A Glut Of Facebook Updates Results In Fewer People Seeing Posts From Pages

Fewer people are seeing Facebook posts from brands, businesses and celebrities, the social network has acknowledged.
Facebook has long used a set of computerized rules—referred to in shorthand as an “algorithm"—to determine which updates show up when you log in. It recently made tweaks to its algorithm that push updates from Facebook Pages—the presences maintained by organizations and businesses—lower in the news feed and show fewer posts to users.
One way Facebook makes money is through a form of advertising where it charges Page owners to boost the reach of their posts beyond the “organic” reach arrived at by Facebook’s algorithm.

The company says the news feed updates put a focus on “higher-quality content.” The end result: While celebrities and brands with large followings may continue to enjoy large audience on Facebook, small businesses who rely on their Facebook pages for marketing will likely be forced to pay up or see their reach on Facebook limited.
Each day, there are an average of 1,500 stories the company can show in someone’s news feed, and Facebook said in December that as a result of the increased competition for post views, many pages will likely see a decline in organic reach.
“We have not given a specific reach number that pages should expect to see because organic reach will vary by page and by post,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to ReadWrite today.
It is unclear how page views have been affected, but a report from Valleywag today claims the company is slashing organic reach to just one to two percent of people who have clicked a Page’s Like button.

See Also: Facebook Is About To Get More Friendly, Just Not To Brands

ReadWrite contributor Lauren Orsini has experienced a significant drop in the number of followers that see her posts. Today, she shared news of her book launch to over 600 followers that Like her page, but it only appeared in the news feeds of 34 people, or just 5.6 percent of her fans.
Facebook says the best way to ensure a broad audience is viewing your posts is to buy advertisements. Pages can buy ads by reach, and advertisers can target specific demographics to view posts.
“Like many mediums, if businesses want to make sure that people see their content, the best strategy is, and always has been, paid advertising,” the spokesperson said.
However, there is some controversy over the accuracy of advertising metrics and the returns advertisers see from such campaigns.
The downside for Facebook as it makes these changes is that some prospective advertisers may pull away from Facebook altogether.
A decrease in organic reach is an ongoing worry for Page owners as many people use Facebook as a means of free advertising instead of paying for more traditional marketing campaigns. As Facebook continues to put an emphasis on more “high quality” content and lowers organic reach, it could force businesses, small mom-and-pop shops and big brands alike, to rethink their marketing strategies.
Photo by Andreas Ivarsson

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How to Use Facebook Website Custom Audiences

Are Facebook ads a core part of your social media tactics?

Are you ready to build a raving fan base that reads your articles and buys your products?

The truth is that with the right tools, no advertising can match the impact of Facebook.

If you’re on the fence because you’re not sure how effective Facebook ads are, let me introduce you to Website Custom Audiences (WCA).

In this post you’ll discover what website custom audiences are, how to create them and how to use them.

What Is Website Custom Audiences?

 

In its most basic form, Website Custom Audiences is a powerful tool that lets you create Facebook ads that target users who have visited your website. Now you can reach well beyond your core fans and email subscribers.

Catch the attention of recent website visitors with a relevant ad about your product or service.

WCA may sound quite a bit like Facebook Exchange (FBX), another way to retarget users on Facebook who visited your website. But FBX is created only through an approved third-party and can only create a domain ad that drives people to your website.

The special thing about a WCA is that it’s created and used within ads run through Power Editor or the self-serve ad tool. That means you can create any ad you typically could on Facebook. Your ad can be related to your Facebook page, a page post, offer, event or application.

The image above is an example of WCA in action. I created this ad to sell my one-on-one service and retarget anyone who has visited my website during the past 1-3 days.

I also run a similar ad targeted at non-fans who visited my website to increase my number of relevant Facebook fans.

Target recent website visitors to increase your relevant fan base.

The response to these and other ads using WCA has been incredible because I’m able to create something extremely relevant for those people who see the ads.

What Are the Benefits of Using Website Custom Audiences?

 

I’ve never been so excited about a new Facebook advertising feature—the impact WCA has on reach is remarkable. Partner it with your simple sales funnel and watch things get really interesting.
As I’m sure you know, relevance is the key to crazy ROI on Facebook. The more relevant the connection, the more likely the user is to buy.

That’s why I recommend a simple Facebook sales funnel that focuses on building a highly relevant audience, providing regular valuable content to build trust, collecting email addresses and selling.
Let me use my page as an example of the impact WCA makes when paired with a simple Facebook sales funnel.

I have a little over 40,000 Facebook fans. I also have an email list of about 17,000 people. Accounting for overlap, we can assume that makes about 50,000 unique people I can target with Facebook ads who are familiar with me.

Until the launch of WCA, I’d burn through my fans and email list pretty quickly when promoting a post or looking for a conversion. So I’d then move on to Lookalike Audiences and interests targeting.

