facebook Archives - Barbara Genest

September 24, 2022

Facebook Ad Best Practices to Follow as a Solo Entrepreneur

With over two billion monthly active users, Facebook is the most popular social networking site in the world. It’s also the most powerful advertising platform. Facebook ads let you connect with your customers and promote your products or services. But not all Facebook ads are created equal. The most effective ads target the right audience at the right time with a compelling offer. To create the best Facebook ads possible, you’ll need a strategic plan and design.

These best practices for creating effective Facebook ads will make it easier:

Create a Compelling Message and Image

To create an ad that will be successful on Facebook, you must create a compelling message and pair it with a relevant image or video. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when making your ad copy: Keep the text in your ad short and concise, use emotive language to get people’s attention, use a high-quality image or video in your ad so that it is not blurry or pixelated and always ensure that the image you use in your ad aligns with the message you are sending out – don’t use a photo of a family if you want to sell something related to business.

Use a Clear and Concise Headline

Facebook Ads can be a very effective marketing strategy when used correctly. One of the most important factors is the headline, which must be clear and concise. Summarize what the article or ad is about. For example, in an article about how to bake a cake, your headline may be “6 Tips for Baking a Better Cake.” If you write about true love, your headline might say, “How to Make Your Partner Fall in Love with You.” When Facebook users see your ad, they will want to know that it is trustworthy and not clickbait. They want to know the facts before making a decision. Let them know what the article or link will tell them and how it could benefit their life.

Include a Call-To-Action Button

When creating a Facebook ad, one of the most important things is to include is a call-to-action button. This button will usually direct the viewer to take some kind of action, such as clicking on a link, visiting your website, or signing up for an email list. But did you know that including CTAs in your ads can increase click-through rates by up to eighty percent?

Include a Link to Your Website

Adding a link to your website can improve the click-through rate, but it is also crucial for users to be able to click on something in the advertisement.

Following these best practices will ensure you create effective Facebook ads each and every time. While Facebook ads are vital to your marketing strategy as an entrepreneur, that doesn’t mean you can expect results without optimizing them first. Including these Facebook ad best practices will help you reach your target audience more efficiently and affordably.

February 12, 2022

Important Instagram and Facebook Story Differences to Know

While Instagram and Facebook offer similar features, it is important to highlight the differences to pick the right one or use them efficiently to market to your target audience. Choosing the perfect platform is only as successful as your knowledge and understanding of using it or creating highly engaging story content. The story features offered on each platform are slightly different and can provide many different outcomes depending on your niche and goal as a business.

Here are the important differences to know between Instagram and Facebook stories:

Slightly Different Interface and Feature Options

Instagram is often slightly easier to use, but there are not many differences beyond the layout and art style. The main difference includes the amount of picture and video filters Instagram offers compared to Facebook. Instagram also allows you to go live, and it still appears within your stories section, unlike Facebook, where it will appear in the newsfeed. However, the benefit to Facebook posting the live to the newsfeed means it will last forever, but at that point, it is no longer a story, and you would need to create a new story to promote the video.

Age and Amount of Active Users

Instagram is for a younger audience, while Facebook is slightly older. The age range for Instagram includes those between eighteen and thirty-four, and Facebook consists of those between twenty-five and forty-four. Facebook’s audience is larger and more diverse because they created the option to make a business page and many different groups related to your niche or industry. Unlike Instagram, you only have one profile and a highlights section that heavily relies on hashtags to gain more views and exposure.

Group and Community Building Priorities

Facebook is better at this, and using stories allows you to beat the timeline algorithm by keeping you near the top of your follower’s news feed. In addition, Facebook group stories inspire user-generated content and get your target audience more involved and engaged.

Return on Investment

Facebook has the best return on investment for any social media platform due to its ads and the high number of users. While Instagram has the same ads, they don’t have the same daily active users or diversity.

Don’t waste time any longer struggling to pick between Instagram and Facebook. As you can see, each of them provides its own benefits. If you have the time, using both is a great strategy; however, adopting either will still bring you success as long you use them correctly. Take the time to test both and be sure you know where your target audience lives the most to make the best and most optimal decision.

What You Need to Know About Instagram Stories Highlights

February 12, 2022

Five Ways to Customize Your Facebook Stories

It is said that Facebook reaches more than half of the world’s social networking population. It is also the second most downloaded smartphone application in the world. Two facts that should show you why Facebook is still an important tool to utilize and understand fully.

Each day nearly three hundred million people and businesses, just like you, post to their Facebook stories. While still not as popular as Instagram stories, it is still a beneficial tool to understand as Facebook continues to be a leading social media platform worldwide.

The following are five ways to customize your Facebook stories to increase your brand awareness:

Use Text Creatively

Adjust the size and use more than one font style. Fix the position, add captions, add a background color. Consider learning more about graphic design so that your thumbnails look captivating or use templates you can find on Canva and other websites.

Add Motion

With your camera, text, or other stickers and graphics, guide your viewers’ eye to the parts of the content you want them to view and act on the most. For example, if you want them to take action, visual motion cues to guide them toward the right buttons will help.

Four Benefits to Using Snapchat Stories to Market your Business

Have Fun with Filters and other Effects

People are sometimes critical of filters and effects when you’re trying to make someone look different than they really look, but the truth is, these filters and effects are fun and grab attention. So use them as much as you want or as little as you want but have fun.

Selfie Filters and Picture Filters

Try out the various selfie and picture filters that you can use to make your stories stand out. Facebook offers multiple filters. Currently, it’s the magic wand on the bottom left when you’re in the app. The filters show up at the bottom of the screen. Try out some fun filters on holidays or other special days to make your content stand out.

