social media

(Not Quite) A Dozen Steps to Follow For an Amazing Online Contest

You’ve won!

Those words are always great to hear or see. It means you’ve got something free coming your way. You know who else loves those words? Your current and potential clients.

Holding contests is one of the best ways to engage people with your brand and nowadays the easiest way to run a contest is via social media.

If you go into it with a carefully orchestrated plan, you’ll reap the rewards of increased audience engagement, shares, followers and all around impressions. Try it without a solid plan and you may find yourself with a bit of a mess that can give your brand a black eye.

Follow these 11 steps to strategize, plan, schedule and administer your social media contest so you get the most benefit from it.

1. Know the Goal

Contests are exciting and fun, but the most exciting and fun parts are the promoting, the prizes and the themes. The goals can tend to be a bit of an afterthought, even though it’s the goals that should really be shaping your entire campaign.

For example, let’s say you are a company that offers hang gliding instruction and instructor certification, so you hold a contest where people can win a free top-of-the-market altimeter, which keeps track of a glider’s altitude, and a variometer, which keeps track of a glider’s climb or descent rate. But, the real goal of your contest is to try and get people to sign up for the lessons you offer.

Because you’re after people who have never hang glided before instead of seasoned hang gliding veterans, who would also be interested in this equipment, you have to come up with a format that will target the former rather than the latter.

This can be tricky because seasoned hang gliders will be the ones who know the true value of the equipment you are offering as a prize and will most likely be the ones to share it and want to win, whereas people who have never hang glided before might not even know what an altimeter and a variometer are and almost certainly wouldn’t know that you’re offering the best ones available.

So, in order to target people who have never hang glided, you’ll need to emphasize how winning the equipment will make it easier to learn because these pieces of equipment will help them.

When you start with the goal of increasing lesson sign-ups (or whatever your goal is), you can develop the contest format organically from there.

Common contest goals include:

Increase overall purchases.
Increase brand awareness.
Increase conversion actions registrations for demos, lesson, webinars, content downloads.
Capture emails.
Boost site traffic.
Get more social media followers.

Your contest has to reinforce whatever goal you have. So, if more traffic for your site is a goal, visiting a landing page should be a mandatory action to enter the contest. If you want to increase purchases, than making a purchase should be mandatory to enter it.

2. Decide on Where to Host & Promote

Where you decide to host your contest may have a big impact on it. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have strict guidelines for contests and you will have to abide by those guidelines if you want to host your contest on those sites.

You may opt to host the contest on your own site and just promote it on social media, which means you will have different guidelines to follow than if you were completely hosting it on a social platform and entries were contingent on that platform (sharing a post on the platform, for example).

Make sure you have your legal counsel check your contest plan to make sure everything is legal and you are following all the rules and — most importantly — you’re not leaving yourself open to legal action.

The more platforms you use to run your contest, the more complexity you will bring to it. To make things easier, you can have a single point of entry (Facebook or a page on your website, for example) and just use other platforms for promotional purposes.

3. Decide How People Will Enter

Some common entry requirements include:

Submit an email address along with other contact information.
Require an action such as “liking” or “following” your page, commenting on or sharing a particular post.
Ask people to cast a vote for something using polling tools on the social media platform or on your website.
Create and submit user generated content that gets judged.

Direct submissions, especially when you use a customized form for the contest, are the easiest to track and require the least amount of effort. Requiring an action on a social media platform like commenting or sharing can also be easy. Voting is another type of entry that is fairly easy to track, although it’s best to use a custom form for it.

Having people create and send content to you is the entry type with the most engagement and it can even give you some marketing assets that can be used later on, however you will want to be extra careful with this type of entry. You’ll need to make things like ownership rights extra clear in the contest guidelines and you’ll want to be able to vet all the user made content before it is posted somewhere so you can catch anything negative before it is posted.

If you need a tool to track new “likes” on a page, you can try:

4. Create the Theme and the Name (the fun stuff!)

Now we get to the really fun part; coming up with a theme and a name for your contest. The contest should have its own sub-brand to your actual brand and its own branding devices.

An example using our own name might be The WizMotions All-Star Animation Challenge. The All-Star Animation Challenge would then be its own mini-brand under the WizMotions brand for the duration of the contest. This comes in especially handy when you run regular contests using the same format.