Creating a Lookalike Audience.

Now, with the addition of WCA, I can generate ads that target recent visitors to my site and entice them to like my Facebook page or sign up for my webinar while memories of my content are fresh.
What group of people would be most likely to want to click on a link to my recent blog post? Someone who has previously visited my website, of course!

As I mentioned above, my highly relevant audience (fans and email subscribers) was previously about 50,000 people. I’ve since created a WCA with a duration of 30 days that consists of more than 115,000 users.

While we can assume some overlap with fans and email subscribers, it’s safe to say that I’m reaching at least 65,000 more highly relevant people who are intimately familiar with my content.
But the power of WCAs goes further: You can also target by specific pages or sections of your website people visited.

So, for example, I could create an ad for my Power Editor training course targeted at those who read a tutorial about Power Editor on my website. Or target those who visited the landing page for that course.

You can use WCA to exclude people as well. I could promote a post and exclude people who’ve already read it. Or I could promote my webinar or training course, but exclude anyone who’s already signed up.

That’s increasing efficiency and limiting waste!

How Do You Create Website Custom Audiences?

 

Whether you create a WCA from Power Editor or the Ads Manager, the process is the same with the exception of the first step. So let’s start there.

From the Ads Manager, click on Audiences in the left column, then click the green Create Audience button.

Create a WCA from the Ads Manager.

If you’re using Power Editor, click Audiences on the left side (old design) or click the Ad Tools drop-down at the top right and select Audiences (new design).

View audiences within Power Editor.

Next, click the Create Audience drop-down at the top left and select Custom Audience.

Create a custom audience within Power Editor.

From this point forward, everything is the same whether you create the WCA in Ads Manager or Power Editor.

First, you’ll be asked to agree to Facebook’s Terms for Custom Audience from your Mobile App and Website. You should accept that.

Accept Facebook’s terms for using custom audiences from your website.

If you haven’t previously created a custom audience, you may also get an error message indicating it isn’t yet active.

After accepting the terms, you’ll see the following screen. This is where the magic happens.

Create a WCA.

The top section is easy. Name your WCA something that will make sense later. For example, Website Custom Audience—All Pages—30 Day Duration.

You don’t have to fill in the description unless you need more space to describe this particular WCA. The name is most important because that’s what you’ll see when you’re targeting in an ad.
The Visited area is where you create your rules for determining which website visitors will be part of your WCA.

Create rules for your WCA.

You’ll be able to select Domain, URL or Path. You can use Domain by itself, or include it with one or both of the other options.

• Domain lets you target anyone who visited a particular domain within your control.
• URL lets you target anyone who visited a URL that contains a particular character or string of characters.
• Path lets you target anyone who visited a page that contains a particular character or string of characters within the path (after the domain).

You can include multiple character strings in each section if you want to create a basic OR statement. In the Path box, I used this option to target anyone who both visited jonloomer.com AND visited a page that included either website OR custom OR turkeys in the URL.

Click the + button to create an additional AND statement rule. For example, you could create a new rule for Visited URL and assign particular page URLs from your site like this:
Visited URL: website-custom-audience facebook-ads

That statement, along with your established Domain, targets anyone who both visited jonloomer.com AND visited a page that included either website-custom-audience OR facebook-ads in the URL.

You can also change the Contains Any option to Doesn’t Contain if you want to exclude particular page visits.

By default, the WCA’s duration is 30 days (but you can change that to be as short as 1 day or as long as 180 days).

The duration includes anyone in your audience who visited qualifying pages during the most recent 30 days (or the duration you set). This is dynamic and the clock starts ticking as soon as you click Create.

This WCA will generate a list of users who visited qualifying pages of your website during the past 30 days.

Finally, you’ll want to click the View Remarketing Pixel link at the top of the page.

You’ll need to paste your remarketing pixel between the <HEAD> tags of your website.

This brings up the code you need to copy and paste between the <HEAD> tags of your website’s template in order to put the pixel on every page of your website.

How Do You Use Website Custom Audiences?

 

When you create a Facebook ad, you’ll type the name of your WCA in the Custom Audience box.

When you have more than one WCA, you may want to include one in your ad, but exclude another. If you’re using the self-serve ad tool, you can only include, not exclude, a WCA.

Enter the name of your WCA to target those users in the self-serve ad tool.

However, if you’re using Power Editor, you have the ability to both target and exclude WCAs.

Target or exclude WCAs within Power Editor.

Need some ideas on how you could use WCAs? I have a few.

You can use “page likes” to target anyone who visited your website during the past 30 days who doesn’t already like your page (i.e., exclude current fans).

You can use “promote blog post” to target anyone who visited your website during the past 30 days, but exclude anyone who already read that post.