Try Out Boomerang

This app gives a looping effect to your stories and images. It blurs the background and brings faces into focus with an extra glow. They’re kind of like animated GIFS but play your video forward and backward. It can grab attention for different stories that you share.

Ask Your Audience to Join In

User-generated content, questions, and polls, anything that gets your audience involved is highly powerful content. But, if you want engagement or action from your audience, remember that you have to tell them what to do, tell them what’s in it for them, and then tell them what to do again.

Be sure to follow these tips when creating your Facebook stories if you want to keep your audience engaged and fully interested in your business or services. Creating consistent, engaging, and valuable Facebook stories is vital if you’re keeping your audience interested and active on the platform, growing your authority and brand awareness within the industry, and generating more sustainable leads.

February 5, 2022

Three Reasons Why Businesses Should Be Using Facebook Stories

Facebook still reigns supreme when choosing a social media platform to market and engage your target audience as a business. It has been reported that just this year alone, roughly 1.9 billion users log into their Facebook accounts each day.

To take those stats even further, Facebook users stay on the platform for nearly two and a half hours every single day. Even YouTube and Instagram can’t compete with these numbers, and with its launch of Facebook Stories, it’s planning to stay on top.

3 reasons your business needs Facebook, and its stories feature:

To Create Exclusive and Time Sensitive Material

Time-sensitive material inspires your viewers to act due to the fear of missing out. If you’ve otherwise engaged them and impressed them up until you made your offer, a time-sensitive offer evokes what markers call FOMO, fear of missing out. As a result, it’s a powerful way to get your audience to act.

Most social media allow brands and individuals to create specific time-sensitive content such as a webinar, event, or other content that will not be useful after the time specified. However, the ephemeral content offerings perform well if thought out and created purposefully.

To Focus on Improved Customer Engagement

Engagement, that elusive back and forth communication between you and your ideal target customer, is one of the most important ways to use social media to communicate with your audience. Creating engaging stories takes thought and consideration and an understanding of who your audience is, what they want, and what they really need.

You can humanize your company in ways you may not have previously thought by creating in-the-moment content that thrills your audience but is not available to them at a later date in the same form. Creating this type of content, because it’s usually spur-of-the-moment stuff, usually takes less time too.

To Increase Brand Visibility and Awareness

The truth of the matter is, everyone including big brands, uses social media stories to stand out and gain visibility. If you’re not doing it, you won’t be found as easily, so you may as well use the stories as intended.

Start brainstorming the types of content you can create that is short-lived, or ephemeral as they like to call it, so that you can connect on a new level with your audience while encouraging the audience to take the next step and buy something from you in a way that feels natural and wholistic to your audience.

Building your Audience with Facebook

These three powerful reasons work together to provide major benefits to the success of your business. Getting your customers engaged, developing new and unique content, and making sure your brand is still visible against others on Facebook makes their story feature a must-have tool to use.

January 23, 2022

How long should your Videos Be?

It is no surprise to people in the marketing world that Videos are a great way to display your content. But what are the Ideal lengths for your videos?

In today’s post, I review what Hubspot reveals as the best video lengths for the four Native Video Platforms.

30 seconds for Instagram
Why 30 seconds
HubSpot discovered the videos that received the most comment average 26 seconds. Keep your Videos Brief.

45 seconds for Twitter
Why 45 Seconds?
HubSpot calculated Twitter’s #VideoOfTheDay average 43 seconds.
Twitter users are accustomed to short updates so Keep it Short.

1 minute for Facebook.
Why 1 Minute?
HubSpot’s Facebook audience Engages the most with 1-minute long Videos. Users like watching Snappy Videos They can quickly Like and Share and Move on.

2 minutes for YouTubeWhy 2 Minutes?
HubSpot sees the most engagement on Videos that are about 2 minutes.
Users like spending time on YouTube because they can easily find Specific Videos or watch their favorite YouTubers’ Content. Longer Content is Perfect for YouTube.

Click here for Free SEO Cheat Sheet

When a video pops up on your Facebook feed, what do you usually do first? My guess is that you take a peek at its length, ponder whether it’s worth your time, and let that thought process influence whether or not you press play.

Once you do actually press play, how many times have you abandoned the video just a few seconds in and scrolled down to the next post? I know I have. I don’t finish half the Facebook videos I start.

It seems impossible to hold people’s attention nowadays. Phones buzz with distracting notifications and promise instant gratification, tempting people to check their screens every five minutes. This has diminished the human attention span so much, some studies claim it’s now shorter than a goldfish’s.

Video marketers know we lack patience. So they’re starting to tailor content for our dwindling attention spans. In fact, 56% of all videos published in the last year are less than 2 minutes long.

Discover videos, templates, tips, and other resources dedicated to helping you launch an effective video marketing strategy.

But marketers must innovate further because users expect different video lengths on different platforms. Odds are, they’re more willing to watch a 2-minute long video on YouTube than on Twitter.

If you don’t customize video length for each platform, then you’re not fully catering to your audience. Sooner or later, the attention they give to your brand will wither away.

That’s why we decided to create this handy, bookmarkable infographic about the optimal video length for the most popular video channels. To help you better engage your audience on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, we extracted insights from HubSpot’s own social and YouTube data, and combined it with existing research in the area.

We also provided a video example for each channel, if you ever need some inspiration.

So check out the infographic below and start creating optimized videos for these four native video platforms!

Read the Full HubSpot Article