How to Contact Facebook Through Email and Phone ?

How to Contact Facebook Through Email and Phone 

There are a lot of unlike ways to contact a company. You can call their offices or their employees right, you can email anyone who works there or any of the official email addresses, you can send a letter to their home base or any of their branch offices, you can get a emissary to delivery a meaning in person, you can text certain numbers, and extra.

Companies like Facebook, for example, only have so much to do at any given time that it’d be incredible for them to answer every query. Heck, it’s simple mathematics. Facebook has an spectators of over 1.6 billion monthly active users. Even if .1% of those users send in one ticket per month, that’s still 1,600,000 tickets per month. If every single one of them were keen to customer service, that would still be 4 tickets per employee per day, every day of every month, with weekends.

Credibly, not even a quarter of Facebook’s staff is customer support, and of those who are, many are keen to specific geographic regions or languages. The rest are managers, IT support for the data centers, programmers and developers, executives, advertisers and advertising account bosses, and so forth. Support is just one minor aspect of the whole huge business.

This is why Facebook’s troubleshooting procedure is a little slipshod. If you have a problem, you Google it. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a good, robust answer, often on this blog. If you’re not, you might end up in the awful pit of broken English and non-answers that is Facebook’s support forums. No one officially working with Facebook truly posts relevant answers there; they all just paste in simple links to other support threads or occasionally certification. Meanwhile you have people resurrecting three year old threads with problems that don’t have anything to do with the threads, people posting their dissimilar problems as replies to non-solutions from other users, and a whole lot of added awkwardness.

Facebook Phone Support

There are two main phone numbers that float around when enquiring about Facebook phone support.

This is NOT Facebook support! There are varied reports about what they truly are, but the most common is that they’re a scam company that will pretend to be Facebook support, only to get you to install malware on your computer and demand payments for their facilities. You can see some more evidence if you Google the number. You’ll see it show up as some guy’s “tech support” number, a number for Skype customer service, a sum for Flickr.

Email Support

Some of the phone tree options give you some email addresses you can try for specific kinds of support. Some of them are possibly more valid than others.

records@facebook.com is the email address for law enforcement. If you have a law enforcement query or if there’s an eminent material at hand, you can email this line. However, if you are not a law enforcement agent, I highly commend you do not use this line. At best you will be ignored; at worst you could get in the way of an search and be charged with obstruction of justice. Okay, so that’s a little doubtful, but still; don’t use it, it won’t help you.

cronies@fb.com is one of two email addresses available to contact the business development department. This is primarily for high-tier industries that may be interested in a partnership of some kind, like Instagram or Oculus before Facebook bought them. Small businesses or persons with support issues will find no help here.

push@fb.com is the other email address for the business department, and is more geared towards stocks of advertising. You may be able to get some help here, but only if your issue is specifically related to Facebook ads themselves. Even so, often the person in care of the account is going to refer you to form-pasted messages or the self help tools.

selling@fb.com is the email address for the marketing division. Note that this is not related to your marketing, but rather to Facebook’s itself. If you have a unruly with Facebook’s marketing campaigns in your area, this would be the place to reach. Otherwise, nope luck.

media@fb.com is the email address to reach the Facebook press subdivision. If you’re a reporter looking to contact someone in Facebook for a comment on a news story, or for an interview of some kind, this would be where you reach out. You won’t find support help here, however.

This is quite the list of Facebook email addresses, but again, none of them work for general customer support. I’m only assuming support is the reason you’re here; maybe I’m wrong. Maybe one of these email speeches fit the bill for what you were looking for. If so, I’m happy to help. On the other hand, if you’re looking for an authentic customer care email, you’re out of luck.

Facebook’s community forums, as I mentioned afore, are a pit of black despair. There’s very rarely any help to be found there, since it’s not a support forum, it’s a open forum. It’s meant for knowledgeable users to help those less fortunate in the methods of the mind. Tactlessly, anyone who has a solution to a problem avoids those forums, so the only people answering inquiries tend to be people who have no idea how to help.

since been detached. Those old posts are awful to find, because they’re completely unhelpful but will clog up search results if you don’t filter them.

