Join Jason Hartman and Facebook Marketing 101 guru, Brian Carter, as they explore the best practices to get the most out of marketing your products or services on Facebook. Brian explains how Facebook compares to Google AdWords and SEO, and how to use Twitter as well as an enhancement. He talks about the difference between a group and a page and how to decide which one to choose. He also discusses how to use Facebook inexpensively and with the biggest impact, describing how to engage with your targeted audience and how to promote your page to get more fans. Brian shares many incredibly useful tips and breaks down the process into simple, easy-to-follow steps. For more details, listen at: www.SpeakingofWealth.com.
Brian Carter is a respected elite internet marketing expert around the world. He is known for his hands-on business experience, cutting edge insights, background in improve and stand-up comedy, which has made him a much sought after speaker and trainer. Brian is the co-author of Facebook Marketing, and has authored an ebook called How to Get More Fans On Facebook. He also offers a training program, called Facebook Marketing 101. Brian develops strategies and builds search visibility and social marketing fanbases for companies of all sizes, including Universal Studios, The U.S. Army, Hardee’s, and Carls’ Jr. He has been quoted in Twitter Marketing for Dummies and has been quoted and profiled in such publications as Information Week, U.S. News and World Report, The Wall Street Journal, and Entrepreneur Magazine. Brian also writes for Search Engine Journal and AIIFacebook. He is a speaker and trainer for top marketing conferences, such as SEOmoz, SMX, Pubcon, The AIIFacebook Expo, Socialize, The South Carolina Society of Association Executives, and The American Marketing Association, among others. He is the CEO of The Brian Carter Group.
Introduction: Speakers, publishers, consultants, coaches and info marketers unite the Speaking of Wealth show is your roadmap to success and significance. Learn the latest tools, technologies and tactics to get more bookings, sell more products and attract more clients. If you are looking to increase your direct response sales, create a big time personal brand and become the go-to-guru. The Speaking of Wealth show is for you. Here is your host Jason Hartman.
Jason Hartman: Welcome to the Speaking of Wealth Show. This is your host Jason Hartman where we discuss profit strategies for speakers, publishers, authors, consultants, coaches, info marketers, and just go over a whole bunch of exciting things that you can use to increase your business, to make your business more successful, and more and more passive, and more and more automated, and more and more scalable, so we will be back with a great interview. Be sure to visit us at speakingofwealth.com. You can take advantage of our blog, subscribe to the RSS feed, and many other resources for free at speakingofwealth.com and we will be back with a great interview for you in less than 60 seconds.
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Jason Hartman: It’s my pleasure to welcome Brian Carter to the show. He is an internet marketer. He is an expert in Facebook most recently, used to be more engaged in Twitter and other forms of media search engine optimization etcetera, and AdWords and we will talk today mostly about how to increase your Facebook fan base, and I think you are learning a lot of good stuff. Brian welcomes its great to have you.
Brian: Thanks Jason. Thanks for having me.
Jason Hartman: So tell us about your evolution if you will since 1999 as an internet marketer?
Brian: Well, what’s funny is at that time I was going to the school for acupuncture, and I wanted to explain that to people so I started a website, wrote all these articles and in the process I learned a lot about natural search, how to get traffic that way, and I just wrote a lot of articles, and then I started to learn about keywords by the time around like 2004 I had AdSense on my site, and I started getting, I was making 4, 5000 bucks a month from that, so hmm may be I can increase this, and I did that some keyword research and figured out systems for myself, teamed up with about 18 writers, and we put out about a 1000 articles in I don’t know six weeks, and we are bringing in over 20,000 bucks a month for a while, so that was my first lesson with SEO, and then I got into AdWords, and I kind of drifted away from acupuncture because I just love how with internet marketing you get all these stats, you get numbers back on everything you do, so you can optimize it to get better results.
Jason Hartman: Well, you know I have to go off topic for just a moment here Brian.
Brian: Yeah.
