Facebook Ads Manager Updates: What Marketers Need to Know

Do you use Facebook's Ads Manager to create ads?

Have you noticed the recent changes?

In this article, you'll discover how to navigate the updated Facebook Ads Manager and leverage its new features.

Discover new updates to Facebook Ads Manager and what marketers need to know to leverage its features.

When you first go to your Ad Accounts page, you'll see a list of your ad accounts. If you use Business Manager and also have ad accounts outside of it, you'll see a link for both types of accounts.

Your accounts are listed on your Ad Accounts page.

One interesting part about Ads Manager is that even if you're not using Business Manager, you'll receive notifications for only your Facebook pages while inside Ads Manager. These are referred to as Business Notifications.

The new layout can help you stay focused.

This will help keep you focused on your work instead of being interrupted by personal notifications from your profile.

When you click through to a specific ad account, you'll get an overview of the insights from your latest Facebook ad campaigns. You can click on a specific campaign to see more detailed insights for it or toggle campaigns on and off.

Gain valuable insights for each account.

You can use the three buttons on the right side of the table header to add or remove columns of data, break down data, and export data.

You can expand, export, and even break down data.

Use the three buttons at the top right of the screen to search, filter, or change the date range to view specific campaigns.

View data and date ranges for specific campaigns.

The button to the left of your account name has options to save the view as a report that can be emailed to you regularly, as well as monitor your ad campaign performance.

Save views and have them automatically emailed to you.

When you're ready to access other areas of your Ads Manager, click on the three lines next to Ads Manager, and if applicable, hover over All Tools. This will display all of your Ads Manager features.

Hover your mouse over each tool to learn more about how it works.

Note: Some of these options may not be available if you're not a Business Manager user.

If it's been some time since you've been in Facebook Ads Manager and you're interested in running remarketing/retargeting ads (ads to people who have visited your website), click on the Pixels link under Assets in the Ads Manager menu. If you see the image below, click Create a Pixel to start using the new Facebook pixel.

Setting up the new Facebook pixel.

You can learn more about how it tracks your conversions here. But basically, after you click the button, give your pixel a name.

The pixel tracks your conversions.

You're given the option to install the code yourself or email it to someone else who can install it on your website for you.

You can install the code instantly or email it to another person who can install it later.

Once installed and activated, you should see a green light, and eventually some traffic gathering through your pixel code.

A green light means the pixel is working correctly.

You can then click the Create Conversion button to configure Facebook to recognize when specific conversions happen on your website.

For example, when someone submits a lead form, you can tell Facebook that the lead conversion happens when a visitor lands on the thank-you page for your lead form.

The Facebook pixel can be customized with triggers to let you know about specific conversions.

You can also create custom audiences for your remarketing/retargeting ads based on whether someone has visited any page, a specific page, or one page but not another on your website.

For example, did people go to your lead form page, but not to your thank-you page to complete the lead conversion? You might want to advertise to them and try to get that conversion.

Audiences can vary in the types of actions they take.

The same could apply to a retailer whose visitors may have viewed a product or put it in their shopping cart, but didn't purchase it. Or visitors to a squeeze page who didn't convert into subscribers.

Speaking of custom audiences, if you click on the Audiences link under Assets in the Ads Manager menu, you may find that you have a new option besides the traditional Customer List, Website Traffic, and App Activity.

Create a custom audience.

Choose the new Engagement on Facebook option to create custom audiences based on how long people have engaged with video content you posted to your Facebook page.

You can measure audiences based on the amount of time they spend with your live or recorded videos.

Once you choose the length or percentage of engagement, you can choose one or more videos. These include live or recorded videos.

Live or recorded videos should now display.

Then you can name your audience and save it.

Add a description to your audience name.

Like any other custom audience, your new custom audience must reach at least 20 people to be used for ad targeting.

When you're ready to create an ad, click the green Create an Ad button throughout Ads Manager. Here, you might notice a few changes.

Choose an objective for your ad.

For starters, you can hover over each marketing objective to learn more about it.