Honestly, though, the most reliable way to contact Facebook is to use one of the hundreds of support forms and hope that Facebook will see your coupon in a timely fashion, answer to it, and help you out.

Before filling out a form, here are a few tips.

Make sure the contact information you have in Facebook is valid. If you’re filing a ticket, you will get a answer in the inbox of the email address you’re using. If you don’t have entrée to that email inbox, you’re not going to see a response even if there is one. Unfortunately, this makes troubleshooting email issues a lot tougher.

Don’t submit more than one ticket for the same issue. There’s nothing a support agent hates more than being flooded with dismissed tickets, partially because it clutters up their authentic work, and partially because it hurts their feat metrics. They’ll be less inclined to help you at totally.

Why Setting Up Multiple Facebook Campaigns is Effective ?

Relatively recently, Facebook added a third layer to their promotion campaign organization, and it’s very effective. Now you can efficiently organize your ads in a quantity of ways, to make them as effective as likely. To do this, though, you need to utilize all three levels. If you’re bouncing the new level just because Facebook changed and you were perfectly fine with the old way of doing things, well, you’re Grandpa Simpson yelling at a fog.

The Ad Level

Let’s start from the bottom up. At the very bottom of the hierarchal pyramid, you have the ad themself. Every ad is a unique entity. It has an image, a positioning, a title and copy. It has a URL. It has targeting factors for a specific audience. It has a budget and a spending plan.

If you wanted a variation on that ad, you would need to create a copy of that ad. In the past, before Facebook added the second level in the tree, you would need to create that ad within the same campaign. This meant if you wanted a completely different ad base, you would need to make a new campaign.

The Ad Set Level

The Ad Set level is the new level  Facebook other. Think of this like a grouping of similar ads. You have one base ad, and five differences of that ad, testing different images; these are all part of the same ad set. You might use ad sets to test different finances, or different viewers, or different copy.

Within each ad set can be as many ads as necessary to test each feature you want to test. Ad sets fit within campaigns. In general, you will divide ad sets by budget, targeting or development.

The Ad Campaign Level

The ad campaign is the top level for ad group, at least within Facebook’s system. It’s the group that contains all ad sets for a set objective. You might use a campaign centered around a particular event. Within that campaign, you have ad sets for each different type of ad, like a news feed ad, a sidebar ad, and a mobile ad. Within those sets, you have distinctions on each ad, testing changes in copy or in image.

Ideal Organization

At the top level, you have your campaigns. Form a new campaign for each major objective you want to complete. For example, say you’re a small trade, and you want to earn more product sales. At the same time, you want people to download your mobile app. These are two different objectives, and thus warrant two different campaigns.

In the ads manager you will want to create two new campaigns. Term one “app downloads” and the extra “product sales.” Or something like that, I don’t care what you name them, just name them something you can recall, or that’s descriptive enough that you don’t need to remember.

With in each campaign, you will produce as many ad sets as you need. Divide ad sets based on your targeting, your budget, or your list. For example, under your Product Sales campaign, you might make three different ad sets, each with a different target audience. Everything else – budget and schedule – will be the same. Alternatively, you can use the same audience for all three, but change your schedule. One set might run unceasingly, one set might run for a month only, and one set might run only during explicit hours of the day.

The Ad Set level is also where you choose the ad placement. For your App Downloads campaign, you might path three campaigns; one for desktop users, one for mobile users that runs all the time, and one for a different audience of mobile users that runs for a short duration.

Within each ad set, you create your individual ads. Ideally, each ad should be more or less the similar, with one thing changed. This is called split testing.

When you split test your ads, you’re going to want to keep as many variable the same as possible. This means the same budget, the same aiming, the same copy, but a different image. Or the same image, but a unalike title.

The primary ways you will track your split ads are through UTM limits or through the Facebook offsite pixel.

