Facebook has come along way since its debut in 2004, especially when it comes to the Facebook Advertising platform. Facebook has almost single-handedly turned paid social media marketing into a cornerstone of modern digital marketing tactics. In the next year to come, all can expect Facebook to evolve in deeper ways. These evolutions include both new features and shifts in the way business will be able to use Facebook ads to reach prospects.
Here are the most important Facebook advertising trends for 2018. With them, you can improve your marketing funnel and hopefully find more leads than ever in the coming year.

1. MOO. The bright Facebook ad design immediately catches people’s attention + the ad’s headline says clearly what it is they’re selling. When creating Facebook ad images, it’s always a good idea to use an original photo or animation, it’s an easy way to catch people’s attention and show off your branding.

2. Create colorful ad images. If you think about the Facebook newsfeed, it’s full on photos and dull ads. Creating a colourful ad that pops into people’s eyes is the best way to earn their attention. Research shows that people make up their minds within 90 seconds of their initial interaction with people or products. About 62‐90% of their assessment is based on colors alone. The New York Times is constantly testing new Facebook ad colours to avoid ad fatigue and appeal to more people. And you don’t even need hardcore Photoshop skills to do it.

3. The importance of video ads. Mobile audiences eat up video more hungrily than ever. Altogether, Facebook users watch over 100 million hours of video a day. As a result of their demand and improvements in video players, there is an explosion in both paid and organic video content. On average, videos on Facebook get 135% more organic reach than photos. Your business can potentially improve both its organic reach and engagement on paid posts by creating more promotional assets as videos. Making the switch does not have to be expensive or painful either. With just a few Facebook video ads, you can improve engagement and prospecting. You also help people remember your messaging since people remember video almost seven-times better than they do text.

4. Pipedrive. The in-image copy makes sure the most important copy gets immediately seen + a CTA button hints people can click on the ad. Pipedrive’s SaaS Facebook ad also makes it easy to understand what product they’re selling, it’s made loud and clear in the ad image, main text, headline, and link description.

5. Use highly contrasted colors. A study by UsabilityTools showed that using highly contrasting landing page call-to-actions resulted in 75% higher click-through rate, compared to a low-contrast CTA. Higher contrasts help to draw more attention to your ad. But sometimes, the contrast you’re looking for isn’t the one between ad elements. You can also create Facebook ads that contrast with the entire newsfeed.

6. Carousel ads can use multiple images, multiple offers, or multiple USPs in one go, providing a richer experience and a more compelling CTA.

7. MindTitan. This ad example uses the carousel format that lets you add up to 10 images into a single ad (the perfect way of showcasing your products / telling a story) + the ad’s design has an eye-catching contrast to it. You can use Facebook carousel ads to tell a story, showcase your products, or list the benefits to customers (as MindTitan’s ad does).

8. Create ads that contrast with the entire newsfeed. Sure, there are other aspects that might have contributed to the light ad’s success. However, as everyone kept using this ad design with new ad copy and CTAs, it returned awesome results for months to come.

9. Slideshow ads use lightweight video to load faster and intrude less on the browsing experience. They can be a great transition for small businesses looking to create more video.

Now, you don’t need to worry about your target audience seeing the same ad design over and over again. They’ll only see each design a couple of times, extending your Facebook campaign’s lifetime by multiple weeks.

Just a few years ago, you could get away with building a social media marketing strategy on the fly. As long as you were present, you were doing more than your competitors–right? Well it’s 2018 and not much of the same logic applies today. Brands must be fully invested in their social media marketing strategies and focus on engagement. Otherwise, you’ll lose out on real customers, which means serious effects on your bottom line. This is not here to scare your brand into the world of social media. Instead, this is to provide your marketing team with the right steps to take toward a successful social strategy so your brand isn’t left in the dust. Here are the some steps to create a winning social media marketing strategy in 2018:

1. Social Media Monitoring and Listening.

Social listening enables social media specialists to track and review the social buzz around your brand, industry or competition. By listening in, you can look for trends in moods and behaviors while also looking for opportunities to promote your product.

2. Identify Business Goals.

Every piece of your social media strategy serves the goals you set. You simply can’t move forward without knowing what you’re working toward. Look closely at your company’s overall needs and decide how you want to use social media to contribute to reaching them. You’ll undoubtedly come up with several personalized goals, but there are a few that all companies should include in their strategy increasing brand awareness, retaining customers and reducing marketing costs are relevant to everyone.

3. Create Social Media Marketing Goals That Solve Your Biggest Challenges.

Understand what you want out of your efforts. Social media marketing isn’t about flipping a switch and calling it a day. Instead, social media planning should be looked at like cooking your favorite dish. Once you have your ingredients, you follow a recipe and presto! But that’s not always the case. What if you have guests and need to feed more people? What if someone is allergic to one of the ingredients? Suddenly, your goal goes from making a meal to ensuring it will feed enough people and be edible by all.