Hover your mouse over each campaign type to learn more about it.

You can click on the link near the top right to create an ad for an existing ad campaign. This is useful if you want to create multiple ad variations for A/B testing in a particular ad campaign, or if you want to use a different image for each ad placement in the same ad campaign.

Enter a campaign name.

You might also find that for certain objectives, the ad creation process has changed. For example, if you choose to send people to your website or increase conversions on your website, you'll choose your website and your conversion pixel later in the process.

Now choosing your website and conversion pixel happens later in the process.

If you're starting a new ad campaign, choose your marketing objective and give it a name. When you click Continue, you'll define your ad audience.

Define whom you want to see your ads.

The audience targeting is still pretty standard. You can click the drop-down list next to New Audiences if you have saved audiences (audiences that you've defined previously).

Choose a new audience or select from your saved audiences.

You can select custom audiences to include or exclude.

You can choose to include or exclude custom audiences.

You can specify where people live or when they visit a specific location.

Locations help you pinpoint where your audience is physically.

And you can choose from hundreds of different demographics, interests, and behaviors.

From here, you can apply further audience demographics.

All the while, you can monitor your bar to see if your audience is too broad or too specific for your needs.

Too broad or too specific, the Audience Definition Bar provides a quick assessment.

Next, you'll choose your placements. Note: You can still select or deselect specific placements later in the process when designing your ad creatives.

Define where you would like your ads to appear.

At this point, configure your budget and schedule, and name your ad set if you plan to reuse it in the future.

Giving your ad set a name makes it available to use again.

From here, you'll design your ad, starting with your media.

Select media, text, and links to create one or multiple ads.

Enter the basic website URL, headline, description, and call to action.

Enter text that clearly tells people what you're promoting.

This step is followed by the Advanced Options, which you use to configure your your Instagram account, news feed description, display link, conversion pixel, and sponsor (if you have a verified page and are promoting branded content).

Advanced Options help you configure your connected Instagram account.

Once you're finished, review your order to see your overall settings and then submit it for review.

Check all of your ad settings before submitting it for review.

Once your ad is approved, you have the option to create a similar ad.

Once approved, creating a similar ad is easy.

The similar ad will fall under the same ad campaign and ad set, allowing you to test different headlines, descriptions, images, and so on.

Test different headlines, images, and descriptions.

Or you can continue to your Ads Manager dashboard and review the progress of your campaigns and ads. You can also create similar ads from your dashboard by clicking down to your ad and selecting the Create Similar Ad option.

Your dashboard also allows you to create similar ads.

Should you choose to create multiple ads for your campaign, be sure to monitor ad performance so you can focus your budget on the ones that perform best, and drill down to each ad's insights.

Monitor each ad for performance.

This is where having the pixel conversion tracking code is essential, as you'll be able to see within Facebook which ad is actually driving conversions.

View ad performance and conversions from within Facebook.

If you have a lot of ads with the same photo, it may help to click on them to see which ad text specifically is or isn't working.

Ads with the same picture can be analyzed by which ad text performs better.

Note: You can click on your Instagram or Facebook post after it has stopped running to see how it performed down the road in terms of likes and comments. To do this, click the See Post and See Instagram Post links under each ad.

For example, this is an ad that ran last year. While there weren't any useful comments, it was good to know there were so many likes.

When your campaign finishes, you can always go to the Instagram post or Facebook ad itself.

In Conclusion

While it might take a while to get used to Facebook changes, sometimes those changes can be for the better, as they lead to new updates and features. Hopefully, you'll get used to the new Ads Manager and find things like custom audiences built on video engagement helpful in your ad campaigns!

What do you think? Are you using the new Ads Manager in Facebook? Let us know what you think of its latest layout and features in the comments below!

Tips on what marketers need to know about leveraging the new updates to Facebook Ads Manager.

View the original article here

Original source: Facebook Ads Manager Updates: What Marketers Need to Know.
http://www.jretechnology.com

Launch Strategy: A Case Study in How to Move People to Action

Are you planning to release a book, podcast, or other product?

