It can allow you to market products, increase customer lifetime value, be seen as authority figures in your industry, control discourse and benefit from effectively free advertising, and much more, with an investment of zero dollars and only a few hours of easy, albeit mind-numbing work.

By now, it’s well known that the old cliche “If you build it, they will come” is awful business advice. However, if you have a large community of people, you can almost always build something to sell them. Community building has always been a viable way to start or grow a business. Years ago, communities took the form of forums, but for a few reasons, Facebook groups have largely replaced forums.

Why Facebook Groups?

Members of a standalone forum generally have to revisit the forum in order to receive notifications. Members of a Facebook group, on the other hand, receive notifications of new activity straight to their phone or email.

To join a standalone forum, a new member has to register. Joining a Facebook group, on the other hand, is a process with much less friction for an existing Facebook user.

The Age-old Chicken and Egg problem

The hard part of community building has always been the chicken and egg problem: no one wants to join a community which doesn’t yet have any members. Luckily, this article will enable you to solve the chicken-and-egg problem by instantly building a community with several hundred engaged and interested members.

The Method

Step 1: Join relevant groups

The first step is to join Facebook groups that are highly related to the group you are making. Quality is more important than quantity here; you want to join groups that are full of engaged users, rather than large groups that are neglected.

Step 2: Make some new friends

Once you’ve joined a few groups, simply right-click on the names of every poster you see, open their Facebook profile page in a new tab, and add them as a friend. Alternatively, you could simply find members on the group’s Members page, but adding recently active users allows us to ensure that all of our new friends are active and interested in our topic.

Facebook has rate-limiting and friend-adding limitations depending on how much they trust your account. I had no trouble adding 50-100 friends per day for several days. You’ll want to repeat this process every day for several days, until you’ve added several hundred friends in total.

Step 3: Wait…

Now wait a few days. Because people are friendly, forgetful, impulsive, or apathetic, around half of the people you’ve added as a friend will accept your friend request. Probably much more if you’re an attractive female. We only need to wait a few days to give most people a chance to respond to our friend request.

Step 4: Add our new friends to our Facebook group

In one browser window, on the left side of the screen, re-visit a group you used in steps one and two. In another browser window on the right side of your screen, open your Facebook group. Now in the first tab, go to the Members page. You’ll notice that your friends appear at the top of the Members list. Now select the Add Members input box in your rightmost browser window, and type names of friends that you see listed in your leftmost browser window.

Before you do this, you’ll probably want to set your group to Private. More people will join a group which lacks discussions if they think maybe it’s bustling with activity.

Once they’ve accepted the group invitation, threads from your group will show up in their regular Facebook feed. Most people join several different groups for each of their interests, and they will indiscriminately engage with the threads from your group when they show up in their feed.

How to prosper and not die

Good moderation is essential for facebook groups. Spammy posts will be flagged and will lack engagement, which will kill your group’s engagement score in Facebook’s edgerank (stopping your group from showing up in users’ feeds) and drive users away.

Scheduled posting can be a way to boost engagement and keep people interested and active without interrupting yourself several times a day to post in your group.

For more ideas on some ways to build engagement, check out our post on 7 Tricks to Hack Your Facebook Group Engagement

That study yielded some pretty interesting, albeit expected results. Facebook and Twitter were particularly popular, while LinkedIn and Pinterest didn’t find much favor. Instagram was limited to fashion startups and Google+ was largely dead.

This made us think: how do B2B startups use social media? Are there any differences between B2B and B2C startups? If yes, what are these differences?

To find answers, we analyzed how 50 venture-backed companies in the B2B use social media.

The results were equal parts expected and surprising.

Our Process

As before, we followed a simple process in our analysis:

• We searched for B2B startups founded after 2015 in the Crunchbase database.
• To filter out startups listing themselves on Crunchbase for SEO purposes, we only looked at venture-backed startups or startups that had raised an angel round at the very least.
• From this list, we picked out 50 startups at random and analyzed their social media use.

We limited our analysis to the top 6 social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google+. We skipped Snapchat since it doesn’t really have a lot of uptake among B2B companies right now.

Our data looked like this at the end:

Notice the series of “NAs” under the Instagram column?

That’s not an accident – very few B2B businesses we analyzed were on Instagram, as expected.

Let’s take a look at some other top findings from this analysis.

Most B2B startups prefer Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn; Pinterest, Instagram and Google+ are widely ignored

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone: B2B startups are concentrated mostly on business-friendly platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn.

Facebook gets a lot of traction as well, but that’s mostly because of Facebook’s massive reach.

Pinterest and Instagram, as expected, find few takers.

Here are the numbers:

Social Network	Total Followers Across All Startups
Facebook	2,546,292
Twitter	450,045
Pinterest	276,807
LinkedIn	67,183
Instagram	11,560
Google+	10,237

You’re obviously thinking that Facebook has a substantial lead over all other networks, but that’s mostly because of a single startup – PlayBuzz – which has a massive 2.4M fans on Facebook. PlayBuzz is a hybrid B2B/B2C startup that offers quiz creation tools to publishers but also publishes quizzes of its own, which gives it this massive reach.

PlayBuzz similarly skews Pinterest numbers. This single account has over 274,000 followers.

LinkedIn is the most popular platform among B2B companies

100% of the startups we surveyed had a LinkedIn presence (even though the lowest ranked startup – in terms of followers – had just 3 followers on LinkedIn).

Similarly, 96% of the startups we surveyed (or rather, 48 out of 50) use Twitter to keep their audience updated.

In contrast, only 40 out of 50 surveyed companies had a Facebook presence. For Instagram, this was much higher with only 12 out of 50 companies maintaining a presence on the platform.