Finally, you can use “sell product” to target anyone who visited the landing page for your product, but exclude anyone who visited the thank-you page and therefore has already purchased that product.

Frequently Asked Questions About Website Custom Audiences

 

I get a lot of questions about Facebook ads and WCAs, so I thought I’d answer the most commons ones here.

How many WCAs can I create? Right now, you can create up to 200 WCAs, though that limit will eventually be lifted.

If I’m using more than one WCA, do I need a pixel for each one? No. You only need to paste the pixel to your website once.

What’s the longest duration I can set for my WCA? 180 days. Once a user has been part of your WCA for longer than your set duration, they dynamically drop off of the list.

Can I use my pixel on multiple accounts? No. You can only paste one pixel per account, so you can’t generate multiple pixels for other websites. You could technically use the same pixel, but filter based on domain.

Can I create a WCA to watch what my competitors are doing? No. You can’t create a WCA based on visitors to a competitor’s website because you need access to the back end to paste the retargeting pixel.

Are WCA updates in real time or is there a lag? They’re in real time, so you’ll see the number of people added to your audience rise as users visit your website.

Some Final Thoughts

Facebook ads offer some of the most powerful targeting available to marketers. With WCAs, you can explode your reach and drive more traffic to your website, increase sales and increase your number of fans, of course.

What do you think? Have you experimented with WCAs? What results are you seeing? Let me know in the comments below!

12 Most Pleasant Ways To Avoid Death By PowerPoint

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It is estimated that there are 350 PowerPoint presentations every second. Think back to the last time you viewed a PowerPoint — was it engaging or did you feel as if banging your head against the wall would be more preferable than enduring the rest of the presentation? As a presenter, there are many ways to spice up your PowerPoint presentation to help your audience avoid death by PowerPoint
Getting people to show up to the presentation can be the biggest challenge. The best way to do this is to form a reputation for being a dynamic presenter. If you don’t have that reputation, the best way to get it is to incorporate these 12 tips!

1. Engaging title and description

If you are not the keynote speaker you will likely have to persuade people at the conference to attend your presentation. The easiest way to do this, aside from begging and leveraging personal favors, is to have an engaging and attention-grabbing title and description in the program.

2. Get personal

Personal stories are interesting and show how your topic is relevant to you and to people in your field. Consider sharing personal experiences and stories during your presentation.

3. Connect with social media

Live tweet during your presentation and schedule it ahead of time with HootSuite. Include your Twitter handle and a hashtag on the first and last slide. Inject three tweetable moments into your presentation and make sharing easy for the audience.

4. Leverage photos

Images are interesting and can say more than a few bullet points on a page. Get creative — consider including comics, memes, wuzzles or photos you took yourself.

5. Poll the audience in real time

Use SMS Poll to ask your audience any multiple-choice questions in real time via text message. You set up the question and answer choices in advance. Then you can add it to any slide in your PowerPoint. Note: you will need internet during the presentation for this to work.

6. Animations and transitions

This one is a toss up — different people have a different take on this. Keep your audience in mind when making this choice. If you include these do not use too many of them. Stay classy.

7. Get specific

If you are directing your audience online don’t just reference a website, show them a screenshot so they know where to go.

8. 10 tips in 10 minutes

Grab the audience’s attention by doing a 10 tips in 10 minutes section. Have an audience member set a timer. This is a great way to get attention by doing something out of the ordinary.

9. Connect your vision to figures of prominence

A good way to do this is through quotes. Consider making a Pinterest-like photo via PicMonkey.

10. Get the audience involved

Breakout into small discussion groups, provide handouts or include fill-in-the-blank PowerPoint
slides.

11. Inject some humor into the presentation

Humor gets people interested. Be careful — humor is normally at the expense of a group or individual. Consider making fun of neutral topics such as yourself, the weather or even think about poking fun at the typical cookie-cutter PowerPoints.

12. Have some give away items related to the topic

Everyone likes leaving a presentation with free swag. Don’t worry — everyone who attends does not need a prize. Just bring a few and give them away! If you can get prizes related to your topic then you get bonus points.
What is the most interesting thing you have seen someone do while giving a PowerPoint presentation? What else should be added to this list?

Featured image courtesy of stock_xchng.

Photo illustration work: Paul Biedermann, re:DESIGN

4 Social Media Tools to Improve Your Social Media Marketing

Are you struggling with day-to-day social media marketing tasks?

Are you looking for tools to speed up your social tasks?

In this article, I’ll share four social media tools and tips to help community managers save time, show creativity and streamline community management for their companies.

Why Social Media Tools

Community managers for organizations of all sizes are tasked to cover everything from curating content to creating it. Customer support, marketing, Vine and webinars all fall into the mix.

The sheer volume of tasks can be overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be. With just a few tools, individuals and teams can manage their responsibilities better, while presenting a successful social media presence.

