WEBINAR RECORDING: Awesome Money Making Facebook Success!

Making Money out of Facebook? The joke that we made during the webinar is that Facebook actually doesn’t make you money (directly).  You actually end up spending tons of money with them, BUT as we have found it to be a great Marketing Platform we are making way more than we are spending and guess what? WE LOVE IT.

As per the previous dedication I wrote to the amazing Martha Arifin yesterday, I have been very lucky to not only have her as a client – but she has become an amazing personal friend and business partner.

We kind of balance each other out.  She is the “Quiet Asian” detail person and I am the “Flamboyant Persian” strategic mind.  When it comes to Facebook and talking in particular as to our own businesses, it has been amazing for us and many of our fine clients.  Sure, it’s not for everybody – but when it fits a business type and is used correctly, we have found it to be one of the best Online Marketing Tools – right up there with Google Search, Email Marketing and of course having a rocking website.

Please enjoy the recording or if you are more of a word person – read the transcript below and if you like what you see, contact us or check out the Awesome Marketing Vault! One top Online Course that is guaranteed that you will love it!

Thank you from Edward Zia!

Small Business and Facebook Marketing Mentor!

 

Edward Zia: Good evening everyone. It’s 7:00pm on a Monday night and we’re here for the Awesome Money Making Facebook Success webinar. This is Edward Zia, small business marketing mentor, with Martha Arifin. Say hello to the audience Martha.

Martha Arifin: Hello audience. This is Martha here.

Edward Zia: We have got a treasure trove of great stuff tonight. What we’re going to talk about is Facebook and really how to make money out of it. The title is somewhat misleading. You can’t actually make money out of Facebook. Generally, you give money to Facebook, but it’s the amount of business and relationships you get. Great to have you here. Just give me a quick tutorial of the thing. If it’s your first time in here, you should be able to send us questions. It is a live webinar. We’re not some vague recording … Are we recording or are we here, Martha?

Martha Arifin: We’re here live.

Edward Zia: We are here live from inner Western Sydney. If you’ve got any questions, please get them through. Our webinar is based on feedback, so welcome. We expect to go for half an hour to 45 minutes with some great sort of stuff. A lot of people on the line that we don’t know actually. It’s pretty much us … At the top left is Martha and I. I’m obviously the Persian man and Martha is the Asian woman. There is one of my cats that are running around. This is a recent seminar. What do you do for a living, Martha?

Martha Arifin: I help my clients with their online websites and social media needs.

Edward Zia: Exactly and I’m a Persian marketing mentor that helps small business owners. I don’t know what race has to do with it, but I’m still Persian. What tonight is it’s a free webinar to give you some powerful insights and really just to give you some base tips on how to get more out of Facebook. Some of it’s quite obvious … If you need a hand with anything afterwards, just ask us. We’re here. Again, we want to more give you concepts at the time. Feel free to send us questions. As you’re listening to this webinar, please keep in mind your business objectives, the way you prefer to market and really the ideas that work for you.

What happens is that we’re going to go through tons of different ideas, all these different ideas, and some of them you will like and some of them you won’t like. Again, Martha and I aren’t here to preach that you should do this or do that. Our goal is just to tell you the truth as we see it, everything that we see, the good bad and the ugly. It’s up to you to decide what to apply to your business. What do you think about that Martha?

200% this helps small business owners. I don’t know what race has to do with it, but I’m still Persian. What tonight is it’s a free webinar to give you some powerful insights and really just to give you some base tips on how to get more out of Facebook. Some of it’s quite obvious … If you need a hand with anything afterwards, just ask us. We’re here. Again, we want to more give you concepts at the time. Feel free to send us questions. As you’re listening to this webinar, please keep in mind your business objectives, the way you prefer to market and really the ideas that work for you. What happens is that we’re going to go through tons of different ideas, all these different ideas, and some of them you will like and some of them you won’t like. Again, Martha and I aren’t here to preach that you should do this or do that. Our goal is just to tell you the truth as we see it, everything that we see, the good bad and the ugly. It’s up to you to decide what to apply to your business. What do you think about that Martha?

Martha Arifin: Yeah, that’s right. You’ve got to eventually come up with a strategist system that works for you and your audience.

Edward Zia: Precisely. Again, not preaching. We’re just telling you what works and what doesn’t in our experience. Please adapt it to suit yourself. We’re going to cut through the good and we’re going to give you the ultimate tools and, of course, this is all being recorded, so will be available for afterwards. Like always, when we hit you with tons of content, please don’t get overwhelmed. Well, get overwhelmed panic a little bit and freak out, but then calm down and just ask us any questions. Don’t worry about a thing. We’re here to help you. And, of course, without doing the sell job, do I know my stuff Martha or do I just make up stuff all the time?

Martha Arifin: No, yeah, you’re very good Ed.

Edward Zia: I love Martha. There you go. Martha is just great. The big thing is that I want to suggest we all make mistakes and top marketers make small mistakes and have large wins. The trick is if you make heaps of mistakes and stuff things up, don’t worry about it. Just forgive yourself and get on with the job. Even better, small business marketing, what is it? Making your because more awesome, helping more people find it, selling more stuff. We always say test and measure. Trial little things, get used to it and as you prove that stuff works for your business at getting you more clients and a higher margin, then do more of it.

What I want to do is I want go through myself pretty quickly, what I have to say, and I want to hand it over to awesome Martha. Just very quickly, I love Martha. We’ve worked together for about 2 years now?

Martha Arifin: Yeah, we’re close to 2 years now.

Edward Zia: Yeah, 2 years. I’m more of a strategist and mental sort of character and Martha is the quiet, hyper-detail, successful entrepreneur. You’re a lecturer, aren’t you Martha?

Martha Arifin: Yeah, yeah. I teach at a private design college in North Sydney.

Edward Zia: There you go. She has a heart of gold and a complete powerful outlook. Without further ado, let’s just dive right into the beautiful content. Here’s the thing. I’m just going to shoot through my bit very quickly. I really want Martha to steal the show and go into all the detail. Here’s my thing on Facebook, and this is a general thing: Facebook Schmacebook. Everyone is on Facebook. People even like me put photos of cats on Facebook and the reality is not many people actually make money out of Facebook. To be straight up with you, I do really well out of it. We do really well out Facebook these days.