For Pinterest and Google+, these numbers were 14 out of 50 and 35 out of 50 respectively.

Social Network	Total Startups with Active Profiles (out of 50)	% of Total Startups with Active Profiles
Facebook	40	80%
LinkedIn	50	100%
Twitter	48	96%
Instagram	12	24%
Pinterest	14	28%
Google+	35	70%

A couple of things to note:

• A lot of Google+ profiles are empty or haven’t seen updates in months. Most of these profiles were likely created because of YouTube or Google Apps. So while on paper, Google+ is more popular than Pinterest and Instagram (35 out of 50 vs. 14 out of 50 users), this doesn’t translate into actual use.
• Similarly, a lot of Facebook business pages are scarcely utilized. Twitter profiles, on the other hand, are frequently updated with fresh content.

B2B startups have the highest median follower count on Twitter and LinkedIn

Looking at the median follower count for each startup and social network is much more illuminating than simply looking at the average or total follower count. This eliminates the outliers who often account for a disproportionately high number of followers.

For our B2B startups, the median follower count looks like this:

Social Network	Median Follower Count of Each Startup
Twitter	955
LinkedIn	905
Facebook	684
Instagram	529.5
Pinterest	67
Google+	40

The average looks quite a bit different:

Social Network	Average Follower Count of Each Startup
Twitter	9,375
LinkedIn	1,343
Facebook	63,657
Instagram	963
Pinterest	19,771
Google+	292

A few things stand out here:

• Startups have a much higher median follower count on Twitter and LinkedIn than on Facebook, even though the total number of followers on Facebook is substantially higher. As mentioned before, this can be attributed to PlayBuzz racking up 2.4M Facebook likes.
• Instagram has a much higher median follower count than Pinterest or Google+. This is again because nearly 99% of all Pinterest followers in our list can be attributed to PlayBuzz (274k out of 276k followers). Instagram may have fewer startups on it, but the ones that are there take the platform seriously enough.

There is no correlation between funding and followers

B2B startups are usually more capital efficient than B2C startups. One analysis by Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures found that “enterprise-oriented startups have delivered more value per private dollar invested” as compared to consumer-focused startups.

In the current funding environment, this means that an increasingly larger share of venture dollars are flowing out to B2B startups.

For instance, this study by PitchBook found that from 2014 to 2016, investment in B2B startups increased while the B2C investment market actually shrunk in 2016:

This is reflected in our analysis as well.

Excluding 6 startups with undisclosed funding totals, the 50 startups on our list have raised a total of $554.45M – or nearly $12.5M per startup.

These are the top 10 most funded startups on our list:

Looking at the funding vs. total followers, however, isn’t particularly insightful.

For instance, the startup with the second highest funding total at $59.77M – Magnet System – has just 90 followers on Twitter.

Looking at the top 10 startups with the highest social media followers vs. the 10 most funded startups, we see just 4 startups in common:

Even though an increasingly larger share of B2B buyers research online before making purchase decisions (94% as per one study), a number of our top funded startups haven’t found it worthwhile to invest heavily in social media.

A few reasons why this might be the case:

• Social media isn’t popular among their target decision makers.
• Lack of in-house social media marketing expertise, and/or lack of time/tools to dedicate to social media.
• The product isn’t conducive to social media. For instance, one of the startups on our list – Vascular Graft Systems – manufactures medical grafts. Its target customers of surgeons and hospitals isn’t likely to be looking for solutions on Twitter or Facebook.

Part II: What Kind of Content is Shared

We’ve seen how usage patterns vary across different social networks.

In this next part, we’ll take a look at what kind of content B2B businesses like to share on different channels.

1. On Twitter

Simply Measured has the highest number of followers at 349k:

This is followed by SalesLoft at 10.5k:

That’s a mighty big difference.

The top 10 startups on Twitter looked something like this:

Startup	Total Twitter Followers	Twitter Handle
Simply Measured	349,000	@simplymeasured
SalesLoft	10,500	@salesloft
ShipServ	9902	@shipserv
Parsley	7906	@parsely
Funding Options	6484	@FundingOptions
MailJet	6471	@mailjet
Pixlee	6154	@pixlee
freee	5973	@freee_jp
Lattice Engines	4687	@lattice_engines
Proformative	4472	@proformative

Interestingly enough, with 411,547 followers, the top 10 startups accounted for 91% of the total 450,045 Twitter followers across all 50 startups.

What kind of content is shared?

Companies post more frequently on Twitter than on any other social media. Simply Measured has posted almost 30k posts that have got them 349k followers.

They post anywhere between 10-15 posts on a single day. It could be about news in their niche or even some development at their office.

SalesLoft is no different. They also post dozens of posts in one day and pin a new post every day to give more attention to that tweet.

Takeaways:

• B2B startups that do well on Twitter embrace its free-wheeling, no rules nature. They post often and don’t limit themselves to specific topics.
• Pinning a tweet is a good way to give it more attention.
• News, internal events, advice, blog posts, images – everything is game for Twitter.

2. On Linkedin

Linkedin is the only social channel every B2B company is using in our list. Most of them keep their profile updated with 2-3 posts every week.

SimplyMeasured tops the list with the most number of subscribers followed by Kantox.

These are the top 10 startups on our list in terms of LinkedIn followers:

Startup	Total LinkedIn Followers
Simply Measured	9758
SalesLoft	4305
Kantox	4022
Kapow	3774
Lattice Engines	3026
Jifflenow	2905
Velocify	2612
Cydcor	2572
Mintigo	2360
NuORDER	1879

What kind of content is shared?

Both Simply Measured and Kantox post more business focused stories. Linked is not where you’d want to post memes or a GIF.

Companies also post internship and job offers on their LinkedIn page.

