What’s Covered In This Article

• How To Manage Your Facebook Business Page
• How To Analyze Facebook Insights
• Wrap Up

Through Facebook you can deepen the relationship with your audience, discover what content customers are engaging with the most and develop conversations with your audience.

In this post we’re going to look at two specific areas of Facebook for business: management and analysis.

How To Manage Your Facebook Business Page

If you manage an active business-to-consumer Facebook page then you will generally want to interact with your audience on Facebook more than a company that is exclusively business-to-business.

For large brands with thousands of fans, there will likely be a higher amount of time investment needed in managing the content of the page and any messages from the community.

Community Management

Facebook offers a simple and effective method of communicating to your audience. Many fans view Facebook as a 24/7 customer support. Questions about your business are more likely to be sent via Facebook Messenger than they are through regular email.

Facebook records how long it takes you on average to respond to messages. A quick turnaround time is generally seen on your page’s main display. Responding to comments and engaging with fans is also a big part of community management.

There are three general approaches that you can take to community management:

Manual community management

Managing your community involves responding and engaging to posts, comments and messages. This is perfect for smaller pages who don’t need much investment into managing inbound messages.

Automated community management

A recent development for Facebook messenger has been the launch of chatbots for business pages. Chatbots are automated programs that reply with certain conversation choices. This is great for pages that receive high volumes of standard questions to their inbox.

Hybrid community management

A hybrid approach means that automated tools such chatbots are used. There is also a personal engagement between a company and individual. This includes liking, sharing or commenting on user content to develop closer relationship with the community. But also letting an automated tool like a chatbot or autoresponse mechanism take away some of the daily customer service queries.

How To Analyze Facebook Insights

The data is valuable to due to the depth of information that Facebook users record about themselves on their personal profiles. The default overview of the Facebook Analytics dashboard shows key metrics as being:

• Unique users (the number of unique users who are using your Facebook page)
• New users (the number of new users who have recently started interacting with your Facebook page)
• Active conversations
• New conversations

User data can be dissected into age, gender and location (country, city) information based on a user’s profile. Device information is also captured, including operating system and device model.

In my opinion the demographic data may be more accurate than Google Analytics data, due to the fact that users enter their date of birth when signing up for Facebook.

• Reach: How many people saw your post

• Clicks: How many of those people actually clicked on your post when it showed up in their feed.

• Reactions, Comments, Shares: How many people interacted with your post on a deeper level. The more interaction you get the more likely you are to appear in their friends feeds.

• Average Watch Time: How long are people watching your video? When do they stop watching? How many make it to the end?

Wrap Up

It’s important to consider the level of investment (time and money) you’re willing to commit to this platform based on your size and industry. Facebook is a fantastic opportunity to develop deeper relationships with your audience.

What’s Covered In This Article

• What are Stock Images
• Benefits of Using Stock Images
• Our 5 Favorite Stock Image Libraries
• Wrap Up

What are Stock Images?

Stock images are a powerful resource available to marketers. Through stock photo marketplaces you can purchase off the shelf imagery for any occasion or campaign.

These marketplaces offer a range of prices and image styles and no one site is going to fit every project. But they are useful tools in taking a project to the next level.

Benefits of Using Stock Images

Cheaper

Creating your own imagery is often unrealistic for many companies and therefore it’s better to buy or use ready to go pre-shot photos rather than commissioning your own.

For a lot of marketing materials, custom images are not always necessary. It’s often okay to use stock images available online that meet your requirements.

These can be a lot easier to manage than paying for custom images that require graphic designers or photographers.

High Quality and Professional

Stock images are often captured by some of the world’s best photographers.

By using stock image marketplaces you can enjoy the benefits of high quality photography for pretty much any occasion. The standard of stock imagery is high and you’ll be able to find something for your needs with relative ease.

Large, Easily Accessible Collections

The internet is swimming in both free and paid stock photo marketplaces. There is no shortage of photography and imagery.

This level of competition between marketplaces drives the quality higher, and the price lower. It’s never been easier to take your pick of high quality photography.

