Welcome to this week’s edition of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a news show for marketers who want to stay on the leading edge of social media.

On this week’s Social Media Marketing Talk Show, we explore Facebook’s New subscription service for creators and pausing Messenger chatbots with Luria Petrucci, Facebook privacy updates, and other breaking social media marketing news of the week!

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If you’re new to the show, click on the green “Watch replay” button below and sign in or register to watch our latest episode from Friday, March 30, 2018. You can also listen to the show as an audio podcast, found on iTunes/Apple Podcast, Android, Google Play, Stitcher, and RSS.

For this week’s top stories, you’ll find timestamps below that allow you to fast-forward in the replay above.

Facebook Tests Monthly Subscription Service for Creators: Last week, Facebook announced that it’s currently building a range of new monetization and audience tools for creators. One of these new monetization options is being described as a Patreon-like system where users can sign up for a monthly subscription to their favorite creators in exchange for exclusive content and a fan badge. TechCrunch reports that the subscriptions will begin at $4.99 with Facebook and either Google Play or the iOS App Store taking a cut. However, custom pricing could come later. Facebook is expected to launch the program next month with 10 creators across the U.S. and UK. (6:00)

Facebook builds Patreon, Niche clones to lure creators with cash by @joshconstine https://t.co/8WRMXhaosM pic.twitter.com/eLejCYEnhp

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) March 19, 2018

Facebook Temporarily Pauses Chatbot and App Reviews: Along with a number of platform changes intended to protect user data and prevent its misuse, Facebook is currently pausing all app reviews. This means developers won’t be able to launch any new apps or new chatbots on the Facebook platform while the company reviews its current privacy and data policies. (18:09)

Facebook assures developers and users that existing Facebook Messenger bot experiences that have already been approved and connected “will continue to function as is.” Developers are also cautioned not to clear cookies, sign out, or attempt to reconnect their bots through any third-party tools such as ManyChat or ChatFuel until Facebook updates its policies.

Facebook Announces Upcoming Platform Changes and Stricter Developer Policies: In addition to pausing its app and chatbot review process, Facebook announced several other platform updates that will take effect in the “upcoming days and beyond.” There will be stricter policies and terms for B2B app development and more user control over what data those apps are permitted to access. Facebook is also conducting a full audit of any app with suspicious activity and making it simpler for users to report any misuses of data they find. Facebook promises to ban developers that misuse personally identifiable information and notify users if an app is removed for this reason. (25:55)

Facebook Establishes New Privacy Tools: Facebook announced a new set of changes to its user-facing privacy settings and is rolling out the ability to manage, download, and delete any data that has been previously collected by Facebook across its platform. Facebook redesigned and streamlined its account settings to a single page on mobile, added a new Privacy Shortcuts menu, added extra layers of security, and much more. These updates will be available to all users “in the coming weeks.” (29:49)

Facebook Unveils New Comment Privacy Feature: Facebook appears to be testing a new privacy feature for comments. A new Lock icon allows users to toggle two privacy settings for comments on public posts: open to the public or only visible to you and the profile or page owner. This possible new feature was spotted in the UK and shared by Matt Navarra. (33:04)

Facebook rolling out its Comment Privacy feature?

Now available to me in the UK… pic.twitter.com/MYb3vP7ntc

— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) March 28, 2018

Facebook Plans to Shut Down Third-Party Ad Data: In a separate statement, Facebook announced plans to shut down Partner Categories soon, a product that enables third-party data providers to offer ad targeting data directly on Facebook. Recode reports that Facebook currently allows advertisers to target groups of people based on a mix of offline data such as offline purchasing activity collected by companies like Experian and Acxiom, user activity and profile data collected by Facebook, and a company’s own customer data. Facebook will wind down the practice of including third-party ad data “over the next six months” in a continued effort to improve and protect privacy on Facebook.

Facebook is changing what data advertisers can use to target you with ads https://t.co/N0cJsS1lgG pic.twitter.com/qKOvLsKprQ

— Recode (@Recode) March 28, 2018

Facebook Temporarily Drops Audience Reach Estimates From Custom Ads: In an email to brands and advertisers, Facebook stated that after identifying a new technical issue with reach estimation for custom audiences that could “potentially allow misuse of the functionality,” it’s removing the ability to see reach estimates for all custom audiences across all of its interfaces until the issue can be resolved. Facebook will also limit how many custom audiences an advertiser can create during this time.

Exclusive: Facebook will no longer show audience reach estimates for Custom Audiences after vulnerability detected by @ginnymarvin https://t.co/8vP68D2MwT

— Marketing Land (@Marketingland) March 23, 2018

Facebook Prioritizes Local News Globally:  Earlier this year, Facebook announced plans to prioritize news items from users’ local towns or cities in the news feed. This update initially rolled out in the U.S. but has now been expanded to “people in all countries, in all languages.” Facebook states that this update will help “local publishers who cover multiple, nearby cities reach audiences in those cities” and “[connect] people to local publishers from those cities.”

News Feed FYI: More Local News on Facebook, Globally https://t.co/ekEo5M6boh

— Facebook Newsroom (@fbnewsroom) March 26, 2018

Facebook Expands Local News Section to More U.S. Cities: In January, Facebook began testing a new section of the mobile app that connects users to a separate feed entirely dedicated to local news, events, and announcements. This new section, called Today In, was being vetted by local publishers in six U.S. cities. Due to the positive response to this experimental feature, Facebook plans to expand the test to 25 additional U.S. cities over the next few weeks. The list of cities and how to find Today In can be found on the Facebook Media blog.

Along with this rollout, Facebook is starting a small test with some first-responder pages “to help them communicate local alerts on Facebook” and determine if posts are an effective way to support established emergency alert systems. The local alert indicator will appear in both the news feed and Today In in a select number of cities, where Today In is currently available.

LinkedIn Introduces Native Video for Sponsored Content and Company Pages: LinkedIn is rolling out autoplaying native video ads that will be featured as stand-alone posts in the LinkedIn news feed. LinkedIn is also introducing the ability for businesses and publishers to include native video on their company pages. Both of these capabilities are rolling out now and will be available to all businesses “in the next few weeks.”

Facebook Tests Expiring Friend Requests: Facebook is testing 14-day time limits on accepting friend requests with a small subset of users. TechCrunch notes this new feature is “a way to assist people with managing unwanted friend requests by eventually deleting those people [they] saw but didn’t accept.”

Facebook fights creeps and apathy with expiring friend requests https://t.co/kiRZc0AnUH by @joshconstine pic.twitter.com/p9m8TWxI2X

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) March 26, 2018

Facebook Adds Video Cover Image Options for Profiles: Facebook now allows users to select a video for a profile cover image from the Cover Artwork library. Previously, Facebook only offered static images in this gallery.

Pinterest Rolled Out New Following Tab: Pinterest announced it’s rolling out a new way to discover ideas from the people and brands you already follow on the platform. The new Following tab makes it “easy to see the latest Pins from all the people you follow, in the order they save them.” This new feature is available on the web and on mobile for both iOS and Android.