Takeaways:

• LinkedIn is strictly business. For B2B companies, it’s a particularly important channel of customer acquisition. Maintaining a strong presence here is crucial for attracting business customers.
• Besides customer acquisition, LinkedIn’s other big role is in talent acquisition. A strong LinkedIn page gives potential employees a glimpse of your company, its expertise, and its culture. Posting stories about company culture, internal events as well as job openings can be particularly effective.

3. On Facebook

80% of the B2B companies surveyed use Facebook to promote themselves. Playbuzz has the maximum number of likes followed by Free.

Here are the top 10 startups on Facebook in terms of likes:

Startup	Total Facebook Likes
Playbuzz	2,420,270
Simply Measured	56336
freee	26464
Pixlee	6540
Cydcor	4621
Lattice Engines	4330
ShipServ	3293
Kapow	2973
Velocify	2929
Mailjet	2105

Facebook’s median like count per startup is lower than LinkedIn or Twitter. This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone – Facebook’s poor organic reach and constantly changing algorithm means that businesses don’t feel compelled to invest in getting likes.

That doesn’t mean that businesses aren’t actually using Facebook. As per research by CMI, 75% of B2B buyers are Facebook users. This reach, combined with Facebook’s superior ad targeting, means that businesses can use targeted ads to reach their customers.

Why spend on likes when you can simply buy clicks to your landing pages?

What kind of content is shared?

Facebook posts are a mix of all other social media post-types. It’s not as open-ended as Twitter but it isn’t as business-like as LinkedIn either.

As expected, there is a lot of visual content.

For example, SimplyMeasured posts videos, photos of their office and also the company and industry news.

Freee, which sells accounting software, links out to its blog posts as well (the pages are translated from Japanese).

Takeaways

• Facebook is a great way to humanize your brand. Sharing “behind the scenes” content, office pictures, internal events photos, etc. can be powerful branding and recruiting tools. Nearly all of your would-be customers and employees will likely be on Facebook anyway.
• Visual content dominates Facebook. GIFs, images, videos – anything besides a standard text post will help you reach a bigger audience.

4. On Instagram

Instagram is mostly ignored by B2B companies. Only 12 out of 50 use Instagram.

Playbuzz has the most number of followers followed by Cydcor.

Here is the Instagram top 10:

Startup	Total Followers on Instagram
Playbuzz	5461
Cydcor	1559
Simply Measured	1428
NuORDER	885
Kapow	734
SalesLoft	584
High Alpha	475
Handshake	225
Velocify	104
Newtopia	55
Balluun	35

What kind of content is shared?

Cydcor shares a lot of pictures and short videos from work on Instagram:

PlayBuzz, meanwhile, mostly shares memes. Fitting given its hybrid B2B/B2C model.

Both the companies don’t miss out on a chance to use relevant hashtags

Takeaways:

• Instagram isn’t a great platform to acquire actual customers. Its traffic is too far up in the funnel to convert into leads without significant effort. However, Instagram is a great branding and recruiting tool, especially if your business wants to target younger talent.
• Sharing behind-the-scenes images and brand-focused pictures is a great way to use Instagram’s reach for branding and recruiting.
• Since Instagram won’t likely net you leads directly, it’s recommended that you keep it out of your marketing mix until you’ve exhausted all other social channels.

5. On Pinterest

Pinterest is used by only 14 out of 50 companies from the list – fitting for a B2C focused startup.

The top performing one is PlayBuzz, an online content publishing platform. They have 275,000 followers.

However, because of its hybrid B2B/B2C model, PlayBuzz is an outlier. Other startups on our list have just 310 followers on average.

The others in the top 10 are:

Startup	Total Followers on Pinterest
Playbuzz	274000
Simply Measured	1900
SalesLoft	194
Newtopia	187
Cydcor	171
Kapow	168
Balluun	90
Mailjet	44
NuORDER	32
Talentory	9

What kind of content is shared?

SimplyMeasured has 14 boards with 205 pins covering marketing topics and images.

Given SimplyMeasured’s social media heavy target audience, this makes for great marketing content.

Besides tips, SimplyMeasured also shares images from company events, such as this board:

There are also boards showing off a “day in the life” of a SimplyMeasured employee, along with boards with short team biographies:

Additionally, SimplyMeasured shares a lot of its tweets automatically. This isn’t really ideal but when you’re short of resources, it can get you at least some traction.

Takeaways:

• Again, Pinterest’s audience skews younger and more female. This traffic is likely to be very high up in the funnel to be actually lucrative. It’s best to use Pinterest as a branding and recruiting tool.
• Automate sharing on Pinterest from your more used platforms if necessary. This will ensure that you have a presence on the platform without spending too many resources on it.

6. On Google+

Most of these companies do have Google+ page but with zero recent updates.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise – Google+ is largely a ghost town with just 1% of Google’s actual users active on it (although the claims vary).

PlayBuzz and SimplyMeasured top the list with 2,642 and 2,545 followers respectively.

The top 10 looks like this:

Startup	Total Followers on Google+
Playbuzz	2642
Simply Measured	2451
Velocify	2044
Parsely	594
Traxpay	486
Mailjet	386
freee	287
Proformative	254
Funding Options	185
BellaDati	173

What kind of content is shared?

Velocify posts one post every week on Google plus. Doesn’t matter how attractive they make the headline they get little to no engagement from the users.

Parsely use to post a lot of statistics but now they have stopped and the reason is simple – there is no engagement from the users.

SimplyMeasured uses Google+ just to share its YouTube videos:

Takeaways:

• There is no need to generate new content for Google+. If you can keep posting posts that you share on other social media channels, it should be enough to keep your G+ profile updated. Else you’ll just waste time creating content for a channel that doesn’t give you much engagement.