In fact, I’ve got a few clients on the line who actually found me through Facebook. I do great out of Facebook these days. I don’t actually make money from Facebook, but Facebook gives me that marketing platform to connect with people on a daily basis. I’m in the back of their minds, so when they need a marketing mentor, they’re more likely to hire me. The thing with Facebook, I got nothing out of it for about a year and a half. It really did not go well for me, but when I sort of figured out how to post really good content, how to make it compelling, how to do it consistently and how to grow my page …

About 4 months ago, it just took off for me and Facebook has really revolutionized my business in terms of getting new clients. If anything, I used to rely a lot on face-to-face business networking to get clients. These days Facebook seems to be doing it nicely for me. What do you think of all that Martha?

Martha Arifin: The way I see it is Facebook is just another way of doing networking, but because it’s online, it’s social media, it’s 24/7 7 days a week. While you’re asleep or you’re having a holiday, the Facebook strategies you’ve put in place is actually working for you instead of doing a 1 in 1 week meeting.

Edward Zia: Exactly. I think the challenge is that … I’m going to be a bit cynical against Facebook for the moment because again Facebook is not for everyone, so please don’t think we’re working for Facebook and we’re saying it’s the best thing ever. Facebook doesn’t suit everyone. You might be more suited to LinkedIn or Twitter or something like that. What do you think of the whole LinkedIn versus Facebook discussion Martha?

Martha Arifin: It’s totally depend on what you’re trying to do, whether your goal is a new target audience, LinkedIn, Facebook and also there’s a personal side of Facebook versus the business side of Facebook. There’s also Pinterest, Instagram, where the younger audience seem to be hanging around, among other things.

Edward Zia: Exactly. Then again, going back to Facebook, it took me a while to master it. I’m going to tell you exactly what I do that makes my Facebook work personally for me. Here is my Facebook page. It has grown a little bit then, but at the time I took the screenshot, my Facebook page had 2,293 likes and 184 talking about it. If you spend some time on my Facebook page, you can get a feel for the content that I’m doing. What I do is I do about $10-20 a day of paid like building, so I do about $500 a month on my Facebook budget and I’m very specific.

I’m using it just to advertise for likes for people to follow my page. If you don’t know what a like is for your business page, it basically kind of means the number of subscribers, the amount of people that are following you. Right now, I’ve got … In here, now it’s crossed 2,300. I’ve got 2,300 people subscribed to my Facebook page, which is pretty reasonable size. Martha’s is bigger, which I’m really jealous about, but there you go. She’s smarter than me.

Martha Arifin: Yeah, I learned from the best.

Edward Zia: No.

Martha Arifin: Yeah.

Edward Zia: You’re wonderful and unfortunately the best wasn’t me. Anyway, that’s my Facebook page. Really what matter is it says 184 talking about this. You can sort of see that under my name there. What it means is in the last 7 days … It’s 7 days, right?

Martha Arifin: Mmhmm (affirmative).

Edward Zia: I’m pretty sure it’s 7 days; it’s a rolling average … 184 have been talking about my page. Really what it is that Facebook … It’s basically … Like is meaningless in itself, but by putting content out there all the time, I get to connect with the audience. There are a different range of posts that you can do. I’m just sort of going through some of the posts that I have. I’m not talking my Facebook personal page. This is just purely business page. We can talk about Facebook personal pages another time, but I’m just going to go through some of the posts I do.

This post here is just a photo I took of everyone, including Martha, at a 4Networking event and you’ll notice that … I’ve just put it up … 197 people have seen that photo, so it’s amazing. Straight from my mobile, putting a photo up, 197 people have seen it. If you think about that for a second. That’s 197 people that have seen an image of mine. It took no time to take the photo and it took what? A minute to post it.

Martha Arifin: Yep, yep.

Edward Zia: Think about that for a second. For a minute of work … All that takes … No, let’s say 5 minutes of work, 197 people have been exposed to my brand.

Martha Arifin: Yeah, I noticed that you’re using one of the most powerful tagging method in Facebook. You tag people on your post, which means that their friends will be able to see that, so it will go to for example here. My friends will be able to see this one as well as some of the other people tagged on that as well.

Edward Zia: Exactly. It can be as light as just posting photos of people and yourself and your clients to stay engaged. Some are going to more the pointy end of this. Here are a few other posts that I’ve done. On the left-hand side is actually a video I took. I recorded a video with Richard de Groot and I uploaded it directly from my Android, my Google Samsung active phone, a Samsung Galaxy phone. Just to clarify, it’s a pretty advanced feature. I’m pretty sure the Apple iPhone you can’t take a video-

Martha Arifin: I think it does.

Edward Zia: It does work now?

Martha Arifin: Yeah, I figured out a way to do it.

Edward Zia: How do you do it Martha?

Martha Arifin: You select it.

Edward Zia: Okay, so I’m standing wrong. I thought Apple iPhone and Google, you can record a video and upload it straight to Facebook.

Martha Arifin: Yeah.

Edward Zia: You notice on this one … You might not be able to see, but the video on the left it’s been shared twice. There’s at least 10 people liking it and it’s got 437 views.

Martha Arifin: Very, very good.

Edward Zia: In other words, I put a video up just getting in people’s minds and 437 views, which is amazing. A lot of people will be thinking “Okay, that’s great. You’ve got videos of yourself, Edward, and photos. That’s useless”. Great, good. I knew you’d think that, which is why the next post on the right is actually a link to my website. I’m a regular blogger, so I blog every day and I release a blog the following day. Just so you know what blogging is, blogging is basically writing articles. Again, I could do a whole day workshop on just blogging, but just to give you a quick insight. Visit my blog, check it out after this. The blog is The Edward Files at my site, excellenceabove.com.au.

What a blog is basically writing articles that are interesting around your area of expertise, so people start following the blog. About 4 months ago, I used to get 200 visits to my website and now I get over 1,500 a month, all verifiable with Google Analytics. What I’ve done here is that I’m deliberately writing blogs on my website. Putting blog content on my website helps it get found by Google, but more talking Facebook, which is the point of the webinar, I then put blogs throughout my Facebook, so people who click on my blog through Facebook will be taken to my website.