Shorter names are often better and can help when you’re promoting your contest in social media posts since space is limited in those posts on platforms like Twitter and Instagram and others.

5. Set the Timeline

Pick the date you will make the final announcement and work backward to ascertain when any drawing or judging involved with begin and end. Go back more and decide when the contest will be closed for entries, when it will be open for entries, when promotion for it will start and any other dates that you have to figure out.

You have to give yourself the necessary time to handle all of these steps, design any creative pieces you’ll require and get approval from your legal team, etc.

6. Pick the Prizes (more fun!)

You may have something in mind already for a fantastic prize, but hold off until you have everything else in place so you don’t get locked onto the prize element and rush through everything else.

As we’ve mentioned above, you have to make sure the prize is directly connected to your overall goal. If you offer something that is appealing to too broad an audience, like a car, a bunch of money or a general trip, you will likely attract a lot of entrants, but the majority of them may not be potential customer leads.

Rather, like the aforementioned altimeter and variometer for the hang gliding place, try to pick prizes that have some connection to your business, your brand and the values you espouse. It also helps to think of things from a storytelling angle so whoever wins your prize can become a living testimonial.

Imagine if the person who won the altimeter and the variometer actually went on to take lessons and really get into hang gliding? That’s a cool little promotional video story right there.

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7. Draft a Promotional Calendar

Consulting the contest calendar you’ve created, plan your social media posts and whatever other promotional materials you will be using (like an animated explainer video, for example) and when it will all be published. Even if you don’t end up following your promotional calendar exactly, you want to avoid promoting it without any type of plan in place.

You’ll need promotional material for the following six phases of your contest:

Pre-launch
Launch
Final call for entries
Closed for entries
Winner announcements
Post-contest promotion of winners

8. Develop a Promotional Strategy

Start with a bang to get as many entrants as possible when you launch. You want maximum engagement, so have a pre-launch promotional strategy that lets people know when your contest is about to drop.

Your strategy should include paid ads, organic promotion, content on your website, social media posts and other content and don’t forget the awesome animation video, which every contest should have (according to us). Your budget need not be huge, but you do get what you pay for, so invest what you can.

9. Put a Management and Crisis Plan in Place

Online contests run twenty-four-seven, so you should have some way of monitoring activity for it even on the evenings and weekends. You could try limiting the contest hours to your business hours, but that’s problematic online.

Many an unprepared social media marketing team has been unprepared by the engagement a contest can generate since they usually come with a big jump in audience engagement. It pays to be prepared in advance.

Having a backup plan for if things go awry can also be helpful for, well if things go awry. Rather than trying to improvise your way through it, you’ll be able to look at your crisis plan, which should be written down, and know exactly what to do.

10. Finalize Your Rules, and Give it to the Lawyers

Get your legal counsel to look everything over once you’ve finalized it to make sure it’s all legal and nothing can come back to bite you. You want them to give you the thumbs up for all your rules, procedures and prizes.

If you run your contest nationally or internationally, keep in mind that different regions and countries have different regulations and you’ll need to be in compliance with regulations everywhere you want to run the contest.

11. Document Everything for Learning Purposes

Take notes, gather data and figure out your ROI so you can tell whether or not you’ve reached your goals. Then, next time you run a contest you’ll be even more prepared.

As previously mentioned, an animated video is a great way to promote a contest. Click here to schedule an appointment with WizMotions to see how we can help you make the perfect contest promotional video.

Improve Your Paid Social Media Advertising with these 7 Easy Steps

When it comes to paid social media advertising, you’re either getting a great return on your investment and connecting to the exact people you need to, or you are spending a lot of money without converting. If your social media paid advertising strategy is more of the latter than the former, the good news is that it is easy to fix.

And you need to fix it if it isn’t working, because paid advertising on social media is more important than ever with organic reach quickly drying up.

If your paid social media advertising requires some repairs, try these seven steps.

Set an Objective (No, not likes.)

Like with all advertising and marketing, you need to know what it is you’re working toward. You need a specific, focussed objective and it cannot be to get “likes.”

Decide what action you want audiences to take when they see your ad and then structure your ad and overall campaign to guide the viewer to take that action. Use data from past campaigns to create target performance goals and continually optimize your present and future campaigns to help you reach those goals.