Jason Hartman: And I have to ask you do you think acupuncture is legit? Does it really work?
Brian: Oh yeah it works. The problem is misinformation. There is a lot of good research on it, and its really complicated, and unfortunately there is a lot of mysticism around it, but it really works through the nervous system in the brain and there are some good studies and MRIs and things like that that show us how and why it works.
Jason Hartman: And why, and what does it work for like pain relief and things like that?
Brian: Well, yeah definitely for pain relief and I will tell you what for people with the chronic pain its one of the best ways it can sometimes permanently remove chronic pain which is really it can be a neurological issue. The drugs can’t fix for people, and drugs for medications is going to create all these other issues like addiction and so on, so just the chronic pain thing if that’s acupuncture did it would be awesome, but it does a bunch of other things, and I don’t know.
I always, one of the reasons I got out of it was because there was some research, but not enough, and there is some acceptance, but a lot of disdain for it, and I just really wasn’t comfortable, and you know I never have to get patience come in, and I wanted to figure out exactly what I was doing with helping them, so I appreciated it like science and they really just wanted you know kind of a somebody to be nice to them, and make them feel better and so I prefer internet marketing gives me a chance to try stuff out, and see what works, and quantify it.
Jason Hartman: I just had to ask you since you have that background so what really you will say is as it really is a disinterested party nowadays. Back to business if we can, so tell us more about your evolution as an internet marketing?
Brian: Well, I did freelance for a while doing AdWords in SEO for various medium sized companies, small businesses, and then I started working for an agency. I moved to South Carolina to an agency that does a lot of hotel promotion, and I build a department there, and that was the whole operation kind of build to the point where I trained up some people in SEO and AdWords, and we eventually did social media too, and we were bringing in 600,000 a year from our clients for that.
They are using that to fund other parts of their business, and then like in July I decided to go freelance for a number of reasons, and still some great people at that agency, but anyway that gave me a whole bunch of more experience with a lot of different niches, so since July through that antenna I have been freelancing and then I started doing this Facebook training. Oh one other thing that happened in there I got to work for a while with an agency that does a lot of Facebook fan acquisition for Fortune 1000 companies, and I am not allowed to say who any of them are, but they were working with orders of like you know get us 250,000 for $170,000 and then that company that was providing it, their job was to make sure when we did the ads, we got to make sure we delivered the fans at a rate below at certain cost per fan so that they made money on the margin.
Jason Hartman: Very interesting, so you — they were basically outsourcing that work to you. You were the only one really getting the fans, and they were just didn’t making the markup in between right?
Brian: Yeah it’s funny because you know with these Fortune 1000 companies only the really big agencies work with them, and then a lot of times they will sub out to another agency. And in this case, they subbed out to yet another agency, so it’s pretty far. Its pretty far they have to go pretty far, feel to actually get the work done.
Jason Hartman: Sure, absolutely. Well, yeah that’s really amazing I mean having fans can be valuable. No question about it. So how does Facebook marketing compared to your background with Google AdWords and search engine optimization?
Brian: Well, it’s — let me contrast, compare a contrast search marketing which is this you and AdWords versus Facebook style social marketing. They are completely different. There are a few similarities, but here are some of the main differences. First off SEO takes time, long term you are building something, I compare AdWords in SEO like this. SEO is like buying a house. AdWords is like renting a house because you buy paper click ads. As soon as you stop that’s gone, right but when you do SEO you are building equity into your business you know actually into the website itself, right?
Jason Hartman: I would think that’s a good analogy you make absolutely and the other thing I really have not liked in the past about AdWords using it myself for my own businesses is that when you have an agency involved it just seems like you never really know if there how they are spending your money if they are even spending it on your account I don’t know. I was pretty disappointed and then even if you go direct to Google a lot of people have accused Google of click fraud, or at least not preventing click fraud being sort of complacent and really being accomplices on it by letting it occur.