Twitter Adds New Companies to Official Partners Program:  In 2015, Twitter launched its Official Partner Program, which features an “elite set of companies… [that can help brands] increase returns on advertising campaigns, gain brand insights, scale customer care, and more.” This week, Twitter announced that it’s adding six new partners to this program. These companies include Curalate, Jebbit, VidMob, Vidsy, Animoto, and Social Native.

Today we’re expanding the @TwitterMktg toolset with six innovative solutions that deliver memorable, high-quality #creative for brands.

Welcome new Twitter Official Partners! @Curalate @Jebbit @vidmob@VidsyHQ @Animoto @socialnativehttps://t.co/xsQM2QDd1w

— Official Partner (@OfficialPartner) March 27, 2018

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Do you want more clients?

Wondering if LinkedIn can help you acquire more business?

To explore how to use LinkedIn to find leads and turn them into customers, I interview John Nemo.

More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview LinkedIn marketing expert John Nemo. Author of LinkedIn Riches: How to Use LinkedIn for Business, Sales and Marketing, John is also host of Nemo Radio podcast, which is focused on online marketing and lead generation. He has worked to rewrite LinkedIn profiles for well-known individuals such as John Lee Dumas, Ray Edwards, and Chris Brogan.

John shares which LinkedIn and third-party tools he uses to identify and manage his prospects.

You’ll discover how John develops LinkedIn connections into pre-qualified leads and clients.

LinkedIn Prospecting: How to Find and Connect With Future Customers featuring insights from John Nemo on the Social Media Marketing Podcast.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.

Listen Now

Listen now: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Play | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS

Here are some of the things you’ll discover in this show:

LinkedIn Marketing

John’s Story

Back when John had a day job in marketing, he was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and wanted to start his own marketing agency. However, leaving a safe day job was hard when he was the sole breadwinner for his wife and three boys younger than age 10. In late 2012, with one client and enough money for 30 days, John decided to make the leap into starting his own business.

To find more clients, John had a plan to use LinkedIn for prospecting. Until John started his business, he (like a lot of people) viewed LinkedIn only as a place for job-seekers and recruiters. Your profile was a résumé. But after he began viewing LinkedIn as a way to find clients, his perspective on the platform changed.

Motivated by the need to feed his children, John stayed busy on LinkedIn bringing in clients for his marketing agency. Within 90 days, John had replaced his six-figure salary, generated revenue, and had a bunch of clients in the door. He had to start hiring staff and kept growing his business, continuing to use LinkedIn to get new clients.

After a few years, the marketing agency felt too much like John’s old job. He was managing staff and doing payroll instead of creating stuff. From there, John pivoted to helping people learn how to find clients on LinkedIn.

In 2014, John published LinkedIn Riches. Then he created an online course (also called LinkedIn Riches). Today, John has a one-man shop, creating online courses and working with a small group of clients and customers. With his more entrepreneurial lifestyle, John can choose the things he wants to do, and LinkedIn has been the engine behind where his business is today.

Listen to the show to hear John share how often he uses LinkedIn now.

Why Prospect on LinkedIn?

If you’re looking for business-to-business (B2B) prospects, LinkedIn is the best place on the planet because it has the market cornered right now. No other B2B network has as many members and as much reach as LinkedIn does.

Currently, LinkedIn has about 550 million members in 200 different countries, and two new members join every second of the day. LinkedIn is a behemoth and one of the most visible websites in the world.

Looking for prospects on LinkedIn is effective because it’s like a search engine for professionals. For all its members, LinkedIn has categorized, analyzed, sorted, tagged, and saved every little bit of data. By leveraging all that data, LinkedIn can help you find your prospects.

For example, within 3 seconds, you can find a list of CEOs in San Diego who work in the health care industry and have a company with more than 10 employees.

If you understand what to say to people, LinkedIn is like the world’s biggest professional coffee shop. You can have one-on-one, real-time engagement with people via the LinkedIn message box, status updates, or articles. Professionals worldwide check in every day. If you’re savvy and pay attention, you can really leverage LinkedIn for marketing.

Listen to the show to hear John discuss other features that make LinkedIn a one-stop shop for professionals.

How to Write a Client-Facing LinkedIn Profile

Most LinkedIn users still treat their profile like a résumé. People write in the third person about what they’ve done, where they worked, and awards they’ve won. However, your ideal prospects and customers don’t care about you. They care about how you can solve their problems.

When John teaches people how to rewrite their LinkedIn profiles, he talks about making the profile client-facing. To start, identify whom you help, which should be your target audience (such as CEOs or entrepreneurs), and what benefit you offer that audience. John offers a template like this: “We help [target audience] achieve [the benefit they get from working with you] by providing [your service].”

For instance, when John explains what he does, he says, “I help business coaches and consultants quickly find more clients online by providing LinkedIn lead-generation training.”

John says you can continue this client-facing profile by saying more about how you help your ideal audience and why your service works. After you talk about how you can help and why, share what others say about you by adding testimonials. At the end, John also recommends adding a call to action, whether that’s signing up for your live event or something else.

When you write a client-facing profile, think about what prospects will see and how they’ll react when you initially contact them on LinkedIn. You focus on the client because, when you first contact a prospect on LinkedIn, that person will wonder who you are and look at your profile. Even if someone searches your name on Google, your LinkedIn profile is often one of the top results.

Say your ideal clients are marketing managers in charge of social media. If the first line of your profile says you help marketing managers in charge of social media do this, this, and this, that person is excited and intrigued because you can solve something they need help with. Your profile helps that person connect the dots.

With LinkedIn, John says the riches are in the niches. He recommends identifying two or three target audiences you really serve well. Identify them by job title and industry type. If you try to be everything to everybody, finding clients on LinkedIn won’t work. Similarly, if prospects don’t like your profile, they may never respond to your inquiry.

John stresses that everything you do on LinkedIn begins with your profile because people will check it. Everyone wants context for a conversation. If your personal invite piques someone’s curiosity enough to look at your profile, your profile needs to convey that you can help that person. Then they’ll accept your invite so you have a way to start a dialog.

Listen to the show to hear John and I discuss what a LinkedIn profile for Social Media Examiner might say.

How to Find Prospects on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has an incredible internal search engine for finding prospects. Whether you’re on the LinkedIn mobile app or the desktop version, start by typing the job title of the person you want to reach in the search box, such as “business coach.” (John notes the search box supports Boolean searches, which means you can add operators like AND or use quotes to make your search more specific.)

On the search results page, filters with checkboxes help you narrow your search results to your exact ideal customer. John might start by filtering his search for business coaches to Minneapolis, where he lives, reducing the list of 80,000 coaches to 800. Another filter can narrow the list to coaches who attended a college like the University of Minnesota.

For even more nuance, you can add more filters to find people in your specific niche. John might filter to find business coaches who specialize in health care clients. All this filtering gives you context for a conversation.

I ask what kind of an account you need to search all of LinkedIn. John says a free account offers limited results and filters. He recommends upgrading to a paid premium account because you’ll get more data and search filters. You also have more access to the people you’re looking for and who look at your profile. Think of a premium account as paying for more access to the search engine.

