Visit Aaron and Jessica’s website at www.amishbuggyrides.com

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Currently there are about 160,000,000 US Facebook accounts, but not all of these accounts are active. Some may be dummy accounts created for business accounts that require a personal account associated with it, as per Facebook’s requirements. This means at least half the country does not have a Facebook account. So how do you reach these people?

Traditional Media Can Reach People Missed on Facebook

As you can see in the PEW Research statistics on all Internet users who have a Facebook account, the Facebook audience skews toward younger people and women. So of the people missed on Facebook, the highest percentage of those missed are men and older people, which is a significant number of people being missed if you rely only on Facebook.

Internet Users With a Facebook Account

If your target audience is older men, Facebook may not be your best medium, while newspaper, certain radio formats and TV programs may be a better way to reach this demographic.

Traditional Media Can Reach Large Audiences Fast and Timely

Other advantages traditional media can offer are faster delivery of large audiences, timing of the message and more detailed and potentially impactful messages. An example of the need to reach a large audience quickly would be doing something like a three-day sale where you need to reach a large number of people in just a few days. If you are only using Facebook, in just a few days you may only reach a small portion of your Fans. Facebook’s strength is its ability to reach your best prospects over time. It may take you at least a week or two to reach the equivalent of your entire fan base. However, with traditional media, you can reach very large numbers of impressions very quickly depending on factors such as the number of ads you run each day on the radio, TV, or newspaper; the impact of a newspaper ad may vary based on factors such as where it is placed in the paper, color, and size.

Traditional Media Can Help Build Your Facebook Fan Base

Traditional media is also a great way to help build your Fan base on Facebook. Using your radio, TV, newspaper, billboard, or whatever media you choose, you can send people to your Facebook page. When you promote your Facebook page on other media, you should give people a reason to like you when they visit your page. A good way to do this is with sweepstakes or special discounts that can only be accessed when people like your page. This would require special third party programs to enable your Facebook page to hide and reveal pages based on whether or not the viewer has liked your page.

Traditional Media and Facebook Can Work Together

If you have been advertising for a while, you may remember hearing the term media mix. Over the past ten years or so, as the Internet and other new media has gained more acceptance, many people have forgotten about the importance of a media mix. There are a number of reasons why a media mix can be very important. First, keep in mind Facebook is more of a social media than an advertising media. As a social media, it enables you to develop top-of-mind awareness with your best potential customers in a very positive way. Use Facebook to increase top-of-mind awareness while your using traditional media to promote. Remember, even Facebook only reaches less than half of the population at best. And if you are targeting older men, the reach on Facebook just may not be enough. Another reason for having a media mix is for repetition. You may have heard the word reach and frequency used together when talking about two of the most important factors in advertising. Reach is the number of people who get your message. Frequency is the number of times they get it. It is obvious, the more often someone is exposed to your message, the more chance they will remember it and respond to it.

Since people use more than one media, the right media mix can help increase frequency and reach. An example may be something like this: You post something on Facebook in the morning. Some of your fans see it. Then they head to work and hear your ad on the radio in the car. You not only reached them twice, you reached them two different ways, potentially enhancing awareness. There are many ways traditional media can generate a synergy with Facebook depending on the media. Print media can use QR codes, or soon to come, Augmented Reality to connect print with Facebook, or any digital media. Radio or TV can tie on-air contests to your Facebook page.

Ultimately, few advertisers should try to rely solely on one media. While Facebook can yield impressive results all by itself, in most cases, whatever success you can get from Facebook can be significantly amplified with a well-designed mix between Facebook and traditional media.

The post Facebook Versus Traditional Mass Media, Part 2 appeared first on Aim Advertising, Lewisburg, PA.

The answer is yes!  When you understand the difference between fans on your Facebook page and people you reach with traditional media such as radio, newspaper or TV, it’s easy to understand how you can generate more sales with a smaller audience on Facebook than a larger audience on traditional mass media.  The difference is a high percentage of your fans on Facebook are already predisposed to do business with you, while a smaller percentage of people reached with traditional mass media will not have that same interest.

Imagine you are selling furniture.  When you build a “fan base” it is likely most of your Fans will be people who like your store.  But when you advertise in a newspaper, you are probably paying to reach many people who may not like your store.  Which is better, 100% of 1,000 people that like your business or 2% of 20,000 people that may like your business?