Brian: Yeah I mean I think the stats I seen as a quick fraud is definitely less than 5% may be less than 2%, but yeah I mean I from my perspective with AdWords we were able to get a lot of it, this is good ROI without any problem, so we never worried too much about 1 or 2% click fraud or anything like that. But yeah with the agency it really depends on who you get, and how they work, and how transparent they are, and with a lot of this stuff it can be so complicated that it’s hard to do, to do the service, and also educate the customer.
You kind of as of someone who is doing it, you want to be able to say look I will explain some of it to you. I will give you some reports, but you got to trust me that I am going to get results for you so that I have time to do the work and you know but some agencies go too far. And you know they don’t tell you what they are spending on, or what your cost per click is, and there is unfortunately there is room there for them to be the [unintelligible 0:09:24] I guess.
Jason Hartman: Yeah right. Okay so back to really the topic at hand which is the differences so you compared to AdWords and SEO which I think was a great analogy now take us into, and make the comparison extended to the social media world.
Brian: Well, the way I look at let’s look Facebook marketing is about trying to capturing audience the same way that you would capture an email audience, and then you market it to them over and over with search marketing and AdWords, a lot of people just try to get the person when they are ready to buy, and you know you get that [lowering 0:09:56] and through there is great ROI on that, but if you didn’t get an email or anything you can’t market to them repeatedly, so you have to definitely think of Facebook marketing as more like email you are going to capture the right audience, and then you are going to engage them, and the engaging is kind of somewhere to how you might email someone overtime, and it’s a difficult analogy because there are so many people out there so even if they had email list, say I don’t think to do an incredible job with it.
You know how many people who have an email list really have a strategy. You know they might have a newsletter, but how many of them have actually come up with an auto responder follow up sequence that they strategize through right to bring the prospect to a sale.
Jason Hartman: Right. Now are you saying to do the auto responder strategy actually in the Facebook environment?
Brian: Well, no I am trying to make a comparison.
Jason Hartman: Right.
Brian: Because people have trouble — when people come to you Facebook from search marketing they expect they are going to get this instant ROI right, so I am trying to say that this paradigm is a lot more like email marketing paradigm where you have a list you try to figure out what value it is, what’s the value of each email subscriber then you have to get that from. You have to get the right people into your list and so on, so it’s the same deal with collecting a fan base. There have to be the right people, and we can talk separately about how do you target them, but you have to have the right people, and then you have to have a strategy for getting them to whatever goal you have for them.
Jason Hartman: And you know I think it’s really good that you say that Brian because I tell you as much as I use Facebook extensively in all of my companies and in my own personal life. You know I love it, but it really does and I am going to play Devil’s Advocate with you for a moment, and I hope we really bring this to some. You know we drill down on the string this discussion during this interview. Is that — it seems like a lot of it is like this sort of feel good like you are doing something a bit of a waste of time know to be honest with you because I see very few people really monetizing
Facebook well, and you are an expert in that, and that’s why I want you to have you on the show, and if you have any stories you want to share about how people have really turned the Facebook world into real dollars that would be wonderful to you, and strategies for doing so because I think it’s all about a real strategy. A lot of people go on there. They make friends. They make fans, but the end of the day is there any real end game to it?
Brian: Sure. Well, let me put it this way. I mean its not magic but and it is different and there is people socializing the issue that people might be going on there to waste time or whatever and those things are all true, but yeah people do make money on it. Ecommerce sites do make money off of the people that come from Facebook. Hotels and destinations do get bookings from Facebook, but I think partly we are not totally there yet because it is so new that everybody still is figuring out how to do it right.
There is a lot of you know I talk to a lot of social media experts, and they use the analogy of the car before the horse a lot, right? So, if you go this is some of its like marketing. If you go, hang out with people in the networking event, you have to create a relationship first, right? You don’t walk in and start trying to sell people at the networking event unless like you are all MLM or something out of it.