Keep reading for four social media tools that will make your social media tasks much easier.

#1: Manage the Appearance of Links to Your Website With Facebook Debugger

 

We all know Facebook updates that include pictures and snippets of their content do unbelievably better than ones that publish bare links. We’re a visual bunch, us humans.

Has this ever happened to you? You updated a page on your website with new images. Then, when you tried to publish a link to the page on Facebook, you found yourself staring at the link text for way too long.

If Facebook has trouble finding an image to include with your link, the preview can take a long time to show up.

After what seemed like an interminable amount of time, you ended up with a link that looks an awful lot like the link text.

This link leads to a page that hasn’t been debugged.

There are times when you’ll need to debug the links you want to share. Learning how to force Facebook to refresh its cache of your site is a rite of passage for social media pros. Once you know how, you’ll want to tell everyone how to do it!

When you add content and images to a webpage, use the Facebook Debugger to make Facebook update its information for the link.

Use the Facebook Debugger to refresh the cache on Facebook.

After you enter the link in question, Facebook will publish the image you added to the page, alongside your link.

This is how the same link previewed after I put the link through the Facebook Debugger.

Bookmark the Facebook Debugger for quick and easy access, and your links will include an image in the preview each time you update a web page.

#2: Create Your Own GIFs With GIFBrewery

 

GIFs are “in” right now, and for good reason. Brands use these mini-clips/short demos/video previews to communicate emotion and engage their communities.

Because GIFs often have a choppy, raw quality to them—they can even be pretty arty—they add a human touch to your marketing. GIFs are also incredibly lightweight, which makes them perfect for emails. They add an animated element to an otherwise static medium.

Gone are the days of complex frame extracting and layer fiddling on Photoshop. GIFBrewery lets you quickly and effortlessly convert small video clips into GIFs, with almost no technical or animation skill. In fact, you can create high-quality, original GIFs in about 2 minutes or less.

Here’s how it works.

Use QuickTime’s Screen Recording option to capture a short demonstration of your app, a brief clip of how to use a tricky new product feature or a workflow tip to share with your community.

Create a quick screen recording, then use GIFBrewery to make it into a glorious GIF.

Then use GIFBrewery to convert the video into a GIF.

GIFBrewery has a slick, simple interface that takes just minutes to learn.

InVision, the free prototyping and collaboration tool for design teams, has definitely got this trick down.

They sent out this newsletter the other day. It shows you just how powerful a GIF can be, when it comes to immediately summing up a new feature. Don’t worry, this is some pretty advanced stuff (don’t expect these results your first time). With GIFBrewery, you can get similar results without much effort.

InVision perfectly pulls off the use of a GIF to tell how to use a new feature.

GIFBrewery has a number of useful features and is available from the Mac App Store for $4.99. Want to get more creative with it? Use it to create GIFs for Twitter replies, animated team portraits for your About page or to introduce a longer video over social media.

No Mac? No problem. Android users can create GIFs using GIFDroid.

#3: Set Up a GIF Database on Tumblr

 

Now that you’ve got all these awesome GIFs, you need to make sure your community management team can access them at a moment’s notice.

Tumblr is the perfect platform for this. Famous for sharing animated GIFs, Tumblr also lets you create password-protected blogs and grant access to multiple users—perfect for your team.

Tumblr’s protected blogs allow for multiple users.

Load or reblog the GIFs that fit your brand’s tone to your protected blog, and your whole team can access what they need from anywhere.

#4: Automate Community Management Tasks With Zapier

 

Have you ever thought to yourself, “Whenever X happens, I always have to do Y. I wish I could make that happen on its own.” Wish no more—welcome to the future of the automated Internet!

One of the fastest and most powerful ways to streamline your community management workflow is to use a service like Zapier to automate your social media–related tasks.

Use Zapier to streamline your social media workflow.

Zapier integrates directly with over 250 other apps through what they call zaps, “a connection between two apps that automates time-consuming tasks.”

While you can spend hours going through the site and getting inspired by new app connections, here’s just one way I use Zapier every day to make my community management an automatic breeze.

I have all of my scheduled Buffer posts set to be immediately added to our Google calendar so everyone on my team can keep track of when I post what.

Use Zapier to automatically add scheduled social updates to your Google calendar.

Zapier ties these services together, asking your permission to allow it to act as a sort of bridge between them.

This is such a powerful tool. Bringing services together can cut down a variety of repetitive tasks. Consider using Zapier to help you and your team work better… and smarter.

Conclusion

Social media community management is a high-volume, fast-paced undertaking. As your brand grows, so do the number of social media profiles, tasks and demands for original content. As the size of your community management team grows, so does the need for tools to help streamline the workflow.

Use the tips and tools in this article as a starting point to help you manage how links to your website appear on Facebook, create content that supports your brand and automate repetitive tasks.