UTM parameters are a Google device. You use these in union with a Google Analytics installation on your website. For each ad, you’ll want to go to the URL creator and create a specific campaign and ad set flag for each URL. When you run the ad, you use this long URL as the landing page. This allows you to track gen about the people who click through your ad. Make sure you use a different URL for each ad, or else your data will total and you won’t be able to tell who came from which ad.

The Facebook offsite pixel is a bit of code you can create over the Power Editor. You can read all about it. It’s a conversion chasing tool; it follows people who click through your ad and records data about them. It also records when they alter, so they can be added to a special audience.

Why Use Multiple Campaigns?

As mentioned above, you should be using a unlike campaign for each business objective. What you shouldn’t do, however, is try to finish one campaign formerly you start another. There’s no reason not to run multiple campaigns.

The biggest benefit of multiple campaigns is the ability to run time-sensitive campaigns in addition to the standard ads you run all the time. You don’t have to deactivate or edit your existing campaign; you just make a new one. You can bet a company like Sony has a dozen unlike campaigns running at once.

3 Out of the Box Facebook Contest Ideas ?

 Out of the Box Facebook Contest Ideas

Running a Facebook contest is a complex effort.  You almost need to use a third party contest app, lest you be forced to manually scan every account for signs of being a spambot, collect a list of names by hand and pick a winner individually.  Some contests involve going through every entry, while others work best with a capricious choice, but both can be performed through a third party.  Of course, it’s up to you which you use.

The problem that comes with many third party contest apps is that they all toil in very similar means.  “Like this photo to enter a contest to win the item in the picture!”  This is a boring contest, it earns you very little real engagement and it’s now against the terms of deal for Facebook.

1. The Product Improvement Giveaway

Have you ever wondered how you might improve your product or facility?  Have you ever wondered what your employers want out of your business that you’re not if? Run a contest!  Ask your users what they would do to improve your business model at any point along the way.  Add a feature to your product?  Streamline your software in some way?  Offer additional tokens or features on your sales?  Bundle fixtures?  The sky is the limit.

This contest does a few things for you.  First, it gives you a massive list of possible improvement ideas.  Many of them are going to be miserable to you, of course.  Some will be personal conveniences for a small segment of users.  Someone wants a useless feature detached from your software, fine, but when 90% of the rest of your users like that feature, removing it wouldn’t make sense.  Many of the ideas will be duplicates as well.  You will need to instruct that the first person to portray the idea – or the person with the best portrayal of that idea – will be the one to win.  In exceptional circumstances you could give bonus prizes away if a few people tie.

2. The Personal Experience Documentary

One of the hardest obstacles to face for a business is the status.  Satisfied users are rarely going to come back and consent reviews, unless you prod them to do so with a follow-up contact.  Meanwhile, dissatisfied users are very likely to come back and carp, to air their grievances and to warn other users gone.  This leads to a very unbalanced situation you need to put a lot of work into balancing out.  Why not fix it with a contest?

Set up your contest by asking users for tributes of some kind.  Offer them a number of ways to provide that testimonial.  You could ask them to leave a review of a product on your page, provided you allow them to leave harmful reviews as well, otherwise you’ll be guilty of incentivizing positive journals.  You could ask them to submit photos of them using your product.  You could ask them to write a story or create a video.  Each type of entry gives you a resource you can use later.

One of the keys to this sort of match lies in the fine print.  Your goal with this is two-fold; first you poke your users into action, to get them to leave you helpful testimonials on your page and on other criticism sites.  Second, you gather resources for your own testimonial usage.  In the fine print, specify that any submission can be used at your discretion in future selling efforts, and that entry in the contest constitutes pact to this.

This way, when a user leaves you a positive analysis as part of their submission, you can then use that positive review in your marketing sweats.  This gives you fuel for your name, to leave product reviews on product pages and powerful quotes on marketing solid.

3. The Teaser Contest

This is the sort of contest you run as a lead-up to a new produce launch.  You can quietly disseminate marketing material throughout the Internet and then quiz people each day on the happy of that material.  Some ideas;

Post a zoomed-in picture and ask users to speculation what it may be.

