How to Maximize Your Facebook Marketing [Interview with Mike Gingerich from TabSite]

Neal Schaffer: 0:01

Welcome to maximize your social actionable advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social, social media author, speaker, consultant, and founder of maximize social business, Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, this is Neal Schaffer, welcome to another episode of maximize your social, sorry, I don't have that Las Vegas glitter to my voice. But I actually am still here in Las Vegas, meaning just a number of great people. And I am actually sitting here right next to the one and only Mike Gingrich of tab site. Now, if you know me, when I speak on social and specifically on Facebook, I bring up a lot of Facebook, application providers, top providers, topside, me and one of the leading ones. And I just, you know, wanted to get the chance to talk to Mike, about not only topsite, but about Facebook in general, how you can maximize your Facebook and learn more about his product, what have you. So Mike, thank you very much for agreeing to this interview.

Mike Gingerich: 0:58

Neil, glad to be with you today. And to share a little bit of time here in Las Vegas.

Neal Schaffer: 1:02

It's amazing. If you are using a particular social media tool or application, and you reach out to them via social and they do not respond to you, you may not want to be using that tool or app, Mike is someone that has engaged with me reached out to me. And that's really, if you're in social media, that's sort of the support, both, you know, engagement support is what I would call it but also support for the product that you would want. So you know, thank you for that, Mike, I really appreciate that. And it really says a lot about you and your company.

Mike Gingerich: 1:29

Thank you, Neil. I appreciate those kind words.

Neal Schaffer: 1:32

So you know, when I talk about maximize your Facebook, I believe that the you know, the platform that Facebook provides you to create applications and tabs is something that is unique and social media. No other platform really has that. You know, can you tell me a little bit about how companies I'm sure you have a number of case studies of companies that have been successful using topside, just one or two that you'd like to share of how companies through creating an application on top site have been able to, you know, meet goals achieve amazing things on Facebook?

Mike Gingerich: 2:00

Sure, sure. Yeah. Well, for the small medium sized business market, I can think of one photographer, okay, so she's a solopreneur. And she's looking to grow her regional audience for her photography, business. She specializes in weddings, family photography, and like high school senior pictures. And so one of the things that she did was she ran a Facebook photo contest of the weddings that she had done that year. And I think she had done 2425 Different weddings. And so she placed a photo contest up on Facebook, letting each of these couples know that their photo was entered into photo contest, and they could invite people, their friends, their family, to vote for them. And that the the winner was going to get a large portrait designed well by her for them. And so that was unique in the sense that the pictures were not submitted by other users. These were ones that she had taken. But but she had a ready made audience there who is ready to vote on them. So everyone who went to the wedding that that couple would say, Hey, we're we had opportunity to win this come vote for us. And so it ran for about seven days, it garnered a lot of votes. And she did a couple things, she did shed a light gate on it. So people to come in to vote would have the opportunity to like her Facebook page to be able to see the entries and to vote for theirs. And she had voting as one time per day. And so then people were motivated to come back and vote daily for their couple that they wanted to win. And the end result was that, you know, the reach on her page, the engagement on her page, and the likes on her page grew significantly. And you know, as a part of that, also, by those people coming back and voting day in and day out over that seven day period, there's a thing called EdgeRank, with Facebook, which allows that Facebook's going to determine, you know what content you want to see. And the more you engage with the page, the more they will show you contrast that page thinking that's a value to you will show you more of that. And so more people would see her content going forward. So she was able to maintain that. And from that audience of weddings that she had done, and people that came to vote for them. She was able to, you know, secure new business that took her into the following year very well.

Neal Schaffer: 4:17

That's awesome, Mike. And it's funny, because a lot of people say, Well, you know, they read books, they hear people, well, you know, big brands can do that. But what about small, medium sized businesses? So I really appreciate that, you know, it can be done by anybody. Right? Absolutely. Absolutely. So I guess a few sort of add on questions to that. Number one, I'm a small business and I've never done a campaign you know, through traditional marketing or what have you considering Facebook and I know that you also support a lot of different functionality. How should I develop my first campaign?