Want to make your launch a success?

To discover how he launched his latest bestselling book, I interview Michael Hyatt.

The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Michael Hyatt, author of Platform and co-author of the new book, Living Forward. He's also the host of the This Is Your Life podcast and he blogs at MichaelHyatt.com. In his prior life, Michael was the CEO and chairman of book publisher Thomas Nelson.

Michael explores how he launched his latest Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller, Living Forward: A Proven Plan to Stop Drifting and Get the Life You Want.

You'll discover how to create a launch plan for any project.

Listen as Michael Hyatt shares what marketers need to know about project launch and how to move people to act.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.

Listen now: Play in new window | Download

You can also subscribe via iTunes, RSS, Stitcher or SoundCloud.

Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:

Why write a physical book in the digital age?

Michael has Living Forward available as an audio book, an ebook, and a print book. Since everyone talks about digital books, you'd think physical books are obsolete, Michael says. The truth is ebooks are only 25% of the market; the other 75% are physical books. Publishing only in digital format would mean missing the vast majority of the potential market.

Furthermore, as of now, you don't really have a chance to reach any of the major bestsellers lists unless you publish a traditional book, he adds. The New York Times has an ebook bestsellers list, but those are really only for digital editions of physical books. You also don't have much chance of getting any major media unless you publish a physical book, because most of the gatekeepers in traditional media want to see a print book.

The ebooks on The New York Times Best Sellers list tend to be digital editions of physical books.

Finally, an ebook doesn't have the same cultural authority as a traditional hardcover book. There are a lot of reasons to write a book, but Michael doesn't know of anything that can give you more authority in your niche than having a published book. An ebook is better than nothing, but it's not as good as a traditionally published hardcover book, he says.

There are other benefits to being a bestselling author. If you're a speaker, you can be introduced with that moniker. It also enables you to increase the prices of whatever you're selling and helps with distribution.

There's a limited amount of shelf space in conventional bookstores. They are risk-averse in what they order, because they get stuck with books they can't sell. Even though they can return unsold books to the publisher, it's just a hassle, he says. Once your book gets on the bestsellers list, the retailers that didn't initially order your book have to have it all of a sudden.

Listen to the show to learn more about Michael's 35-year background in publishing.

About Living Forward

Michael says Living Forward is about creating a life plan. Michael wanted to help people stop drifting through life, become intentional, and start designing the outcomes they want. He learned these things when he started working with an executive coach around 2000.

Living Forward by Michael Hyatt and Daniel Harkavy.

After he became a divisional manager at Thomas Nelson, Michael and his team were working like crazy to build up the division. They got to number one in 18 months, but the cost was life balance. When Michael told his friend, author John Maxwell, that he was looking for a coach, John introduced him to Daniel Harkavy, the CEO of Building Champions. Daniel became his coach for a decade, as well as a good friend. One of the first things Daniel taught Michael was how to create a written life plan.

His life plan was so transformational that Michael began to write about it on his blog. A while later, he and Daniel decided to just write a book together. They wanted to help people create an extraordinary life.

The creative process took much longer than it should, Michael explains. The book was published March 1, 2016, even though they started working on it in the summer of 2014.

Michael wrote the first draft of the manuscript in 30 days up in the mountains in Colorado. After that, figuring out their collective voice was a bit of a creative challenge, but they did it.

Listen to the show to discover why Michael considered self-publishing and then decided against it.

Pre-launch

Nine months before the book launched, Michael started involving his tribe. For instance, he came up with some titles, put them on Facebook and his blog, and asked people to vote.

Another instance is when they narrowed the book cover selection to two. Half of the team liked each one, and Michael was ambivalent, so they shared it. They got extraordinary input, but more importantly they got buy-in from their tribe.

Michael got input on the book cover from his tribe.

Three weeks before the book officially launched, they began sharing pre-launch videos. They followed Jeff Walker's Product Launch Formula. The basic idea is to do a series of videos where you present real, compelling, helpful content. You do this to build trust, so when you ask people to buy the product, they already have a relationship with you.