Thinking of your website as a big shopping mall, a big Westfield’s if you’re in Australia, the goal of a shopping mall is just to get people on site, get people in the building, because when you have people in the building, they’re more likely to buy something or make an inquiry. What do you think about that Martha?

Martha Arifin: Yeah, that’s right. Facebook is just one of the market channels, must I say. Among other things, we can do networking, you can do offline / online market, but you bring them to your mall, which is your website, which is your portal, and then you can do whatever is needed on the website to sell a product or services and keep the communication happening there.

Edward Zia: Exactly. That happens on my blog, but you can put in any link. You can release an online product, you can just make it your homepage … It’s anything you want and the trick is by investing money into making my Facebook page bigger by advertising for likes, it gives me a bigger pool to market to.

Martha Arifin: Yeah and it is affordable too for small business owners and entrepreneurs, unlike putting up billboard along M4 or whatever because people are already on social media and some of them are on social media all the time because they have them on mobile phones nowadays. It’s just making it a very simple decision to make.

Edward Zia: Precisely. That is very good. Then another post I have … This is Martha actually and these are some specialized offers. You might not be able to see it and Martha will talk about it this a bit later on, but there’s a lovely photo of Martha holding tickets to our workshop. What it is … I use the offer command, so let’s say you’ve got a workshop or an event or something you want to fill, you can create an offer and you give money to Facebook. It’s hard to tell, but from reading it it’s 4,642 people saw this post and 17 people claimed the offer.

Martha Arifin: Mmhmm (affirmative).

Edward Zia: That’s amazing and I ended up getting about 30 signups to our Awesome Business Boot Camp, which is coming soon. That’s our small business sales and marketing webinar. I spent about … I think from memory that is a $65 post. I spent $65 with Facebook and it gave me 4,642 views. That’s really good. I’m using it to fill my … Think about it this way. Let’s say someone hires me 1-on-1, I’ll probably make … I don’t know … At least 3 grand over a period of months. In other words, I’m spending money to get people to my event, where there’s a probability they may end up hiring me.

Martha Arifin: Yeah.

Edward Zia: Yeah. In other words, that’s a Promoted Post feature. This is actually an offer feature of Facebook that I’ve used very well in my own business and Martha is going to talk about that afterwards. This is just quickly … This is my blog over here. I blog all the time and Mark Finch is on the line too. The handsome man. There’s Mark Finch at the top centre left. Hello Mark. What it is that … This is an example of my blog, so go to my website excellenceabove.com.au today! Have a look around and you can sort of see the way I’ve done it. I’ve put blog articles there and then I share it through Facebook and all my other materials. It all went a little bit too far.

Here’s my profile. I just want to show you a bit of data. I took this screenshot I think a few days ago from my Google Analytics. In the last month, I’ve had 1,556 visits to my website, so I’m 564 from social media, that’s mostly Facebook, and 531 that’s people typing in a direct referral, that’s other little websites sending traffic my way, 252 and organic searches 209. I’ll tell you what? This is only 2-300 not that long ago and it’s not just Facebook that’s done it. It’s been a combination of all strategies: having a good website, doing blogs and using Facebook.

In other words, what I mean is you know it says 564 visits through social media, mostly that’s people reading my blogs that they find through Facebook. Imagine that. I’m getting all this traffic to my website using Facebook in combination with other strategies. I just want to point out … Martha and I were saying this the other day … Facebook by itself is completely useless.

Martha Arifin: Mmhmm (affirmative).

Edward Zia: What’s your view on that comment?

Martha Arifin: Yeah, well, it’s about the whole experience, so think about people find you on Facebook, they see your post, maybe watch a video, click on you in a comment, share your post … That’s 1 experience, but why do you want to create a whole rounded experience. You could be on Facebook, YouTube, networking, websites, blogging, that’s what we want to do. Facebook on its own probably wouldn’t work for most of us.

Edward Zia: Exactly. In other words Facebook … This is a very crude Old World pre-tech metaphor I use … Imagine if you went to a radio station and you bought advertising space, but you put no ad through it. You just had 30 seconds of static instead of 30 seconds of an ad. Building likes on Facebook without putting out good content is a complete waste of money and time.

Martha Arifin: That’s right.

Edward Zia: It’s about content. It’s about creating engaging content and it’s different for everyone. Everyone is in different businesses, like for example mine is about me, going to events, my cats and blogging. We’ll pick on Mark Finch, who is a handsome man. Mark Finch is a martial arts mindset guy. In his case, it might be photos of him doing martial arts classes. It might be, similar to me, it might be blogs that he’s written, it might be motivational quotes, it might be his online proxy he is putting through the site.

Marianne Barakat who is on the line, who is an amazing blind woman who is a motivational speaker, who is listening in quite well … She might very well use Facebook to actually put audio through there talking about what she’s doing and that type of thing. There’s heaps of different sort of characters on the line and, of course, always please get your questions through. We love questions and the more questions is the better we can help you. Enough about me, it’s Martha Arifin time, so let’s give her a hand everyone. Yay. Martha, it’s all yours.

Martha Arifin: Okay. I could skip this slide very quickly because the reason you’re all here is you’re already convinced that Facebook … Well, some of you probably aren’t … But Facebook is actually probably one of the major social media platforms available today. It might change in a couple of years’ time. Who knows? But at the moment it has 1.1bn active members. All these stats, I don’t have to read it all out for you, but 3/4 access it through a mobile device, which is quite stunning. The number is there. But Facebook pretty much changed the paradigm, our paradigm, like computers did in the 80s.

Prior to computers and suddenly there are computers. There were computers which changed the way we do things and the way the businesses do things, so if we don’t embrace Facebook and other social media … I’m not just saying Facebook, but other social media … It’s like “Okay, I don’t want to take on computers” and see where we end up in a couple of years’ time. Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg, woman, which is … I totally respect Sheryl Sandberg. She is one of the corporate America’s most successful women. Facebook CEO, just below the founder himself, Mark Zuckerberg.

