Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:05] Hi, welcome to Confessions in the Home Office. If you've watched or listened before, welcome back. And if you're new, my name is Wendy Hill. For Almost the past 20 years, I've been running my marketing consulting business out of my house. It's called Market Momentum, and I'm located in Greenville, South Carolina. Each week, I publish an episode about a marketing topic you need to know about, about stories about working from home. And sometimes I have some other business owners on some great guests just so you can learn about their business and kind of their journey of being, you know, with being an entrepreneur. So this is our first episode of the second season. This is the first episode for January of 2025. I was hoping I would be in my new podcast studio, which of course, horses in my home. But we're still working on it. We did some painting last week. We just had light fixtures put in, so it's still kind of a mess. So hopefully soon I'll be able to give you a tour of the new studio. I'm really excited about it. So today I'm starting off with a topic that's really important for business owners. Is Facebook marketing over? There's so many other platforms out there. A lot of times people say, I don't think. I don't think Facebook does it and anymore, or I just don't think Facebook's where I need to be anymore. So by the end of this episode, you're going to have the answer. Is Facebook marketing over or not? But first of all, let's address the elephant in the room. Facebook is not just for old people. People always say, oh, my mom's on Facebook, or my grandma's on Facebook, or you're on Facebook, Wendy, and you're there all the time. If I hear that Facebook's for old people one more time, I'm just gonna laugh. Facebook has over 3 billion monthly active users. And when you put all the Met together and when you say, what are meta apps? That's Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, all those. You have 3.3 billion daily users. So meta and Facebook especially are not going away. But there have been some changes. And one of the first changes I want to talk to you about is how content is shown. So when we all signed up, like around 2008, and in Ford, on Facebook, you saw content from the people that you were friends with and pages that you followed, and then eventually groups that you belong to. And now when you're scrolling, you see content from those people, and then sometimes you don't see as much because you see stuff from pages that you don't follow, but they might be on the topics that you were talking about with your family earlier or something you were looking up on Google or YouTube earlier. And you'll say, that is funny, I was thinking about that. Or I was looking for that earlier and now here's a group or a page about it, or here's somebody that I might want to be friends with because of something they offer or something they do. So about 50% of what you see now is, is stuff from people that, that you don't know or pages that you don't know, but it's stuff that you might want to know. So that's kind of how the algorithm has changed. So if you think about TikTok's for you page and you know they're kind of giving you recommendations, that's what Facebook's doing to you all the time when you're scrolling.
[00:03:20] So let's talk about some things that are working on Facebook right now. So short form videos, those are also called reels.
[00:03:27] Those are working really well on Facebook and those are 90 second videos. And a lot of times you'll have an option of sharing all your videos that are up to 90 seconds as reels. I recommend you do that unless you just want to keep things private that will show other people your content.
[00:03:46] And I would recommend that if you're going to create reels, that you create those in Instagram and then cross post them over to Facebook. So there's just a lot more features and it's just easier, it's more intuitive to go through and upload the video and, and put stickers on things or add music to things, do some edits and write more about it. I feel like Facebook is still a little clunky, but reels still work well on Facebook. But I would create them in Instagram first.
[00:04:18] So the other thing is when you're working on videos, you need to make sure that you create a hook. And a hook is something in like the first three seconds that makes somebody stop when they're scrolling. So sometimes you see a video and you just keep going past it. But then there's these videos that you're watching. You're like, what? Why did I stop and watch that? Well, it was most likely because of the hook. So here's some. If you're wondering what a hook is, here's some examples of hooks. I'm going to read these off my screen. You've been doing your social media wrong this whole time. You think maybe I Have maybe I need to learn about that. The secret to being your own boss that nobody talks about. That's something I might want to know about. I tested this AI tool for 30 days and you won't believe what happened. Well, I might want to know about that. This 10 second hack will change how you schedule your social media. Well, yeah, that takes a long time. I might want to know about that point of view when you discover how to batch content. Yes, we all want to know how to do that better because it takes up so much time and what other marketing consultants don't want you to know. Things like that. Those are hooks. So you can, you could rewrite those for any industry or product or whatever, but the keys create curio. Can't say it. Curiosity and highlight that there's a gap that maybe somebody who needs to know about so they'll stop and watch your video.