In addition to the ability of focusing on your best potential customers, Facebook gives you the ability to interact and bond with your fan base, even if you have not yet done business with them.  With traditional mass media, you have no way of directly interacting with the audience.  The ability to directly interact with your fans also gives you unprecedented control over the loyalty with your customer base and the way your customers think about your business.

Now, let’s compare how you actually reach your audience on Facebook and how you reach an audience on traditional media.  With Facebook, you reach your audience with what are called posts.  With traditional media you reach your audience with spots or print ads. The number of people reached with spots and print ads is limited to the size of the audience of that media.  You cannot change that. But with Facebook, a well timed and researched post can expand your audience by many times the number of fans on your page.  This is due to the viral effect that is inherent to social media.  With traditional media, the closest thing to creating a viral effect is creating word of mouth.  This is very difficult to achieve on any regular basis with traditional mass media.

Here is how the viral effect works.  When you create a post that your fans either like, comment on, or share, their friends will see it.  If your fans each have an average of 200 friends, and you get 20 of them to share your post, the 4,000 friends of those fans will see your post.  So, even though you only have 1,000 fans, 4,000 people see your post.  And it is likely the friends of your fans are likeminded and could become fans of your Facebook page.

Now, let’s talk about cost.  In general the cost of traditional media is based on a ratio of the number of people reached per dollar.  Typically a media such as radio costs anywhere from $8.00 to $20.00 per thousand people reached.  In a market such as Harrisburg, you can buy ads on one of the top stations for around $10.00 per thousand depending on the size of the ad schedule, and time of day the ads run.  This station may have an average of 6,000 people listening when your ad runs.  Therefore, at a cost of $10 per thousand an ad would cost $60.  To reach 20,000 impressions you would need to run 3.33 ads costing $200.  But if you have a fan base of 1,000 people with an average of 200 friends each, and create a post that gets 20 shares, you will get 4,000 impressions.  To get 20,000 impressions, you would need to create four posts that get 20 shares each.

The difference is there is no charge for the use of Facebook.  But depending on how you value your time, the cost of creating the posts can vary. But perhaps more significant, the 20,000 impressions created with Facebook is comprised of a much better qualified audience because it is leveraged off your fan base, compared to a more general audience on radio.

In our next installment on Facebook Versus Traditional Mass media, we will talk about the advantages of a media mix employing traditional mass media, Facebook and other digital media.

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Larry’s is located on 34 Chestnut Street in Mifflinburg and 44 North Derr Drive in Lewisburg. Visit their new website at www.larrys-pizza.com.

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Visit their new site at kingfloor.net

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Aim Advertising proudly announces another website launch in February 2013, for Susquehanna Fire Equipment Company in Dewart, Pennsylvania!

Susquehanna Fire Equipment Company provides the most innovative and advanced fire, safety and suppression equipment and services available today to protect lives and property. Visit their new website at www.susquehannafire.com

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Edge Rank

Your Edge Rank determines how much of your stuff your Fans see. Facebook created this to figure out exactly what you, the user, is truly interested in. If you are interacting with a brand or person on a regular basis, they will show you more of their posts in your stream than they will from brands and people you don’t interact with a lot. If you do not get your Fans to interact for a while, you may drop off their Newsfeed. So, as you can see, it is important to interact.

This post not only received 79 likes and 70 comments, but generated 3,583 impressions

Likes, Comments, and Shares

In order of importance it is

1. Shares
2. Comments
3. Likes

In terms of Edge Rank, I do not know how they weigh these, but I know when you get a lot of shares, the number of people that see your post is significantly more than if you got few shares and mostly comments. We have also observed posts with many comments do much better then posts with few comments and many likes.

Good Engagement Strategies

Pictures are the best way to initiate engagement. Find pictures that will be fun or interesting to your Fans. Ask them to engage with questions. Quizzes can be popular. Ask people to Caption funny pictures. Just show a funny heading with a funny picture, and depending on your audience, if the picture hits a chord, it could start a lot of interaction. Videos are also a great way to engage, but always make sure you include text with the link to the video.

Timing is very important. If you post something too early for your audience and a bunch of other posts come in after yours, there is a good chance your post will be too far down the Newsfeed to be seen. So you need to test posts to get an idea of what times work best for your audience.

We have been able to get the equivalent of three to four times the number Fans on the page seeing some of our posts. So with only 1,000 fans, our client was getting three to four thousand people seeing the post.

Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights gives you an easy way to see how many people are seeing your posts, how many are talking about it, how viral it is, and how many users are engaged.