Social media jump start the whole economy in the US and all around the world, so Facebook is definitely the way to go. Your customers are already here. Facebook is the most popular social media destination. We are looking at Instagram. Some of you have heard of Pinterest, which is very similar. Pinterest and Facebook or Instagram and Facebook, they are working hand in hand, but Facebook is the most popular social media destination now. Your competitors might already be here, so if you’re not engaging with your potential customers, they probably are already doing whatever needs to be done there.

It is easy to upload things, easy to maintain, to update a page, to be information, text, videos, links, etc, etc. What’s unique about Facebook is its Newsfeed. News is basically the aggregate post, so when you log in onto your Facebook page, you’ll see some of the posts updates from the pages that you’ve liked or from some of your friends if you’re logging into your personal page. That’s called the Newsfeed. It used to be called The Wall, The Wall Post. Facebook control what you see.

To a certain degree, you can control what you can’t or cannot see by hiding some of the posts or blocking some of the posts, report them as spam, but pretty much Facebook has control over the algorithm. It changes from time to time, but recently has made a complete, like quite a huge amount of change. The idea is you build your fan base, that’s your number of likes and then try to reach them because 96%, and that’s how high the number is, they don’t come back to your page after liking it. Let’s say you create a campaign to increase the likes of your Facebook page, people click on the like button on your business page.

From that point onwards, 96% of them don’t usually come back to your business page unless they see a post on their Newsfeed. This is why it is quite unique and this is why you need a strategy to come up with, “Okay, what type of post? What time of the day? What day of the month? Etc”. Having set the Newsfeed and Facebook algorithm just recently and it is still rolling out, so some of you might not see this yet … Still rolling out is the new page design of Facebook. You will get a complete makeover of your page.

When I say your page, it’s the business page, so not your personal Facebook page. It’s called The Page. The new page design of Facebook is rolling out as we speak. Some of the pages have options to take on the new design. I’m not sure if you can see that, but this is one of my friends in my Facebook group. She writes cyber active services to educate people about protecting children online. She has opted in to take on the new Facebook page, so the Facebook business page. Some of the interfaces have changed, so basically the idea of me saying this is you might see that whatever we say now, the concept works, but technicality and everything else, the details, might change from time to time. If you … I’m just trying to …

Edward Zia: There you go.

Martha Arifin: If you have not got the new page design, you just need to wait. On my page here, on my business page, at the top of the actual prime profile image is a invite to join the wait list. See where the red arrow is, if you’ve got that button, you can choose to opt in to join the wait list for this new design. Before you do that, read all about it. I have it on my post, so if you go to my Facebook page, there’s a post about the advantages of having new page design and disadvantages. Some things actually moving around the way that you probably don’t like it, especially if you’re using a lot of apps because they’re kind of hidden, but feel free to go to my Facebook page and have a read of the post of the new Newsfeed page design.

Another Newsfeed change recently … I know this probably is a bit of an advanced discussion, but just last month, Facebook announced that when you as a business page tag another page … Let’s say if I’m posting something on my Trusted Web Expert Facebook page and I tag the Awesome Marketing with Edward Zia business page, both of us will benefit from my post because the content might surface for followers of both pages. On the screenshot here, one of the status updates that I put up a couple of days ago, I tagged Facebook pages.

The way you do it is you just have the little @ symbol in front of the name, so you’re tagging, but obviously Facebook has certain algorithm to check the relevancy between the party that posted and the relevant page.

Edward Zia: This is where I’m just jumping in to support Martha on that one. What it pretty much is that Facebook changes all the time and personally I’m on Facebook a lot and the reason why I’m on … A lot of people make fun of me for being on Facebook all the time, but I make money out of it, so that’s why I’m on it all the time. That’s the point. This goes back to the original title of the webinar. When you work out how to use Facebook properly to suit your specific circumstances in your business, you can make a lot of money out of it. You can be paid to use Facebook.

For me, Facebook is outstanding. I’m crazy not to use it based on the amount of exposure and leads that have converted to paying clients and also selling my online products as well. Things like what Martha’s going into some of it is quite advanced and might be a little bit beyond this line, but what we encourage is beyond this webinar take action in really understanding Facebook because my view is if you’re not going to use Facebook then just walk away. If you’re going to use it, then work out how to use it really well so you can make tons of money out of it.

Martha Arifin: Thank you. On this slide, The Most Common Mistakes on Facebook, Facebook definitely works. It works for some of the major brands, works for small business owners and anyone in between. The problem is not Facebook. The problem is the user not using it to its full potential. It all comes back to the strategy and technicalities, tactics and so on and so forth. Number 1 here, if I might break it down, is because we don’t have a plan. As with anything marketing, because the way I see it Facebook is a marketing tool, you don’t just log into Facebook and say “Okay, I need to post something”, so just the need to post something without any plan it’s like going to a meeting with no agenda and no goals.

You might still be there, you might appear and you might be present, but at the end of the day, you really don’t know whether or not it works. You need to have a plan. The easiest way is to come up with a goal. Taking it to a basic level, whether the goal is to increase the number of likes or is it to drive sales or just to build brand awareness for some of the major brands. That’s all they want to do on the website. They’re not selling anything … Just to build a brand. Or you want to increase visits to your website. Who is your target audience? Are you talking to your internal clients?

You’ve got to really think about it. Before you even jump into Facebook and try to put up posts, just think about who are you talking to? I came across an article who talked about a persona. You picture someone as if that’s a real person, so for example women aged 36 years old who has a family with 2 kids and X amount of income. You picture the person when you’re posting your post. That’s actually worked like a charm, that one. Do you have any ideas on that one? Like to comment on that one, Edward?

Edward Zia: Exactly and we got a question from Margaret Kitchen to answer in a moment. One thing with Facebook is you’ve got to really know your audience and you’ve got to work out which angle to take. If you go through my Facebook page after this and go through Martha’s and you’ll see what works for us. A good way of working out what posts work is the number of likes. Likes is a measure of engagement, generally speaking. Everyone has their own style, so you might be a serious financial planner or you might be a more eccentric marketing mentor like myself. It really depends on your brand and it’s real horses for courses.