Jason Hartman: Right, yeah.
Brian: So you know you don’t hear a lot of people saying hey, you know these networking events are great, but you know all these people that go there, and the first time they went to the networking event they didn’t sell anything. Well, of course not, right? So, the problem is that if we use any benchmark like let’s say look at your Facebook fan page, and are you getting 1% of your fans to like or comment on your post okay. If you are not then there is a good chance that 20% of around 20% of your fans are actually seeing your post, right? Most people don’t know that, so they think hey I got a thousand fans. They don’t realize that may be 200 people will see their post.
Jason Hartman: Right. So there is a lot of leadership there.
Brian: How you are going to make any money if you are not even visible?
Jason Hartman: Great question.
Brian: So there it’s a multi step thing, and that’s why I am trying to make the analogy with email marketing as you have to capture the audience. You have to remain visible to them, and then you get them to your site or whatever and sell them. Since a lot of people are doing things well, like may be they don’t have enough fans. May be they have the wrong fans, may be they are not getting engagement, so they are not visible then of course they are not going to sell anything.
Jason Hartman: Right absolutely. So say they’ve done that. I mean do you want to talk about any tips on engaging people and moving them down that sales funnel in the social media environment.
Brian: Yeah so well this is — yeah let me put it this way. I am going to mention my website for the first time, so fanrich.net we teach this stuff how do you get fans, how do you use advertising to get fans cheaply the right fan, and then how do you engage to those people? How do you get the interaction so how do you get up to 1% or hire 2 or 3% of your fans to like or comment on your post, and thus you are visible to 70 to 100% of your fan base. How do you get that to happen? Well, number one you have to ask for it.
You know you ask them a question. You might get comments. You say click like if you blink then you are going to get more likes, right? So, call the action within the post just like any direct marketing so this is one step in the Facebook marketing process, and we are asking for that action in the post. Another thing is that you really have to kind of get out of the way because when you attract people in Facebook you are typically doing it based on something they are already interested in. It’s kind of difficult without an example, but let’s say I don’t know its there what niche should we talk about?
Jason Hartman: Oh we can talk about any niche. You want to talk about info products, infopreneuring. I think that’s of great interest nowadays, how to advice in ebooks and downloadable audio courses and such.
Brian: Yeah sure so lets say if somebody that wants to make money at home which is a crazy niche I am going to start using your [unintelligible 0:16:41].
Jason Hartman: Well, everybody does that differently, and I actually hear niche is correct, but I am scared that I am wrong, so I am going to niche nowadays I don’t know may be its —
Brian: Dictionary says niche, so I am going with you.
Jason Hartman: Yeah everybody is — we got to get an English professor on the show.
Brian: So niche, so let’s say we are going to make money from home. We attract people. We want to make money from home then what we have to do is what I call Selling the Dream. So what is their dream? What do they want? They want to make money at home? Yes but why? Right so why do they want to make money at home because they want independence. They want free time with their family. They want to stop worrying about goals. They want to be able to take vacations. They want to live a good life. They want luxury, so you sell them those things. You make them think about those things. You ask them click like if you love luxury.
Click like if you love going to vacation with your family. You know you put pictures in that aspire their imagination about those particular things. So you become the rallying point for those people around their biggest passion and if you got, the way you get them as you target people with Facebook ads. Let’s say the interest is making money at home and whatever you find all those things that people typed into their profile, and then you will create an ad that says click like if you love making money at home, or click like if you love financial independence or whatever, and those people click like at a high rate, and that high clicked rate just like an AdWords in Facebook ads it will reduce your cost per click, so you get those cheap fans. You will become someone who kind of fires, fires up their imagination about their particular passion, and then you stay in front of them.
You are the community leader, the discussion leader, and the whole time every time they come back and interact, and they see your thing. They are getting another view of you and the stuff that you do, and the stuff you sell, so like if we backup there is two ways to think about our ROI from Facebook. One is from actual sales, and the other is from the value of the exposure you get to those people because when you look at like how much do the super bowl ad cost $27 per thousand people CPM.