Post a sample feature and ask users to supposition what it might be for.

Post a fill-in-the-blank contest asking for product specifications send out in press issues.

Post a silhouette and ask users to supposition what it is.

The goal here is to create micro-contests each day for a week or a month, giving away petty prizes along the way.  Each micro-contest can have a prize scaled to the difficulty of the material.

You can take this idea one step further.  Investigate Alternate Reality Games or cryptography challenges to set up a long-running multi-tiered contest with prizes rising in value as the user gets profounder.  Hide answers in image filenames, audio waveforms, embedded code comments and behind challenges.  A well-done ARG can be incredibly viral and deeply attractive.

What prize do you offer for an ARG?  You can start with exclusive access to info, scale up through slips and free items, and you can even end with something as major as a trip to your headquarters or an upcoming happening.

3 Ways to Increase the Organic Reach of your Facebook Page ?

Organic reach, on Facebook, is the contact your posts have when they’re posted. In case you didn’t know, Facebook’s algorithm is constantly measuring the relative meeting between your brand and each single user. If they visit your page, click your posts, like them, share them or comment on them, it increases their meeting ranking by some amount. If they stay away from your posts, hide them or otherwise overlook your brand, their meeting rank decreases over time.

The reason organic reach is important is because it’s a dimension of how high, on average, the meeting of your users happens to be. This is distinct from the meeting on promoted posts, which is artificially inflated and costs you money to pass. Sure, you could increase your engagement across the board by helping every post, but that’s going to rack up important costs over time.

1. Understand the Algorithm

The first thing you need to do is learn what Facebook considers an meeting factor, what drives users away and how you can affect your relative meeting. The umbrella term for all of this is the News Feed Algorithm, formerly known as EdgeRank.

               EdgeRank, as many still call it, is a constant calculation made between any two users. Interrelating more with someone will cause their posts to show up on your feed more often. Overlooking them for a long time will tell Facebook that you don’t care what they post, and will lower their post reflectivity on your feed. It’s all specific on a per-user basis; there’s no one EdgeRank for your Page. Essentially, you need to know what goes into the calculation and how you can affect it. Here are the basics:

Freshness of interaction. Essentially, the more recently a customer has networked with your page in some way – even if that’s just clicking on your page and seeing your feed – the more likely your posts will show up on their feeds. How can you move this? Post more often! More frequent posts, of varying types and with varying content, gives users more odds to click and engage with your page.

Type of post content. This is a little one that’s often ignored. Facebook has started demoting the value of meeting for meeting’s sake. In other words, if you post a picture and ask your users to like it for no reason, those likes are going to be less valued in the algorithm than likes on a posted picture where you didn’t ask for likes. How can you affect this? Don’t beg for likes and bonds. Yes, common advice says to just ask for it, but it’s increasingly less effective to do so. Instead, be clever about asking for meeting. Ask questions, post riddles or post images that are beautiful enough to like on their own merits.

Type of interaction. There are only a handful of actions a user can take that moves their EdgeRank. They can click links in your posts. They can share your posts. They can remark on your posts. They can like your posts. They can follow your page as a whole, if they haven’t already. Beyond that, nothing has a major result. How can you affect this? Post a variety of content that attracts each type of meeting. If you never posts links, you’ll never receive link click meeting. Post links that attract users to click through, post images users like to share, post questions users will remark on; it all adds up.

2. Make Use of Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is the Facebook equivalent of Google Analytics, planned to record the actions and demographics of the people who network with your business page. This is an incredibly dear little dashboard, if you know what’s important.

Demographics. You can see the genders, ages and locations of the users winning with your page. More importantly, you can see the engagement statistics for those demographics. Curious how often women between the ages of 17 and 25 share your posts? It’s right there, in the Insights panel.

Engagement statistics per post.  You can see, on a post-level basis, three numbers. One is the reach; how many people, in total, saw your post. One is clicks; how many people clicked the link in the content. The third is meeting; how many likes, shares and comments that post usual. All of these are valuable to know.

