“We want you to help us run social media ads!”

We hear this all the time. And we hate it when people ask us to do it right off the bat. It’s just not a good place to start with your social marketing campaign. Check out my man Dave’s blog here. He sums it up well, but in short, you need a marketing strategy.

Strategy is exactly what you need, but here is one more thing you need before you run social media ads, a presence.

You need a living social media presence. Yes, living.

Before Kelsie and I will ever recommend that you run advertisements on Facebook, we will make certain that your Facebook presence is alive.

Here are four indicators to know your Facebook presence is alive and well:

1) Your posts, on average, have the same amount of reach as your followers/likes.

Because you have a business page, Facebook automatically gives you some awesome tools. They will tell you how many people your post has reached. We will talk about reach later, but follow me here, if you have a following on your business page, say 1,000, but you are only reaching 200 people, (we see this all the time) would you consider that good?

No.

You are creating a post that Facebook is literally not showing your own following. Listen: you are the product for Facebook. You don’t pay for it. When you, the product, do not fit their algorithm meant to keep people on their website, they will not show your post to even the people who have clicked the “like” button on your page.

Wow. More on algorithm later.

2) You have people liking your page often and on occasion disliking it.

We always warn clients about this. They hate the second part. “NOOOOOO! People can’t stop liking us!”

Yes they can, and they will.

We equate it to fishing. Except you’re the fish. You are swimming around in the lake with other fish; some are bigger, some are smaller. You were reeled in by a customer. They were so happy to reel you in, but then they realized you needed to be released for whatever reason.

Thank them for doing that; it keeps you living and reminds you that you have a pulse. It allows you to think about where you are swimming. Big fish are big for a reason.

We know this flips the traditional wisdom of marketing on its head. But we believe traditional wisdom is often more traditional than wise.

3) Posts from a few weeks/months/years back are still gaining likes.

We love this one. It is proof you are getting noticed. If your post is a month old, unless it went some sort of crazy viral, Facebook is not showing it to people anymore on their news feed.

So how did it get a like then? Someone went to your page and started scrolling through your posts. You drew them in enough that they wanted to engage with you by being directly on your page and scrolling down to see what you had to offer them.

Using the fishing analogy, good fishermen know where to go in the lake to find the best fish. They are coming to your spot in the lake to do their fishing.

4) People are commenting on your posts.

This one isn’t hard to understand. You want people to engage with what you are doing

When your following is engaging in this manner, Facebook loves you dearly and will reward you handsomely by expanding your reach. It’s part of the algorithm.

The dreadful and mystical algorithm. We will teach you more about it soon.

But remember, you need to be swimming, not fishing.

Talk soon,

Aaron & Kelsie

P.S. There are way more than four signs that your social media is alive and well.

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