LinkedIn premium fees range from $25 to $150 per month. The account tiers focus mostly on different fields, such as a job-seeker, HR person, or salesperson. For most marketers, John recommends the sales account, which has two different levels and costs $65 to $100 per month. For John, the data he gets makes the cost worthwhile.

For example, John can contact the 800 business coaches in Minneapolis who went to the University of Minnesota. The context from the search filters gives him an easy way to break the ice. He might reach out with an invite that says, “Hey Joe, I see you’re a business coach here in Minneapolis. By the way, I see you went to the University of Minnesota. Go Gophers!”

Although LinkedIn doesn’t let you send a message to 800 people at once, you can use third-party automation tools. John says using third-party tools is a gray area. LinkedIn says it doesn’t like these tools and doesn’t want people to use them. John’s take is that LinkedIn doesn’t want people scraping data and scamming people.

The tools John uses just save the repetitive work of copying and pasting messages to individual profiles so that he can send those 800 invites over a day or two with a click of a couple of buttons. He likens these tools to an email marketing system where he can insert a name and personal message based on the criteria in his search filters.

John doesn’t use automation when someone replies. Beginning with a reply, you have a personal one-on-one conversation.

John says the automation tools he likes change, but right now he likes Meet Leonard (which offers tons of different plans and pricing), LinMailPro, and Linked Helper. Most of these tools work via a Google Chrome browser add-on that you purchase and connect to LinkedIn.

Sometimes, John has seen LinkedIn say, especially to free users, “Hey wait a minute. Are you trying to automate? Don’t do that.” LinkedIn tends to leave paid users alone.

In the past 4 or 5 years, John has used third-party tools and never had trouble because he acts like a human being. He doesn’t try to send 8 messages one day and 8,000 the next day. He doesn’t spam people with sales offers. He doesn’t annoy people. John says to use the tools to save time on repetitive tasks like copying and pasting or opening new windows.

John also says these opinions are his two cents. He’s not an attorney. He’s not here to advocate for or against third-party tools. For John, there are great third-party tools that save time.

Next, I ask about the difference between sending prospects a connection request versus a message. John sends a connection request because LinkedIn makes messaging connections easier than messaging people who aren’t connections. To send direct messages to someone who isn’t a connection, you have to pay with InMail credits. A premium account might get you 10 to 30 credits per month.

However, when you send a prospect a nice, friendly, personal invite, they’ll see your client-facing profile and think, “Wow, this guy could help me. I should connect with him.” After a prospect accepts your invitation to connect, you can exchange unlimited direct messages.

Also, when you send an invite, LinkedIn gives the other person the opportunity to write you back before they accept the connection. People might be curious about your invite, and you can answer their questions. In this way, you also start a dialog with a prospect.

Listen to the show to learn what people have asked John in response to a LinkedIn connection invitation.

How to Compose a Message to Prospects

John emphasizes that the LinkedIn inbox is where you make money and find marketing success on LinkedIn. First, John offers some details about how the LinkedIn inbox works.

LinkedIn has completely revamped the messaging experience. Gone are the cold, professional emails people used to exchange within LinkedIn. Now, with the LinkedIn inbox, or message box, you can message back and forth with anyone who is a first-degree connection like a couple of teens texting.

The messages move in real time. Little green dots next to a person’s profile indicate they’re active right now. You can start messaging someone who is active and chit-chat back and forth. Each person can see when the other person is formulating a response because a speech bubble with dots indicates that person is writing you back.

John goes on to explain what to say in your messages to prospects. Generally speaking, whatever you ask someone has to reflect the trust you’ve earned so far. At this point, all you’ve done is connect with someone. With that level of trust in mind, don’t immediately try to sell something or ask them to sign up for something or get on the phone.

Instead, after a prospect becomes a connection, the first message John sends has four key components. First, he starts by saying, “Hey Mike, so glad we got connected.” Then John asks a question right away. He asks if the connection is interested in topics relevant to his business. He might ask, “Are you interested in how to get more leads with LinkedIn?”

After you ask the question, you need to offer value. For example, you might offer a great free template, webinar, training series, podcast episode, or other helpful content. However, don’t put the link into the message right away.

The third component of your message is asking permission. You don’t assume your new connection wants the link. To ask permission, you say, “Just reply with the word YES, and I’ll send it over.” (Writing YES in all caps isn’t necessary but makes the desired response stand out more.)

With this approach, people on a mobile device can easily send a thumbs-up or a smart reply that says “yes.” (LinkedIn smart replies try to guess how you might respond to a message.)

Fourth, John always ends the message without pressure. You can say, “If you’re not interested, no worries at all. Have a great day!”

After you send the first message with these four components, you wait. If the person replies YES, then John copies and pastes from a follow-up script. John might reply, “Awesome! Here’s a free link to the webinar. Can’t wait to hear your thoughts.”

Another important point about the offer is that you move leads off LinkedIn, which is rented land, and onto your own email list or website. Like Facebook has done, LinkedIn could change everything tomorrow.

Listen to the show to hear John read a full example of his initial message to a new LinkedIn connection.

Message Tracking and Management

To manage the workflow for messaging prospects on LinkedIn, John uses Meet Leonard, which has a built-in CRM (customer relationship management) tool. John has 18,000 LinkedIn connections. He’s organized them all by job title and tagged them. For instance, John has a group of about 3,000 business coaches.

With Meet Leonard, John can send 200 invites a day to business coaches, and it tracks who’s accepted and who hasn’t. Each day, as acceptances come in, he can see that these five people accepted and choose to send a follow-up note. The CRM can also withdraw the invites automatically after 30 days.

After a prospecting invite becomes a more personal one-on-one exchange, you track the messages in your LinkedIn inbox. You can filter your inbox to see only unread messages, and those YES responses stand out because people have given you the one-word response you asked for.

From there, copying and pasting from the script help you manage the workload. For John or his virtual assistant, the copying and pasting take minimal time. John doesn’t mind spending 10 to 30 seconds copying and pasting from his script to point people to his webinar because they’re high-end, high-value prospects now.

John says the response rates to his initial prospecting invites depend on the script. With his Messaging Magic script, about 60-70 people out of 500 respond YES within a few minutes. John also has a script called Days to Come, and responses to that one tend to have a lag period. Maybe someone didn’t check their inbox until the next day. So he’s constantly getting more replies.

The most important thing is John receives at most one or two complaints with his scripts, and when he does receive a complaint, Meet Leonard helps him track that person’s preferences. As an example, if someone says, “This isn’t for me” or “Don’t send this stuff,” John changes their tag to No More Messages because he doesn’t want to annoy people. This approach saves everybody time.

Because John uses search filters to narrow down the people he contacts on the front end, he receives a lot more interested responses than negative ones. In addition to people asking for his link, they might ask about information on his profile or consulting services. Of the 60 or 70 immediate yes responses, about 30 to 50 turn into good conversations that lead to something else.