Engagement breakdown by time. You can see, in perfectly constructed graphs, what times of day and what days of the week are best for posting new content. When are your users most active and most affianced?

All of this information is valuable on its own, but it truly shines when you put it together. Learn what types of people are most affianced with your brand, and what audience groups need a little love to polish. Learn what types of content gain the most exposure, and of what kind.

3. Draw Connections and Optimize Content

This is where you take your knowledge of EdgeRank and your insight into your community and combine them to increase your meeting as much as possible.

Expand your audience. To do this, expression at your demographics to find the audience groups that aren’t dominant, and determine what sort of content they like the best. Post more of that content  to attract them.

Involve your existing audience. You don’t want to negligence your dominant audience groups. Do the same thing you did for the earlie

step, but with your primary audience. This should be your main focus; keep the largest group of people affianced. Expanding your audience is main, but focusing on a core group is essential to maintain your current grasp.

Post more of your best happy for clicks. Clicks are a very valuable metric for visit, but they’re also essential for driving conversions to your website. Use linkbait titles, post partial infographics and otherwise inspire users to click through to your site.

Post more of your best content for meeting. Some content doesn’t funnel users to your site; it keeps them in place and gets them to comment and share. Ask questions, run polls and generally hearten your users to engage; that’s how you succeed on Facebook.

Time your posts for best result. Figure out what the peak hours and peak days are for activity amongst your audience groups and time your posts to be available just before the peak. Make sure they’re visible when users sign on to check, but not so old they’re buried under more recent updates.

Test with new styles of content for new audiences. At least one post each week should be an experiment, whether it’s to try a new type of meeting or to attract a new type of user. Without testing, you’ll stagnate as a brand.

Putting your knowledge to work is how you build your reach naturally and save the money you would otherwise apply on helping your posts.

5 Ways to Reduce Your Facebook Ads Cost Per Click ?

Facebook ads run on a cost per objective basis. You salary dependent on the objective you want to complete. Website clicks and page likes are the cheapest, while website adaptations are the most expensive. No matter what objective you’re using, however, you want to make sure you’re giving as little as possible per independent. Here’s how.

1. Pick the Right Objective

Facebook’s ad objectives define what counts as a exchange for your ad. If you want to sell products, you might want to be using the product deals objective rather than the website clicks objective. Why? Website clicks just means you salary each time someone clicks to your website, regardless of whether or not they ever see your products, let alone purchase. If you run the website changes objective, you pay when a user adapts, not just when they click. On the other hand, it costs more, so you have to stability this with other factors.
The last thing you want to do is use the wrong objective in a way that kills your campaign. Trying to use the video views impartial, for example, when you don’t have a video to play will just waste time and inexpensive.

2. Use a More Compelling Image


The first thing you need to understand is that you will need a number of different versions of each image you use, dependent on the location and objective of the ad. Yes, even different objectives display ads slightly differently, and this can disturb the size of the image.
There are other ad image guidelines beyond size that you need to identify. For one thing, pictures of happy people tend to be a good avoidance. If you don’t know anything more specific, test pictures of smiling people, particularly women. If you can capture them in situation that’s relevant to your business, even well.
You should also pick images with colors that stand out from the boring every-day color system of Facebook. This is particularly important for sidebar ads, which tend to blend in with the blue-and-white drabness of the rest of the page. News feed ads can be a bit less vibrant because they’re large and existing front and midpoint.

3. Use an Appropriate Frequency

Do you know what ad frequency is? A lot of first-time marketers either don’t know or don’t pay care.
There are three numbers that measure how your ads are viewed by people on Facebook. Impresses are the total number of times your ad was seen. If one person views your ad five times, that’s five impresses. Reach is the total number of individual people who saw your ad. If one person sees your ad five times, that’s one reach. Regularity is the number of times, on average, that a person sees your ad. If your audience is one person, and he sees your ad five times, you have a regularity of five.
On Facebook, you can set limits to your regularity. You should pay attention to your regularity and adjust your budget and targeting accordingly. You can read more about these adjustments on  AdEspres so.

