturally memorable (might come in handy)
- People love stories (find me someone who won’t listen to a story)
- We love to repeat a story (another hum-dinger of an idea there)
- When you choose a story format there are different ways to tell the same story (so we could use this idea to say the same thing but different ways)
I may have laid it on a little thick there but essentially what I am trying to say here is that stories are the way forward.
How do you make your Facebook updates fit the story concept?
You could plan a story over 3 episodes i.e. posts. Or, a 28 day kind of story. In other words have a beginning, middle and end to your posts about a specific part of your business. The jargon word for this is strategy … yep a plan.
When you plan out a conversational style collection of posts, that have a theme and a memorable thread =story – people are more likely to engage.
NB. As each story is ranked according to relevance to each member of your tribe, this is why it is important to post a variety of stories over time to fulfill the likes of each kind of tribe member. This explains why you have highs and lows in your reach and that will always be the case. The skill you can easily learn as a storyteller is to tune in to your tribe and write what they want to read at the right time = News feed visibility [bctt tweet=”We live by stories. We learn by stories. History is made by stories. Get the picture?” username=”fionacatchpowle”]
Think about the TV adverts that have a theme running through them but they are different. This is where your story develops a brand personality and we all know when, whether we see just the middle of the clip that, we are watching a Marks and Spencer’s ad. Or Milk Tray ad. Or a John Lewis Christmas ad!
So, the morale of the story is to think conversation not confrontation
Blog
The new Facebook algorithm and what it means to business owners
To fully understand the futility of the drama let’s start first with a back to basics concept of ‘communicating with your tribe’.
It should have and should always be about relevant and meaningful conversations full stop, regardless of your chosen medium or platform. In fact let’s say that is the biggest full stop in the world ever and anything else is pointless.
If you are in business, and my definition of this is that you are carrying out daily activities that generate an income, and to do this you need to communicate with other people or businesses you by default have no higher single objective than to say who you are, what you do and why should they pick you.
At the same time we can also say that being ‘in business’ is a long term plan. Chances of taking an idea from concept to fruition as an overnight success without needing to speak/write/portray any detail of said business is well … not highly likely.
Getting back to Facebook and how our nature and assumptions of communicating have wandered off the path…[bctt tweet=”By default you have no higher single objective than to say who you are, what you do and why should they pick you #FacebookWarrior” username=”fionacatchpowle”]
The tool gives us access to hundreds of potential customers. We know this as a fact based on the information there are over 2.1 billion monthly active users of people who need stuff.
If we are selling the right stuff for them and we can get that info in front of them there is a possibility they could buy from us. Kind of like doing 2.1 billion leaflet drop … maybe not such a good plan after all.
Facebook has been a way of communicating with people and then evolved into the realm of business, which seemed cool on face value. It was never created in the first place to be a mass-media dumping ground (like the aforementioned leaflet) but the not so smart marketer decided to make it all about that, and quite frankly spoilt it for the rest of us.
To combat zillions of pieces of information being posted, Facebook had to define ways to make it possible to be selective about what you saw in your news feed, as there simply is not enough time in the day to see it all and is it really news worthy? (the clue is in the title in case you have wondered – the news feed should be a feed of newsworthy items).
But the tiny error they made was to decide for us. They couldn’t really help that because it just has to be like that in order to evolve. However they could have probably helped deliver that AI (artificial intelligence) concept a little more openly in the first place. Enter stage right Edge Rank aka The Algorithm.
What happened next was a bit strange in my view. Rather than focus on what you were saying and how to present it, engage with users a build a tribe of like-minded people who would become your customers, we ended up with many a peculiar ‘guru’ creating a concept that we to join in a competition to ‘Beat the Algorithm’ – this has and continues to cause a lot of unnecessary confusion and mis-information among marketers.
Please get over it. You cannot beat the algorithm in any of its guises but you can train yourself to work in beautiful harmony with the algorithm.
[bctt tweet=”It’s not rocket science, the news feed should be a feed of newsworthy items #FacebookWarrior” username=”fionacatchpowle”]
The algorithm in any shape or form is, and always will be there, to enhance the user experience and make it meaningful and relevant. Concentrate on this when you create, post and engage with others and you will find as a business the experience will become more enjoyable for you as well.
The concept of ‘trying’ to use Facebook seems exhausting to me. Business owners need to take a step back, think about how they are acting and learn some of the basic Facebook Mechanics to relieve the stress and time consuming behaviour they are currently attempting.