After John goes through this initial process, he follows up with connections about every 3 to 4 weeks. John tracks follow-ups based on the groups he’s created in his CRM (business coaches, CEOs, etc.). Using Basecamp or Evernote, he records when he messaged a specific group. To illustrate, he’ll note that on March 30, he sent the CEOs a specific script.

With this organization in place, John can quickly see when 3 to 4 weeks have passed and it’s time to follow up with the group. John recommends following up about every 3 weeks because one or two LinkedIn messages per month is hardly overkill, especially if those messages are helpful, conversational, friendly, low-pressure, and don’t spam people with links.

Your follow-up doesn’t always have to be content. Instead, John might ask a question from his list of one-question surveys. For example, he’ll say, “If you have a second, I would love your answer to this. What LinkedIn topic would you like to know more about?” These questions are like a free survey on LinkedIn to 500 people, and the responses help John find useful content for his next email.

Overall, part of John’s messaging process is automated, but some of the work is one on one. It’s also important to move leads to an email list, webinar, podcast, or another offering where people can consume your content on their own time. Then they can contact you later when they’re ready to buy. For John, these purchases might be online training or other services like speaking or consulting.

Listen to the show to hear how pre-qualifying people helps John manage LinkedIn messages.

Discovery of the Week

InShot is a cool mobile video editor for iOS or Android. With this app, you can almost carry a movie studio in your pocket.

InShot allows you to add music, effects, voiceovers, emojis, and text. You can also adjust the video speed, and control where elements you add appear on the video timeline. This app will work perfectly for any videos you create for Instagram, Facebook Stories, Facebook news feed, and so on.

The app can work with vertical, landscape, and square video formats. It can even transform one format into another.

Unlike some mobile video apps, you don’t have to record video within the InShot app. You can import video, and even merge separate videos from your camera roll and arrange them in a specific order.

Although InShot offers a lot of features for an app, it’s still pretty easy to use. However, you might prefer to use it on a device with a bigger screen, like an iPad or tablet.

The InShot app is free, but with in-app purchases, you can add effects, filters, stickers, and stamps. On average, these items cost about $1 to $2.

Thanks to Ray Edwards for mentioning InShot on his show, which prompted us to take a look at the app.

Listen to the show to learn more and let us know how InShot works for you.

Key takeaways mentioned in this episode:

What do you think? What are your thoughts on LinkedIn prospecting? Please share your comments below.

Do you want more clients?

Wondering if LinkedIn can help you acquire more business?

To explore how to use LinkedIn to find leads and turn them into customers, I interview John Nemo.

More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview LinkedIn marketing expert John Nemo. Author of LinkedIn Riches: How to Use LinkedIn for Business, Sales and Marketing, John is also host of Nemo Radio podcast, which is focused on online marketing and lead generation. He has worked to rewrite LinkedIn profiles for well-known individuals such as John Lee Dumas, Ray Edwards, and Chris Brogan.

John shares which LinkedIn and third-party tools he uses to identify and manage his prospects.

You’ll discover how John develops LinkedIn connections into pre-qualified leads and clients.

LinkedIn Prospecting: How to Find and Connect With Future Customers featuring insights from John Nemo on the Social Media Marketing Podcast.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.

Listen Now

Listen now: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Play | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS

Here are some of the things you’ll discover in this show:

LinkedIn Marketing

John’s Story

Back when John had a day job in marketing, he was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and wanted to start his own marketing agency. However, leaving a safe day job was hard when he was the sole breadwinner for his wife and three boys younger than age 10. In late 2012, with one client and enough money for 30 days, John decided to make the leap into starting his own business.

To find more clients, John had a plan to use LinkedIn for prospecting. Until John started his business, he (like a lot of people) viewed LinkedIn only as a place for job-seekers and recruiters. Your profile was a résumé. But after he began viewing LinkedIn as a way to find clients, his perspective on the platform changed.

Motivated by the need to feed his children, John stayed busy on LinkedIn bringing in clients for his marketing agency. Within 90 days, John had replaced his six-figure salary, generated revenue, and had a bunch of clients in the door. He had to start hiring staff and kept growing his business, continuing to use LinkedIn to get new clients.

After a few years, the marketing agency felt too much like John’s old job. He was managing staff and doing payroll instead of creating stuff. From there, John pivoted to helping people learn how to find clients on LinkedIn.

In 2014, John published LinkedIn Riches. Then he created an online course (also called LinkedIn Riches). Today, John has a one-man shop, creating online courses and working with a small group of clients and customers. With his more entrepreneurial lifestyle, John can choose the things he wants to do, and LinkedIn has been the engine behind where his business is today.

Listen to the show to hear John share how often he uses LinkedIn now.

Why Prospect on LinkedIn?

If you’re looking for business-to-business (B2B) prospects, LinkedIn is the best place on the planet because it has the market cornered right now. No other B2B network has as many members and as much reach as LinkedIn does.

Currently, LinkedIn has about 550 million members in 200 different countries, and two new members join every second of the day. LinkedIn is a behemoth and one of the most visible websites in the world.

Looking for prospects on LinkedIn is effective because it’s like a search engine for professionals. For all its members, LinkedIn has categorized, analyzed, sorted, tagged, and saved every little bit of data. By leveraging all that data, LinkedIn can help you find your prospects.

For example, within 3 seconds, you can find a list of CEOs in San Diego who work in the health care industry and have a company with more than 10 employees.

If you understand what to say to people, LinkedIn is like the world’s biggest professional coffee shop. You can have one-on-one, real-time engagement with people via the LinkedIn message box, status updates, or articles. Professionals worldwide check in every day. If you’re savvy and pay attention, you can really leverage LinkedIn for marketing.

Listen to the show to hear John discuss other features that make LinkedIn a one-stop shop for professionals.

How to Write a Client-Facing LinkedIn Profile

Most LinkedIn users still treat their profile like a résumé. People write in the third person about what they’ve done, where they worked, and awards they’ve won. However, your ideal prospects and customers don’t care about you. They care about how you can solve their problems.

When John teaches people how to rewrite their LinkedIn profiles, he talks about making the profile client-facing. To start, identify whom you help, which should be your target audience (such as CEOs or entrepreneurs), and what benefit you offer that audience. John offers a template like this: “We help [target audience] achieve [the benefit they get from working with you] by providing [your service].”

For instance, when John explains what he does, he says, “I help business coaches and consultants quickly find more clients online by providing LinkedIn lead-generation training.”

John says you can continue this client-facing profile by saying more about how you help your ideal audience and why your service works. After you talk about how you can help and why, share what others say about you by adding testimonials. At the end, John also recommends adding a call to action, whether that’s signing up for your live event or something else.

When you write a client-facing profile, think about what prospects will see and how they’ll react when you initially contact them on LinkedIn. You focus on the client because, when you first contact a prospect on LinkedIn, that person will wonder who you are and look at your profile. Even if someone searches your name on Google, your LinkedIn profile is often one of the top results.

Say your ideal clients are marketing managers in charge of social media. If the first line of your profile says you help marketing managers in charge of social media do this, this, and this, that person is excited and intrigued because you can solve something they need help with. Your profile helps that person connect the dots.