Rather than just getting people to click on a thumb, try these for campaign objectives:

- Traffic – Drive people to your homepage, a specially created landing page or a specific product page.
- Engagement – Encourage comments, shares, use of hashtags you’ve created or anything else that will get people to do more than just click on the thumb.
- Awareness – Increase awareness of your brand or a product you’re pushing. This is where engagement is especially valuable.
- Leads – Promote valuable gated content that people have to sign up for with an email address to access.
- Sales – Pump up interest in a product by promoting its features and how they help customers and then push it with sales and specials.

Pick the Right Platforms

Some businesses treat social media as a monolithic entity, forgetting that it consists of many different platforms, all of which appeal to different demographics and are best suited to different purposes.

For example, LinkedIn probably isn’t the best place to promote a contest where people have to share your company profile. That’s more likely to work on something like Facebook because it has less of a professional vibe and users are more interested in consumer products.

If you are targeting people below the age of 25, you should avoid Facebook, where participation is dropping among young people, and get into Snapchat, which nearly 80% of 18-24 year olds use, many of them daily.

While these generalized numbers on social media use in the United States are helpful, the only numbers you can truly trust are your own. So, dig into your own data, identify who you’re targeting and determine which platforms would have the largest number of your target audience.

Whichever platforms you go with, you should get consistent engagement on them and not struggle too much to pull people away from your competitors. Pick your platforms and concentrate your efforts on them.

Find the Middle Ground

We all know that targeting on social media platforms like Facebook can get crazy specific. However, the more specific you are, the smaller the group gets. To avoid going too narrow and having too small of a targeted audience, try broadening your targeting features and finding a middle ground. You could slightly increase the age range by a few years both up and down or you could choose a slightly larger metro area. Collect data on these different targeted campaigns and use that data to experiment and fine tune them.

Offer Valuable Content

Strive to make your content valuable to people and try to make it look organic so people are more inclined to view it. Close to 90% of users say they are interested in following brands on social media, but about 60% of them say they end up unfollowing brands because they get annoying with over-promotion or cringeworthy posts.

The best way to offer valuable content that seems organic is to know your audience and create content in the vein of what they like to view. Do they like animation? (You know they do. Everybody does.) Try an animated video, then. Give them a strong call to action at the end of your content.

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Fit Your Ads into Your Campaign Funnel

Few people purchase something directly after clicking on an ad. They go through a process (or journey, if you prefer, where they have to think about it and do a bit of research before they commit to buying.

What you want your content to do is coax the person into making a purchase. Give them a little bit at a time, showing them the features and letting them know what those features will do for them. The objective is for them to keep getting content as they mull over the purchase and become a little more enticed as they move through the stages of the sales funnel, from awareness to interest to evaluation to decision to purchase.

People at the top of the funnel who aren’t even aware of your brand will need an introduction to it, (which is where an animated explainer video fits in nicely, by the way), while someone lower down the funnel who is closer to making a decision may need something like a free demo.

To really get people to connect with your brand, it’s a good idea to get them to do something interactive, like a 30-day challenge where they can keep track of their progress on an interactive checklist or something like that.

Interaction like this means people will make more of a connection with your brand than just watching or reading something.

Set Your Budget and Bid Strategically

When it comes to bidding for ad space on social media, you don’t want to bid too low or your ad won’t be seen by anyone, but you don’t want to bid too high or you’ll end up overpaying. It’s a good rule of thumb to start in the middle of the bid range you are given. You won’t see as many impressions as you would at a higher bid, but you also won’t end up paying too much for those impressions.

If you want to get mathematical about your bidding strategy, use your historical data to find some numbers that will inform your bidding.

You’ll need your:

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
Average Cost Per Click (CPC)
Average Conversion Rate

Set a maximum CPA that you’re willing to pay for a sale. Let’s say $18.

Dig into your data and find your average conversion rate. Let’s say 1%

You can then multiply your max. CPA by your average conversion rate: $18 x 1% to get an average CPC: $0.18. This would be your maximum bid to attain your set CPA.

This isn’t a set-in-stone formulation that will work for every single campaign. If you have a particularly well converting campaign, you may bump up your bid or you may want to play with different bidding strategies to see what works best for you.