How much does a radio ad cost may be $9 per thousand people, so if you are really modest about what is your — what is the value once you have a fan of being able to be in front of those people repeatedly. Let’s just say it’s like a $5 cost per thousand because in a way you captured this people and we call that owned media versus paid media. You paid once now you own the audience so you continually advertise to them, and so let’s say you have 5000 fans and you are doing well with your feedback rate you are getting 1%. You are reaching may be let’s say 70% of the people. You post everyday at 3500 per day over a month its about a 100,000 so its about $500 worth of advertising per month that’s another way to look at it, and I think that’s important because that you don’t want that to be your only ROI on Facebook but people do need to think that there is a value to that.
Jason Hartman: Right. There is definitely a value to it, so more on monetization and how we get those people to take action and actually do something. It’s good that they are looking at stuff. It’s great that they are engaging in stuff, and its great that your fan page makes you look popular as well for this sort of social proof aspect, but get them to take out their wallets and buy something.
Brian: Yeah well I mean and we don’t — the only reason we need to think about that is are they the wrong people. Do they — do you mean do you have there — are they — they are not different human beings from the ones that search Google and make your money. They are the human beings. It’s that just that they happened to be in a different frame of mind so that they are aliens to themselves, and they would never buy in that frame of mind.
Jason Hartman: I don’t think so.
Brian: Right so still the question is do you have the right prospects in your fan base, is your Facebook fan page build with the right prospects and what determines that is really you know its funny to me having done Facebook fan acquisition with ads, I would never do at any other way. I would not do contests because that’s the main other way to do it. You get people in who just want to win some. They just want some free.
There is a problem with that right? But if you do the ads, you can be very selective about demographics, age, are they married, are they single, are they male, are they female, where they live you can’t do income unfortunately you can do interest targeting. Do they read Fortune magazine? Do they read wired magazine stuff like that, so let’s say you have the wrong prospects well, no matter what you do you are probably not going to make money from them. If you do a really good job getting the right prospects then you just have to get them to your site, get them warmed up, get them to your site, and then they should behave similarly to all your other web traffic.
Jason Hartman: So what else can you tell us? I mean I think everybody knows what a Facebook fan page is and so forth some of those sort of basics I sure hope if they are listening to this show they do. Any other tips on the page like little stuff, logistical type of stuff, what should you post? What should your picture look like? How large should it be things like that?
Brian: Well, I mean there is little things like you know you have 200 for your page photo, your avatar you want to call it, your main photo you have 200 width and 600 height there you can definitely fit a lot of stuff in there.
Jason Hartman: And we should mention those are pixel sizes you are mentioning right?
Brian: Right 200 pixels/600 high, so yeah I mean you can get a picture in there. Now, you need to think about what does thumbnail of your page image is going to be? It’s going to be square and really small, so you can do something like have part of your own image. You are going to turn that part into the thumbnail and then the other part it might be your website address or other details that you want to provide about your business, and then down in the info box on the left below that you can put in as long as you put in the www before your website address you don’t have to put the http, but then it does become a clickable link, and I think every business should have that.
Let’s see there is like a pre-like page thing you know like if you want to have a learning tab that people come to you before they go to the wall. You can put like, why should they like your page? You really need to think sequentially like these people are coming for the first time. You don’t want to overwhelm them with too much information, but you do need to tell them if they are thinking about liking your page and they haven’t. Why should they? So it’s every step like that. It’s every time like that I call a conversion step. You are going to get more or less people depending on how well you write to copy and whether you are actually given them anything.
Jason Hartman: What do you think about these fan pages that are highly customized where they’ve got — they don’t even look like a Facebook page many times? Do you think those are more effective or less effective then sort of the standard Facebook format?