They created videos around the three questions the book covers:

How do you want to be remembered?What's important to you?How do you get from where you are to where you want to be?

The videos incorporated Michael and Daniel talking, along with B-roll footage (voiceover on top of video representing what they're discussing). People had to share their email address to watch the videos. They had around 40,000 people opt in.

When I asked about the goals of the pre-launch video sequence, Michael explained they were trying to build excitement about the book and also attract people they could convert into buyers.

They also created a life-planning assessment as an opt-in. People love to take tests, like Myers & Briggs, the DISC test, or StrengthsFinder, Michael says. They created this assessment to enable people to figure out where they are in the various categories of life with the idea of surfacing why they needed a life plan.

The life plan assessment was another opt-in.

It's all building towards driving sales during launch week, Michael continues. The way the bestsellers lists work is they measure what sells from Sunday through Saturday at midnight. The book that has the highest number of sales during that one-week period is theoretically number one in its category.

Listen to the show to hear why they used Facebook ads and on what content.

Book order bonuses

The reason to offer bonuses is to drive up the pre-orders on Amazon, since other retailers and the media look at how books rank on Amazon, Michael explains. Even Amazon looks at it for how many books to order.

Anyone who pre-ordered Living Forward could go to the website, enter the receipt number and their email address, and get the download link for the bonuses. They had five: a free copy of the audio book, a ticket to a live event, a detailed action guide, Living Forward Quickstart Audio Training, and a complete library of the planning templates.

Michael admits putting together the bonuses was a lot of work. However, the cool thing about it was they were all organically related to the topic and beautifully designed. They approached it like they were selling a $1,000 course with a beautiful sales page with testimonials and endorsements.

They didn't validate whether there was a receipt there, Michael shares. Although they went back and spot-checked, they couldn't find a single occurrence of someone taking the bonuses without pre-ordering, and that was with almost 20,000 people taking advantage of the offer.

Create organic bonus content for people who pre-order your book.

Another aspect to the launch, Michael adds, was their pre-launch team. They invited people to apply to join (3,500 people applied) and they accepted 500. Members of the team got a complimentary physical review copy, exclusive access to a private Facebook group with Michael and Daniel, and a group phone session, where the authors shared a behind-the-scenes look into the launch.

In exchange, the team had to agree to read the book as soon as they got it, provide feedback and engage with the authors via Facebook or email, write a brief book review (pro or con) on Amazon or another retailer's site, and help spread the word about the book.

Listen to the show to learn the mistake people make when compiling bonus content.

Endorsements

Endorsements are important for any kind of product, whether it's an online course, a membership site, or a book.

The difference between an endorsement and a testimonial is endorsements are typically from famous people everybody knows, famous people in your niche, or non-famous people who have important jobs and important-sounding titles. They provide third-party validation and social authority, and make it easier for customers and gatekeepers to say yes.

Michael and Daniel reached out to about 60 people they knew to request endorsements, and 53 of them agreed. These people included Tony Robbins, David Allen, Dave Ramsey, John Maxwell, Seth Godin, and me.

Michael and Daniel sent out 60 requests for endorsements and got back 53.

Then make a dream prospect list. Decide whom you would love to endorse your product, and then reach out to them. Don't send all of your request emails at once, Michael suggests. Instead, send out two or three emails to people you're pretty sure will agree to endorse you. Then, when you send out the rest of your requests, include those endorsements.

One more thing, Michael adds. Just ask for the endorsement. Don't beat around the bush.

Finally, provide guidance (such as length of endorsement) and samples, and give them a really tight deadline. Although these people are really busy, Michael tells them they have 10 days. Sometimes they will ask for an extension, but the biggest names do it really quickly.

Michael did not have his assistant send the requests. He did it personally. "It's much easier to say no to my assistant than to me," he says.

Provide guidance, samples, and a deadline with your endorsement requests. Image: Shutterstock.

Then after the book came out, Michael FedExed those who endorsed it a copy of with a handwritten note, instead of a "Dear Friend" letter that comes with the book from the publisher.