Mike Gingerich: 4:45

Yeah, well, I think you first need to know your What are your end goals? Are you trying to build up your reach on your page? Are you trying to get email signups? You need to determine, you know, exactly what what's going to look like success to you. So that'd be the first thing and then you know, the Second thing is you need to to plan out, okay? So what are ways that we can do this, if I'm trying to get a email signup, for instance, and I'm trying to grow my email list, then one of the ways it's going to be most beneficial for that is to perhaps offer something in return for that. So some type of resource, a ebook or a coupon, that will give someone the incentive to to want to sign up for for your list. So you have to determine what that is, it needs to be something that's going to be relevant, something that's not going to be too high dollar to you, but it is a value to them to get number three, then you need to plan out your communication strategy. And so like with our types of application, we can help you build that tab quickly, then it's a do it yourself tool, you can come in and quickly create, okay, the form, I want to put a capture the name and the email address, here's my image I want to use, here's my offer that I want to give out, you put that in, that can go live, but you need to plan out your communication that so your communications prior primarily on Facebook going to be in your newsfeed posts on your page to pre alert someone, hey, we're going to put this out there, this is going to be coming. Now, hey, this is live, you can go and vote here. And this contest is soon going to be ending. So you know, make sure you sign up to get this access here. So you want to put those as well as communicating that out on your other social channels and your email list and mitt, your website, your blog, that type of thing, then you want to you want to follow up and engage with those people afterwards and know what you're going to do with that information afterwards.

Neal Schaffer: 6:27

That's awesome. You know this, I find more and more as we enter 2014 that people are really all over the place. They've always been all over the place. But in terms of social media, it's funny, I shared a Google Plus circle when I shared it on Facebook, I got you know, I want to get as much engagement on Facebook as I did on Google Plus, I had a tremendous amount of engagement on Facebook. And it really is about this cross platform promotion of everything you do. So I want to ask you two more questions before we end this podcast. Number one being it's 2014. You know, Facebook is saying that we need to pay more, and I was actually just at Facebook corporate headquarters last month, and I totally understand what they say. And there's so much content going out there in the newsfeed is limited to what you can show, right? So what is your you know, if you have one top tip or two or three top tips for Facebook marketing in 2014 related to topside or above and beyond that, that's that's one question. And then I want you to end and maybe you can include this as part of your answer is there are you know, there are a number of companies that offer similar tabs. Some of them have been acquired by bigger companies like wildfire, like Google, how do you differentiate what you offer versus your competitors? So I'll and I hope that's not too severe for question asker here, I'm sure you get asked that a lot. So I want to end this podcast those two questions. Let's first start with your best advice for Facebook marketing in 2014. Okay,

Mike Gingerich: 7:45

I think with Facebook, marketing 2014, it's going to be key to evaluate your your content, what you're posting on Facebook. And in terms of you need to look at your what your goals are. So there's going to be content that is for engagement. And there's going to be content that is perhaps for capturing leads and content that is going to be in this computer smallest percentage because it is a social network, but content that would be like more of a direct sell something that offers something so you want to take a look at your content mix, it has to be engaging on Facebook. And I think too many people are still in the I don't know if they're in a Twitter mindset or what but there's, there's too much of a just a quick push of information out. And so it is a social network, and particularly on Facebook that needs to be socially engaging. So you need to take a look at that. With Facebook for business, I think that you do really need to take a look at using Facebook ads. And people say oh, you know, Facebook used to be free now you have to pay. But the converse side of that is that you can get a ad on Facebook. And because Facebook knows so much about you what your Likes are your your interest, those types of things, for the individuals that for business, that's that's a very valuable tool, because you can get very specific and who you target and to reach your audience, whether that's a local audience, or whether that's a specific international global audience. Facebook can help you reach just that unique target audience. And one of their greatest tools in 2014 that you need to look at is their lookalike audiences, okay, because with Facebook ads, you can upload an email list your email list, and that will show you know who your people are. And you could target those people again to offer another an ad that's related to a product or service that's complementary or an upsell that you have. But one of the things related to that is once you have a look alike a custom audience loaded, you can create in the Facebook ads, a look alike audience, Facebook will use their demographic data to find a audience that is just like that audience and you can target those and so if you have a email list of people who have purchased from you, isn't it a tremendous value to be able to create a look alike audience that is very similar that you can reach out to either through a Facebook ad,