What do you think? How do you streamline your day-to-day process of creatively engaging with users? What tools can you share? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

How to Use LinkedIn to Build Relationships and Generate Leads

Are you using LinkedIn to your advantage?

Do you use LinkedIn marketing tactics to generate more leads?

Over the past year, LinkedIn has added and revamped some important tools that can streamline your marketing, networking and outreach.

In this article you’ll find the latest LinkedIn features and how you can use them to your benefit.

#1: Stay In Touch On The Contacts Page

Think of your Contacts page as your control center. It’s where you keep track of your long list of connections, but it also offers alerts and tags. These features, along with helpful filtering options, keep everything organized and easily accessible.

Alerts are in the boxes at the top of the page. They let you know when your contacts have a significant event happening, like a job change, work anniversary or birthday. Use these alerts to your advantage and send a quick note to acknowledge their success. They’ll appreciate the gesture and it’s a great way to keep in touch (and top of mind).

Watch the alerts at the top of your page to keep up with and respond to your connections.

Moving down the page, you’ll see a list of your contacts. When you hover over a profile, you have the option to add the person to a tag, send a direct message, hide his or her profile or delete the contact.

You can tag, message, hide or delete connections right from the Contacts page.

The Tag feature allows you to save members—whether you’re connected to them or not—into useful lists for easy organization and sorting.

You can add your connections to tags and lists to easily find or sort them.

The sorting and filtering features are handy when you want to quickly find all of your contacts related to a specific campaign, company, etc. You can sort by Recent Conversation, Last Name, First Name and New—it’s basic and quick.

Filtering gives you a few more options like Company, Location, Title, Saved, Hidden, Potential Duplicates and Connections (i.e., your first-degree connections).

If you’ve connected your LinkedIn account to your email contacts or an app, you can filter by All Contacts and Source (contacts imported from a specific app or email source).

Here’s a quick tip: If you add people you’re not connected with to your tags, you may not remember who you are and aren’t connected with. You can quickly figure it out by looking at the color of the little In box on the right side of each contact. If the box is blue, you are a first-degree connection. If the box is grey, you are not directly connected.

Use the In box to easily distinguish between first-level connections and people you aren’t connected to.

#2: Add Media To Your Profile And Notes About Others’

I’m sure you already have an attractive LinkedIn profile with a great headshot and professional portfolio, but have you added rich media yet? You can enhance your profile by sharing images, videos, PDF files or SlideShare presentations. Just click over to your Edit Profile screen and upload your achievements.

LinkedIn says over 10 million pictures, videos and presentations have already been uploaded to profiles!

Make your profile stand out and showcase your skills with rich media.

Have you checked out your contacts’ profiles lately? It’s no longer just a list of their accomplishments and skills. You have some valuable tools that allow you to make your own private notes to remember key information about each person.

Just below a member’s image and headline is the Relationship and Contact Info box.

The Contact Info tab is a quick look at that person’s email and other social profiles they’ve shared.

The Relationship tab is where you’ll find the real functionality. You can see a timeline of your association (including the date you connected), as well as conversations you’ve had on LinkedIn. You can also add notes, set a reminder to follow up, record how you met and assign a tag to the person. Don’t worry, they won’t see your updates! This is purely for you.

The Reminder feature is a quick way to stay organized with your outreach activities.

#3: Manage Messages In Your Inbox

Your Inbox, of course, is where you’ll find your new messages, sent messages and invitations.
Much like Facebook, when someone invites you to connect on LinkedIn, you can see any shared connections. Unlike Facebook, you can also reply to the request without accepting it—use the Reply (don’t accept yet) option. This is handy if you need to ask a question or send a clarification before accepting a request.

You can reply to LinkedIn members who send you connection requests before you accept.

As for sending messages, you can either use the Compose button, then type the name of the person you’re sending the message to, or you can go to your Contacts page and select the contact you want to send to.

You can send a message to up to 50 people, so the Contacts page option is much easier than typing in 50 names—use tags and lists as an even quicker way to find the people you’re looking for!
One last note: When you send a message to multiple recipients, make sure to deselect the “Allow recipients to see each other’s names and email addresses.”

#4: Increase Engagement Opportunities In Groups

One of LinkedIn’s most valuable features has always been LinkedIn groups. They’re extremely useful for meeting new connections in your industry and establishing yourself as a thought leader. Regular participation goes a long way toward building trust with others in the group.

If your brand has its own group page, you’ll appreciate the rotating hero image and manager’s choice posts at the top of a group’s Discussions page. These allow for more streamlined branding within the group and increase the exposure of popular or important posts chosen by your group’s administrator.

The rotating hero image and manager’s choice posts can increase group interest and engagement.

As you’re looking for groups to join, check out not just the discussions, but also the top contributors. See any familiar faces or people you want to meet?

