(inspiring music)
- According to all of Forbes' latest 2008
fall research, this is the social mix of many
US-based companies.
75% are using Facebook, 65% Instagram,
56% Houzz, primarily for business-oriented
and we'll talk about that, 51% LinkedIn,
again business, not customer, and finally
43 are using Pinterest with its Google+
connectivity to help drive business.
We're gonna look at each of these platforms
and see the pros and cons.
The first is Facebook.
People still love Facebook because it's
the number one digital platform.
It is super-targetable.
So you can target by zip code, and then
by specific demographic, should you choose
to do any ad.
It's also very sharable for work.
You do need to set up a Facebook business account.
The business account can be found
at Facebook.com/pages/create.php.
It is a powerhouse database that allows
some of the best analytics out there.
Some of our findings are that it's still
primarily reaching women, it is still
primarily targeting people around 30K or less,
and that the mass majority of them, over 80%,
have a college degree.
The algorithms on Facebook are still greatly
favoring video at the end of 2018.
That means a native video posted directly to Facebook.
Secondly, the algorithms are favoring Facebook Live.
So that's when you pull out your cellphone,
you're recording, you're talking, it could be
on your desktop, and it's more of a conversational.
And finally the algorithms are looking at post.
So if you really wanna drive your engagement
and reach across Facebook, you may wanna consider
moving into the video space.
What kind of videos or Facebook Lives
did you wanna talk about?
Event is a perfect opportunity.
Showcasing your work is a second great opportunity.
And finally, how do you design?
What is your thought process?
Show people how you work through
the design aspect and you're really gonna
gain their trust in the process,
which is what you're looking for.
Finally, what are the best practices
for the companies that it's working for?
Many of them aren't posting as much
as you thought, most of those one time a week.
They also are doing a video that they've maybe
recorded for YouTube, and they are populating it
also on Facebook as they have content,
making sure, however, that there are some sort
of captions or text because the first
up to 10 seconds on Facebook will be silent,
so you really need to capture people's attention that way.
Again, what is important with Facebook is always
to drive people further along the sales cycle.
Don't leave people on Facebook.
This was a huge red flag across all
of the research findings, that people didn't
understand that they needed to move you
from Facebook to the webpage, or to calling you,
to signing up for something.
If you just leave people on the platform,
you are not going to move them along the sales cycle.
You need to change your call to action strategy.
What about metrics?
If you are a newbie in this space, you really
haven't invested much in Facebook, you really
need to try to amp up to 25 likes per week.
If you're further along, your goal is to go
to for at least 250.
Now, Facebook necessarily gonna work with you
because it's not gonna show your content
to all people, but that would be a target
and a goal, to keep tweaking until you get there.
And what about analytics?
Facebook insight is free.
It is the gear wheel on the Facebook fan page.
You're going to want to select view insights,
and then look for things like tracking
total number of likes, number of friends of fans
that's gonna show your potential reach,
number of people talking about your page.
Weekly reach.
You need a baseline and then 30 days later to see
how you've grown.
You can also keep scrolling down and look
at the virality of posts.
This shows your engagement by post, your likes
by demographic and by location, to show
if your likes are coming locally or not,
your reach, and if you really want,
to scroll down to the information by post.
But again, should you be on Facebook?
The consensus is absolutely.
Do try to navigate towards very easy things
like Facebook Live where you could whip out
your phone and talk, so it doesn't take a lot of your time.
And you can consider getting help here.
(inspiring music)