Conclusion

B2B companies tend to focus on social channels that can deliver immediate ROI or help broadcast company news. For most businesses, this usually means LinkedIn and Twitter. The former serves to contact and capture leads while the latter works as a broadcast medium.

Other networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. are more visual in nature and thus, fall further down the priority ladder for B2B startups. Startups that do use them do so mostly for building their brands and attracting quality talent.

If you’re running a B2B startup, LinkedIn and Twitter seem to be the best two social channels to start your social media marketing with. As you grow your audience and learn the ropes, use a tool like Jarvis to expand further to Instagram, Facebook and other social channels.

Do you actively use Social Media to engage and build relations with potential customers in your town or city?

You are robbing yourself of some great opportunities if you are not taking full advantage of Social Media to promote your local business.

Social Media is a gold mine for small businesses that rely on word of mouth marketing and long term relationships to grow.

Growth of local Business depends on who you know in your community and what’s better than Social Media to get to know more people?

If you are still in doubt and waiting for one final push to start using Social Media, let’s have a look at some examples of local businesses killing it on Social Media.

They are consistent:

Don’t wait to get a lot of fans or followers before you start posting regularly to your Social Media pages.

Just set up a business page and start updating on a regular basis because local customers will prefer to deal with a business that is approachable, both online and offline.

Here’s the analysis of a local business page that offers domestic services like cleaning, gardening, home removals, and the likes.

As you can see, they are posting more than once on a daily basis and they are mixing it up nicely between photos, videos, and links.

It doesn’t have to be your own content.

You can also share great content from web (It’s known as content Curation).

These businesses are also cross-promoting the content between different social media channels.

Cross promotions or Content Repurposing allows you to use one piece of content on many different channels for maximum exposure.

You don’t necessarily need to create unique content for each and every platform.

Just modify it a little bit and use on different channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, or SlideShare.

They are focusing on building relationships:

On social media, put your entire focus on building strong relationships with your customers.

That’s the only way to convert a follower into customer and a one-time customer into regular client.

As earlier mentioned, it’s all about who you know in your community.

The more people you know the better your chances of getting new business from referrals and word of mouth.

Even if they don’t need your services, they will recommend or refer a friend who’s looking for a similar product or service.

Relationship building starts with great customer service.

Smart businesses respond in a jiffy when someone leaves a message or mention them in a tweet.

They don’t mind giving the limelight to their customers by sharing their photos or comments.

Here’s another example.

A happy customer posts a positive review and the business makes the most of it by giving a public shout-out (and highlighting the review in their post).

Another way to build relationship is to encourage your customers to share personal stories, opinions, or ideas.

They are Promoting the business without being too salesy:

You must not think of Social Media as an advertising channel.

However, you can promote your business without going overboard.

Here’s how a local kitchenware business is doing it by sharing special discounts and promo code with their fans.

You can also share the photos from your office or premises.

It will add a lot of credibility and they will be tempted to visit your store or office in person.

Here’s another way of promoting your business.

A professional photographer has created this board on Pinterest to highlight her professional achievements.

You can also use Social Media for recruitment purpose.

In fact, you can save money on job advertisements by posting directly to your social media page.

Similarly, you can announce an upcoming event or sales.

They are showing the human side of their business:

Smart local businesses are not shy of showing the human faces behind their business.

You can do it by highlighting your staff and team members every once in a while.

You can also share personal stories and opinions.

Just avoid political triggers or controversial topics but there’s nothing wrong with sharing your thoughts on a topic which is not relevant to your business.

There’s no need to talk about your business or profession all the time.

You should not come across as a robot.

You can also draw attention to the human side of your business by participating or talking about a local event.

And when there’s a special occasion like Christmas or Halloween, you should be the first to share greetings and best wishes with your customers.

They are trying to engage people:

Social Media is not supposed to be a one-way communication.

It’s a two-way conversation.

You need to engage your customers and encourage them to interact with your posts.

Engagement rate is one of the biggest factors that affect your organic reach.

The easiest way to make them respond is to ask questions.

Even better, you can create polls or surveys to make it easier for them to respond.

Takeaways for Local Businesses:

Hopefully, you have got a good dose of motivation by now.

Let’s recap the lessons that we have learned so far.

• Post great content on a consistent basis.
• Try different types of content that includes but is not limited to graphics, videos, infographic, and links to articles or blog posts.
• Make sure that you are sending out greetings and best wishes on special occasions like Christmas, Halloween, Mothers Day, Valentines, etc.
• Collect social proof while you are at it. When you get a good review or a thank-you tweet from a client, share it on all of your profiles.
• Share photos of your staff, office, and premises to build trust and credibility.
• Encourage them to share your posts with their friends by offering discounts or launching a contest.
• Ask questions, start polls, or initiate discussions to improve engagement rate.
• Respond to all of their messages, mentions, and queries as soon as possible

Do that and you will live happily ever after.

In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

You will start from a grand total of zero followers.

You will have to promote your profile to build a following. To make matters worse, it’s going to be a slow progress in the beginning.

Don’t lose hope, and remember getting your first 500 followers is going to be the toughest. As soon as you start to get some followers, Matthew effect will come to the fore, and you will start to see a steady growth in follower, given that you are consistently producing great content.

Here’s how to promote your social media profiles.

Paid Advertising:

The organic reach might be down at Social media websites, but their paid advertising solutions have improved a lot.

You can reach out to your target audience with great precision.

Simply choose your target audience and run some ads to get your first 100 or 1000 followers. Normally a Page like will cost you less than a dollar on Facebook, and the cost is equally low on other platforms.

Cross Promotions:

One of the easiest and the cheapest methods to get your first few followers is to invite all of your friends or contacts to like/follow your page.