For example, Jerry Seinfeld and both Mercedes advertise through … I’ve seen them put stuff of Facebook. They’re 2 totally different brands, but they’re still here. It’s about working out your brand and getting the angle right to suit your medium. For example, Mercedes doing funny stuff, it wouldn’t work. It’s not their brand. They’re a serious, prestige brand. But let’s say … What’s a good example? Xero, the accounting software, that’s a bit of a quirky brand so they can get away with it. We had a great question from Margaret. I’ll answer it first and then Martha is going to have a shot at it.

Awesome Margaret Kitchen has asked “Can you make Facebook work for you if you’re just starting out and do not have the funds to take advantage of what is available?”. Absolutely. With Facebook, I spend a lot on Facebook because I make a lot money out of it, but it’s free to create a Facebook page and you can invite your personal friends to like your Facebook page, so you need no money, actual cash money, to start a Facebook page. So absolutely, of course money does help, but there are plenty of people that have built amazing Facebook pages in communities that make them money without putting any money into it. What do you think of that one, Martha?

Martha Arifin: Yeah, Facebook again is just a platform, so you can have all sort of online or offline things happening which drives traffic to Facebook. Easiest way is to invite your friends, but also you could go out networking, make sure that are Facebook links on your business cards, on your flyers, on your email signature, to get things started. You could also run a very, very effective campaign without paying on Facebook. As a matter of fact, we did a competition … You know like a competition where you hit like, comments or share to win whatever it is that you’re offering. You can easily go to 900 people without a cent paid to Facebook and I’ve seen it down many, many times before. Yes, it is very possible. Okay, now, what’s that?

Edward Zia: Thank you Martha for putting a photo of me on Facebook.

Martha Arifin: Content is King. When we come to content is you might want to think about okay, obviously you know what you’re doing, what you want to put out there, but if you’re starting on Facebook and thinking “Okay, what do I want to put out there?”, what you want to be is a thought leader in your leader, a person of authority. You can start it with your passion or something that really drives you because then if you do that, it’s not so much of a burden because it’s more like your passion. It’s something that you’re expert in. You can choose a topic, so for example … If I’m doing Facebook marketing, I can just have it be Facebook marketing.

It could be a bit more generic like social media marketing or internet marketing or small business marketing and things like that. You’ll pick a topic or a theme and then build up content around it. You can also guest blog on major sites and do others to blog on yours as well, as part of the content so you don’t have to do the work yourself.

Edward Zia: Just a quick point on that one. When it comes to content, a lot of people on Facebook … And this is an issue and I don’t like this and Facebook doesn’t like it either … But what a lot of people do on Facebook is they just share stupid motivational images all the time. What happened … I’m going to steal a bit of Martha’s thunder, but about 6 months ago when Facebook did the massive update, Facebook is as annoyed at those stupid motivational images as we are because what was happening everyone was jumping on Facebook and just sharing stupid motivational images.

What Facebook likes is original content, so instead of you just sharing what … I don’t know … 5 other coaches have shared, be true to yourself. Then you have the stupid pond in the background. Whatever. Whatever hippy stuff. You’ve got to create original content. In my mind, unless you’re helping out a friend, there’s not much merit in sharing other people’s content. You need original content. What’s your take on that Martha?

Martha Arifin: Yes. I think it was back in October, or something around that, Facebook changed their whole algorithm because of that very reason because there’s not many quality posts put up on Facebook. Let’s just go back a little bit. We’ve got different types of posts on Facebook. We’ve got status updates, when you type in, but you don’t upload any photos or videos, anything like that. That’s called status updates or like text updates. That rank quite good on Facebook posts. You also have the video update as well as the photo update.

Then the third one is we have the link share. There came a point where people just posted links from other people’s page without adding any content to it, like their own comments and feedback, so that linked share has dropped dramatically. I think it still is. It depends on what it is you put out there, but still as … If you compare … You can try it on your own audience. If you put up like a text update, which is the status updates with nothing else, or a photo or video updates or link share, in average the link share would reach the least amount of audience. That’s probably because of that very reason.

Edward Zia: Exactly. We’ve got a great question from Kellie. I’ll have a shot at answering it first. I was actually speaking to Kellie earlier today. She emailed me saying “Edward, I’ve got trouble with Facebook” and I said “Kellie, come to our webinar tonight” and here you are. Welcome Kellie Wigley. What Kellie is asking … I’ll just read out what she’s saying “I recently sent out a mass email invitation to invite people to my business page and only received 3 responses. Is Facebook perhaps a wrong point for business net?”.

It’s very interesting. That could be it, but I wouldn’t throw out the baby with the bath water just yet, Kellie. The thing you’ve got to consider … And I’m going to talk email marketing for the moment … It depends how big your database is, how well the email was written … It also depends on things such as how often you email the database, how relevant the database is. In other words, even though in that case you sent out a mass email “Like your Facebook”, there may have been nothing wrong with Facebook. There may have been a problem with the database or the email itself.

Again, based on the information there, it’s very hard to say whether it’s Facebook or the email or both. That’s a part of it as well because if you’re just emailing people saying “Like my Facebook page”, that may not be the right way of doing it. It’s probably more connecting with people directly on Facebook and them liking it. I’m not sure if I just sent out a mass email asking people to like your business page because again if you’ve got their email address, don’t get them to like your business page, just start getting them to go straight to your website.

Here’s the big thing. I’m not arguing against Facebook at the moment. A lot of people get too hung up … This is going to sound funny. I know this is a webinar on Facebook, but I’m going to argue against Facebook for the moment. A lot of people think “Oh my God, I’ve got a Facebook page, I’ve got to send traffic there”. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a second. The whole point of Facebook in my mind is to get your name known and get traffic to your website.

Martha Arifin: That’s right.

Edward Zia: It’s tail wagging the dog. My view is if I’ve got someone’s email address, I’m not going to send them to Facebook. I’m going to send them to my website so they can buy my products or whatever. What’s your take on that one Martha?

