The Maine SEO Blog

We speculated a while back that Facebook may be rolling out Offers to all business pages and as of today it looks like Facebook offers are here! Offers are really Facebook’s way of taking advantage of the coupon craze. The set up of offers is super easy to use. Below is the tour from Facebook on how to use Facebook offers.

So, first off you find offers right in the same bar that you create all your other status updates. Circled below…

After you click on the “offer, event +” button you will get a drop down of options. Choose “Offer.”

They you will want to choose a great image. Make sure that you use an image that will stand out. You want it to fit well in the space provided, be bright and interesting. If you the offer is for a specific product the image should be of that product, if it’s for a particular service, it should be related to the service.

Like with any ad that you would create you want to make sure that you have a very clear, concise and clever headline that will draw your audiences attention.

Next fill in some of the offers details. When does the deal end? Is there an expiration date on the coupon? Etc.

Then share with your coworkers etc. so everyone knows about the offer.

When folks redeem your offer it’s very easy. They will see the offer in their news feed be able to click to redeem and then it will be sent directly to their email that is attached to their Facebook account. To learn more about how offers work, check out our blogpost “Facebook Offers Coming Soon! Facebook Marketing.”

Joan Woodbrey Crocker
Anyone seen a good deal?

Facebook Offers is just one of the many new marketing products that Facebook has recently announced along with the new Facebook Timeline for business pages.

Currently Facebook offers are only available to  managed advertising clients of Facebook, meaning those businesses that have an advertising account and Facebook Rep. However, they have said they are looking to expand the number of pages eligible to post offers and expect to make offers available more broadly soon, which is great news!

So, what is a Facebook offer exactly?

A Facebook offer is a FREE marketing opportunity on Facebook. It’s a way for businesses and brands to offer discounts to their customers via posting an offer to their Facebook page. Offers work just like coupons. When someone clicks on the offer to claim it they will receive a direct email with the printable coupon that they can then take to a physical location to redeem. I’m not sure if you can use any of the offers online for discounts from websites yet, that’s something that we’ll need to explore once they become available. Below is an example of a Facebook Offer from the Facebook help page…

Another great thing about the new Facebook Offer is that they are very easy to create. See the steps below:

1. Go to your page
2. Go to the sharing tool at the top of your Timeline Page and click “offer”
3. Enter your headline – Facebook recommends that you do a strong offer, those with 20% or more off or Free have a better success rate. In the ad above the headline is “Get One Free Cupcake with Any Cupcake Purchase”
4. Set an Expiry date. Facebook gives you a calendar during set up so you can pick your date.
5. Upload an interesting image for your offer. This should be a good image of the product offered.
6. Hit Next
7. Now you need to set the terms and conditions of your offer. Remember, that simple easily understood offers are more likely to be used.
8. Click Post

It’s as simple as that. Now what happens to your offer once it’s created or what are the next steps that you should take?

• First, promote your offer. You can do this by creating a sponsored story ad on Facebook. Also, you can pin it to the top of your timeline so that new visitors notice it. Share it with friends. Promote it the same way you would do with any other piece of content that’s important on Facebook.
• Your offer will likely start showing up in your fans news feeds. This is most likely where they will click on the offer to redeem it. EdgeRank still applies here. If your friends are claiming this and there is a lot of interaction with the deal the more likely it is to show up in your/and friends’s news feeds. Also, people are more inclined to share deals with their friends than regular content.
• Next, track it to see how well it’s performing. You can do this by hovering over the offer, it will show you how many people have claimed it
• Set up a special offer code so you can track how many were actually redeemed. Or, you can tally them at the register.

As you can see the potential of this free Facebook Marketing tool is huge! Here’s hoping that they release it to all Facebook pages soon! For more info check out the Facebook Help page on Offers.

Joan Woodbrey Crocker
Can’t Wait for Facebook Offers

So, yesterday Facebook announced that they are rolling out Timeline for Facebook pages. If you haven’t switched your page over already you’ll have until March 30th to do so, before Facebook automatically changes pages over. But, that’s not all they announced. Yesterday was the first ever FMC (Facebook Marketing Conference) which was an invite only event, however they did stream it live so I was able to listen in.

Mike Hoefflinger, the Director of Global Business Marketing at Facebook introduced us to a few new products, some of which Facebook rolled out yesterday and others that won’t be out til April.

Hoefflinger told the story of how we are “going back to the future”, relating new ways of doing business with mom and pop stores of the past. He stated, “People prefer narration. Ads come from anywhere, stories come from people that you are connected to and have a relationship with. We’ve been doing ads because we couldn’t build enough connections to tell stories and have relationships at the scale of business today.” Social is changing that.

He went on to talk about how Facebook is leading that change making is to you can build enough connections and here are some of the products that they are rolling out that will hopefully help to accelerate that change.

1. Timeline for Pages: Mission control for you business – launch pad for your stories

Not only do you get the new cleaner look and bigger cover image new pages offer a greater experience to know what your friends are doing and how they are interacting with a particular brand or page which in turn builds stronger connections for you.

You can now also include how you got started and many other milestones for your company that have happened in the past, creating a greater story for your company.

Now people can message you directly on your page. You can give a personal one on one reply that they deserve.

2. Brand new story type: Offers

These are simple offers that will show up in the news feed and all you have to do to collect on them is click the add. You will then immediately have the offer emailed to your email account that’s attached to your Facebook account.

Check out Mari Smith’s blog post “Facebook Launches ‘Facebook Offers’ for Businesses” for more info.

3. Reach Generator:
This is a new premium advertising solution for large clients seeking to reach a higher percentage of fans via sponsored activity. While this is probably not going to be used my small and mid sized businesses, it is a new product that Facebook is offering.

Currently pages reach 16% of fans/friends every month, what if you could reach 50 – 75%? With Reach Generator you can now double your engagement. This is a package you purchase from Facebook where every day they sponsor a post and guarantee a 75% reach to your fanbase over a month long period. Some numbers that Hoefflinger gave as an example:

Using Reach Generator the following companies accomplished…

-  Ben & Jerry’s reached 98% of all their fans and increased sales at a 3-1 ROI
-  Dr. Pepper had a 140% increase in people talking about this
-  Butterfinger had a 6 point increase in brand favorability

This is definitely a product worth using if you are a larger company with the money to afford it.

4. Premium on Facebook: the most impactful way for you to distribute your content on Facebook (you create, Facebook takes care of placement)

With Premium on Facebook your ads will no longer be the small ad to the right of the page but instead it will be seamlessly integrated throughout the site as if it were a regular update that had a lot of reach. As Hoefflinger says, “Marketing on Facebook will now feel like the rest of Facebook.”

Top placements for these ads? You the advertiser would start with a page post, then it would be placed on the right hand side of Facebook, then it would be put in the newsfeed.

There will also be a 4th placement option with Premium that will allow businesses to display ads on the log-out page of Facebook after users have logged out. This can include video, photos etc.

Not only will your ad now be in the newsfeed and possibly the logout, but it will also be on mobile, something Facebook has not done in the past.

According to Hoefflinger, using Premium on Facebook you should see 5 – 10x improvement in your ads success.
What are your thoughts on the new products Facebook is offering it’s advertisers?

Joan Woodbrey Crocker
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