This week we’re going to deviate from the video blog and head back to some written commentary. Next week we’ll follow this blog up with a video, but I wanted to get your mind questioning a marketing strategy first.
By now almost every brewery in the world has a Facebook Page, a Twitter account and Instagram. Those three social media powers can develop a strong base for any marketing campaign, but how it’s developed should be up for consideration.
As I discussed in our first video blog, you can certainly set up adverts to promote specific events or your page to your demographic and market segment.
You’ll notice at the end of the video we discuss pricing, which we’ll dive into here.
The pro for paying for adverts through Facebook is the ability to market directly to your desired audience, both on Facebook and Instagram. In promoting your page this way it allows you to control who sees your promotion.
You can specifically target areas around your brewery, taproom or an event location you might be attending. You can spend money targeting people that like your Page, or friends of the people that like your Page. You can also find people that are interested in the other craft breweries around you to give you a more narrow focus.
While the pay-to-play method isn’t the backbone of Facebook or Instagram, it does give you a lot of power in how you market to any given audience.
However, in understanding the pros of paying for views you have to be aware of the con. In this case it’s how Facebook perceives your page, your actions for promoting your page and the opportunity to be seen without paying. When you first launched your page you might have simply shared with a lot of your friends and family and their friends and family. This created a hype and moved the needle for your page.
Each time you’d post you would receive X amount of Likes and possibly some comments. For a while this works fine, but then the Posts begin to dwindle. At which point you might scramble to analyze your content or discover new ways of pushing your content. What many of us fall into is once we have a great Post we then Boost that said Post targeting a specific audience and utilizing this for more traction — remember all of this is about traction.
Let’s assume you’ve been working the social strategy for several years. While you may have 50,000 Likes on your Facebook Page, that doesn’t mean you have access to all 50,000 individuals when you make a Post. Instead Facebook can control who of your Likes sees you and how. A lot of this will be built around the day-to-day interaction of the individual person that Likes your content, which you can’t necessarily control.
Of course this is frustrating, but you must remember that Facebook is a company just like yours. This is simply its way of monetization.
They base this algorithm on interactions, whether that’s a Post Like, Love, Laugh, Wow, etc., or Comments on a Post. Then there’s the discussion on whether that algorithm gets shifted based on whether you pay for adverts or “Boost” posts.
That’s where the con begins. If you continually pay to “Boost” posts so that you can reach more of your Likes, will your algorithm diminish causing you to have to pay more money to reach your audience.
This is the frustration among many business owners and marketers. After you fund the machine it almost appears that you must continue to achieve results. Additionally what we’ve found at Brewer Magazine is it’s a balance. Strong content will assist you in receiving wide results, but in my opinion it will only get you so far.
In today’s market content is king. You can literally gain fans by generating a Post with imagery, text or video that will encapsulate your followers and make them fall in love with your brand.
Make sure you pay attention to our video blog next week where we’ll walk you through Boosting a Post and discuss the proper time to do so.
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