4. Implement Split Testing

Every time I mention testing, watching or changing your ads, I’m talking about split testing.
Split testing works like this: you take one ad and create an careful copy of it. You change one thing – and only one thing – about that ad. You then run both ads for an equal amount of time with an equal audience and an equal budget. You measure which does better. Then you pick the better one, copy it, and run another test.
You can further complicate tests by running numerous variations at once, though this can cause issues with classifying which of two changes is well. Try to only test one variable at a time. For example, you can easily run six different pictures on like ads. However, you should never run an ad that has multiple variables changed. For example, don’t run an ad, a variant with a different picture, and a variant with different copy. If both perform well than the original, you don’t know which change to make.
There are all kinds of belongings you can test when you split test variables. You can change your image by a little or totally. You can alter your copy, your landing page link URL, or your title. You can change your targeting options in a million ways in the back end of the ads method.

5. Track All Data

Finally, track everything. Track data, monitor them, and make sure you’re improving in the metrics that count.
This means, of course, that you need to take zero measurements of such statistics for every ad and for your advertising as a whole. Figure out how much you’re spending, what your reach is, what your incidence is, what your targeting is and what goals you’d like to reach. Work to optimize sides of your advertising like your conversion rate, your click-through rate and your cost per click. Make changes that lower your CPC, but don’t go overboard. The ideal penny-per-click isn’t really ideal at all; in fact, it mostly means your clicks are paltry.
Each change you make should be geared towards either improving the performance of your ads or falling the cost of those ads.

The Difference Between Fan Page Likes and Website Likes ?

Facebook has likes as an action for a whole lot of different scenarios. On the site, you can like a post, or you can like a page. You can even add other emotions now, like Wow or Sad – a pithy emoticon-based way of sharing feelings so you don’t have to learn to express them with words or actions. Putting that aside, though, you also have likes originating from a website like button.

There is a functional alteration in the way all three of these likes work, and it’s one that many people don’t instinctively grasp. This is why people who buy likes targeting their website like button are confused when their page doesn’t grow. Let’s take a look at each of the likes and see how they function.

Post Likes

Post likes – and wows, and sads, and angrys, and loves – are answers to a post that allow a user to involve with a post and express something to the poster, without having to really leave a comment. Likes are mostly used as a way to acknowledge a post, without having to say you do, or come up with something else to say in adding to that credit. It’s roughly analogous to some millennials typing “lol” or “heh” in an instant message, if you’re familiar with those; it’s a way for the person receiving the message to admit that they saw it and say, at the same time, that they have nothing of value to add to that train of thought.

Post likes have a minor distribution effect. They create a “Person A has liked X post” story that is shared in the feeds of the people who are friends with person A. Facebook documented that these stories were largely ignored, though, and has been reducing how many of them show up. These days they tend to only show up for posts about trending topics.

The major problem with these stories is that it’s often hard for the friends of person A to respond to the story. If post X was made by person B, and person B has discretion settings that don’t allow contributions from non-friends, the friends of person A won’t be able to comment.

That’s a little puzzling, so let’s break it down. If Bob makes a post and has his discretion settings set in such a way that their posts are public but only friends can comment on them, it will be visible to anyone. Janet likes Bob’s post, which makes a “Janet liked Bob’s Post” story in the news feed of Bartleby. Bartleby wants to comment, but can’t, because he isn’t a friend of Bob. He can see the post, but he can’t engage with it.

Page Likes

A page like is roughly equivalent to a follow on Twitter. When Bob has a Facebook Page rather than a profile, that page works like a business page. It can accumulate followers, it can run ads, it’s limited in direct messaging, and all the other features and limitations of a page.