4. Analytics and Reporting.

Your social media tool should enable you to export reports on the data that has been collected. Look for quick reporting and analytics to share with your team or clients. Use reporting to make intelligent, informed decisions about your social media strategy.

5. Assign roles.

Knowing who’s responsible for what increases productivity and avoids confusion and overlapping efforts. Things may be a bit messy in the beginning, but with time team members will know their roles and what daily tasks they’re responsible for. When everyone knows his or her role, it’s time to start planning the execution process. You can either plan daily or weekly. I don’t advise putting a monthly plan together because lots of things will come up and you may end up wasting time adapting to the new changes. You can use tools like Basecamp or ActiveCollab to manage your team and assign tasks to each member. These tools save you tons of time and help you stay organized.

If you work at building lasting relationships, there’s a lot less room for failure with your social media marketing strategy.

Did you know that more than half of the population wants to start their own business, but only 10% try to? More and more people try to make it every year. Owning a startup can be challenging in many ways, especially getting what you want on social media. I´ve been working for startups in social media for some years now, and Facebook should always be a big part of the marketing strategy. A Facebook page is a free marketing tool for businesses. Not only can you list your products and services with it, but it also gives you the opportunity to share links and post images and videos to connect easily to your customers. This is where you can show your company’s humane side and develop your brand identity. Let us see how a startup can leverage Facebook’s reach:

1. How to create a facebook page?

Go to facebook.com. Once you’re there, you’ll see a ‘Sign Up’ button on the upper left corner of the page beside the Facebook logo. Click ‘Sign Up’. Again, you need to have a personal account in order to manage your Facebook page. You can change the privacy settings later so that no else sees your personal account if you’re just looking to market your business page.

2. Create a facebook business page.

Go to https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php to start creating your own page. Select ‘local business’ or whichever category best fits your company.

3. Fill out business details.

Now, fill out the form with the basic details of your business, read the Facebook Pages Terms and check ‘I agree’, and click the ‘Get Started’ button. You’ll be redirected to another form where you’ll provide additional details about your business. Although it has a ‘Skip’ option, it’s a good idea to fill out these details to make your business page appear more professional. When you choose your business category, more specific subcategories will come up– choose the one that best applies to your business. Don’t forget to fill out all the other details such as the description of your business, and your business website if you have one. Creating a unique Facebook address (URL) is also important! A branded URL will makes it easier for people to find your page. Remember that you can only change it once after this, so make sure to double-check. It’s a good idea to use your business name and to keep it consistent with all your online usernames (consistent branding). Sure, it can take some time to fill in all this stuff, but the more specific it is, the better. Think of each little data-point as an opportunity to optimize your page so it’s easier for you to use, quicker for others to find, and better for your marketing.

4. Ensure all business info is complete.

Update your page information. You’ll see this option as you scroll up the page, on the upper right side. Updating your information builds credibility and helps your audience get better acquainted with your brand. There are so many data-points, and if you’re in the initial startup phase you might actually find out some things about your business you didn’t know before through this process. For instance, have you thought about your general business category? Have you ironed out simple things like hours of operation? Do you know your targeted audience? Be thorough.

Creating a local business page on Facebook and listing your products and services can help you generate more leads for your small business. From taking up more space on the search engine results page, to advertising lead magnets to your target audience, understanding how to leverage what Facebook has to offer will greatly enhance your marketing and sales efforts.

From Ariana to Zendaya, we’re all familiar with the names of Instagram’s top millennial female influencers. But the social platform is also home to a huge number of of “micro influencers,” or users who might command just a few thousand followers yet whose style and brand affiliations are closely followed and emulated by their dedicated fans. From Pinterest to Instagram to YouTube, visual platforms continue their deepening influence with consumers. Clique Media Group teamed up with Dash Hudson to find out more about the typical female millennial micro-influencer, and the infographic in this article gives advertisers a glimpse into her world and shows how to make the most of her influence. The research found that female micro-influencers have the most followers on Instagram and spend the most on fashion and that advertisers should harness their audiences on the platform with product blitzes. Here are trends why millennial female continue to embrace visual platforms:

1. Digitally Fluent Millennials Zoom in on Visuals. As Millennials represent the first generation to grow up immersed in social media and online technology, they exhibit true fluency in a host of digital platforms. These Millennial women gravitate toward visual platforms – including Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram – that allow them to share photos and videos.

2. Millennials showcase life experiences via still and video images: More than 60 percent of millennial women strongly agree or agree that they love sharing significant moments in their life on social media channels.In addition, this generation uses today’s visual platforms to provide their communities with a real-time glimpse into their experiences and adventures.