About a month later, Michael asked those who endorsed the book to help him get the word out. To make it easy, they created an entire page with images for social media, tweets, Facebook posts, etc., that others could use to introduce the book to their tribes.

Listen to the show to discover why relationships are important when it comes to endorsements, as well as where to put the endorsements.

Launch week activities

Since the bestsellers lists measure sales during the first week a book comes out, launch week activities are important.

They produced their big launch event in Nashville like they would a TV show. It had a custom backdrop, five cameras, and live-streaming to the web. There were 1,000 people physically at the event. While the event was free for most, 200 people bought a ticket to the pre-event reception (which paid for the party). These people got an autographed book and had their picture taken with the authors.

After the reception, Michael and Daniel got on stage and taught for an hour. They made a printable workbook for all attendees, and brought in a local retailer to sell books so they could do another book-signing. There was also an after-party for their teams and some of the local media. The evening was about four hours start to finish.

While this type of event was new to Michael, his Chief Marketing Officer Chad Cannon (also from Thomas Nelson) had done tons of these with other authors. It went off without a hitch.

This celebration definitely had a marketing side to it. There were 20,000 people who watched the live broadcast and another 20,000 who watched the replay. It was all about generating excitement. The call to action was to buy the book. People who bought it during the launch event got another set of bonuses.

They produced a 1,000-person event for the Living Forward launch.

For book-launch week, Michael, who chooses his speaking engagements strategically, did four events, including Chalene Johnson's Smart Success Live, an event for a big company, and a live webinar three times in one day. Webinars are one of his best marketing tools, he adds. They had 12,000 people register for the webinar.

When I ask about the benefits of all of this work, Michael says he's trying to grow his audience. People may not buy one of his $500 courses or join Platform University, but they'll buy a book because it's just going to be $15 to $20. It's a low-threshold entry point. Michael says he knows once he can get someone onto his mailing list, he can begin to build a relationship. He knows the lifetime value of his customers.

With this campaign, they added almost 100,000 new email subscribers. To Michael that's gold, because he knows he can convert them into paying customers for other products.

Michael constantly strives to grow his email subscribers.

These techniques (webinars, videos, and endorsements) can be used for any launch. It's become a template they use, Michael says. They keep adding to it, enhancing it, and learning from it. It's a lot of work to write a book, so why would you not promote it? A lot of authors spend all this time writing a book, and then they just throw the book against the wall and hope it sticks. If it doesn't, they go on to the next thing.

Although Michael's goal was to get Living Forward on The New York Times Best Sellers List, it didn't happen. They sold 20,000 books in the first week, and even though it was the third bestselling book in the country, The New York Times didn't include it on their list. That happens to authors a lot, especially now, Michael explains.

However, if he hadn't aimed for the NYT list, he wouldn't have hit the Wall Street Journal and the USA Today bestselling books lists.

Listen to the show to learn about the additional bonus they threw in during launch week and why they did it.

Copied is a full-featured clipboard manager that saves you a ton of time if you have content on your phone that you need to work with on your laptop (or vice versa).

Copied automatically captures and saves the things you copy, whether it's a URL, an image, or a paragraph of text, onto your clipboard and syncs them via iCloud. That way, you can use them on all devices.

The Copied app allows you see what you've copied on all Mac devices.

Most of the time if you have something on your computer that you want to put on your phone, you need to text it or email it to yourself. Plus, sometimes you want to copy a few different things and not go back and forth among different tabs. This keeps everything in one place.

You can create rules so only things copied from certain apps get saved. For instance, you can tell it not to save copied passwords from your password manager.

Copied is Mac- and iOS-based. The Mac app is $7.99 and the iOS app is free.

Listen to the show to learn more and let us know how the Copied app works for you.

Listen to the show!

Ways to subscribe to the Social Media Marketing podcast:

What do you think? What are your thoughts on launching products? Please leave your comments below.

Michael Hyatt talks with Michael Stelzner about how to create a launch plan for any project.