[00:05:36] So the next thing that's working on Facebook right now are those posts that are just text, but they have the colored background. You know, you'll be scrolling and you'll see that somebody writes something and you're like, why did I stop and read that? Well, I read that because it had a purple background and maybe it had some cute emojis or something. So try that and see, it just kind of breaks the people's concentrations when they're just kind of scrolling mindlessly through their, through Facebook. So try posting that once or twice a week and kind of see if you get more likes or get more comments or shares or anything like that. And the other thing is, don't forget about stories. Stories work really well on Instagram. Stories do pretty well on Facebook. But just because they're not performing the way that they are on Instagram, that's still a great way to stay top of mind. So with your business, your personal brand, whatever you're doing, use stories for things. And that way people will see your brand or your business when they're, when they pull open their, their account and look and you'll get some more views. You may not get a ton or you might get a lot. So definitely, definitely use the, the stories feature on Facebook. And if you hear all that tapping in the background, that's my dog Cash. He's up doing his normal clogging routine that he does every time I record a podcast. But I can't kick him out of my office because he'll stand at the door and cry. So he has me trained. So now we have a quick ad from our sponsor. So this is from we the patriot shop did you know that over 60% of the price you pay for consumer goods does not add any value to you as a consumer? This is because billions of dollars are spent every year on advertising, distribution and big box stores. However, there's a company that invests this money in better and safer ingredients. These products are safer and affordable alternatives which can help your family's budget. This US based manufacturer attracts around 20,000 new shoppers each month. It switched from big box stores seeking better, healthier products while supporting a more sustainable economy. Join the movement and find out why over 2 million monthly shoppers have already switched away from big box stores. Visit WeThePatriotShop.com America Again, that's we the PatriotShop.com America now let's get back to Facebook.
[00:07:53] So let's talk about Facebook analytics for just a second about views and sharing. So things have changed. If you do anything with Facebook ads or you go in and look at analytics, it changes all the time. So if you know, I can't stand doing a training on this with people or showing them something on a screen because 30 days later the screen looks different and they say, I don't know where you showed me this or where this was, but it's gone or it's different. So one thing you need to know is Facebook counts a video view. Now just after one millisecond, it used to be after three seconds. So you're going to get a lot of views. It's going to look like your views are up because people just barely look at it and they hop off. So you just need to keep that, you need to keep that in your mind when you're looking at things. If you think, oh, my video views are way up, maybe not. It may be just because of the way Facebook is counting it now.
[00:08:45] But something I want you to look at is private messages and how many of those have been shared. So when people share your content in DMs, which I know, we're all shooting stuff to each other all the time, I know I am to my friends at night.
[00:08:59] Facebook's algorithm loves that. And so it's good to create content that is shareable, that you think things people share with others or ask people to share it with others. And that will definitely help you on Facebook.
[00:09:14] And so now let's talk about meta AI. So artificial intelligence on meta and it's everywhere now. So they have a feature where if there's long responses with things or a lot of text, it'll summarize the comments for you. So you don't have to read everything. And I know that sounds really lazy and yeah, it probably is sometimes, but people say a lot of junk on Facebook and sometimes it's just a little too much. I think that if you're doing research or you're. You're looking up something or you're just needing to get some quick information, this is not a terrible feature. It just makes things go faster. And the other thing, if you're running Facebook ads now, AI can generate other headlines for you and help you with copy and. And help you change some keywords on things, and it really help. They also have ways to target people better. So there's an Advantage plus feature in ads, and it's like having someone who really knows how to find audience, the right audience, working for you. A lot of times you'd have to pay somebody who does a lot of ad work to go out and find these audiences. Now you can use the Advantage plus feature to do that. So I would take advantage of the AI. And when you're running ads and you want to do several options and maybe you write one and let AI write the other and see how they perform.
[00:10:32] So, in summary, my biggest piece of advice for this year is I would create content that you want people to share something that you think this works for them, but it might work for someone else. And I would also try to keep things really real with AI. I feel like images are getting altered. We're. We all laughed about people putting filters on their pictures for a couple years, and now there's like, AI generated photos.
[00:11:00] We can't tell everything, but I feel like you can tell what's fake. A lot of times I would keep things really real. Human content is always going to be more desirable to people than artificial. So now that you've listened to this short episode, you'll know that Facebook marketing is not over. There's a lot of features. There's things changing. I'll try to keep you up to date as much as I can on what's going on, but I think it's good things. They're definitely. Facebook doesn't want to go away. They were kind of the ones that started the whole meta movement. And so I think they're always working on improvements. We get frustrated with them when they block things or take things down or sometimes the looking on the back end of the ad section is really frustrating. But overall, I feel like they're trying to help us and they want us to spend money with them on ads. So they're definitely going to keep trying to help so just remember that.
[00:11:56] And I wouldn't go away from Facebook if it's something where you're like, I just don't think my customers are on Facebook. Maybe yours aren't, but there's a good chance that they are. If you've already built up your Facebook page, up a lot of followers, you've had content, I wouldn't just, I wouldn't just stick it on the shelf. I would take what you've already used and try to make it even better. So that's it. So that's it for today's episode. I hope you hope you found it helpful like and subscribe. Leave a comment Share this episode with a friend and share it in a DM that'll make my stats look good on Facebook.
[00:12:30] So if you have any questions or you have a topic that you'd like for me to cover, send an email to wendyndyhill.com and I'll see you next week.