Measure Results, Test Different Content and Modify Ads for Consistent Improvement

Make like a kid at a science fair and experiment. Use past data to make educated guesses on current and future campaigns to make them perform better. Try new copy, different images and a variety of offers to see which version of your campaign performs the best. You can also try aiming the same ad at two different target groups to see which one it works with better.

Something that always works well with people is a good animated explainer video, which WizMotions can help you with. Click here to use our price estimation calculator to see approximately how much your video will cost.

4 Social Media and Content Marketing Trends You Need to Start Following … Riiiiiight About … Now!

In a recent survey of 344 social media managers, nearly 80% of them said their businesses use social media, but only 52% said they achieve any significant revenue growth directly related to their social media efforts. So, what are those 52% doing that is so right?

For one, they are following the latest trends in social media, adjusting their strategy and using those trends to direct people into their sales funnel.

“What are these trends, anyway?” (<<<<< That’s you talking.)

Well, we’re glad you asked. Let’s take a look at ‘em.

Social Listening

Social listening isn’t new, obviously. It’s been around for a long time and brands have consistently used it to keep an eye (or would it be ear?) on their brand’s reputation online. However, it’s now more akin to market research than just reputation monitoring.

Gone are the days when a brand would just toss some light marketing material onto a random mention about it online. Now, brands are actively looking for leads, gathering crucial feedback data and developing social media campaigns that put them front and center in conversations.

Clutch recently published a study that says a quarter of businesses they asked said they use social listening to actively improve their products and services. Another 42% said they use social listening to improve customer relationships and 85% use it to monitor ongoing customer requests, issues and inquiries.

Formerly the domain of Facebook and Twitter, social listening is now done on Instagram, YouTube and even places like Reddit that aren’t normally associated with social media.

What to listen for and how to use it:

Ensure the data you gather is shared across your entire operation.
Note ongoing complaints regarding your brand.
Look for opportunities to insert your brand into subjects that are generally associated with it.
Build your social media brand awareness and lead generation campaigns around the data you collect.

For a great example of a brand using social listening to not only insert itself into a conversation, but actually become the conversation, look at Kleenex’s campaign where they monitored posts looking for people who talked about being ill. The brand then had a representative contact the person’s family and friends so it could organize a surprise “Kleenex Kit” to be delivered to the ill person. The kits were filled with items meant to help the person get over their illness.

The campaign created that coveted positive buzz around the brand.

Ephemeral Content

Ephemeral content is content that disappears after a set amount of time, a la Snapchat and Instagram Story. Although many brands might see this temporary content as impractical or difficult to use, if they are trying to appeal to younger demographics, it would be well worth it to try them out.

According to Pew Research, 78% of 18-24 year olds use Snapchat every day and 71% of those users use it multiple times per day. Since introducing its Stories feature (which it did to seem more like Snapchat), Instagram has seen an increase in daily users from 51% to 60%.

A big reason that younger people like this disappearing content so much is because it’s more useful for mundane, everyday type of conversations among close friends, a recent Cornell University study has concluded.

Because ephemeral content posts aren’t sitting around on someone’s profile forever, people don’t feel the need to present a highly polished and idealized version of themselves. Rather, the fact that the posts disappear facilitates more casual chatting among friends.

Brands should keep this sentiment in mind when dealing with ephemeral content. For Snapchat posts, which disappear quickly, share only “human” moments or really amazing offers that only last while the post is up to generate excitement and anticipation. For Snapchat and Instagram Stories, which last for 24 hours, try:

Promotions that offer good deals that end once the post is gone.
Offers personalized toward a highly specific follower group.
“Slice of life” type moments that show the human side of your brand. (Think something that a person rather than a company would share.)
Geofilter marketing, which can be used to create promotions with regional games for followers and generate excitement.

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Micro-Influencers

With nearly 40% of Twitter users acknowledging that they have bought a product after a recommendation from someone they follow, it’s no surprise that 48% of brands say they plan on increasing their influencer marketing budgets this year.

When looking for social media influencers, the current trend is leaning away from the full-blown social media celebrities (people who have more than 500,000 followers) and more toward so-called “micro influencers” who have fewer than 500,000 followers. This is because these micro-influencers typically have a higher engagement rate from their audience.