Martha Arifin: Yes, like we mentioned earlier, your website is the portal. It’s like your shop, your virtual shop. Everything else that you do, because marketing, LinkedIn, YouTube, or offline marketing if you put out an ad in a magazine somewhere, the point is to take them back to your shop. Then whatever you do in your shop, like you paint it nicely, all in order, you’ve got customer service in there. That’s a totally different topic altogether, but yeah, Edward is right. It’s just a marketing tool. You want to point them back to your website.

Edward Zia: Exactly. Mark has aimed a question at me and it’s a very good question, so I’m spending about $500 a month on Facebook advertising. Mark is asking “What kind of response are you getting for your $500 per month, that is how many likes, potential version”. I’ll just tell the numbers straight out. It’s costing me $2-3 per like, okay?

Martha Arifin: Yeah.

Edward Zia: The reason why you might think “Oh my God, $2-3 per like” … It might take 1,000 view of my ad to get 1 like, but the likes are very specific. I’ve aimed a like at small business owners and people on networking. That’s a bit of a paid one, but the thing about paid Facebook advertising, you’re not aiming it to 13-year-old females, you can direct it to 28-year-old small business owners, male or female, even by suburb. You can be very specific. In other words, in justifying Martha the awesome account in her … You’re probably about 200 likes a month? About maybe 150-200 likes a month?

Martha Arifin: Mmhmm (affirmative).

Edward Zia: I probably get about 5 leads a month from Facebook. 5 leads a month doesn’t sound like much, but one of them usually converts into a 2 or 3 grand client, so the case is already there. Actually leads of saying “Hi Edward, I want to hire you”, I’m getting about 1 a week, but again, 1 of them converts and that’s several grand, so done. That’s over the lifetime of the clients generally speaking. The interesting thing is, the thing I like about it, as you saw in that data before, I’m getting about 600 visits to my website a month, which is just outstanding. Also, I’m selling about 2-4 Marketing Vaults a month, so I’m selling about $2-400 worth of online products.

Only selling 2-4 a month; it’s relatively new and I’m building it. The other thing is my Facebook page hits about 900 people a week. From that point of view, I’m getting the money back, so it’s not a problem for me. This is the way to think about it, like all marketing expense, if you’re spending 500 bucks or whatever, the trick is are you making more … ? At the end of the day, I might ramp it up very soon to 1,000 bucks a month because it’s just outstanding. It’s another thing for a return of investment. If you’re spending a grand a month and making 5, then that’s not spending … That’s making 4 grand a month.

Martha Arifin: That’s right. That’s like if I’m asking you “Okay, if you give me $100 now, I’ll give you $200 tomorrow”, would you give me your money? You would just run around and try to make it and just give me $100 because it would make you $200 or $500 or $1,000, so you’ve got to really track it which is … One of the slides is about tracking. If you’re not tracking it, you’re just wasting your money.

Edward Zia: Yeah. Just so you know, I wasted a … Great photos, Martha … I wasted a bit of money for a while because I didn’t quite get how to use Facebook because I didn’t quite get how to use Facebook to suit my business. Just to clarify, I’m not saying that if you spend $500 a month now on like building, you’re going to make several grand that month. Nothing may happen for several months, but as you build your community and that way, maybe after 3-6 months of heavy work it might start returning. Again, you don’t have to …

My advice to people, if you’re starting off on Facebook, don’t spend any money yet. If you’ve heaps of money, please spend it, but if you don’t, take it easy. Just use all the free strategies and start getting leads for nothing. Then when you feel comfortable, then start giving Facebook money.

Martha Arifin: Yeah, yeah. Very good. Just to move forward. This on here is content, still on content, is if you want to put out a mixture of both your business and personal … Although some people are not comfortable with putting out their personal lives on social media. The younger audience, right now the Generation … Whatever it’s now up to … Generation Y.

Edward Zia: Generation Z.

Martha Arifin: Z. Their entire life is on digital. When they’re 80, they’ve got their entire lives well recorded digitally, which is a bit scary for me, but you know … The mix of business and personal, you’re choosing what you want to put out there, but this is my Instagram account. I don’t use this mainly for business. I do put a bit of stuff here and there linked into my Facebook account, but I use it mainly for my personal stuff. Instagram, Pinterest, a bit of a combination of both. Facebook personal page, yes, obviously all stuff goes up there, but Facebook business page and LinkedIn are a little bit more on a business genre there.

People would like to know, especially with small business owners, entrepreneurs, people really want to connect with you as a person, so at least you’re both business and personal. You can put up a picture of your cat too.

Edward Zia: Exactly. Mine exploits cats. We had a great question from Greg Standen here. Greg’s brilliant. Great question. “I’ve heard it said before that Facebook is not a sales tool and a lead generator, but more of a brand awareness builder. Thoughts?” I’m going to sound like a cynical ex-corporate marketing manager here, but when it comes to small … If you’re a big company, brand awareness is great, but when you’re a small business owner, brand awareness I think is a bit meaningless. At the end of the day, it comes down to sales because if you’re like me. I don’t know billing … Let’s say you’re billing 12 grand a month, which is roughly what I do these days, I don’t want to spend a grand a month and not get it back.

That would really anger me. You really want to get the money back. It depends on how you use it. Facebook for me is a sales tool. It’s a lead generator and it also does brand awareness, so just to I think answer your question Greg, it’s not an either/or. Lead generation … A lot of people think you either do brand awareness or lead generation. It’s not an either/or argument, it’s an and. The trick is how do you build brand awareness and get leads to make money out of it. The reality is with my Facebook campaign because I’m getting clients out of it that are hiring me and I’m making more money than what I’m spending, I’m getting free … I’m actually making money out of brand awareness.

Again, it comes down to the content. If you’re just putting up photos of your cat all the time, then that probably won’t work, but if you’re putting up photos of your cat and then linking it to your website selling products or your services, then you stand a shot at selling someone. This is the whole content. Not all of it is awesome Martha with her cute daughter singing on a microphone; Some of it is “Please buy my stuff”.

