Giselle Bisson Visibility Shift

If you want to master Facebook — you need to think like an algorithm.

Social media shouldn’t be the only tool in your toolbox. It never was.

Though, if done right Facebook can still be the best way to promote my bread and butter clients — workshops, conferences and events.

Why?

Facebook is geographically and demographically hyper targeted. This is actually unprecedented in marketing.

Look at the competition:

Local newspapers: hyper local, but limited to the standard sections — World News, Business, Home/Garden, Lifestyle, Events, Sports.  Local newspapers are not suitable, for example, for advertising something that is demographically targeted to a niche market.

Local radio:  Hyper local, but you are limited by the number of hours in the day, and it’s hit or miss if someone is listening. And is anyone listening to local radio anymore, or are they on Pandora, podcasts or XM?

Billboards, taxi advertising: Hyper local, but not hyper targeted. (Unless reaching a specific neighborhood.)

Television: Only hyper local if you use community access or cable.

Email: Maybe hyper local and hyper targeted. Probably not, unless your list is built that way.

Twitter: This is where Twitter misses the boat on revenue. Its ads are just terrible at targeting by region. I hope Elon Musk fixes this.

What makes Facebook advertising perfect for event marketing is whenever you’re drawing people from a one hour radius from the venue, and you are targeting the fans of whomever is performing or presenting. 

Generally I post three times day for an event on their Fan page, and one time/day in the Event page. I make sure the posts tag back to the walls of the lineup/presenters. Then I engage them in conversations with THEIR fans.

This dramatically expands the viral reach.

I then weave in and out of my client’s page, my page/s and the fan/event page to further boost the Organic reach of the posts.

(Often far beyond Facebook’s paid reach.) 

Then we only pay to boost the posts that demonstrate the best engagement so they stick to the top of the fan’s feeds for 3 days. (Bargain!)

We then use this social proof of the stickiest/most engaged content to develop ads.

A recent client sold out a 2,200-seat arena this way. We used email lists, social media, street team/posters, print ads and local event listings.

We tracked sales to the ticketing page — very few came from print ads, some came from email, the majority came from Facebook.

You use email to build your Fan page. Then you use the Fan page to build the email.

They are not the same thing — email is not viral, it is not conversational and it is a silent community.

Facebook is an active, conversational community.

I think of email as just another social network, albeit one that has a really low rate of actually seeing/responding/opening your message and one that rarely distributes it beyond the email list. 

Email is dated — it is not the center of your marketing universe anymore and if it was, my clients would not include two major email marketers who sought me out to coach them on how to use social media.