The Top Contributors section is meant to improve the quality and quantity of content and interactions within groups and is recalculated every day. Regular positive interaction, like posting and commenting, raises a member’s standing in the group while promotional, spam, negative or inappropriate content drops their contributor level.

Find Top Contributors in the top right corner of each LinkedIn group with your own contribution level located just below.

If you’re already in a group, you can find your personal group status just below the Top Contributors box. You can see discussions you’ve started (including those pending approval) and other discussions you’re participating in or following.

If you want to make it into the Top Contributors box, make it a point to post regularly and share content that’s relevant to the group. Take the time to read and engage thoughtfully with other posts and group members.

#5: Promote Your Brand And Content With A Company Pages

Have you established a LinkedIn company page for your business? You can customize the banner image at the top of the home page, set featured groups and take advantage of showcase pages.

Showcase pages benefit both businesses and users. As a business, you can focus your message and share content and updates you’ve created for specific audiences. And you can even track your success because showcase pages have separate analytics pages. Users can choose to follow showcase pages they’re interested in without having to follow the company page.

To improve your page’s visibility, I suggest using the Sponsored Updates feature. Sponsored updates are simply company updates that you pay to promote to a targeted audience. They can greatly increase the exposure and reach of your company page.

Sponsored updates are a good way to increase the exposure of your company page.

You can target your sponsored content based on a number of options, including location, company name or category, job title and category, schools attended or LinkedIn groups.

To get maximum engagement on a sponsored update, include a catchy headline and a clear call to action. Keep in mind that updates with links can drive double the engagement and images generally result in a 98% higher engagement rate.

To determine the value and engagement of your sponsored update, check your company page analytics (if you’re an administrator). Keep track of your regular posts and your page’s overall reach, engagement, follower demographics and how the page compares to similar pages.

Use company page analytics to figure out what kinds of updates get the most engagement.

#6: Check Out Other LinkedIn Features

Three additional LinkedIn features you should take advantage of are Who’s Viewed Your Updates, LinkedIn Pulse and the LinkedIn mobile app.

You’ll find Who’s Viewed Your Updates in a box on the right side of your LinkedIn home page. It shows you how many people have viewed your most recent updates, and how many likes and comments each update received. The benefit of this feature is that it illustrates not only the views and interactions of your first-degree connections, but also your second- and third-degree connections.

Discover the reach and engagement of your updates with the Who’s Viewed Your Updates feature.

Previously known as LinkedIn Today, LinkedIn Pulse is an excellent way to find new and relevant content to stay updated on topics of interest or to share. You can access LinkedIn Pulse via your home page feed or the Pulse app on mobile devices.

The LinkedIn mobile app is now available for most devices (including both iOS and Android) and provides an easy way for you to access your contacts and calendars wherever you go.

The app allows you to choose which connections you add to your phone contacts (it doesn’t just download them all). But the app does say it will do a one-time scan of your phone contacts to see whom you’re not connected to.

Easily access your LinkedIn contacts on the LinkedIn mobile app.

If you have a large network, you may want to think twice before downloading your entire LinkedIn contacts list to your smartphone’s address book. Hundreds of imported contacts could be a nightmare to manage.

The features I shared here are my favorites.

I’ve found them to be the most useful for professionals, business owners and salespeople. The options are robust and offer an easy way to centrally manage your contacts, leads and campaign players no matter where you are.

What do you think? What’s your favorite LinkedIn feature to manage your account and connections? Your least favorite? Let us know in the comments!

Guide to Facebook Reach: What Marketers Need to Know

Have you seen a drop in your Facebook performance?

Do you want more fans to see your Facebook updates?

If so, you need to understand Facebook reach.

In this article, you’ll find out what Facebook reach is, why some pages have more visibility than others and how to improve your own Facebook page reach.

What Is Facebook Reach?

Facebook is always rolling out new features in an effort to give users a more seamless and useful experience. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always work in your favor when it comes to reaching as many people as possible with your page content.

Facebook reach is the number of unique people who saw your content. It affects every other metric you can track: engagement, likes, comments, clicks and negative feedback. And that’s not all. There are different kinds of reach: post, page, organic, viral and paid. Everything on Facebook boils down to reach.

Total Reach on Facebook.

Post reach and page reach, for example, are different and have different weight. Post reach is the number of people who saw a specific post in their news feed. Page reach is the number of people who saw any of your post content during a given period of time (daily, weekly or monthly).

These two reach metrics can be deceiving or confusing. If you don’t post very often, you may have a very high post reach, but a low page reach. If you post often (e.g., five times a day or more) you may have a low post reach, but a pretty high page reach.

Which one should you focus on? Ask yourself whether you want to have individual posts seen by the most fans or make sure your brand gets in front of your fans on a regular basis. Your answer determines which form of reach—post or page—is more important to you.