Brian: Well, I mean yeah if you are still talking about just like a learning tab you know a welcome tab for people who are not fans yet I still, I think there is only so much you can do on there because it you really want to have people to fans. I mean it doesn’t matter what’s on there, how cool it is if you can’t contact those people again later, so just like you know just having some websites people decide in getting the email first is the most important thing because then they can contact them again. So you know it’s just a direct marketing perspective that I have.
The thing is that sometimes with the corporation you get like seven different departments. They all want to have something on their page which kind of messes up the results because you gave them too many choices and they choose none of them, and they don’t like a page and you lose them.
Jason Hartman: A confused mind always says no. Good point.
Brian: Yeah so that’s what I would do is I would — if you can come up with you know some of my clients to get sales from their Facebook page is will have a Facebook exclusive discount so you might want to say click like, and you can get our Facebook exclusive discount, so sometimes it’s a coupon code or a special link or whatever.
Jason Hartman: Sounds good, okay. Well, your course — tell us some of the additional things that it covers. I looked on there, and I was really impressed with some of the little secrets like that java script that we talked about before we went on the air today. What else do you cover in the program?
Brian: Well, fpm101.com is free that’s the first section of the course, all about pages some of the stuff we talked about making sure you get the right choice between a page or a group and get it set up right, so you never have to start over. Some people do. They do things wrong.
201 is about engagement. How to get higher feedback rate getting more likes and comments which means you get more of your fans to see your post, and we go through each of these sections are about two hours. There is a total of 22 videos in the entire thing, and then 301 is advertising. How to get the fan acquisition or even if you just want to use ads to get traffic to your sites, its really cheap because the average AdWords CBC is about 250, and Facebook is more like $0.50 so you can get fans for you know as cheap as we had.
I campaign where we got three fans for a penny, and we got 3000 fans that way, so it can be $0.10, $0.15 a fan, and that gives you a lot of control because a lot of — the two main problems people have are how do I get more fans, and how do I get them to interact with me, and that’s what 201 and 301 do, so that’s a fanreach.net. We made it real easy for people. It’s only a $1 to try it for three days, and if you don’t like it after that you will go, give it back.
After that its 97 bucks and when we add in the 401 course which is about the revenue monetization stuff like that its going to be closer to 500 bucks, but we are going to give everybody free upgrades, if they get in before that so and its — the other thing that there is two more things we do for students because we are all about support. We have a private discussion group where we answer questions from people all day, and we do a weekly webinar for our students too.
Jason Hartman: Fantastic now. One more thing I want to ask you do you actually have a done for you program. Do you do this for people or are you strictly limited to consulting on it?
Brian: No yeah I and Barry — my partner Barry also do this as a service, so it really depends on somebody wants to approach us. They could write brian@fanreach.net for example. Its really client by client, depends on you know what the campaign is going to be like what the price is, but yeah we do. We do it as a service too.
Jason Hartman: One more thing I want to ask you and then may be we will just wrap up here is your thoughts on Twitter.
Brian: Over hyped by geeks and journalists, but still a very cool networking tool, just has a lot of limitations. It doesn’t has a multimedia that Facebook has, and doesn’t have — it has like 1/20th the number of people on it that Facebook has, so its great for personal networking for B2B may be for reaching journalist and getting PR, but other than if you are — specifically if you are doing B2C I would do Facebook.
Jason Hartman: Facebook is better for Business to Consumer okay good point. Well, what would you like people to know in closing?
Brian: You know social media is not a fad. Facebook gets as many visits more visits than Google now, so these two things are going to go hand in hand in the future. We are still not at the top of the for Facebook marketing, so it’s still very cheap. This is the time to get in now, so you can get the early mover advantage. This is the time to do it.
Jason Hartman: Fantastic. Well, Brian Carter thank you so much for joining us today. We appreciate the insights, and keep up the good work out there.
Brian: Thanks for having me, and same to you.
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The Speaking of Wealth Team
Transcribed by: Renee’Naphier