View the original article here

Original source: Launch Strategy: A Case Study in How to Move People to Action.
http://www.jretechnology.com

How to Help Your Staff to Curate Content

Is third-party content part of your social media marketing mix?

Do you have multiple people in your company who discover content?

With the right process, a team can become a content-curation powerhouse.

In this article, you'll discover how to set up a collaborative workflow for content curation.

Discover how to help your employees to curate content.

Collaboration starts with structure. It's vital to establish clear roles and communicate exactly who's responsible for what. Two roles are needed: a coordinator and a group of contributors.

Coordinator

The coordinator's job is to identify major topics that your target audience cares about, and to make a master list of how all of these topics can be grouped together.

For example:

LeadershipSocial media marketingOnline marketingEmail marketingLanding pagesConversion rate optimizationProduct developmentPricing strategiesIndustry newsFun stuff

Next, match these topics to the contributors in your company so that they collect and submit content they naturally run into.

Choose contributors from the departments who can best deliver the content you're looking for. Image: Shutterstock.

Contributors

Contributors help you generate a diverse flow of all things sharable. As you assemble contributors, remember to look beyond your social media or marketing team. Accessing more cross-discipline sources means you'll have more content to choose from.

What matters is quantity, creating what Andy Crestodina calls a "content cannon." Ask specific people for specific amounts of content on designated topics within set timeframes.

Hi Tim,

The last optimization report you researched turned out great. In fact, I'd love to share many of the helpful resources you found while putting it together on our social channels.

The next time you come across something like [article], please send it to me on [collection tool].

Even better, since I know you work on projects like that regularly, please provide me with three posts and an infographic along those same lines by next Friday.

Thanks,

Aaron

This specificity is crucial in the next step.

The content your contributors suggest will come in all shapes and sizes: long-form blog posts, short-form posts, quotes, infographics, charts, stats, case studies, slide decks, videos, white papers, and more.

For collaborative social media, it's essential to find a tool that allows you to gather and schedule content. Here are some tools to consider for collecting content.

Slack

Slack allows you to create topic-specific channels such as #leadership, #product-dev, #customer-service, etc. As you create each channel, invite specific contributors based on the types of content they naturally come across.

By creating topic-specific channels, collaborators can share their content suggestions on Slack.

With Slack, you can even create custom emoji reactions to note which channels you plan to share the content on.

Slack lets you respond to content suggestions with emojis that represent specific social channels.

Trello

Use Trello to build a social media collaboration board. You can organize your contributors' suggestions based on the type of content.

Organize your social media collaboration board on Trello using various content types.

Or organize your contributors' suggestions based on topics.

Alternatively, you can organize your social media collaboration board on Trello using topics.

Memit

Memit brings together the clipping and collecting abilities of tools like Evernote and Pocket and will allow multiple users to contribute directly to topical collections.

In addition to saving links, you can save contributions directly to your preferred cloud platform. This represents a great two-for-one feature. It allows you to maximize not only social content curation, but also internal curation of useful resources.

Memit lets you organize content suggestions into topic-specific collections.

As the coordinator, you can select and share content directly to platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. Metrics are also tracked.

Memit also lets you share content suggestions directly from within the application.

Regardless of the tool you select, be sure you can create multiple, manageable collections for each topic and invite contributors to the specific collections.

It's important that the content you share on social media stands out. For this, your selection process needs some criteria. Here are three factors to help you comb through the curated content to select strong, relevant content to share.

Voice

Your company's voice is a lifeline to your online identity. Shared content should align your voice with your company's values, morals, and mission statement. Be sure what you write reflects your voice, whether it's playful, inventive, conversational, or formal. In other words, don't be indiscriminate with what you actually share.

Make sure your post reflects your voice.

Tip: Use a quantity mentality when you structure and collect content; focus on quality when you post content.

Value

When sharing content, quality trumps quantity. Before you click Publish, Queue, or Share, ask yourself a few questions to make sure the content has value for your audience. Would your network thank you for this post? Does the post make you say "Holy smoke"? Does it pass the Facebook test of what the real people in your life would love? Would you email it to a friend?