Also, look at who your target audience tends to follow so you can tap into collaboration opportunities. Sometimes these may just fall into your proverbial lap, as was the case with Posca paint pens. Artist Matt Cummings started posting drawings he had done with the pens, which influenced other artists such as PaperBeatsScissors to do it, too.

This actually turned Posca Markers into a trending topic on Twitter with one user saying:

If that ain’t influencer marketing, we don’t know what is!

Animated Explainer Videos

And, our favorite trend; the increased usage of animated explainer videos on social media. Last year, the number of video posts per person rose by 94% in the USA and Facebook averages more than 4 billion video streams every single day. And when it comes to explainer videos, animation just wins out because it works for pretty much anything. HubSpot, Video Brewery and Switch Video all created lists of the best explainer videos on the internet that equal 50 videos in total. Only seven of those videos across all three lists are non-animated.

Hop on these trend bandwagons to get your social media marketing strategy humming. If you need some help with that last one, click here to use our price estimation calculator to see approximately how much your video will cost. (We know that’s your No. 1 question.)

8 Ways to Connect with Your Audience with Instagram Stories

With 250 million users each day, Instagram Stories is a platform that many brands will want to be on. The question is, how do you entice new followers to watch and engage with your brand’s content on the platform? To get a piece of this potentially lucrative pie, brands should have a strategy for Stories.

Try these eight ways of connecting with your audience on Instagram Stories.

Product Usage

Before they commit, customers like to see a product in use. And while a good old demo video is one option, a better option is something more candid. Rather than just putting up a demo video or a slick marketing video, put up a video of someone using your product or service in exactly the way it was meant to be used.

Sports apparel brands have had success showing athletes working out in their clothing. Showing your products in use lets your potential customers get a look at what they’ll be buying before they lay down their cash. Beyond Yoga, for example, does this on a regular basis.

Limited-Time Promotions

Instagram Stories lends itself well to limited time promotions because of the whole disappearing thing. You can use it to promote something that is only available while your video is up for a nice little boost of activity. They’re also a great way to move excess product quickly and get some promotional swag out there. A limited time promotion will work better on your social media accounts than if you were to do it from Amazon or your website, because the people who follow you on social media are already interested in what you offer so they’ll be more receptive to it. Pacific Northwest Wonderland, an outdoor adventure company, puts up limited time offers on their Instagram Stories once in a while.

Stories

This one seems like a no-brainer, of course. Instagram Stories is a great way to tell a story to your audience. It’s just a matter of knowing what will resonate with them. You know your customers best (at least we hope you do), so put your thinking caps on and try to come up with something fun that will grab their attention.

You could try using animals or roleplaying a scenario that your customers face regularly. Your imagination is the only limit. Subscription dog accessory brand BarkBox created an “interview” between a pug and one of their employees. Their dog-loving audience ate it up like a dog eats homework.

News

Don’t just limit your news sharing to what’s going on with your brand. Share news about the industry you’re in. It’ll help frame your brand as an expert in that field and demonstrate that you care about that particular industry. Your followers will appreciate that you don’t stick to constantly promoting your own brand and are willing to step out of your promotional role and into a more informative role. But, also do share your own company news, especially when you have exciting stuff happening. Clothing brand Aritzia uses Instagram Stories to highlight its own mentions in the general news.

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Games

Everybody loves a good game. They can stimulate interest and entertain your followers by being more immersive than a traditional post that your followers just watch. Game ideas include guessing games that involve your products or services, scavenger hunts and trivia. Travel + Leisure played a guessing game with its followers where it would post clues about where the brand was in the world and people had to guess. Don’t forget great prizes so people are motivated to play along!

Behind-the-Scenes Content

Going behind-the-scenes at company events is a good way to give your audience a more intimate connection with your brand. The exclusivity of the content creates a stronger bond between your brand and your followers. It keeps them up-to-date with what’s going on with your company and gives them a peek behind the scenes so they can see things people outside the brand don’t normally get to see. Obviously, company events are the best time for this, especially if your employees’ day-to-day activities aren’t that exciting. But, company picnics, potlucks, awards ceremonies, charity events, trade shows, conferences, etc. are good for this exclusive content. UCLA Athletics takes their followers behind the scenes at both games and practices to give them exclusive content.