With LinkedIn, John says the riches are in the niches. He recommends identifying two or three target audiences you really serve well. Identify them by job title and industry type. If you try to be everything to everybody, finding clients on LinkedIn won’t work. Similarly, if prospects don’t like your profile, they may never respond to your inquiry.

John stresses that everything you do on LinkedIn begins with your profile because people will check it. Everyone wants context for a conversation. If your personal invite piques someone’s curiosity enough to look at your profile, your profile needs to convey that you can help that person. Then they’ll accept your invite so you have a way to start a dialog.

Listen to the show to hear John and I discuss what a LinkedIn profile for Social Media Examiner might say.

How to Find Prospects on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has an incredible internal search engine for finding prospects. Whether you’re on the LinkedIn mobile app or the desktop version, start by typing the job title of the person you want to reach in the search box, such as “business coach.” (John notes the search box supports Boolean searches, which means you can add operators like AND or use quotes to make your search more specific.)

On the search results page, filters with checkboxes help you narrow your search results to your exact ideal customer. John might start by filtering his search for business coaches to Minneapolis, where he lives, reducing the list of 80,000 coaches to 800. Another filter can narrow the list to coaches who attended a college like the University of Minnesota.

For even more nuance, you can add more filters to find people in your specific niche. John might filter to find business coaches who specialize in health care clients. All this filtering gives you context for a conversation.

I ask what kind of an account you need to search all of LinkedIn. John says a free account offers limited results and filters. He recommends upgrading to a paid premium account because you’ll get more data and search filters. You also have more access to the people you’re looking for and who look at your profile. Think of a premium account as paying for more access to the search engine.

LinkedIn premium fees range from $25 to $150 per month. The account tiers focus mostly on different fields, such as a job-seeker, HR person, or salesperson. For most marketers, John recommends the sales account, which has two different levels and costs $65 to $100 per month. For John, the data he gets makes the cost worthwhile.

For example, John can contact the 800 business coaches in Minneapolis who went to the University of Minnesota. The context from the search filters gives him an easy way to break the ice. He might reach out with an invite that says, “Hey Joe, I see you’re a business coach here in Minneapolis. By the way, I see you went to the University of Minnesota. Go Gophers!”

Although LinkedIn doesn’t let you send a message to 800 people at once, you can use third-party automation tools. John says using third-party tools is a gray area. LinkedIn says it doesn’t like these tools and doesn’t want people to use them. John’s take is that LinkedIn doesn’t want people scraping data and scamming people.

The tools John uses just save the repetitive work of copying and pasting messages to individual profiles so that he can send those 800 invites over a day or two with a click of a couple of buttons. He likens these tools to an email marketing system where he can insert a name and personal message based on the criteria in his search filters.

John doesn’t use automation when someone replies. Beginning with a reply, you have a personal one-on-one conversation.

John says the automation tools he likes change, but right now he likes Meet Leonard (which offers tons of different plans and pricing), LinMailPro, and Linked Helper. Most of these tools work via a Google Chrome browser add-on that you purchase and connect to LinkedIn.

Sometimes, John has seen LinkedIn say, especially to free users, “Hey wait a minute. Are you trying to automate? Don’t do that.” LinkedIn tends to leave paid users alone.

In the past 4 or 5 years, John has used third-party tools and never had trouble because he acts like a human being. He doesn’t try to send 8 messages one day and 8,000 the next day. He doesn’t spam people with sales offers. He doesn’t annoy people. John says to use the tools to save time on repetitive tasks like copying and pasting or opening new windows.

John also says these opinions are his two cents. He’s not an attorney. He’s not here to advocate for or against third-party tools. For John, there are great third-party tools that save time.

Next, I ask about the difference between sending prospects a connection request versus a message. John sends a connection request because LinkedIn makes messaging connections easier than messaging people who aren’t connections. To send direct messages to someone who isn’t a connection, you have to pay with InMail credits. A premium account might get you 10 to 30 credits per month.

However, when you send a prospect a nice, friendly, personal invite, they’ll see your client-facing profile and think, “Wow, this guy could help me. I should connect with him.” After a prospect accepts your invitation to connect, you can exchange unlimited direct messages.

Also, when you send an invite, LinkedIn gives the other person the opportunity to write you back before they accept the connection. People might be curious about your invite, and you can answer their questions. In this way, you also start a dialog with a prospect.

Listen to the show to learn what people have asked John in response to a LinkedIn connection invitation.

How to Compose a Message to Prospects

John emphasizes that the LinkedIn inbox is where you make money and find marketing success on LinkedIn. First, John offers some details about how the LinkedIn inbox works.

LinkedIn has completely revamped the messaging experience. Gone are the cold, professional emails people used to exchange within LinkedIn. Now, with the LinkedIn inbox, or message box, you can message back and forth with anyone who is a first-degree connection like a couple of teens texting.

The messages move in real time. Little green dots next to a person’s profile indicate they’re active right now. You can start messaging someone who is active and chit-chat back and forth. Each person can see when the other person is formulating a response because a speech bubble with dots indicates that person is writing you back.

John goes on to explain what to say in your messages to prospects. Generally speaking, whatever you ask someone has to reflect the trust you’ve earned so far. At this point, all you’ve done is connect with someone. With that level of trust in mind, don’t immediately try to sell something or ask them to sign up for something or get on the phone.

Instead, after a prospect becomes a connection, the first message John sends has four key components. First, he starts by saying, “Hey Mike, so glad we got connected.” Then John asks a question right away. He asks if the connection is interested in topics relevant to his business. He might ask, “Are you interested in how to get more leads with LinkedIn?”

After you ask the question, you need to offer value. For example, you might offer a great free template, webinar, training series, podcast episode, or other helpful content. However, don’t put the link into the message right away.

The third component of your message is asking permission. You don’t assume your new connection wants the link. To ask permission, you say, “Just reply with the word YES, and I’ll send it over.” (Writing YES in all caps isn’t necessary but makes the desired response stand out more.)

With this approach, people on a mobile device can easily send a thumbs-up or a smart reply that says “yes.” (LinkedIn smart replies try to guess how you might respond to a message.)

Fourth, John always ends the message without pressure. You can say, “If you’re not interested, no worries at all. Have a great day!”

After you send the first message with these four components, you wait. If the person replies YES, then John copies and pastes from a follow-up script. John might reply, “Awesome! Here’s a free link to the webinar. Can’t wait to hear your thoughts.”

Another important point about the offer is that you move leads off LinkedIn, which is rented land, and onto your own email list or website. Like Facebook has done, LinkedIn could change everything tomorrow.

Listen to the show to hear John read a full example of his initial message to a new LinkedIn connection.

Message Tracking and Management

To manage the workflow for messaging prospects on LinkedIn, John uses Meet Leonard, which has a built-in CRM (customer relationship management) tool. John has 18,000 LinkedIn connections. He’s organized them all by job title and tagged them. For instance, John has a group of about 3,000 business coaches.

With Meet Leonard, John can send 200 invites a day to business coaches, and it tracks who’s accepted and who hasn’t. Each day, as acceptances come in, he can see that these five people accepted and choose to send a follow-up note. The CRM can also withdraw the invites automatically after 30 days.

