Most people view this social network as a way to connect with and keep in touch with friends, not a platform to make millions. But if you knew how to do it, would you?
It's no secret that Facebook is a powerful platform for marketing a business. But so few companies are using the platform to it's full potential.
Did you know that there is a group of entrepreneurs who have built million dollar businesses by only using Facebook for their marketing?
It sounds crazy, right?
But in today's day and age, using Facebook as your primary, or even your only tool for branding, marketing and networking has never been more possible.
The catch?
You can only do it if you focus on creating high quality content and building out your community in an authentic way.
Here are 5 Facebook tactics that have helped these entrepreneurs earn a lot of money:
1. Create opportunities for engagement
Your followers won't engage with you just because they feel like it. You shouldn't even expect them to.
There needs to be clear opportunities for your followers to engage.
A few of the top ways to get your following to engage is through doing giveaways, contests, or just by asking questions. One rule of thumb that many successful people do on their posts is to end each piece of content with a question. Another highly effective tactic is to regularly do product giveaways to help your posts go viral.
Timothy Sykes, the founder of one of the largest online stock trading academies has built a massive social media following by offering giveaways to his followers every week. He does this by asking his followers to answer a relevant trivia question about his content or business.
But how does it go viral?
Timothy also requires each follower who respond to tag 2-3 of their friends in the answer. This has the ability to double or triple the reach of your post.
For winners, Timothy will send them one of his products, such as a DVD program from his academy. It's great low-cost way to drive a lot more engagement.
2. Run Facebook ads, but be careful
When done correctly, Facebook advertising is one of the most powerful platforms for paid traffic. The key to creating a successful campaign is by testing before you scale. You have to keep testing until you have found the right audience, ad creative and landing page that has optimal conversions.
Start by testing with a small amount under $1,000 per month to test a few campaigns and begin to understand how the platform works. Use this time to experiment, try out different landing pages and ad copy.
Ben Simkin, a leading Facebook marketer and the founder of BusinessNET, a Facebook marketing company that has helped its clients sell over $1.45 billion suggests to narrow your target group for an ad to less than 10,000 people.
When you do this, you will be able to make sure that your ad is targeted narrowly enough to make an impact. It may take a while to find the perfect combination, but once you do, increase your budget and focus on that campaign until you can scale.
3. Drive online sales
Facebook is a great engagement vehicle if you have killer video content that is worth sharing. Facebook ads, understood properly, is an amplifier of what's already working organically. The ad platform amplifies the word-of-mouth effect.
Identify customers who have already bought and let Facebook do the heavy lifting to find other customers just like them, especially friends of existing customers. These are called custom audiences and lookalike audiences, respectively. They are the "crown jewels" of Facebook -- the most powerful weapon on Facebook you can wield, even if you have only a dollar a day.
Sam Abbitt is the founder of Savage Race, a series of mud obstacle course events across the United States. Thousands of customers register in each city for three miles of climbing walls, crawling under electrified fences, plunging in ice cold water and leaping over fire obstacles.
He's tried multiple forms of advertising from yellow page ads to Google AdWords. But now he relies upon Facebook to grow his business to seven figures in earnings.
His secret is video -- lots and lots of engaging participant videos. Music is great, but since 85 percent of participants are watching video with the sound off, rapid action shots are key to capturing attention and then the click. They see enough videos of the obstacles along with the social proof of their friends (Facebook customizes this automatically for you), that conversion is irresistible.
Months before Savage Race rolls into a city, they target repeat customers, friends of customers, people who are fans of similar "mud run" events, and the media. The result is that Facebook is his only form of promotion now.
They've even created a loyalty program for repeat customers that is gaining a good amount of traction on their page.
4. Land a dream job
Few people know that you can actually target people by where they work. In other words, use the platform as a secret PR vehicle to micro-bomb audiences for only a dollar a day. This feature is hidden in the ads platform (if you're using Ads Manager) under demographics > work > employers.
You can even target people by their job title, size of company, income and their actual point of sale transactions (which has nothing to do with what they've done on Facebook or happen to have 'liked'.
Tyler Doyle graduated from the LDS Business College looking for a job. Rather than apply to various companies in the Salt Lake City area, he opted to not compete with the hundreds of others young graduates competing for the same position.
He spent 89 cents on Facebook to target a couple employers that he wanted to work for. The key was to flip the job search dynamic to have employers contact him first, as opposed to him applying.
By using Facebook to generate awareness, Tyler was practicing inbound marketing techniques. Most people don't know which items in their newsfeed are sponsored versus not, nor do they properly recall what was paid or not.
Since learning this technique, he's done the same for his clients. And now he's spent several million dollars in Facebook ads and has taught seminars together with Facebook. How's that for the "dollar a day" inception?
5. Generate leads without a sales team and cold calls
B2B and non-sexy industries don't work on Facebook, supposedly. You need to be a sports team, have a massive budget or do something related to cats.
The reality is that Facebook grew to 1.09 billion daily active users not because of scale, but because of the relevancy of micro-conversations. Word of mouth among friends and relevancy created by the newsfeed algorithm.
Facebook was made for small businesses, especially entrepreneurs. So effective marketing on Facebook amplifies the content and relationships already working -- like a warm intro as opposed to a cold call.
Dennis Yu of BlitzMetrics built his firm entirely using Facebook ads. In 2009, Eric Ludwig and Dennis Yu started dabbling in Facebook ads to grow sales for Rosetta Stone. By publishing their techniques on high profile sites and speaking at conferences, they drove leads that turned into bringing on Adidas as a client.
The work with Adidas enticed Nike. The work at Nike resulted in the Golden State Warriors, which then resulted in other sports teams from around the world. And now they have a few dozen pro sports teams as clients.
Thank you to Leonard Kim for writing this article.
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