Lessons

People love to learn and you can use Instagram Stories to teach your followers a lesson related to your industry. Are you taking a business trip? Tell a Story about the place you’re visiting. Show people the manufacturing process behind your products or let them know it’s an important date in the history of your industry. The Outbound Collective, which helps people discover fun things to do outdoors, takes followers along on their journeys of discovery and educates their followers about the places they visit.

CTAs

And don’t forget your Calls to Action. Are they important? Well, according to KISSmetrics, CTAs embedded in videos generate 380% more leads than CTAs in more traditional places like a sidebar or on a website. You can use Instagram Stories to point your followers to your website, to a specific product page, or get them to use a hashtag or do something else that gets them interacting with your brand and buying your stuff. Fashion brand J. Crew uses particularly strong CTAs in their Instagram Stories.

Instagram Stories are yet another way to engage with your followers on what has proven to be a popular platform. Get creative and take advantage of this fun way to connect with your audience. If you need some help, let us know and we’d be happy to chat with you about creating a video just for you. Click here to get started on planning and pricing your very own 2D animation video.

An Even Dozen Social Media Tools Small Business Owners Should Know About

These 12 social media tools will make social media marketing infinitely easier. They are either free or only require a nominal fee to use (with one exception). None of them are total management tools like HootSuite. But, used together, these small tools add up to a streamlined and fluent social media experience.

Adobe Spark

Adobe Spark allows you to edit photos quickly and easily right in your web browser or in the Spark app. Simply touch up photos you’ve taken on your phone before posting them or get a little more creative and use the effects and text captions to create truly unique content. In addition to photos, you can also use Spark to make branded videos, complete with text captioning.

Backly

Backly turns every link you share into a message that also points people back to your site. Rather than just sharing something interesting and having your social media followers go to that other site, Backly will insert a message that also points them back to your site so you can reap the rewards of sharing interesting content.

Bitly

In addition to shortening links for you, Bitly gives your a custom redirect so you can track the click-through ratio on shared links and also what the person does after the click. It’s a phenomenal tool for anyone who wants to share links. (And who doesn’t wanna share links?)

BuzzSumo

Like Sumo wrestlers are wont to do (we think), BuzzSumo helps you find content that is trending for given keywords and topics. Use it to find buzzlinks (a term we just coined that means links to content about topics that have a lot of buzz around them) and use it to optimize your content to take advantage of the topics that have buzz around them online.

IFTTT

The almost-acronym IFTTT stands for “if this, then that.” As the name implies, it allows you to create custom triggers for content sharing. For example, if you publish a new blog post, then IFTTT automatically creates posts for your social media accounts and sends out an email to your mailing list about the post. It helps you streamline this entire process and gets all your accounts talking to each other.

Pixabay

For when you need stock photos and you want to get them for free, Pixabay is the tool to use. It has a plethora of royalty-free stock photos you can choose from either through your browser or through the Pixabay app on your phone.

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Quuu

Quuu bills itself as a way to get hand picked curated content for your social media channels. The completely free service gets you to choose categories that you’re interested in and then it suggests and saves personalized recommendations. This lets you share content that is relevant to your brand without having to spend the time to search for it yourself. You should note that in its current iteration, Quuu only works as a plugin for Buffer or Hootsuite.

Refind

Refind is for those people who see something online and don’t have time to explore it, so they save it for later. (So, basically everyone.) The tool saves and tracks links of interest that you find while browsing. On top of that, you can also use it to find links to similar content. It also has an element of social media to it, as you can connect with other Refind users and see what links they are exploring. It can be useful for tracking content that is trending.

Rocketium

This one is especially interesting to us. Rocketium can turn a photo slideshow into a short video and also take a non-captioned video and provide captions for it. This is important because a lot of Facebook videos are watched without sound, so if there is dialogue that is crucial to the video, captions are necessary to have. It’s lightweight and easy to use.

Social Mention

Social Mention searches for mentions of whatever brands, influencers, topics or products you want to monitor the internet for. It can give you an overview of the conversations happening online about any subject you’re interested in. If you are adept at coding, you can also connect the Social Mention API to other apps to extend its reach.

Yala

Yala doesn’t just schedule posts for you automatically, it can also suggest the best times to post based on your social media feeds. You can use Yala via Slack or Facebook. Try it for free and if you like it, you can get a monthly or annual subscription.