After a prospecting invite becomes a more personal one-on-one exchange, you track the messages in your LinkedIn inbox. You can filter your inbox to see only unread messages, and those YES responses stand out because people have given you the one-word response you asked for.

From there, copying and pasting from the script help you manage the workload. For John or his virtual assistant, the copying and pasting take minimal time. John doesn’t mind spending 10 to 30 seconds copying and pasting from his script to point people to his webinar because they’re high-end, high-value prospects now.

John says the response rates to his initial prospecting invites depend on the script. With his Messaging Magic script, about 60-70 people out of 500 respond YES within a few minutes. John also has a script called Days to Come, and responses to that one tend to have a lag period. Maybe someone didn’t check their inbox until the next day. So he’s constantly getting more replies.

The most important thing is John receives at most one or two complaints with his scripts, and when he does receive a complaint, Meet Leonard helps him track that person’s preferences. As an example, if someone says, “This isn’t for me” or “Don’t send this stuff,” John changes their tag to No More Messages because he doesn’t want to annoy people. This approach saves everybody time.

Because John uses search filters to narrow down the people he contacts on the front end, he receives a lot more interested responses than negative ones. In addition to people asking for his link, they might ask about information on his profile or consulting services. Of the 60 or 70 immediate yes responses, about 30 to 50 turn into good conversations that lead to something else.

After John goes through this initial process, he follows up with connections about every 3 to 4 weeks. John tracks follow-ups based on the groups he’s created in his CRM (business coaches, CEOs, etc.). Using Basecamp or Evernote, he records when he messaged a specific group. To illustrate, he’ll note that on March 30, he sent the CEOs a specific script.

With this organization in place, John can quickly see when 3 to 4 weeks have passed and it’s time to follow up with the group. John recommends following up about every 3 weeks because one or two LinkedIn messages per month is hardly overkill, especially if those messages are helpful, conversational, friendly, low-pressure, and don’t spam people with links.

Your follow-up doesn’t always have to be content. Instead, John might ask a question from his list of one-question surveys. For example, he’ll say, “If you have a second, I would love your answer to this. What LinkedIn topic would you like to know more about?” These questions are like a free survey on LinkedIn to 500 people, and the responses help John find useful content for his next email.

Overall, part of John’s messaging process is automated, but some of the work is one on one. It’s also important to move leads to an email list, webinar, podcast, or another offering where people can consume your content on their own time. Then they can contact you later when they’re ready to buy. For John, these purchases might be online training or other services like speaking or consulting.

Listen to the show to hear how pre-qualifying people helps John manage LinkedIn messages.

Discovery of the Week

InShot is a cool mobile video editor for iOS or Android. With this app, you can almost carry a movie studio in your pocket.

InShot allows you to add music, effects, voiceovers, emojis, and text. You can also adjust the video speed, and control where elements you add appear on the video timeline. This app will work perfectly for any videos you create for Instagram, Facebook Stories, Facebook news feed, and so on.

The app can work with vertical, landscape, and square video formats. It can even transform one format into another.

Unlike some mobile video apps, you don’t have to record video within the InShot app. You can import video, and even merge separate videos from your camera roll and arrange them in a specific order.

Although InShot offers a lot of features for an app, it’s still pretty easy to use. However, you might prefer to use it on a device with a bigger screen, like an iPad or tablet.

The InShot app is free, but with in-app purchases, you can add effects, filters, stickers, and stamps. On average, these items cost about $1 to $2.

Thanks to Ray Edwards for mentioning InShot on his show, which prompted us to take a look at the app.

Listen to the show to learn more and let us know how InShot works for you.

Key takeaways mentioned in this episode:

What do you think? What are your thoughts on LinkedIn prospecting? Please share your comments below.

Is Facebook part of your marketing plan?

Wondering if Facebook ads are still worthwhile?

In this article, you’ll discover stats from recent Facebook advertising research. You’ll also find insights to help you make more informed choices for your advertising campaigns.

New Facebook Advertising Research for Marketers by Johnathan Dane on Social Media Examiner.

#1: Facebook Revenue & Growth Statistics

No one wants to invest in a platform that’s in decline or losing its audience. One sign to predict the longevity of a platform is to look at revenue and growth statistics.

At the end of January 2018, Facebook released its fourth-quarter earnings, so you’re getting the most up-to-date stats and forecasts below. Here are some stats to consider:

• Facebook’s Q4 2017 revenue was roughly $13 billion with $1.44 diluted (adjusted for taxes) earnings per share (EPS) worldwide, with around half of the revenue coming from the U.S., and Europe in second place. GAAP revenue year-over-year change was 47%.

Below are two charts from Statista. The first shows Facebook’s advertising revenue worldwide from 2009-2017:

Take a look at Facebook’s U.S. vs. non-U.S. advertising revenue growth to get a little more granular:

• In Facebook’s Q4 2017 results, the average revenue per daily active user (ARPU) was at $6.18 worldwide, but it was $26.76 if we just look at the U.S. and Canada. This includes payments and other fees, but advertising takes up the bulk of it. To give perspective, daily active users were $1.37 billion on average for September 2017, an increase of 16% year over year.

So we know that Facebook is still making money and will probably be around for another year. But unless you’re a shareholder, the details of this are pretty irrelevant in your day-to-day advertising efforts.

• Checking to see if eMarketer’s predictions were on point, the pace of growth for Facebook’s ad revenue was supposed to be markedly lower by 2018 (26.5%) than it was in 2016 (57.4%). Advertising revenue was $12.8 billion for Q4, up from $10.1 billion in Q3 – and again, we see the U.S. take the lead on this one.

For now, the trend is upward for advertising growth. Also, due in part to Facebook news feed changes that shift organic publishers to a more pay-to-play mindset, we might see advertising costs rise in 2018.

Yikes, more competition for ad space. I know, I know. And how are we seeing mobile vs. desktop advertising revenue?

• Mobile advertising represented approximately 89% of advertising revenue for the fourth quarter, up from 84% of ad revenue for the same quarter in 2016 and up slightly from 88% in Q3.

This chart from Statista shows how Facebook’s growth has been fueled by mobile ads.

Considerations for Application

At first glance, one might come to the conclusion that Facebook is earning money and continuing to grow, and its main source of revenue is from advertisers. No doubt your competitors are advertising there, so why shouldn’t you? Obviously, people are clicking on these ads, looking at the revenue for daily active users (since users don’t pay for membership) so they’ll engage with yours as well, right? Not exactly.

First, although paid ads are the primary source of revenue for Facebook, it does have a few other avenues it taps into (e.g., Facebook Live, games/apps, and soon payoffs on investments in emerging technologies). Also, when you see general statistics like those above, they aren’t broken down enough to tell you which industries and types of businesses, and types of campaigns actually do well.

For instance, Facebook can be viewed more like the Google Display Network than the Search Network as far as the temperature of the traffic you’ll most likely get from the platform. That’s not to say that direct response ads won’t perform well on Facebook, but to determine whether it’s the best platform for your ads, you’ll want to look at your core offer and the intent of your audience.