If the content you've reviewed passes those tests, don't simply share it. The real value of curation comes when you comment on the content, highlight takeaways, and even repurpose key lessons in visuals.

Jacqueline Jensen does this frequently on her Twitter feed. She creates simple visual representations of complex posts using Piktochart.

Don't just share default titles on social; add value by creating your own custom image or summary.

Humanity

The ultimate goal of social media management (just like everything else you do) is sales. But don't let bottom-line thinking cloud your selection process. Social media is meant to be human. And this is precisely why it's vital to develop a collaborative approach to selecting content to share.

Sharing other people's content on social media helps you appear less self-absorbed. A great rule of thumb is to use the 5:3:2 ratio for posting content. Simply put, if you post 10 times per week, 5 should be other people's content, 3 should be your content, and 2 should simply be fun and personal.

Having a large pool of shareable content will help immensely in the selection process. Bear in mind that relevancy trumps recency; newer isn't necessarily better. This means that being a high-quality source of social curation is essential to becoming both trustworthy and follow-worthy.

All of the content gold that you and your team unearth holds no value if you don't plan out your sharing schedule. Here are some general posting guidelines to get you started:

Facebook: Post two times per day, seven days a week, roughly between 1-4 pm or at 10:08 am and 3:04 pm (to be exact). Prioritize business-related posts for Thursday and Friday and save the weekends for personal and fun updates.

Consider posting two times per day on Facebook.

Twitter: Post 14 times per weekday and seven times per day on weekends. Schedule the bulk of your posts for early to mid-afternoon (12-3 pm) and experiment with outlier times like early morning and late evening. According to CoSchedule, B2B performs "16% better during business hours," and B2C performs "17% better on weekends."

LinkedIn: Post once per day, midweek focused, between 7:30 and 8:30 am and/or 5 and 6 pm. No weekends.

Google+: Post two times per day, 9:03 am and 7:04 pm. No weekends.

The big caveat, though, is that while best practices should be your starting point, tracking engagement and experimenting with posting times are essential to determine the best times for your specific audience.

The best curated content in the world is worthless if you don't take the time to optimize your posting schedule for maximum exposure to your target audience.

Conclusion

Every day, people all across your company (from marketing, to product development, to sales, to customer service) discover a treasure trove of sharable, click-worthy content. Use the processes outlined above to take advantage of all of the wonderful content the people in your company come across daily, and you'll soon have a never-ending source of quality content to share on social media.

What do you think? Does your business use a content curation structure? Have you tried any of these tools? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Tips on how to help your team contribute to content curation.

View the original article here

Original source: How to Help Your Staff to Curate Content.
http://www.jretechnology.com

How to Cross Promote Your Social Profiles With Facebook

By Andrea Vahl
Published May 18, 2015

Are you active on multiple social platforms?

Are you using your Facebook page to grow followings on other platforms?

Promoting links to all your social profiles on Facebook lets your fans know where else they can find you.

In this article you'll discover six ways to promote your social profiles on your Facebook page.

Discover how to cross promote your social profiles with Facebook.

You can add links to social sites in the About section of your Facebook page. Add them to any part of your description where they fit.

If you include a link in your short description, it shows up in the About area of your main Facebook timeline.

On the EasyLunchboxes page, special arrow characters highlight the social links. If you want to use these characters in your About section, just copy and paste them from another site.

Add links to social sites in the About section.

Your cover photo description is one of the most underutilized places for text and links. When someone clicks on your cover photo, they see the full description of the photo, so you can add anything there you want to promote.

List your social sites links in the description area of your cover photo.

While this may not bring you hundreds of new followers on all of your social profiles, it's such a quick and painless edit, why wouldn't you take 10 seconds to do a little cross-promotion?

Adding a Facebook app to your page, also known as a tab, can be a great way to show visitors your other social media profiles. Third parties (not Facebook) develop these apps and they all work slightly differently.

Here are some of the apps that easily bring in your other social accounts to your Facebook page:

There are many more apps that can also help you with adding a custom tab to your page.