Add your social media profiles in your newsletters or email signatures.

Your website must link to all of your profiles at a prominent place.

Click to Tweet deserves its own mention since it’s an extremely effective method of using your blog posts to get some Tweets.

Also, promote your profile at one network through the profile at another network, especially if one of them seems to be doing better than the others.

Train and encourage your team members to act as brand ambassadors. You can announce some perks or incentives for team members who will bring a lead through social media.

Offline Advertising:

Add your social media handles to your business cards, brochures, or flyers.

If you’re using traditional advertising mediums like TV ads, billboards, or print ads, make sure that your social media profiles are mentioned along with your website.

Many customers will prefer getting in touch through Facebook Page as compared to your website.

Conclusion:

It all adds up to this.

Social media marketing is not easy, but a little bit of planning, consistently producing good content, focusing on engagement rate, and using a social media management tool will make it as simple as possible.

We hope that this guide has given you a good idea of ways to make the most of Social Media.
Follow these tips and you will live happily ever after.

The right time and the right days to publish your best post?

Want to see if your posts are getting the red flags like Hide or Report as spam reactions? Not sure if you are getting the likes from the age group, location, or gender that you’d like to target?

You can get the answers to all these questions and a lot more through Facebook Insights.

These insights are there by default and you can access them anytime by clicking on Insights link in the menu.

It gets even better with the introduction of Local insights.

If you are a local business, you can see the peak hours when most people are in nearby locations to choose your opening hours. You can also see the age group, gender, and even home location of these people.

This is invaluable information for small businesses that don’t have the budgets to spend on market research or surveys.

Let’s discuss different sections of Facebook Insights and how to use this information as a small business.

Overview:

The overview will give you a quick summary of the likes, reach, engagement, and the actions on the page. You can set it to show statistics from Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days, or Last 28 days.

Scroll down and you will find a quick summary of your paid promotions including the cost and the number of people reached.

Next, you will find your 5 most viewed posts in that specific time period so you can quickly see the kind of content or posts that will work.

As you can see, link posts have reached the most people but it was pushed by a paid boost. Photo and video posts seem to have the best organic reach.

Then you have a comparison with similar business pages and you can see if your page is doing equally well or lagging far behind.

Clearly, the other page has a much better engagement rate. Going through their content and post timings might give you an idea or two?

Facebook will suggest some similar pages or you can also add the Facebook page of your competitors to have the comparison.

Promotions:

Promotions section gives a quick summary of your paid boosts. Complete detail of your paid advertising campaigns can be found in Ads Manager but that’s for another post.

Likes:

Likes section will give you the details about your Page likes.

First, you need to choose the “Start” and “End” dates to get the reports for a certain period of time.

This section shows how your page has performed over a period of time and if you are going into the right direction.

Steady growth shows that you are well on your track and if it’s going down then there’s something wrong and you need to figure out the reason.

Next, you have the “Net likes” graph. It shows the number of likes obtained through organic means, paid promotions, and the unlikes.

It’s common to have a small number of people to unlike your page but an abnormally high outflow means two things.

First, you are not targeting the right audience and second, you are not posting the right content and you need to make changes in your social media calendar.

You will also find a graph that shows the source of your page likes. You can see if the likes are coming from Ads, from your page, or uncategorized sources.

Reach:

Reach section shows the number of people that you’ve reached on Facebook and how they are reacting to your content.

The first graph shows the number of people your posts reached.

Needless to say that you should be aiming for a stable or slightly upward trend in your post reach. The massive hike (like the one in the screenshot above) or drops can come from starting or ending paid promotions, trying different post types, or posting more regularly.

The next graph shows the response of your target audience. It shows the reactions, comments, or shares that your posts are getting.

If you’ve read our Facebook Algorithm guide, you will know that your organic reach is parallel to the response your posts get.

If you are getting a lot of reactions, comments, or shares, your organic reach will improve.

Scroll down if you want to see the kind of reactions your post get.

Almost all of these reactions are equally good, at least as far as reach and algorithm are concerned. However, you might want to get more (or less) of a certain reaction, depending on your goals and objectives.

This chart will show if you are achieving your goal.

Just like the Likes or comments improve your organic reach, reactions like “Hide” or “Report as Spam” will do the opposite.

It’s something you need to keep an eye on a regular basis. Make sure that your posts are getting no such reactions.

The section ends with a graph showing your total reach.

Page Views:

Page views are like Google Analytics for your website. You can see how many people have visited your page, sections that they’ve viewed, and the source of traffic.

Click on “by Section” to see if visitors are viewing the sections that you want them to see.

You can see the age and gender of people who have visited your website, their location, and the device that they are using.

You can also see the source of traffic on your page.

Actions on the Page:

This section will give you the following insights:

• Total Actions on the Page
• People who clicked Action button (by age and gender, country, city, and device)
• People who clicked Get Directions (by age and gender, country, city, and device)
• People who clicked Phone Number (by age and gender, country, city, and device)
• People who clicked Website (by age and gender, country, city, and device)

You can use this information while choosing Target Audience in your paid promotions. For example, if you are creating a campaign to get website clicks, you can target the country or age group that clicked website. If you are looking to get the leads, you can target the ones who have clicked the phone number.

Posts:

Post section gives you all the information that you need to improve your engagement rate and reach.

For example, it tells you the day and time when the majority of your page fans are online.

Going by this information a time between 9:30 PM to 10:30 PM will be the best time to post while there’s no big difference between the number of people online on a specific day.

You can also check the average reach and engagement rate for different types of posts.

Here’s the most interesting part. You can also see the best performing posts from your competitors or pages that you are keeping an eye on.