Post and page reach both have three main subcategories: organic, viral and paid reach.

Organic reach is the reach Facebook gives you for free. It happens in the news feed when your fans see your updates. There are other possibilities, such as random users visiting your page, but these are insignificant compared to news feed views by fans.

Viral reach consists of the people who see your content because someone else created a story about it. For example, if a fan likes, comments or shares your post, their friends will see your post even if they aren’t fans of your page. The same is true if you’ve paid to reach larger audiences who may or may not already be your fans. If one of those targeted people creates a story, their friends will see it as well. Both are viral reach.

A quick note about viral reach: When you export your Insights data to an Excel spreadsheet, viral reach data is still included when you select the old Insights format. However, viral reach is a subsection of organic reach in the new version of Insights, which was rolled out in 2013. Expect to see viral reach metrics totally disappear from your Insights and the Facebook API soon. Facebook has decided to go for simplicity rather than detail.

Paid reach is a subset of post reach and is pretty easy to track and report. You paid for it, so you know where it came from. If you pay to promote your posts, your post reach is going to be much bigger than your standard organic reach (because you’ve paid to reach more of your fans).

You can find paid reach metrics under the Post Reach area in Facebook Insights.

What’s the Best Way to Measure Facebook Reach?

Until recently, it’s been common to benchmark your overall Facebook reach against your total fans (even I was doing this). Many social media marketers checked the number of people reached for a given post, and then compared it to their total number fans and calculated a percentage of how many fans they reached. That’s no longer the best way to look at it.

Facebook’s new Insights gives you access to the number of fans who are online at any given point in time. A Facebook page post lifespan rarely exceeds 2 to 3 hours.

Given that, we should benchmark against the total number of fans who were on Facebook at that time.

For example, in the graph below I can see that most of my fans are logged into Facebook around 3:00pm. If I post at that time, about 3,500 of my 9,500 fans should be logged in.

Use the When Your Fans Are Online option to find out when most of your fans are logged into Facebook, then post at that time and use that reach as your benchmark.

If the post reaches 600 people, I shouldn’t look at it as 6.3% of my page’s fans (600 people out of 9,500), but rather 17% of the fans (600 out of 3,500) who were online and reachable when I posted it.  
This is important when you’re explaining page performance to a boss or client. These are the results your hard work is producing!

How Hard Is It to Get Good Reach?

In December 2013, people started reporting a big drop in organic reach for the pages they were managing. The drop in organic reach varied—some saw a large drop, some saw a small drop and others saw no change.

A post from AdAge revealed a “leaked” deck from Facebook stating that pages should expect their reach to continue decreasing and be ready to pay for visibility in the news feed. The social media ecosystem and blogosphere were outraged.

Not a single day in December passed without a new blog post on the subject. Some were condemning Facebook for contriving sneaky new ways to steal their money. Others were defending Facebook’s efforts to improve the quality of content distributed in the news feed.

On December 20, I looked at the average data of more than 6,000 pages of various sizes and industries. The data shows a constant decline over the previous six months, but no noticeable drop in December (when people started reporting the issue). However, I did discover an interesting trend.
Pages with high post engagement were the least affected (if at all). Pages with a high engagement rate along with a high negative feedback score (i.e., users hide your posts or report them as spam) were more affected. Finally, pages with a very low engagement rate were affected most.

The average monthly organic reach declined from 73% to 55% of fan base (orange graph). Notice there’s no significant drop in December for the average. However, that average decline has not affected every page.

The black graph represents the evolution of a nonprofit page I manage and its monthly organic reach has increased during the same period. That page has very high post engagement and very low negative feedback.

Working to increase post engagement may help you reach more fans in the news feed.

The type of content a page published also had an impact. Photo posts had the most negative effect, so if you post a lot of photos and have a low engagement rate, you’re probably suffering more than the average page.

Do Other Social Networks Offer Better Reach?

When the Facebook reach issue was ignited in December, many social marketers branded Facebook as a fraud and advised that it was time to move on to other social networks, Google+ being the lead contender. That emotional reaction was inherently wrong on all levels.

The most important flaw in that plan is that other social networks don’t provide any kind of reach metric. Only Facebook provides that data. When the other networks do provide analytics, they’re nothing close to the breadth of information Facebook gives page owners.

Most social marketers were upset about the pay-to-play aspect of Facebook’s new reach algorithm. They blamed it on Facebook being a publicly traded company and accused it of only being out for money.

Consider this: Do you think Google is acting as a nonprofit with no interest in monetizing you and your data? Google’s changes to its search algorithm (e.g., Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird) have been far more damaging to online businesses than Facebook’s reach tweaks. When a business’s free SEO ranking goes dark, in many cases they pay for AdWords to stay in front of their audience.
Facebook has one of the best targeting options for businesses. For some of us, leaving Facebook to rely solely upon Google AdWord’s targeting capabilities would be business suicide.