Martha Arifin: Yes, yes. A good rule of thumb is 80% of your content should be what we call community content and 20% is about your product and services, so get people to know you. It’s about building relationships. At the end of the day, it is a sales tool, but it’s not like a quite a hard selling on Facebook. Yeah, it’s a lead generator, it’s sales and also brand awareness. With brand awareness, obviously, you’ve got to look at the cover image, the profile image and the way you upload images, whether or not it has your brand on it. Some people might do a better job than others.

If you have like a designer working on it, you might probably come up with a better … Sort of like a brand pictures and images uploaded every time you upload posts to Facebook, maybe the same font throughout your marketing materials on Facebook and on the website. That’s a brand awareness on its own without having to spend tens of thousands of dollars, which takes me to the next slide which is about planning. Still on point number 1 is you need to have a plan. You can use editorial calendar. If you just Google editorial calendar on Google, you come up with a quite a free one.

You can come up with your own template too. What I usually do here is I can download one and then just modify it to my own requirements because everyone is different. Editorial calendar, for example here the snapshot you can see on Monday I put up 3 posts a day, the Facebook, what time of the day you tweet, LinkedIn and so on. You get the idea, so all the columns and rows of content that you want to put up on Facebook. It’s very, very critical to have a calendar. This one here … There’s going to be a bit of repeated on this. You finally see some networks for you and your audience and you delegate.

That’s my little one there teaching her how to do Facebook stuff … No, just joking. But the delegation being … We’ll talk about it some other time because there are many, many ways you can do that. You can create different accounts to manage the same Facebook page and so on and so forth.

Edward Zia: We’ve got a great question here from Greg. Thank you Greg. I’ll sort of paraphrase it where he was saying: How do you take business from Facebook offline to move from the sales up … What Greg is asking, although I will phrase it differently is if I get some business from Facebook, how do I then process it into a sale? Very straightforward. Quite often people will just private message me saying they’re interested in my services and they might just give me their email address or a phone number and I just call them.

Like anything, be it an email or a lead through Facebook, you just ring them up and call them and just go through the normal process. Yeah, it’s nothing too funny. They might even just leave a comment saying “Hi Martha, I want a website. Can you email me?”. Done. Then you just go through the normal process.

Martha Arifin: Yeah, that’s basically it. 70-80% is they private message me through Facebook and then just follow that through, whatever your sales process is. The problem number 2 is we’re not engaging. Content is the king and engagement is the queen and the queen rules the house. Social media is all about being social. That’s the key word there. Like I said before, a good rule of thumb is 80% of community content and 20% of your own stuff, asking for the sales so don’t be afraid of asking for the sale because at the end of the day, we all want to make money, but we also need to provide value. 20% of your stuff that is your service and products.

Engagement is the queen. You can engage them by asking them an open question. Not many people utilizes this. Competition cover image updates, so update your cover image every now and then. Milestone updates. You can put up a milestone update, if you get a new boyfriend or whatever it is, post about it for 15 minutes. Milestones are actually very popular because people actually get notified a bit more than other type of post and they can just engage with you there.

Edward Zia: Greg has asked another great question. “How does a like turn into a sale?” and that’s exactly the point. In Facebook, a like does not turn into a sale. A like to let’s say one of your posts or let’s say your Facebook business page means that just someone is following you. Again, a like in itself is meaningless. It’s about the content you put out to try and turn them into a sale. I hope that helps, Greg.

Martha Arifin: We’ve got to go through some of these slides here a bit quickly. It’s a 7:45 now.

Edward Zia: Yeah, is 7:45 and we’ve had some great questions. Martha is going to power through this, so please get more of your questions through and we’ll finish up soon. Get your questions through and Martha power through the rest.

Martha Arifin: Engagement is queen. Still tag people in your posts, as Edward demonstrated before. Tag people. When you take a picture of people, put the names, tag them on your posts so it will appear on their friends Newsfeed as well. A little bit of technique here. There’s the pin to the top feature on Facebook. This is on the page, not your profile page. It’s on this page. There’s a pin to the top, so if you hover over the little arrow on your post, you can pin an image to the top of your Newsfeed. That’s another way to increase engagement as well as the highlight.

When you highlight, it becomes a double column. If you look on the right-hand side there, if you highlight a post, then instead of a 1 column, it will take the entire column, so highlight is a bit more like what you have there.

Edward Zia: Exactly. A quick question from Brendan Harrison. Great question. “In regards to paying for Facebook advertising on Facebook, why don’t you run a set ad continuance for a set period?”. Exactly, you can do a boosted post that can run over a few days or you can do it continuously, so there’s plenty of options there.

Martha Arifin: Yes. Scheduled posts is another one. You can use Hootsuite if you’ve heard of it. If you haven’t heard of it, just check it out. Hootsuite. I would recommend go to the pro version. The other one that I could recommend is Buffer. I don’t use Buffer personally. I use Hootsuite, but Buffer … The interface is nicer on Buffer. They are both paid. Hootsuite comes with a free version as well. Basically, it’s a tool that allows you to share content across different social media. Let’s say Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, your app, you just hit one post. Hit it, put it on Hootsuite or Buffer and it will go to all the different social media, so definitely increase engagements there because it will come from different platform.

Number 3 means number mistake is you’re not tracking. Again, going back to our discussion before. If you’re not tracking, you’re losing money. This one here is a bit of an advanced strategy tactic. It’s Conversion Pixel. The good thing about this is you can measure for example if running a paid Facebook ad, you want to make sure that you get the best return of your investment. One of those measured is using Conversion Pixel, but you need your website designer or developer to work with you in regards to this. What you need to do is run an ad. When you click on an ad that goes to let’s say your website, buy something, the checkout … When they go to that page, it has a code built into that page, so then Facebook will then get notified when they buy the product and will check it against the number of likes and clicks and shares and will give you a stat for that. That’s one way of tracking it. Make sure you track everything. That’s just one point, but it’s not the only one. Track everything. If you’ve just increased the light, track the light because if it increases visits to your page, to your website, track that on your website.

We’re getting to the last second slides here. Facebook is not a marketing tool. Sorry, Facebook is a marketing tool, but you don’t make money from Facebook.

Edward Zia: Yeah, we’re all lying. Facebook is crap. This is all a contrail. We work for Facebook.