If you are running short of ideas and can’t decide what type of content or topics will click with your audience, this section can give you some food for thought.

Then there’s a list of all posts with the reach and engagement rate. You can sort them according to reach or engagement rate.

You can sort this list according to reach engagement rate.

Good for you because Social Media marketing is worth all the time and investment.

You can manage some of your Social Media accounts and post updates through services and apps, but a dedicated Social Media manager can do a lot more.

Social Media manager will monitor different social media platforms to find posts, discussions, and trends related to your brand or business.

They will come up with strategies to engage and interact with your target audience.

They will keep an eye on the progress through analytics to make sure your social media strategy is on track.

However, you need to make sure that you are not handing over your business accounts to someone who doesn’t know anything about the scope of Social Media and who’s entire strategy is not based on finding random stuff and posting it to your profiles.

What Makes a Good Social Media Manager?

When used smartly, Social Media can produce amazing results for businesses of all sizes.

When used not so smartly, social media marketing can be a waste of time and resources (and sometimes cause massive embarrassments for brands and businesses).

When you are hiring a social media manager, you need to make sure that you are hiring someone who knows how to produce engaging  and conversion-oriented content, interact with your target customers, and use analytics to find opportunities.

A good Social Media manager will be able to come up with social media marketing plan while keeping your goals and objectives in mind.

They will know the right platforms.

They will not be obsessed with vanity metrics like the number of followers or Likes. Instead, he’ll be looking to create content that engages your target audience and converts them into customers.

They’ll know the right tools to make the most of their time

Last but not the least, good social media managers will have the experience of setting up, monitoring and optimizing Social Media advertising campaigns.

In short, you are looking for someone who is good at content creation, curation, analytics, communication, and PPC at the same time.

Someone who comes with this kind of skill set and expertise is not going to work for peanuts.

Before trying to get an idea of how much a good social media manager costs, let’s see how many hours do you need to manage social media for a small business.

Ideally, Social Media marketing and management needs to be a full-time job.

Posting updates, replying to visitors messages and tweets, scanning social media for relevant posts or discussions, creating new content and coming up with ideas, going through competitors’ accounts, doing the outreach, and following up can take an entire day’s work. But that’s for fairly large businesses.

Small or Local businesses have a relatively small audience so we can safely assume that 3 – 4 hours a day are going to be enough.

The below-mentioned costs are created while keeping that time in mind.

How Much a Freelance Social Media Manager Costs?

Let’s start from Upwork, which is one of the biggest freelance jobs portals.

We searched for Social Media Managers and here’s what we get.

A total of more than 31k freelancers with the following price ranges.

• More than 12k freelancers are charging well under $10/hour
• Around 13k are charging rates between $10/hour to $30/hour
• There are more than 3.5k who will work at $30/hour to $60/hour
• And then there’s the most expensive category charging at least $60/hour or more

We filtered the results to get the freelancers with at least 100 hours billed.

As you can see, we are getting pretty much the same results.

Around 8700 freelancers out of 9700 are charging $10/hr to $30/hr.

Let’s use another filter to find the ones with the highest job success rate.

As expected, that takes out a big majority of freelancers offering a rate below $10/hr.

Still, more than 80% of these freelancers fall into “$10 or below” and “$10/hr – $30/hr” categories.

While quickly going through the top-rated freelancers, we can see that most of them are charging at least $20/hr or more.

According to these rates, a decent quality social media manager for your small business will cost anything from $1000 to $2500 per month.

The range is quite similar on other platforms like Guru or PeoplePerHour.

How Much an In-House Social Media Manager Costs?

To get an idea of the cost for an in-house social media manager, let’s look at PayScale that allows you to research and compare average salaries in different fields and professions.

According to PayScale, social media managers in the US earns $46k per year on average. The salaries range between $27k and $73k.

Source: PayScale

It actually conforms to our earlier estimate i.e. $1000 to $2500 per month (remember we were calculating the cost for just 3 hours or half a day’s work).

Looking at “Social Media” marketing jobs at LinkedIn, we can see that the average salary ranges from $40k/year to as much as $200k/year but these are estimated figures coming from the same source i.e. PayScale.

Estimated salary for “Social Media Manager” jobs at Indeed range from $35k to $80k.

Looking at all these figures, we can come up with a fairly accurate estimate of the cost though your actual cost will differ depending on your goals and objectives.

Remember that someone working at a relatively low rate of $1000/month or less will only be able to do the basic stuff like content curation, responding to direct messages or mentions, and coming up with monthly reports.

You cannot expect the advanced stuff like conversion oriented campaign, influencer outreach, measuring and establishing the ROI of different campaigns or social listening.

Conclusion:

It’s your call and it’s your money but in case you are just starting and looking for a way to maintain a social media presence, you will be better off using a tool than hiring a social media manager.

Go for a dedicated Social Media manager only when you are looking to take it to the next level.

It’s a dream come true for all content marketers (except that it rarely comes true).

It’s frustrating to see people sharing and liking so many things, while you struggle to get any response despite giving it your best.

You read those wonderful stories about successful viral marketing, and think of giving it a try.

You create and publish some content pieces, expecting social media to respond with the same fervor, but they don’t.

You try again, and again, but the audience keeps refusing to respond. Dejected, you look at your content and compare it with some of those widely shared ones, and think … “What in this world is lacking in my content? Even if it’s half as good, it should’ve gotten half of that response? But there’s none. What am I doing wrong?”

Here’s the kicker:

You are not going to find the answers because you are looking in the wrong places.

The secret to share-worthy content is not the quality or originality of the content. These are two important factors, but there are other, more important ones.

Your content marketing strategy needs to tick all the right boxes before your content can start to get the shares that you’ve been looking for.