When you go to a page and like it, you’re promising to updates from that page in your news feed. This, too, can make “Janet has liked Bob’s page” stories in Bartleby’s feed, but in this case there’s nothing limiting Bartleby from viewing Bob’s page in its entirety. Pages don’t have “followers only” settings anymore, not since Facebook minimizing Liking a page doesn’t really grant you access to anything special on Facebook as the liker. You get the page’s posts in your feed rendering to Edge Rank, which might mean you don’t see much at all. The more you engage with a page, the more of their posts you see. The more you ignore the page, the less you see.

Liking a page does have benefits for that page, though. From the page viewpoint, they can now see some information about you. Your demographics are added to their audience demographics. You show up in reach calculations. If they want to run ads to the people who follow them and no one else, you show up as a target for those ads. The page can’t message you unless you message them first, but they are free to respond.

Page likes are what you, as a page manager and website owner, want to gather in as large a quantity as possible. Post likes don’t do a lot, because, as we mentioned, the stories aren’t generated very normally and they don’t do much for you. Parts are better, comments are better, likes are generic filler. It’s a bad thing to have no likes on a page that has a high number of followers, but that’s more because likes are a sign that your followers are active and real, rather than fakes purchased through a bot reseller..

Website Like Button Likes

This third type of like comes from social media buttons embedded on your website. When you see a Facebook like button on a blog, you’re seeing something that is, itself, a lie.

What do I mean by that? Well, if you were to click the like button next to a blog post, you would find out that it’s not actually liking anything. You’re actually sharing this post with your feed. You’ll see a URL, if you inspect the element, that looks something like this

This is a Facebook URL with a script and a parameter. The parameter is the example.com URL, which would be the URL of the blog post you’rethe sharer.php, which is the same as what you see on Facebook when you click “share” on a post.

In other words, there’s no actual “like” going on with the like button. It’s a share, which posts the URL to your Facebook feed so your friends can see it. The entrance of the shared post depends on the open graph meta data of the page you’re sharing, though you can customize it by adding your own post to the top of the link you’re sharing.

Using Website Likes

One learner mistake I see marketers making all the time is not customizing the sharing button on their site. They want to see higher numbers, so they make every social sharing button for Facebook link to their homepage. That means every accrued share from every instance of the button on their site will display the same number, which is the number of shares the homepage of the website has.

It would not be the number of page likes Amazon has – 26.6 million or so – because that’s not the action the like button takes. So not only will the number of shares not match the number of page likes the page has, that discrepancy looks bad if a user notices.

The real way you should use Facebook website like buttons is to use the default for most social sharing buttons, which is “share the page this button is currently on.” Each individual blog post will get shared on its own, and will collect shares that are made of that post, but not of the website in general. There is, tactlessly, no good way to total up all the shares of all the pages on your site without some kind of custom script pulling data from the Facebook API.

• The first trick is to ignore the like button or social sharing buttons on those page, and instead just embed the Facebook like box. This plan works because of the kinds of people who are on those pages of your site.

The second trick would be to actually include the like button, but customize it. Rather than have it share as a post the page the user is currently on, modify the sharing URL to be a landing page. Of course, all of this only works and is only valuable so long as you have an active Facebook presence. If you’re not on Facebook for one reason or another – your URL is filtered, your account is debarred, you chose not to use the site, or you didn’t get enough value to make it price the time – you’re not going to get a lot of use out of either sharing or like buttons.

“We’ve Removed Some Fake Likes” Warning on Facebook?

Recently, Facebook has started sending out notifications at the top of a page, visible only to the admin, when they remove fake likes from that page. This has set a number of webmasters on edge. Many believe that any loss of likes, real or fake, is a huge blow to their business. I’m going to take a moment to discuss why that’s not true, and why this is typically a good thing, no matter what percentage of your likes are removed.

Why Authentic Likes Matter

Well, for one thing, Facebook cares about the realism of their likes. If the site was overrun by fake likes, the fake like economy would crash. Where you might find one like valuable before, you might need a thousand likes for equivalent value. Pages with millions of followers would need trillions of likes on every post just to break even, and that hurts everyone.