3. Image-focused social platforms spark product discovery: For millennial women, visual channels allow them to discover everything from that just-opened boutique to cool new products. In many ways, Instagram has become this generation’s new blogging platform, allowing millennial women to learn about potential purchases and new retail establishments through compelling images. Along the path to purchase, millennials seek out highly visual elements as they collect insights and information – ranging from must-have tips to styling options – to help them evaluate potential purchases. In fact, 30 percent of millennial women check YouTube multiple times per day, and more than a quarter check Instagram daily.

4. Collection & Creation of Beautiful Content. Millennial women live their lives surrounded by online content – both content they create and content they collect. Yet their goal with online content rarely includes being considered an authority figure or to generate a considerable following – in fact, just 5 percent of Millennial women use social media to establish themselves as an expert. Instead, they post everything from food images from their favorite new restaurant to videos of themselves experiencing their latest consumer find. Moreover, this content helps them to share their experiences with their communities, as well as to make decisions along their path to purchase.

5. Millennials’ embrace of lifestyle sites helps inspire new spends: Lifestyle bloggers and sites continue to resonate with millennial women, as they have become more drawn to visual and video. These sites include pictures, as well as quirky and trendy content, and really focus on the aspirational – how millennial women can envision the life that they want to lead.

From compelling videos to beautiful photos to image-oriented, news-you-can-use, this image-focused content has become a real resource to time-pressed, fact-gathering millennial women consumers who seek out ways to streamline their purchase decision-making process. Visual engagement continues to characterize millennial interactions online.

About three billion users worldwide have at least one account in any social network and the social media users number is growing every day. Let’s consider Instagram as an example: it’s already used by about 700 million of users among them there are famous brands and bloggers, movie stars, popular singers and models and, of course, individual users.  The most common reason to build a presence on Instagram is to gain more popularity and influence on Internet. This way there is a great chance to have an opportunity to make money by promoting multiple products and services, attracting more audience to your account, collaborating with influencers and more. But to succeed on Instagram, you should have a huge number of followers and multiply it every day. The Internet is full of different tips and tricks on how to grow your account and your Instagram community – just use Google search with the query “grow my Instagram account”. It will provide you a plenty of blogs with the advice how you should behave on Instagram. But actually all the methods of growing an account can be associated with organic and automated ways of social media growth.

What is an organic growth?

What is supposed by the term “organic method of growth”? It means that you behave naturally on the social network and your actions draw other users to follow you. The natural behavior may include: posting the photos and videos, creating an unified theme for your posts, use of the popular and niche hashtags, organization of the contests and surely the engagement. As Instagram is all about social communication you should take part in making likes, comments, follows which are required to attract more users to like and follow you back. This way your account grows organically — so only your Instagram actions matter.

What is an automated growth?

They will engage other users instead of you: your task is just to target the specific hashtags, geotags or users otherwise this method won’t bring you your target audience but just random users and the bots will like posts, comment them and follow/unfollow users on behalf of your account. This method helps you to save much time and effort and obtain a larger exposure so real people will follow you on Instagram.

What are other strategies for instagram account growth?

You can use the most general one: follow a specific user on Instagram and see in your following feed how many likes, comments and follows he makes regularly. This way is the most well-known but indeed has a lot of flaws: you need to spend much efforts and time to highlight the activity of a certain user, and even if you succeed the results won’t be accurate as Instagram following feed algorithm doesn’t display all the user actions.

The both ways have their pros and cons and it’s always up to you to decide which of them will be useful for your engagement strategy meanwhile automated or bot-driven growth considered a grey scheme by many social media experts.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recently announced changes to the company’s news feed have the potential to dramatically affect how people interact on the social network. Over the next few weeks, Facebook’s news feed will start showing fewer news articles, and less marketing content and ads, Zuckerberg wrote. Instead, users should start seeing more vacation videos from their friends, photos of their nephew’s college graduation, and other more family-friendly posts about the people they know. It’s a major change for Facebook, which over the years has shifted from being a social networking service connecting friends and family to one of the world’s biggest distributors of news and online ads. Here’s what you need to know about Facebook’s big news feed change:

1. Facebook will be prioritizing news from trustworthy sources, news that is informative, and news that is relevant to one’s local community.  According to Mark Zuckerberg, “news will always be a critical way for people to start conversations on important topics”. So the team at Facebook is making another major update to make sure that news on the News Feed is of high quality. Specifically, they will be prioritizing the following types of news:

• News from publications that the community rates as trustworthy
• News that people find informative
• News that is relevant to people’s local community

Facebook has been surveying users to help determine the trustworthiness of publications and informativeness of news.