Neal Schaffer: 10:01

or figure out which Mike actually wanted to comment on if you know, but I was actually interviewing Facebook at their headquarters last month. And I went, I haven't written a blog post about it yet. But since I always podcast before I blog, I wanted to share with you some of the insights based on what Mike just said, first of all about the content. People at Facebook said, Look, treat every Facebook post as if you were writing a love letter. And I thought that was a truly profound statement. And those of you that know me, 2014 and content is go big, go home, really craft, it's not about spewing a lot of content. It's about the content you publish, make an account really strategizing what you do, I'm not just throwing a link out there with a tweet, as Mike said, and really thinking about, you know, the objective. And when I met the director of advertising for Facebook, he was talking about one of the key things they did in 2013, was really create this whole new dashboard, which made you try to determine your objective, and then they're going to recommend the appropriate ad format. Those of you who have read maximize your social, you know that I you know, said in that book, paid social is one of the most underutilized aspects of social media and to spend $50, to get your brand in front of 50,000. Very, very targeted people in whatever niche, it is absolutely, the cheapest thing that you can think of how much of your time is $50 worth. So go ahead and do that if you're not doing paid social, especially if Facebook advertising, which I'm, I'm a huge fan of. But it's funny that you mentioned the custom audience. And when I talked with the advertising folks at Facebook, there's they're trying to make it simple for small and medium sized businesses to do it themselves. But custom audience look alike. And you also have the database of users that they have from third party sources to big companies, I forget the names. But there's still a lot of features where you need to use the advanced Facebook ad manager to use unfortunately, and there are resources out there that will help you do that make it really makes sense, especially that custom audience have been upload your email database, and then being able to market to them and almost do your own type of retargeting. And we can talk about retargeting as well, we're going a little bit above the initial scope of this podcast. But there's a whole other world out there. And I've noticed retargeting really happened a lot on Facebook recently. So if you're wondering, wow, how do these companies know that I went to their website, and I see them on Facebook, you have the ability to do that yourself. And if there's one thing that you get, I mean, there's should be a lot of things you get out of this podcast, number one going over the top site and signing up for the service, and learning about all the amazing applications they provide. But the second one really is making better use of Facebook ads and going above and beyond the self serve and really looking at the custom audiences and and the advanced Facebook, anything you want to add to that what I just said,

Mike Gingerich: 12:26

No, I think you're you're absolutely right. And I think that 2014 will be the year. I mean, I think Facebook is trying to make that easier for small, medium sized businesses. So continue to look for that to be able to get easier. And also look for companies like to website to try to integrate some of these things to be able to make it easy for you to do that with your tabs right in the manager area.

Neal Schaffer: 12:45

That'd be really, really awesome. Especially Well, I don't I don't expect you to go into like advertising management. But that's something that there's still a chasm to cross for many companies to figure that out. So just the final question. I sort of alluded to it, but you know, there's there's a lot of other companies out there. What is tabs sites? The benefit of using tops out over the competition or secret sauce or or what have you. Any anything to comment on

Mike Gingerich: 13:04

that? Yep. Well, I think that, you know, a couple things, there's, we're one of the few that provides a mobile friendly tool so that you can have mobile users access to your tabs and by by getting our smart URL and using that and your campaigns when you publish to the newsfeed allows any user whether on a mobile on a tablet on a desktop to be able to access the tab, which is so important these days with was it over 65% people using Facebook on a mobile device. Number two, is we have a unique tool called the website resizer. And what that does is it helps you utilize some of the tools that you already have developed for your website and to bring them into a Facebook tab in a way that fits well within the tabs 810 With limit, okay, so say you have a landing page on your website, where you're offering a free ebook, you know, that type of thing. And your website's 1000 pixels wide. If you just simply tried to use a regular iframe tool to bring that into a tab, you would be you'd have scroll bars, and it would just kind of look hazy, because it's intended to be 1000 pixels wide. And it's kind of it's scrolling within this 810 window. Our website resizer application allows you to drop that in there. And we will resize that for you so that it looks conducive, kind of like a responsive style to bring that landing page down into an 810. So that it looks valuable and it looks like it actually is and functions on the website. And so therefore you're gaining an efficiency by utilizing what you've created on your website. And maybe it's campaign specific and bring that into Facebook at the same time period for your Facebook audience. So that would be a couple things. It's a do it yourself software. We try to make it easy and have responsive support, as you mentioned allude to earlier, Neil.

Neal Schaffer: 14:46

Yeah, you know the devils in the details. Another quote from my visit to Facebook was when you think mobile think Facebook. And you know we all know how many more people are using mobile on a PC. Think about on smartphones, how much time we spend in Social specifically in Facebook, if you want to reach a mobile audience, think Facebook and just creating a tab and not having it show up on a smartphone that's costing you a lot of potential dollars. So that's a that's a critical functionality you provide as well as that resizing. It's almost like scanning a QR code and then going to a website that wasn't optimized for mobile, when you go to a tattoo shop, and you have to scroll across to see the whole thing. It should be resized, and it should be fitting into that Facebook native environment. So I appreciate the attention to detail that you've all done. So if you haven't, make sure that you checkout topsite.com. And if you tweet out, Mike, Mike Gingrich on Twitter, I'm sure he'll reach out to you as well. But that's it for today. I hope you've enjoyed this podcast if there's other people or other, you know, tools or application providers that you're interested in having me interview, please let me know. I'm still going to try to do a few more podcasts while I'm here in Las Vegas. So hope you enjoyed this one. Wherever you are on the world today. Make it a great day. We'll see you next time. Bye bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on the show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at Neal at maximize your social.com Thanks for listening and have a great day.