Want to know which boxes? Keep on reading to find out.

Network – How Big is yours?

Ever heard of Cumulative Advantage?

Or Matthew effect?

Go, give it a read, because it’s the key to Social Media success.

In simple words, it’s about rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

Wanna see how it applies to Social Media?

Go to your Facebook account and click on the drop down button right next to “News Feed”.

You will see that your News Feed is sorted by “Top Stories”. You can change it to Most Recent, but majority of Facebook users don’t bother with these settings.

What does it mean?

It means that the posts or updates that you get in your newsfeed are not the most recent ones. These are the ones that Facebook Algorithm considered to be the best.

Here’s how Facebook chooses the Top Stories.

“The stories that show in your News Feed are influenced by your connections and activity on Facebook. This helps you to see more stories that interest you from friends you interact with the most. The number of comments and likes a post receives and what kind of story it is (ex: photo, video, status update) can also make it more likely to appear in your News Feed.”

So, a post that generates a lot of interest is considered Top Stuff, and it will get the much needed boost.

An average user has more than 330 friends on Facebook, and we’ve more than 40 million small business pages. Consider posts and updates from all these contacts and the pages that you’ve liked, and things can get quite messy.

Just like SERPs, most people won’t go past a few dozen posts.

You’ve got to get in the Top stories by quickly getting the likes or comments. If you don’t have a strong network to provide this impetus, it will become just another voice in the wilderness.

What you need to do:

Build your network, bit by bit.

Big network means bigger audience and the bigger the audience the stronger the impact.

Another way to get that early traction is using a platform like buzzfeed.com or some established blog in your industry. Even for that, you will need to build relations with other bloggers or authors to get the opportunity.

Consistency – Start now and Persist:

Talking of the big networks and following, Rand Fishkin, one of the most touted experts in SEO and IM circles, has more than 309k followers at Twitter.

Seth Godin has 534k.

Neil Patel has around 194k.

What does all these authors, and the websites like Moz.com, Kissmetrics.com, or Hubspot.com have in common?

More than anything else, it’s the consistency.

They are consistently producing great content for almost a decade. Even today, they’re more active on Social Media than an average user or website.

Rand Fishkin has seven tweets in the past 24 hours. Neil tweets 4 – 5 times on daily basis. Not a day goes by without a new post on Seth Godin’s blog.

That’s consistency for you.

The audience they have today was built, little by little, throughout these years.

Have a look at Top 50 posts of Kissmetrics from 2012.

Go through these posts and you’ll see that the tops posts have around 20 Facebook likes and 250+ shares at LinkedIn on average.

Compare that with the recent ones and you will see an average post gets more than 200 likes and 500+ shares.

The success in content marketing is not a result of what you produce every once in a blue moon. It’s what you produce on consistent basis.

What you need to do?

Stop wasting time on planning and creating that “extraordinary” content.

Perfectionism can lead to procrastination, and procrastination has kept even the most talented individuals or the greatest of ideas from taking off.

Just get started, and focus on producing good, reasonable content on consistent basis.

Outreach & Promotions

Brian Dean (backlinko.com) is known for using the content to maximum advantage, for example, using content to build links and increase search traffic by 110% in 14 days, or to boost his conversion rate by 785% in a day.

Does he manage to do all that by producing great content? The answer is “No”.

There’s tremendous amount of work that goes into outreach and promoting these posts.

Whenever a post is ready to go out, Brian Dean search for and emails at least 100 people who’ll be interested in that content.

The post is shared with his email subscribers, and followers at social media accounts.

And finally, there’s an outreach campaign with a focus on link building.

That’s the kind of work that goes behind every successful viral marketing campaign. Without any kind of promotion, even the greatest of all contents will fail to takeoff.

What you need to do?

Spend double the time on promotions that you need for content creation.

Get in touch with influencers and ask for their opinion. Contact people who have previously linked to or shared similar content. Submit content on relevant groups or communities (e.g. Inbound.org if your content is about Inbound or Online Marketing in general).

Use different quotes and snippets from your post to promote it multiple times over the next 2 – 3 weeks.

You can also use the paid promotional tools like Outbrain, Taboola, or contentblvd.com.

Trigger the Right Emotions:

People want to present themselves in the best possible way.

Anybody who’s active on one of those social networks (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc) or messaging apps (e.g. whatsapp, snapchat, etc) is looking for the right stuff to share.

Let me repeat: Your target audience is looking for the right stuff to share.

It will be a win-win situation if you can provide them with the right stuff.

But what exactly is the right stuff?

In a recent study, researchers looked into the most shared content from New York Times. They found out that the content that triggers a strong emotion tends to get more widely shared, especially the one that elicits positive feelings.

People will share this information because they know it will bring out some response.

Response is the keyword here because nobody wants to share a dud joke.

So, the right stuff can be anything that triggers a strong emotion like Joy, Fear, Anxiety, Awe, Love, Anger, Nostalgia, or empathy.

What do you need to do?

Create content that makes them feel good and look good (when they share it with their contacts).

For example, have a look at the top 5 most shared pieces of content about weight loss.

It’s the same research or news at four different sources, collectively getting more than 4 million likes.

Just because it carries a positive feel.

Know your Audience:

I am part of a “relatives group” on Whatsapp.

It’s family, so everybody tries to like and respond to whatever is posted, even if it’s one of those dad jokes.

Today I posted a really good one, and got no response.

Why?

Because the group comes to life at night, while I posted the joke in day time, when everybody was busy at work.

Many businesses keep making the same mistake. They’ll update their page or profile without trying to figure out the optimal time for posting.

It’s so important to know your audience. The time that they are online, the kind of pages that they like, and the kind of content they share. All of this information is critical to your Social Media success.