Yotpo

This one is a bit of an exception because it does require a higher end plan to work, but it’s well worth it. Yotpo gathers all the reviews and user-generated content about your brand online. If you see content about your brand that you like, you can link to it and share it and if you find less than flattering stuff about your brand, you can take steps to reach out and rectify the situation.

These are just a handful of the available social media tools for small businesses. Another great tool for engagement is animated explainer videos. Click here to use our price estimation calculator to see approximately how much your video will cost. (You don’t even need to talk to anyone!)

Facebook Marketing Trends You Need to Take Advantage of in 2018

It’s nearing the end of the year and that means it’s time for the obligatory “trends” articles to start popping up everywhere. Join us as we take a look at what trends 2018 holds for Facebook advertising, which has become one of the most important ways you can advertise online.

Facebook Video Ads

Facebook users consume over 100 million hours of video each and every day. This demand for video along with improvements to video players means a sharp rise in video content of both the paid and organic variety.

Videos on Facebook average 135% more organic reach than static pictures. So, put down that camera and pick up that video camera instead. (Or, more likely, just switch your phone from camera to video camera.)

While it helps to have professionally shot videos, with some relatively inexpensive equipment, inexpensive editing software and some practice, you can make professional-looking videos. It’s really not that hard nowadays. Try it.

Ad Diversity

Video ads are just one type of offering from Facebook. The social media giant has been continually updating its inventory of ad types to cater to all types of marketing.

Carousel – These ads allow you to use multiple images and offers while telling a story about what you’re advertising.
Slideshow – Using “lightweight” video that loads faster, these ads are meant to be less intrusive to people’s browsing experience. Small businesses that want to start using more video can start with a slideshow ad.
Collection – With these ads, Facebook users can browse through multiple products within the Facebook app itself, which is good because people generally like to stay on the app if they can rather than clicking an external link.
Canvas – This mobile ad format takes a single ad and transforms it into a more immersive, full-screen experience with multiple photos and videos for people to scroll through. Use them for spotlighting big ticket items.
Dynamic – Using a single template, you can promote numerous products. If you prefer, you can also promote customized pitches for different customer segments of your market. They’re also good for quick A/B split testing of ads.
Link – With customizable CTA buttons that are displayed prominently, these ads are ideal if you want to direct people to a landing page.
Lead – These ads contain a way of capturing leads from directly in the Facebook app.

The more you know about these various ad types, the better you’ll be able to use them for their specific strengths.

Keeping People on Facebook

Like any business, Facebook prefers if people stay on its site or app. That’s why they’ve introduced ad formats like Lead and Collection, because they give users the chance to interact with your brand without taking them away from the platform.

Lead ads contain forms that people can fill out without leaving the Facebook app and can even be automatically filled out with a user’s information straight from their Facebook profile. This simplified process means an increase in leads and even gives you the freedom of foregoing a landing page and just using the ad itself as the lead capture device.

Hubspot says Lead ads can “skyrocket conversion rates and make mobile ads more effective for B2B marketers.”

Get started on your very own Whiteboard Animation Video.

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Paid Advertising Up, Organic Reach Down

Facebook began experimenting this year with newsfeeds containing no organic branded posts, instead moving the branded content to a completely separate “Explore” feed. Right now, it’s still just contained to a handful of countries, but if this move is adopted worldwide, branded Facebook business pages would see their organic reach drop dramatically.

Even if this change doesn’t end up happening, business pages have already experienced a drop in organic reach on the platform in recent years. With organic reach having slowly dried up, business pages have to rely much more on paid advertising (which you have to think was a calculated move on Facebook’s part to make more revenue).

If you want to reach your target audience on Facebook now, you have to pay for it. The beauty of doing this is that you can get a lot more focused with your targeting, avoiding people who are unlikely to buy your product or service anyway and zeroing in on those who are more likely to buy it.

By knowing the trends in Facebook advertising for 2018, you can put your business in a better position to take advantage of Facebook’s massive reach. You should definitely be using video by now and one of the best types of video to use is animated explainer videos. Whiteboard videos are ideal for capturing attention. Click here to get started on planning and pricing your very own whiteboard animation video.

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