2. In this newest update, Publishers and marketers may find themselves rethinking their social strategy or scale it back altogether. Mark Zuckerberg stated, “I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.” His statement coincides with this new update that will diminish posts from brands, publishers, marketers, and news stories. Facebook is concerned about providing a quality experience that will promote a user’s well-being. Their studies have shown that genuine interactions between friends is what promotes a strong well-being. Publishers and marketers should look to create posts that will generate back-and-forth discussion among Facebook users, such as Oprah’s recent speech at the Golden Globes or local events that may excite a community.

3. Messenger Ads are now Available Worldwide. Initially tested in Australia and Thailand, brands can now reach Facebook users (all 10 billion of them!) directly through their Facebook messenger app. These ads will appear in a user’s inbox, according to Facebook, based on “how many threads a user has, the size of their phone’s physical screen and the pixel density of the display.” Messenger ads come with a “sponsored” label in the home tab of the Messenger app. They are formatted to look like a typical newsfeed ad, including the headline, copy, image, and calls to action. Users can then click through to any website or destination you select when setting up the promotion. If you’re on the receiving side of a Messenger ad, there’s no way to permanently turn off ads, but a user can tap the downward arrow in the bottom right of an ad and see options to report or hide it.

One of the most important thing, marketers must do is stay up-to-date with every algorithm change. What worked in the past does not necessarily work now, and what works now may not work in the future. Stay current on how social media evolves and be prepared to evolve with it.

You’re shaking, sweating, and have a pit in the bottom of your stomach. You’re not watching a Halloween horror flick. You’re looking at a social media account you manage. Social media people face a lot of potential bumps in the night, and we see brands make mistakes all the time. But what happens if it is you? No need to fear! Here are five common prevention for social media nightmares if they occur.

1. Be Prepared. It’s easy to go into panic mode if your brand is suddenly flooded with negative social media coverage. Not all companies have the resources to secure a team solely responsible for crisis management. If you fall into this category, ensure each individual on the team is aware of their duties should something occur. Having an agile team of people who are ready to react in an instant will ensure everyone is aligned and all necessary steps are taken

2. Consistent spelling errors and grammar mistakes, on the other hand, won’t go unnoticed. If you’re getting more words “wrong than write,” your audience will be distracted from your core messages (as you just were). Your brand’s credibility and authority will be damaged if you are guilty of regular and careless mistakes. Prevent these by having “someone on your team look over your content before you hit ‘Post’; ideally, you’d want at least two pair of eyes after you compose it. Double-check everything, including the @mentions in your Tweet: it’s common to skip Twitter usernames during the proofreading process, only to realize that the post mentions an incorrect or nonexistent Twitter handle! Read your composed messages out loud. If you have any hesitations at all, look up spelling or grammar issues you might be unsure of.

3. Think Before You Post. While no SMB wants to be the recipient of negative comments on social media, there’s one simple way you can help prevent this: think before you post. In the case of Amy’s Baking Company, the company’s owners started to receive media attention in 2010 after responding negatively to a review about their restaurant on Yelp. But that was just the beginning. Recently, it was reported that they posted insulting comments about their detractors on the company’s own Facebook page. The couple later claimed someone unknown to them hacked into their Facebook account and posted the insults. No matter who posted the disparaging remarks, a key take-away can still be learned: never post rude comments or become overly defensive to the point of insulting on your social media pages. Doing so is one of the quickest ways to land in the middle of a social media nightmare.

4. Find Your Brand Advocates. Word of mouth is ever-powerful. Brand advocates come across as authentic, passionate and lacking an ulterior motive for supporting your brand. Brand advocates may reduce the impact or even prevent social media nightmares because of how they often defend your brand as negative activity is emerging. Turning customers into brand advocates can be daunting, but it is an achievable goal that can really help you should a social media disaster occur.

5. Have Security Measures in Place. PC security is one of the most obvious but often the most forgotten elements to include in your crisis communications plan. Update your computer, use separate passwords for each account, and create strong passwords.

Social media doesn’t have to be a source of stress if you’re well prepared for anything that can come your way. Keep these tips in mind and you’ll be able to handle anything that comes your way.

For years, companies have been creating here and there several mediums to promote their products and services. From classified and placement ads on newspapers, striking images on city billboards, to creative eye-catching television commercials, customers can get a good image of what the company has to offer. But those are the usual ones, the business world today does not settle with the traditional types of marketing and advertising. It goes beyond that and explores through the world of cyberspace.

According to Webopedia, Internet marketing, or online marketing, refers to advertising and marketing efforts that use the Web and email to drive direct sales via electronic commerce, in addition to sales leads from Web sites or emails. Internet marketing and online advertising efforts are typically used in conjunction with traditional types of advertising like radio, television, newspapers and magazines.

Online marketing has created quite a roaring impact in raising the awareness of a product or service. SInce a huge amount of people today are into social media and other websites, companies get a greater chance to be known by their respective target markets. However, diving into the online world ain’t just a piece of pie. There are several things to keep in mind once your business decides to go online with marketing and sales.

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