Recently I was at Social Media Marketing World in San Diego. It’s a fantastic event and if you want to stay up on social media at all, you should really consider attending this event.

If you weren’t there, I thought I’d share my notes, favorite tweets, screenshots of some fabulous slides, as well as some video clips to help you ramp up your marketing!

Running Successful Facebook Ads

This was one of two sessions on Facebook ads (which have become super confusing). The first session was with Jon Loomer (jonloomer.com).

With the new Facebook ads, you can target “like” audiences by uploading email lists or asking Facebook to find similar audiences for an author similar to your market.

You can now also do something called website custom audiences on Facebook. What the system does is target anyone who visited your site in the last 30 days (you need to add a cookie to your website to do this). If someone has visited your site but didn’t like your Page on Facebook, your ad will show up in their newsfeed. Cool, right?

Here’s a unique tip from Dennis Yu. If want to do “like audience” ads on Facebook, and you want to find out specific page information such as the Facebook Page ID, etc. here’s what you need to do. Go to your browser and type in: graph.facebook.com/bookmarketingAME (or whatever Facebook page you’re looking for). This tells you a ton about the page, such as page activity, when it was established, how many likes it has, etc. Also, you can find user addresses, etc. Very helpful for targeting ads or Facebook pages.

Another expert on Facebook (Jon Loomer) suggested posting 2, 3 and often 4 times a day on the site. I would suggest that you try different times and see what your fans want, in the end that’s what matters. Regardless, it should be more than once a day!

Facebook ads tip: Never run a sidebar ad. Why? Because Facebook is a very mobile site, meaning that a lot of folks access it using their mobile devices. Sidebar ads don’t show up in mobile!

Optimized (OCPM) CPM is something Jon Loomer recommends highly. Essentially what this means is that Facebook choses who to target within the audience you assign. They will bid appropriately, and you don’t have to make as many ads.

One note on ads, don’t go for gigantic audiences. They just don’t convert well at all.

Note on Facebook Like Audiences ads: If you can find emails of influencers (with similar audiences to yours) you can then have Facebook match the audience on your like campaign. For example, if you are a romance author and you have the email address for a high-profile author with lots of Facebook Likes, you can add this email to your batch when setting up your Like Audiences so it will pull in a similar audience to what this author has. Smart, no?  

The Facebook sales funnel. Here’s are the stages of engagement from Dennis Yu’s presentation:

Though this is a bit harder to read, I thought it was helpful. These are the different ads and the audiences they engage based on ad type:

And here are two great videos of Dennis Yu’s presentation on Facebook Ads, Like Audiences (which is a great new ad you can access through the Power Editor)