Martha Arifin: Yeah. So you don’t make money from Facebook. As a matter of fact, you probably give Facebook money with your advertising campaigns and such. If you don’t make money from Facebook, just go to account settings, there you’ve pressed deactivate your account and you go away. Facebook is about relationship building and it gives you leverage because it’s online 24/7 and that’s the uniqueness of Facebook and any social media.

Edward Zia: I think it’s very funny. Paul Sheep has asked a great question. I’m just going to read it out. Paul Sheep asks some beautiful questions. “What would you say about hosting personal events on a business page versus a personal wall?” Going through the question, Paul Sheep is basically talking about his family and different aspects of his personal life and what goes on a business page and what goes on a personal page. The old cliché is how long is a piece of string? I think it really is quite personal and depends on a range of factors. It depends on the appropriateness of the content.

It depends on what you’re personally comfortable with and depends on the nature of your business, for example I’m a marketing mentor who does all sorts of crazy stuff all around Sydney. I don’t have much of a personal life. All I do is just work all the time and I love it. For me, it’s the same thing, so it doesn’t really matter, but let’s say in Martha’s case … Martha uses her awesome daughter Emma as a Facebook marketing device.

Martha Arifin: Yeah. This is another conversation altogether about posting your daughter on Facebook, but yes.

Edward Zia: Exactly and my cat. Obviously my cats are a business asset that I use in Facebook. I’ve got no straight answer for that, but to give you some more guidance on that one, if you’re not comfortable about sharing that with the world, then don’t. Imagine whatever you’re sharing on Facebook is like putting an ad in a newspaper. If something is private to you, don’t share it. The world doesn’t need to know. Share what’s appropriate to suit your market and what’s going on.

Martha Arifin: Yes, yes. If it’s something that you need to keep to yourself or you don’t want it to go around, don’t put it anywhere on social media, anywhere, even to your friends, closest friends because you don’t know where it’s going to end up. If you’re not comfortable, don’t put it up there. It also depends. In my case, for example, people engage my service because they have a relationship with me, they know about me. They know my style, my character and because they like me, they buy my service. You can get any website done from somewhere form 2-300 bucks. If you sell your service, you sell yourself at the end of the day. It depends on how comfortable it is for you to put up personal stuff on your page.

Edward Zia: Exactly. Paul just clarified your question. Paul’s saying “What do you put on your personal timeline and your business page?”. Again, there’s no answer to that, but what I can say is you shouldn’t really put business stuff on your personal page. It’s not built for that and technically Facebook doesn’t like it, so more business stuff on your business page and personal stuff on your personal page. What happens is especially as small business owners and entrepreneurs, there is a blur between that and it’s more than debated where that blur sits. What sits in the middle and that sort of thing.

Martha Arifin: That’s right. I believe this is our last slide. With social media and Facebook specifically, your strategy is very critical. Going back to your drawing board, make sure you’ve got a strategy. What is your goal? What’s the theme? Then the technique comes second. How do I do this? When do we need to post this? What time of the day etc? What type of ad and budget and everything else? That’s the technique and the skills. All and all, Facebook and social media shorten what I call acquaintance time compared to traditional marketing. Instead of us taking 6 months to a year, I just now shorten it to about maybe 2 or 3 months before someone actually buys a product or service. In my case, that’s very practical.

In summary, that’s how we make money in Facebook. We shorten the time, the selling time or whatever you call that in market terms.

Edward Zia: What Martha is talking about … This is an important concept … Is the sale cycle. Let’s say on your current marketing activity, it’s going to take 12 months before someone hires you or buys your product. With good marketing, you might shorten that to 3 months. Martha is going to answer this question really quickly for Brendan because we are out of time. “Are there good plugins to use on your Facebook page?” I just use a couple there.

Martha Arifin: Okay.

Edward Zia: I think I know what you’re asking there Brendan. With plugins on Facebook page, again Facebook likes to do its own thing. I wouldn’t worry too much about them, but I think what you’re more asking is what are the programs outside of Facebook? Again Hootsuite is a great way of sharing content. I hope that’s good. We’re out of time pretty much. Just doing a quick promotion. We’ve got The Awesome Business Boot Camp coming up. Saturday, April 5 2014, it’s awesomebootcamp.com.au and we’d love to see you there. It’s a full-day free sales and marketing workshop. That brings us to the end. We’ve had so many good questions. We’re out of time. Anything else you want to say right now Martha?

Martha Arifin: Yeah, just if you get overwhelmed, don’t be. It’s a normal situation. When you first get to Facebook, it’s like “Oh, what do I do now? What do I do?”. Just go to your planning board, think about what you want to achieve? Increased likes, visits, blah blah blah, have a goal and have content around it. Schedule it. Have your calendar, schedule it and do 1 step at a time. Try not to tackle too much.

Edward Zia: Exactly. That’s pretty much it. We’re over time because you’ve been an amazing audience and you’ve asked some great questions. Here’s the quick sell. We’ve got an offer which is going for the next 47 seconds. Do we?

Martha Arifin: Do we?

Edward Zia: No, we don’t. I just made that up. We’ve got no offers, but seriously if you want to chat to any of us on the house … If you want to talk to Martha Arifin, Martha is the website girl and she’s great with detail and Facebook and the technical side, there’s Martha’s detail there. Go to her website at trustedwebexpert.com.au. If you want to speak to me from a mentoring strategy small business marketing entrepreneur point of view, visit my website at excellenceabove.com.au or message me. That’s pretty much it.

Just let us know if you’re interested. Just contact us any time if you want to have a chat about what we can do to help you. Be it you need a website or some mentoring or a bit of help on Facebook, we’re here. We’ve got to go because we’re out of time. Thank you for the great feedback everyone.

Martha Arifin: Yeah, thank you everyone for tuning in with us this afternoon.

Edward Zia: Yeah and we’ve gone over time and we love it, so stay tuned for the recording to come out. Thank you guys. We’re getting all the great. Thanks. This is Edward Zia, small business marketing mentor and Martha Arifin.

Martha Arifin: Bye bye.

Edward Zia: See you guys. She does websites.