Industry stats from Locowise in September 2017 using a study of 5000 pages shows average organic reach of a page post as 7.98%
Now, I have no idea what these people are posting but I can tell you hand on heart that no Page I operate or use as a test case has such low reach. Bearing in mind we use post reach followed by engagement as our primary stats to establish if what we are writing is for the right people at the right time, I personally would be gutted if my reach was that low every day.
So I can understand why people may be frustrated, but the long term view I have always adopted is to share information that people want to know. No posting for the sake of it, not gate-liking, no competitions, no baiting. Quite simply my method is about communicating with others as I would like to be communicated with.
My other golden nugget strategy is to think Local not Global. Yes you may have access to potentially thousands of people, but let’s be realistic. If you are a local business your customers will be local. Unless you have every online bell and whistle in place to capture a worldwide audience then you are not going to see results.
You can study ranking and signals until you are old and grey but nothing will replace being human.
The 3 main interactive actions are Comments, Sharing and Reacting (no longer classed as a post like as you have a choice of reactions). Those steps need a human to choose. Their choice will come about by the emotion the post evokes. Be real, be there and be yourself.
I have some online training coming up soon that will show you my Facebook Framework which is a set of repeatable simple steps that make sense. Super easy stress-busters that are effective.
Facebook Mechanics are the buttons to press at the right time. It still dumbfounds me as to why people try to over-complicate the process when there are some straightforward bells and whistles that Facebook have had in place for a long time which are very underutilized.
Stay tuned for more revelations. In the meantime please get in contact if you’d like to work with me on a one to one basis. I’m not everyone’s cup of tea so we need to know we are a good fit by having a video call first.
[bctt tweet=”You can study ranking and signals until you are old and grey but nothing will replace being human #FacebookWarrior” username=”fionacatchpowle”]
Blog
The value of a Page Like (previously known as Fan) has changed in significance dramatically in the last 4 years, when the dreaded Facebook algorithm was born.
The impact of a Page Like on your over-all popularity has lost it’s importance in the big scale of things in favour of percentage page/post reach .
It used to be the case with a Page Like that it meant your fans saw your posts – your valuable, highly crafted, audience targeted content. But that is not the case anymore and hasn’t been for some time.
(They say that ‘organic reach is down’ – but that’s a whole different story and I can prove that using carefully crafted content high reach is doable)
In fact a post like has more long term value to influencing the ‘know, like and trust factor’ of your target audience than a Page Like.
The significance of a Facebook Page Like has gradually faded to the lower levels of awareness right in front of your eyes, but in such a way you probably hadn’t even noticed.
Remember the big Page thumbs-up icon back in the day? Where is it now? Without actually looking do you know where the ‘like’ button is?
Do you know you can Unfollow a Page’s content directly from the news feed?
About a year ago the Increase Page Likes option was even removed from the advert manager option on the front objective page and now comes under engagement.
Last week Facebook started the migration of Likes to Community and now only show total likes as opposed to new likes.
Of course a Page Like has a value, but not the same type of value it did a few years ago.
A Page Like is no-longer the social currency it once was and those that have focused on it for so long, and now can’t help themselves, are the ones who are suffering the most. The old-school method of asking for Page Likes is so 2010.
Unless people are really interested in what you have to tell them they will not see your posts anyway.
There is now more ‘information’ in the news feed than ever before, but our ability to consume it has not changed. There are limits to how much you can see in one day, and Facebook now makes the decisions for you as to what you would prefer to see or not see.
The Facebook Page Like popularity contest is becoming obsolete. The landscape has changed and you need to take note.
A Page like in isolation has very little statistical value, but throw in post likes, comments, shares, social connections & web activity you start to create a list of characteristics that is more akin to a psychological profile. This is also the cornerstone of Facebook Ads.
Every action you and your tribe take on Facebook contributes to every piece of collective data about you and what you really like and whether your Page is of interest to others. You can’t fool the Facebook algorithm, but you can train it.
Which is why there has never been a better time to focus on post likes, post reach and engagement.
How do you do this? Create content that is of interest to your fans, tells a story and resonates as to why people should pick you. Identify the right people at the right time. Start small and grow slowly. You are in this for the long-haul there’s no rush.
The solopreneur has the edge on this. You are the Facebook Mechanic. The Facebook Engineers who can share information about you, your service with passion and purpose. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just make progress and post!