Okay, so that’s not really what happens. However, a like on a page is supposed to signify a person – a real person – who is interested in your brand and what you have to say. When your page is full of followers, you have a wide interested audience. If your page is filled with fake likes, you might as well be delivering a seminar to a bunch of cardboard cutouts. Not only does it hurt your message to fall on fake ears; the few real followers in the crowd of fakes grow uncomfortable and leave.

Facebook also doesn’t like giving pages a workaround to their feed filtering. If they weighted likes more heavily, it would be possible for pages to purchase likes just to spread their message. In a sense, it’s because of fake likes that the individual like is as valueless as it is today.

Fake Likes and Insights

If you’re a veteran Facebook marketer, you’ll know how valuable the Insights system is. Through Insights, you can learn all sorts of interesting and useful information about your audience. You can find out where they live, in general. You can find out what they like. You can find out about their general demographic information. Most importantly, you use this information to target your ads.

Consider this scenario; you go into your Insights panel and look at your demographic information. You see that the majority of your audience is composed of young women, aged around 20, and that they tend to like various clothing brands. Use decide to use that information to target ads at other 20-something women who like clothing brands, to bring them into your audience. It works, and you bring in a number of great new followers, some of whom convert on the spot. That’s how the system is supposed to work.

Now imagine you look and you see the same information, but you notice that the majority of them come from India. This is strange, because you don’t sell your product in India. You shrug and decide to run the ads anyways. You get a whole bunch of new followers, but you see exactly zero conversions. You spent a bunch of money on ads, and got nothing out of it. It’s even worse if you spend money on other ad campaigns in India, where people don’t actually care.

Things get even worse if the fakes spoof their identities and look like they come from, say, California. Now you have a bunch of valley girls  as your demographic. What if the minority, though, are your real fans? They turn out to be 40-something males who live in New York. Yet here you are, spending ad money on ads targeted at California women. Your real demographic is left ignored, while the fake demographics suck up your ad spend and give you nothing in return.

There is, of course, the matter of organic reach as well, which is severely hampered by the presence of fake fans. Every fake fans that sees your message is a real opportunity lost.

Facebook’s Best Practices

Facebook has a few suggestions on fan-based best practices.

First, they advise that you focus on business objectives, not just followers. Yes, growing your following is important, but which matters more to you? Getting an extra hundred followers on Facebook, or getting one more monthly conversion on your website? By running ads and targeting posts such that you’re encouraging conversions and blog followers, you benefit more than you would through boosting your like count for no reason.

Second, don’t buy fake likes. About half of the time when you’re buying likes online, you know they’re fake and you know what you’re getting into. Don’t do it, no matter how tempting the offer may sound. The other half of the time, the seller is trying to pass their likes off as real. They’ll just end up removed, or worse; sitting around hurting you. Only buy likes from qualified sellers, businesses that run ad campaigns on private networks to get you real followers.

Third, learn your audience. More importantly, monitor your audience and watch for trends in an unusual demographic spiking. This can be an indication of fake likes, which can come from outside sources as well as your own accidental targeting mishaps. Try to minimize the actions that cause these spikes.

Why Fake Removal is Fine

If you get the fake like removal message – something like this – consider it a good thing. Facebook has your best interests in mind! They’re removing bots, fake accounts, spam accounts, inactive accounts, and memorialized accounts from your followers list. This has a number of great effects on your brand.

For one thing, it makes your audience Insights that much more accurate. Always check your Insights after such a fake fan removal! You might find out you’ve been targeting your ads a bit left of center, and the removal allows you to refine your targeting to better contact the people who are most interested in your brand. This will probably result in a conversion rate increase, possibly as soon as days after it happens.

For another thing, it broadens your reach. When fake fans are removed, those fans aren’t soaking up your messages. Instead, real fans will see your posts, and those fans will be more likely to like, share, and comment on your posts. When they do, it exposes your posts to that many more real and potential fans, dramatically increasing your organic and viral reach.

The only negative effects that come up from the removal of fake likes are the lowering of your follower count – which isn’t that important on its own – and the loss of any investment you had in fake followers. But then, you’re a smart webmaster; you haven’t been buying fake likes at all.