Your apps can also appear in the left sidebar of your timeline, and you can customize the thumbnail so it matches your branding.

The top three apps on your page appear in the left sidebar and can have custom thumbnails.

One of the benefits of adding your social site links to your page is that people can easily follow you from the tab and see your activity.

The first app listed also appears just under your cover photo.

Your social tabs are automatically updated with your latest posts.

Remember that mobile users can't see your tabs on their phones, so if you include a link to your tab, make sure it's "mobile-ready." This means it has a special link that identifies when users are on a mobile device and takes them to a separate site that shows your tab content.

You can put together a Facebook album with icons from your social channels and include social links in the photo descriptions. When you initially share this album, your followers will see it, and you can always reshare a link to the album as a fun way for people to see your profiles on other social sites.

Use all of the social icons as images in a photo album.

The benefit of putting the photos in an album is that they're a little more visible than a single image that gets pushed down in your uploads as you add more pictures.

In the photo description, add the link to your social site.

Sharing content from other channels with your Facebook page helps you cross-promote all of your social profiles and makes it easier to post content in multiple places.

But always remember the true goal. If you're really trying to drive traffic to a blog post, for example, it doesn't make sense to share the tweet of the pin of the blog post to Facebook. It would take someone too many clicks to get there. But some occasional sharing from your profiles on other social sites helps draw attention to those channels.

If you have share buttons, sharing content from your other social profiles with your Facebook page is usually just a matter of switching the destination to your page.

Sharing from another social site to your page is usually just about switching the destination.

On Instagram, sharing your posts with your Facebook page is a matter of changing your settings. By default, Instagram shares images with your personal profile when you connect Facebook to your Instagram account.

To change the sharing destination of Instagram images from your Facebook profile to your page, open the Instagram app and go to Settings (the three dots in the upper-right corner when you're looking at your profile). Then tap Linked Accounts.

Change your Instagram settings on your mobile device.

Now tap Facebook to make changes to the destination.

Tap Facebook to make changes to your Facebook destination.

Edit where you want your Instagram photos to go when you tap Share to Facebook.

You can select a page to send your photos to instead of your personal profile.

If you only want some photos to go to your Facebook page, you have to manually change this setting before sharing. Or you can set up a workaround such as an IFTTT recipe (discussed in the next section) to send only some images to your Facebook page.

A little automation can be good. While it's a great idea to post natively to social sites so you can upload properly sized photos or tweak the language to fit the site, sometimes it's handy to post to several of your profiles with the click of one button.

There are a lot of tools that can help you do this, and the list below is by no means exhaustive. Here are a few ways to automate:

Send all of your Facebook page posts to Twitter by connecting them here. This option isn't recommended for everyone, as your posts get cut off at 140 characters (with a link back to the original Facebook post) and you may not want every post to go to Twitter.

Use tools to post to several profiles at once. These tools allow you to craft your post and then select which social profiles it will go to. Many of the tools have other features as well, such as analytics, special scheduling and team management.

Use IFTTT to create rules around a type of post or share that you want to automate. For example, if you want to put some images for an event in a special Facebook album, you can create a recipe to automate the process.

Use IFTTT to create special rules around social sites and sharing.

By making others aware of your Facebook page and connecting in multiple places with people, your messages are more likely to be seen.

Think of your own browsing habits and how often you see messages in all places at once. If you're anything like me, it's probably not that often. So don't worry about overwhelming your audience with the same messages if you post in multiple places.

Conclusion

I find that most businesses err on the side of not promoting their other social real estate often enough. Make sure you're using some of these tips to get the word out about your other social channels.

How about you? Are you cross-promoting links to all your social media profiles? What is working best for you? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&appId=167506593384213&version=v2.0"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));About the Author, Andrea Vahl

Andrea Vahl is co-author of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies and also uses her improv comedy skills to blog as Grandma Mary, Social Media Edutainer. Connect with her at http://www.andreavahl.com/. Other posts by Andrea Vahl »

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Original source: How to Cross Promote Your Social Profiles With Facebook.
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