But even so, check out that growth in mobile ad revenue. We’ve read time and time again how mobile is the future, and how all of your landing pages and websites should be mobile-optimized.

It’s not to say that considering mobile won’t help your campaigns at all, but you’ll want to check your analytics to be sure your site actually gets most of its traffic from mobile, not desktop, before you go all in. In the case below, optimizing for how a desktop user engages would take precedence over optimizing for mobile users.

There are some types of businesses that benefit more from a mobile ad focus than others. To illustrate, if you’re a local business, you may want to target people on their phones if their GPS shows that they’re within a certain distance from your physical business location. After all, we aren’t carrying our desktop computers with us when we’re out and about.

Think about what people are doing and where they are when they’re engaging on mobile. What types of offers are most likely to appeal to them during that time – and is your offer optimized for the state of mind users will be in?

Maybe you find a mix of mobile and desktop ads serves you well. Just be cautious about making mobile the end-all-be-all for your campaign success.

#2: Facebook Market Share Stats

Even if Facebook ads perform well in a silo, you want to consider all options for advertising channels you might have in a marketing mix. You have a limited budget and need to make sure you’re spending it wisely.

So let’s consider where Facebook stands when stacked up against other advertising platforms, which could very well be contenders. This chart from eMarketer shows that 2017 will be the first year Facebook holds more than one in five U.S. digital ad dollars.

But let’s not put all your eggs in one basket yet…

• Comparing the revenues previously mentioned with competitors in the market, the company’s total digital revenues in the U.S. will grow 40.4% to $17.37 billion (a share of 20.9%). Yes, sounds good, but again, hang tight…
• With $15.28 billion in mobile ad revenues this previous year, this gives 26.8% for Facebook’s share of the U.S. mobile ad market. Still looking good…
• Facebook is the sixth most valuable public company in the world according to Forbes’ Global 2,000 in May 2017. Its current market value is around $519 billion.

All right, that’s perhaps a subjective opinion in saying it’s the “sixth most valuable.” Some might define value differently. And yes, as impressive as all that sounds, there’s still more to consider.

Considerations for Application

The first thing I notice with many of these stats is they’re about the U.S. market. Keep in mind these stats may not be as beneficial if you don’t know where your particular audience is located. Do you primarily get traffic, conversions, or sales from the U.S.? Just because your brand is located in the U.S. doesn’t mean that your audience is.

If you’re more global or have an audience primarily outside the U.S., you’re going to want to evaluate statistics for those regions and countries. Even a global chart like the one below from Statista wouldn’t break it down enough for proper targeting, mainly because it speaks to ad spend rather than advertiser ROI.

Also, even if your audience is in the U.S., I don’t know how many times I’ve seen brands target all of the U.S. with one campaign. If you really want to see your campaigns perform well at a lower cost per click or even lower cost per conversion, you want to get pretty specific with the way you layer targeting.

Facebook allows you to narrow geographic targeting so that even within the U.S., you might find you get more business in a particular state or city. Even if you get decent performance in several areas, there might be some offers or ad copy variations that appeal more to those in a particular geographic area.

For example, maybe your ad will see good performance from being more geographically targeted by zip codes rather than by state.

Another way to drill down is with advertising by device.

Did you know China is one of the largest contributors to global advertising growth, specifically with regard to mobile? Total ad spend will climb 14.7% in China this year to $84.54 billion. Arguing that granularity in our statistics makes them more relevant to your particular business or audience is also an argument for not ignoring how you operate in the bigger scope of the advertising space.

And let’s say that after our initial discussion of mobile advertising, you still determine advertising for mobile is for you. We know from the previous statistics that advertisers on Facebook are taking advantage of mobile ads, but is Facebook necessarily the right platform for mobile ads?

Per the Marketing Charts image below, it may be that spending to advertise on audio platforms, if targeting mobile users, pays off more for your brand in 2018.

Bigger picture: While mobile accounted for a high percentage of ad revenue on Facebook itself, we see that it’s well below half when compared with the U.S. mobile ad market as a whole. So what are your other options for mobile advertising? Let’s move on.

#3: Instagram Ad Data

Even though Instagram is a separate platform in terms of audience and how users engage, we shouldn’t forget that Instagram is owned by Facebook. What now becomes an important question with any Facebook stats moving forward: Does this include or exclude Instagram?

You can run ads on Instagram through Facebook Ads Manager, so in a discussion of Facebook ads, it’s important to at least briefly cover Instagram ads. You might be surprised that sometimes Facebook lead ads for mobile actually outperform those that run on Instagram. Here are some Instagram ad stats to compare with ones we mentioned for Facebook:

Considerations for Application

Facebook isn’t the only platform to consider for running mobile ads. After all, Instagram is a mobile-engaged platform. Still, we see that its mobile ad market reach is still pretty small. Even though it covers a good chunk of Facebook’s mobile ad revenue, it’s still below half. That being said, with substantial growth year over year, it may start taking more of the pie.

So far, we’ve covered stats about advertising spend and how that’s allocated across devices or platforms, but what about audience considerations?

One might be quick to jump on the bandwagon to advertise on Instagram if targeting teens, since the Statista chart above shows Instagram as second to Snapchat in teen usage. But again, this isn’t specific enough. Ask these questions to decide if Instagram ads are right for you:

• How many teenagers engage with ads specifically, as opposed to organic content?
• What types of ads or content within ads are teens most often engaging with?
• How are teens engaging? Are they actually purchasing after viewing an ad?

Now we have taken this stat beyond the surface-level assumptions and gotten a more well-rounded view of where to gear advertising efforts for teens.

#4: Facebook User & Advertiser Insights

Now it’s time to look at your audience and competition (or in some cases, those who might become co-partners in Facebook advertising efforts). When we say a platform has 2 million monthly advertisers, is that necessarily a good thing? There are two ways to look at that stat.

First, more brands advertise on Facebook because it’s an effective platform that brings ROI. Second, even if #1 is correct, that’s a lot of ads to compete with and you become a small fish in a big pond (unless your product/service is super-awesome and you’re able to convey that in a way that blows the other fish out of the water).

So, let’s take a look at some helpful Facebook stats in this area:

• Visualized in the Statista chart below, Facebook announced that six million active advertisers were using the platform to promote their products and services.

But again, that doesn’t mean they’re advertising to your audience, so I wouldn’t let that number scare you off.

• In an October 2017 survey taken by U.S. small business owners, 24% of respondents thought that social media was very important to connect with customers. This means even though there are some big players on the network, small businesses still believe it’s beneficial.
• Facebook is the most popular platform for marketers to advertise on (91%), followed by Twitter (34%). So if you find that the competition is fierce, you could look into other avenues. It’s correlation, not always causation, when we equate popularity to ROI.

Now let’s take a look at another stat…

Again, satisfied in what way? We only can assume it’s due to results, and what each business considers to be satisfying is subjective. Plus, we also want to break down popularity by business type (B2B vs. B2C). Below is a chart from Clutch that helps us do that:

We should take the sampling with a grain of salt as far as being representative of the whole. It depends on who was surveyed and when, but we might speculate that LinkedIn is still preferred by a good many B2B marketers.