If you know your audience, you will know what clicks with your users, including the topics or trends which are currently prevalent.

For example, here’s a post that received more than 322k shares at Facebook.

A photographer removes mobile phones from photos to emphasize on people’s addiction to mobile phones, and how it is affecting their family lives.

The post gets so many shares because it’s something so many people can relate to. Everybody feels that we are getting too dependent and addicted to our mobile phones.

Your content must appeal to your target audience.

If you are targeting doctors or physicians, it will be something like this.

If your target market consists of men between the ages of 35 – 60, you can try something like this.

Just make sure that the topic or content is relevant to your brand or product.

What you need to do:

To get an idea of what your target audience is looking for, you can use Audience Insights feature at Facebook.

Choose your target audience using the options in the sidebar.

As you can see, there are plenty of options to zoom in on your target audience. You can choose from locations, age groups, genders, and even interests to pinpoint your audience. If you already have a page with more than 1000 likes, you can find similar information about people connected to your page.

For any given audience, you will be able to get the insights like industries that these people are working in, relationship status, pages that they are liking in great numbers, device that they are using to log on to Facebook, and Frequency of Activities.

That’s just Facebook, but it will give you an idea of what your target audience is looking for on social media.

You must also observe and interact with your target users to know their likes and dislikes.

Presentation

Did you know that visual content is 40X more likely to get shared on social media?

Adding images to your Facebook posts will result in 2.3 X increase in engagement, and 150% increase in Retweets when you’re using images in your Tweets.

Have a look at this post that got over 350k shares and 27k likes.

They did it by asking female graphic designers in different countries to edit a person’s photograph and make it more attractive, while keeping the local perception of beauty in mind.

It resulted in 18 variations, with each one being strikingly different to another.

Quite a novel idea, but it wasn’t unique. They pretty much copied it from another widely shared post at Buzzfeed.

If it was an article or post that talk about beauty perceptions in different countries, it wouldn’t have gotten half of those shares. It managed to do so good because it was visually engaging.

Apart from the visual appeal, your headline can also play a big role in presentation.

There’s a reason click-bait sites like Buzzfeed gets millions of users on daily basis. They just thrive on catchy and compelling headlines, without worrying a lot about the originality, size of the content, and SE optimization.

What you need to do:

Focus more on visual content like images, infographics, memes, or presentations.

This article talks about the psychology of clickbait in detail. You don’t really need to copy this model, but you can take a leaf or two from its book.

Going through the headlines, you will find a lot of ideas and patterns that you can use in your headlines.

For example, here’s a screen shot from their homepage.

See that heading about Marbled Planters? We can borrow the idea and use it for this article.

e.g. “These Actionable Tips are guaranteed to make your Content Go Viral”.

Share-worthy content or viral marketing is not about luck.

It’s more like science. Following the above mentioned guidelines will not guarantee, but it’ll certainly improve the chances of your content going viral.

Simply having a lot of followers or fans is not enough. You need to make sure that users are interacting with your brand by liking, commenting, or sharing your posts.

You must use Engagement rate as the metric to evaluate performance at social media.

Remember, we are talking about meaningful engagement. Techniques like click bait, sensationalisation, or hoax stories can be counterproductive.

So what’s the secret of high engagement rate?

Here are 7 social media hacks to boost your engagement:

1 – Videos

Everyone loves videos. It’s the easiest way to digest information, so engagement rates are usually phenomenal. The Facebook team realised this too, so they decided to give any video uploaded to Facebook way more exposure than any other type of post. Then they went one step further and made videos auto play when people scroll over them.

Most videos on Facebook are of a viral sensationalist nature (like in the screenshot below), but the algorithm still favours videos in general. Out of all the types of content you can share on Facebook, a video is by far the type that will consistently trump any other in terms of engagement.

2 – Polls

Create a poll to know their preferences, likes, and dislikes. You can ask them to choose between two different options (relevant to your business). Apart from the engagement, it will also give you insight into their preferences that you can use for product creation or marketing.

3 – Quizzes & Questions

The easiest way to make someone speak is to ask for their opinion.

Quizzes can also work equally well.

4 – Feel Good Posts

Humorous or feel-good posts are often shared the most. Any post, quote, or message that makes your target audience smile will get a boost in interactions.

You can ask them to like or share the posts but remember that Facebook and some other platforms don’t like pages that explicitly ask people to like or share their posts.

Besides, ending all posts with a request to like or share the post will make you look desperate.

Instead, wait for the right content, for example, a post with a tip or information that will be of help to their friends, or a heart touching message like the following.

5 – Identify the best time to post

People will usually like & interact with a post in their spare time. During work, they are too caught up to comment or share, even if they like the post.

Various studies have proved that engagement rate is usually the highest on Saturdays and Sundays, but it can differ from one platform and target audience to another.

The best way to figure out the right time is to post at different timings and use analytics to find the best time.

You can also get an idea of the best time by going to Facebook Insights and clicking on “Posts”.

It will tell you the days and the times when the maximum numbers of people are online, so you can post your best content at those days and times.

Once you’ve figured out the right time, all you need is a tool that allows you to schedule posts.

Jarvis can do that for you (and a lot more).

Just click on Schedule, and choose the timings that you want to use.

6 – Post more Often

Most online businesses are targeting users in different regions parts of the world, so you should try to post more often to ensure that you are reaching out to users in different time zones at their own peak time. Don’t treat this as an excuse to go and send out an update every 5 seconds. There is a balance to be maintained. Try post as much as possible without making your followers feel like they are being spammed to death.

7 – Say Thanks

The key to improved engagement is remembering that it’s not about you or your business. It’s about your target audience and what they are looking for.

Make them the center of attention and they will be compelled to respond.