Don’t automatically discount Facebook from your social media mix. Image source: iStockPhoto.com.

Overall, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Twitter are different and complementary, not opposing alternatives to each other. Look at Facebook as a component of your strategy, not the whole thing.

If most of your audience is on Pinterest or Google+, focus more energy there, but why leave the place where the people you need to reach are spending all of their time?

Does Paying for Facebook Reach Give a Good Return on Investment?

For some, paying Facebook for exposure will become a necessity. Is this such a bad thing? Should you be concerned about the need to pay to increase your content visibility? Not necessarily.
Of course, some content doesn’t deserve to be paid for and some does. Paying to promote the right content in order to reach more people in your target audience (fans or not), can lead to a lot of conversions.

First, make a distinction between casual content and business-worthy content. Photos from your latest speaking gig, videos of fun things you do at the office and quick news updates about your niche are all relevant and good, but should you pay to get more exposure for them? Nah. Those posts don’t impact your bottom line.

When you post about fun stuff you do at the office, it’s not about reaching a big number of your fans.

But if you’re announcing a new product, new features, an ebook or webinar or other content you’ve spent hours on, isn’t it worth it to pay $30 or $50 to make sure your hard work is seen by 9,000 people instead of 1,000? Yes! Your time and specialized content are worth it. Why waste those efforts to save $30 or $50? That’s nonsense.

If you’re sharing the type of content you can track for short-term ROI (e.g., leads or revenue), isn’t it worth it to pay $100 or $150 to generate 300 or 400 hot qualified leads or 10 new subscribers with a lifetime value of $400? You bet! Actually, for this kind of content, I haven’t found a more affordable way to generate ROI with PPC, and I’ve tried a LOT of options.

When posting about a new product or feature that can generate new customers, it’s worth it to pay for more reach.

In the example below, the cost to acquire a new customer via sponsored posts was between $20 and $30, which is around 10% of our average revenue per customer. Pretty good return on investment as far as I’m concerned.

Paying for extended reach can result in higher ROI.

What Are the Best Tactics to Sustain Facebook Reach?

If you want to make the most of Facebook reach this year, I have a few ideas on how to do that. Posting relevant curated content or reposting your own evergreen content are great ways to encourage engagement (which translates to reach), especially when you post when your fans are on Facebook.
Posting more often and at different times of day are your best tactics to increase your overall reach and brand awareness. Pages that post at least three times a day get very high page reach metrics and much more brand awareness than pages that only post once a day or fewer.

In the example below, the page on the left has a pretty high post reach (24% of fans are reached for each post!). The page on the right has a much lower post reach. However, the page on the right posts several times a day while the one on the left only posts once a day. The overall page reach is much higher for the one on the right (93% of fans reached on a monthly basis versus 53%). Neither of these pages are using paid reach; it’s all organic.

Posting frequency affects your post and page reach.

Creating consistently great content is hard. If you’re relying on great content produced in-house to nurture your Facebook page, you need to change your approach.

Curation is the cheapest and most effective way to produce more high-quality, shareable content. There are plenty of experts in your industry, and they all invest a ton of time crafting great content. Have the right curation tools in place to help you spot content quickly and share the best of it on your page. Remember, the goal here is brand awareness. You’ll get that by sharing high-quality content for your audience to see.

Other types of content you can share are events like attending or speaking at a conference or even appearing on a TV or radio show. This kind of post takes less than five minutes to do—you just need to add them into your daily routine.

Sharing your special events gets your brand in front of fans and keeps them in the loop.

Sharing content doesn’t have to be a “go big or go home” scenario. Sharing quick nuggets of content along with your in-depth blog articles mixes things up and keeps it interesting.

Post a fun fact or an expert opinion or question about the latest news in your industry. When you find an interesting article that’s relevant to your niche, just hit Share and add a small introduction. This kind of content is super-easy to create and sustains brand awareness.

Share interesting content relevant to your fans for more engagement and reach.

Don’t forget your evergreen content! Once a week, plan to reshare your best and most costly pieces of content to get them in front of new fans.

Jon Loomer does this a lot and it’s one of his tricks that allows him to post 2 or 3 times daily. Here’s a post on Jon Loomer’s Facebook page published on February 9 about a blog post originally published on November 18. It’s still getting likes, shares and clicks!

Don’t waste your evergreen content; it deserves to be shared again and again.

While it can be frustrating when Facebook changes the rules of the game, you can still use the network to your advantage. Understanding how reach affects all reported data, choosing content wisely and paying to promote posts that can result in conversions can put you ahead in the end.
Compare your reach performance against the average and use the tips here to help you get better results.

What do you think? Have you noticed a dip in your Facebook reach? Do you have any tips to keep your posts front and center in the news feed? Let us know in the comments.