• 64% of social marketers plan on increasing their Facebook ad activities, according to the Social Media Marketing Industry Report.

It’s always good to look at not only current stats, but also projections. The waters may not seem deep now, but they may become deeper in the near future. Timing can be everything when it comes to beating out the competition for ad space. Get in front of your audience while you can.

But all is not lost. You might be surprised to know that out of the 65 million active businesses on the network, only 5 million are advertising each month.

But you’re not home-free yet. Did you know that Facebook pays influencers, publishers, and celebrities to promote Facebook content? This chart from Forbes breaks down average pricing for influencers.

So it’s not just the businesses vying for audience attention. And who makes up this audience? Below, Statista has a breakdown of the global distribution of users by age and gender:

Facebook reports that only 239K monthly users are from the U.S. and Canada, which seems like a small number compared with other areas (almost 89% come from outside the U.S.).

However, when we look at the revenue gained from these users, the data tells a different story.

Considerations for Application

A common line of thought is if everyone else is doing it, you should as well. But where there’s lots of advertisers and competition for ad space, the costs tend to go up. Unless your audience is primarily on Facebook, perhaps you want to go where there’s less competition.

Keep in mind that some stats speak to how much is spent from a region as a whole, while others speak to how many businesses in a particular area are spending that amount. It makes a difference if a few businesses are spending a bucketload versus many businesses spending only a little. So the question remains, are these marketers outside the U.S. spending less to get the same results?

Not to say that you should shift your focus based on that, but when you read the stats, think about what data is missing that would give you a more complete picture. In this case, another question I might wonder is, out of those businesses, how many would actually be competitors of my brand? For instance, these stats don’t show how many out of these areas are in my industry or targeting my specific audience.

#5: Facebook Content & Engagement Numbers

Why recreate the wheel when others’ performance can help you determine what works as far as content? Well, I’ll get to that in a bit. For now, let me at least give those of you just starting out with Facebook advertising a baseline of content you can try with the hopes of increasing your odds of success.

But where should you be running ads: news feed, side, or perhaps Messenger?

Keep in mind, however, that Messenger ad click-through rates (CTRs) decreased overall during Q4 after a period of increases in October and November, ending the year at an average of 1.35%. The chart below, from AdStage, visualizes this well. More on average click-throughs later in this article.

Consideration for Application

Let’s look at the last of those stats: of those who clicked and made a purchase. The rate of 26% could be considered high or low depending on several factors. Because users clicked on ads, that shows some initial interest. The problem may lie on the conversion-rate optimization (CRO) side with the landing pages either not matching the offer or landing pages not providing enough information of value for the user to make that final decision.

Also, this stat says “purchase,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean the user didn’t convert or provide some form of lead identifier such as an email address. If that’s the case, the issue may be more on the sales side. Maybe the sales team didn’t follow up in a timely manner.

Given the vagueness of these stats, it’s good to have varied types of content and ads to test before determining whether your ads work. General effectiveness doesn’t mean brand effectiveness. Also, performance depends on the goal. Link ads may be best for generating website clicks, and video ads may be good for showcasing a product or getting more engagement on Facebook. If I’m not shooting for a purchase, I likely won’t get one.

It’s interesting that a May 2017 survey shows 25% of respondents were annoyed with Facebook advertising, while 11% reported the opposite. During that survey period, 10% of consumers also expressed that Facebook advertising was helpful, while 26% said the opposite.

If there’s a general annoyance, I suppose it wouldn’t matter what content or type you put out, although these particular individuals surveyed may have just had poor experiences or weren’t targeted with the right offer at the right time. I also wonder at the fact that these stats don’t add up to 100%, so what does the majority feel? Smart Insights’ sentiment analysis of 111,800 ads seems almost split down the middle.

#6: Facebook Ad Cost & Performance Metrics

Certain industries or types of businesses tend to have higher costs for their ads than others. There are numerous factors that contribute to this that go beyond the scope of this aticle, but I wanted to give you at least some idea. Here are the most recent stats I found:

• If you want email addresses, Facebook has many advertisers reporting costs below $1 per lead.
• Depending on the source you read (Sprout Social, Aggregate blog, or AdStage), the average CPC and CTRs vary. Since AdStage’s chart was from Q4 2017, it seemed the most up to date though, with Facebook ads’ average CPM at $12.45, average CPC at $0.54, and average CTR at 2.34%. This is a 37% increase in CPM, 14% increase in CPC, and 25% increase in CTR compared to Q3.

Although dated, I took a look at some averages for country, age, and industry. AdEspresso shows that Japan is coming in pretty expensive, while Greece and Ireland are much cheaper.

It seems to be more expensive to advertise to the older age groups.

WordStream has a chart that shows the finance and insurance industry had the highest CPC, while the apparel industry had the lowest. The legal industry had the highest CTR, while the employment and job training industry had the lowest.

Depending on what audience you’re targeting and industry you’re in, it may behoove you to advertise on Facebook. Keep in mind that you’re still not comparing with other advertising channels here.

A lot of stats on mobile vs. desktop are rather dated, with many sources throughout the web referencing AdEspresso’s Q3 2016 costs. But it’s what we’ve got, so let’s look at this chart from AdEspresso that shows cost per app install by placement:

Finally, let’s not forget an Instagram cost assessment:

• The average CPM for Instagram ads increased 35% to $10.14, the average CPC increased 80% to $2.62, and the average CTR increased 33% to 0.39%.

Considerations for Application

Here we come to the meat of it all. It’s great if your audience is on Facebook and they’re engaging with offers similar to yours. But you have a hard-lined budget and want to make sure that Facebook ads are going to bring a good ROI. You might want to compare largest CPC on Facebook to other platforms your audience is actively engaged on.

More importantly, compare cost per conversion/sale on Facebook to other platforms your audience is actively engaged on because it does no good to get low-quality traffic that doesn’t convert. If you’re in one of the industries mentioned above, take note of the CPC and CTR, but again, remember that conversions are what really matter.

The one thing that stats can do is confirm or deny some baseline assumptions you may have. As an example, there are a lot of people who think apparel or ecommerce performs better on platforms like Pinterest; yet there seems to be a lower CPC for the apparel industry. Now if that traffic actually converts, that could be good ROI.

But at the end of the day, stats and averages don’t reflect how your business will perform. The only true way to figure that out is to test. If we were to say that XYZ industry sees 20% of the results, but your brand campaigns are bringing in 15% of those results, it might be better than XYZ industry sees 22% of the results, but your brand campaigns are only bringing in 0.2% of those results. It’s all relative.

Wrap Up

My goal with this post wasn’t to bombard you with Facebook ad stats, but to show you how you can be a critical thinker when you look at these or other stats moving forward. You can turn the data being relayed into information you can actually apply to your campaigns.

What do you think? Are the data and discussion above helpful? How will you use them to adjust your Facebook advertising? Share your thoughts and questions in the comments below.