Traditional Media Compared to Facebook

It’s not uncommon for local businesses in small markets to get more fans on their Facebook page than they can reach with a local radio spot. Then, when you compare the quality of the audiences, pretty much all of the Facebook audience is potentially a customer, while only a small percentage of radio listeners would be customers. As I had mentioned, if you get 3,000 to 4,000 impressions on some posts for a client with just 1,000 Facebook fans that is comparable to an average audience of one of the top local radio stations in a market. At that point you are reaching three or four times more people with Facebook than you could reach with a radio spot.

So start building Top of Mind Awareness today with Facebook.

The post How Do You Sell on Facebook? You Don’t. Part 2 appeared first on Aim Advertising, Lewisburg, PA.

But the question I get all the time is how do you sell on Facebook. The answer is a counter intuitive, “you don’t sell to them,” you build awareness and bond with them. So, how does that make money for my business? I’m asked. The answer is by building market share and loyalty.

If you don’t know how increasing market share and loyalty to your business makes you money, you may need to refer back to the article called Converting Advertising Strategies from the 1900’s to the 2000’s that I posted about a year ago on our adtalk101 blog. But something has changed since then. The change was an additional 500 million Facebook users.

Increase TOMA

About 25 years ago, everyone knew about increasing Top of Mind Awareness (TOMA). All of the media were promoting it. Back then it made sense, and really worked. But over the past 20 years, media rates soared while audiences shrunk, making it inefficient to build TOMA with traditional media. In addition, the economy has made investing in a long-term strategy such as building TOMA even more difficult.

However, over the past few years, many companies like ours, along with some progressive advertisers, are finding Facebook to be the most exciting and powerful TOMA building tool ever, and it’s free! Well . . . let’s say, affordable. In fact, if you don’t have money, but have the time and discipline, you can make Facebook work for you.

Building “Likes”

The two things you need to do once you create your Facebook Business page are build your audience by getting “Likes.” Then you need to keep your name in front of your audience, and if you are good at working your page, get your audience to help find more potential customers and keep you in front of the most people. Today we are going to focus on how to build “Likes.” In the next article we’ll talk about how to build TOMA and loyalty.

There are many ways to build “Likes” or what we sometimes call Fans. When you first launch your page, a good way to start is to dump into Facebook all the emails you can get of people who may be interested in your business, and have Facebook invite them to “Like” your page. What is great about this system is Facebook invites them, you don’t. These emails could be from your email-marketing list or your address book. There is a limit of 5,000 emails that FB will invite. What FB does is match the emails to people who have accounts on Facebook. Then Facebook contacts them on their pages and invites them for you.

The next thing you should typically do if you have a website is make sure there is a link back to your Facebook page inviting people to “Like” you. Then, any advertising you are doing anywhere, especially on in-store signage, should ask people to “Like” you on Facebook. Other things you can do to build “Likes” are to post invitations on other Facebook Walls. Look for FB pages with Fans that may be interested in your business too. An example may be if you have a business that attracts tourists, you would post on the Wall of your local visitor’s bureau FB page something about your site that may attract interest. Look for sites to post on with as many Fans as possible. Some businesses may not let you post on their FB page.

How fast will your “Likes” grow? It depends on how many people are visiting your web site, or see your ads, and/or in-store signs. It also depends on how many other sites with Walls you can post on, and of course the type of people who are Fans of those sites. Other than buying ads or giving something away, the only other way to push the growth of your Fan base is to make really popular posts that get lots of interaction. As I mentioned, we’ll talk about that in our next blog.

If you want to push growth a little faster, you can run a sweepstakes, where you give something away when people sign up on your FB page to win. This involves a little more advanced knowledge of how to work Facebook, and would probably involve using an Advanced Programming Interface (API) program to create a special page that reveals the registration, only if they “Like” your page. The same thing could be accomplished with a special offer available, only when they “Like” your page.

If you want to really push the growth of your fan base you can buy advertising on Facebook with sponsored ads. There are two basic types of sponsored ads. The ones you see in the right banner along your Newsfeed, and the ones you see in your news feed that say one of your friends “Like” your page or business, which are called Sponsored Stories. They both cost about the same.

Now that we’ve discussed growing your audience, watch for our next blog focusing on the real power of Facebook, keeping your brand in front of your fans and building loyalty.

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Hawkins Collision Center

Aim Advertising announces the arrival of a new website to the internet: hawkinscollision.com! Hawkins Collision Center has two locations, Danville and Sunbury, to serve the community better. The site features an email form where customers can schedule an appointment on-line.

For more information, visit the site at hawkinscollision.com.

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