Even a simple Google search returns large amounts of stock images for your search query. Today let’s look at four different stock image marketplaces to compare and contrast the differences between them.

Top 5 Stock Image Libraries

1. Pixabay

Pixabay. is a high quality stock image library populated with 100% free images by photographers all across the world. The website offers high quality images that are free to use commercially or personally without any attribution required.

It is by far my most used image library and has given me images for my homepage, my blogs and countless social posts.  It’s a fantastic resource for anyone who needs hgihquality images on demand.

2. Unsplash

Unsplash shares a lot in common with Pixabay (high quality, free images, with no credit required), but offers access to a different library to help fill your needs. It is a high quality stock image library populated with 100% free images by photographers all across the world. I love Pixabay, but Unsplash is quickly moving up the ranks of libraries I search first. Speaking from personal experience they have a huge amount of beautiful photography.

3. Shutterstock

Shutterstock is one of the largest stock image libraries in the world. This image library can be used on an ad hoc basis or with a membership plan.

You’ll have to pay for your images here, but its a etter bet if you are looking for something very specific.

I recommend paying for the plan you’re likely to get the most benefit out of. For example, if you require 25 images on a monthly basis then there’s a plan for this option.

Similarly there’s a smaller plan for mini users, who need only 5 images per month. If you only need one or two stock images then buying them on a need-to-have basis is probably the best strategy.

4. Getty Images

DETROIT, MI – SEPTEMBER 10: Sam Darnold #14 of the New York Jets throws looks to throw a pass in the third quarter against the Detroit Lions at Ford Field on September 10, 2018 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Rey Del Rio/Getty Images)

Getty Images has a wide selection of stock images from both the present and the past. You can get access to leading content partners such as the TV show Lonely Planet, and also historical archival images and videos.

Getty is by far the most expensive library on this list, but they are also the only site that gives access to a wide range of editorial photos. You can get publicity shots from feature films, current sporting events or even news stories of the day.

Getty Images claims to have the world’s largest visual archive. It’s also possible to get exclusive access to iconic images and videos, as well as broad commercial reach.

5. Adobe Stock

Adobe image editing software is regularly used across industries on a daily basis.  Adobe also offers a high-quality stock image library that works seamlessly with the existing Adobe software packages.

The Adobe Stock image library gifts users 10 free stock images with a 30 day free trial. This in itself is a fantastic offer as it allows users free access that they can cancel anytime within the month.

For a simple, risk free stock image marketplace that works with gold standard image editing software, I would highly recommend Adobe Stock. If you’re a stock image user who uses stock frequently then this is a fantastic resource for Adobe users.

Wrap Up

There will be a lower level of choice in free marketplaces as opposed to paid marketplaces, however I always recommend checking out free image libraries as a first option. For any stock you purchase, it is paramount to pick the platform that offers the best distribution and reproduction permissions.

For anyone who is a content creator, stock image libraries are extremely valuable for off the shelf, ready to use solutions. There are millions of stock images to choose from on the internet, and the marketplaces in this blog post have highlighted a few of the best.

As the pace at which fresh photo and video content becomes more demanding, it’s important to browse and take note of the best resources for stock.  Do you have any favorite stock image marketplaces? Please feel free to get in touch, we’d love to hear what options you like the most.

What’s Covered In This Article

• How To Manage Your Social Media
• 5 Great Tools
• Wrap Up

How To Manage Your Social Media

Often, it’s enough to spend an hour or two per day on social management. A basic toolkit which allows you to schedule posts and see an overview of your audience is often all that you need.

It’s also possible to check social for any mentions of your brand across popular platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. You can gauge and create more organic interaction with anyone who mentions your brand.

This allows you to engage in an interactive dialogue with your audience. Which assists in building brand love and good relationships.

Five Great Tools For Managing Social Media

1. Hootsuite

• Free Plan: 1 user, 3 social profiles and 20 scheduled messages at a time
• $29 – $599/month play that offers a variety of connecting profiles, unlimited scheduled messages, and multiple users

Hootsuite has long been the gold standard for social media management. It has a huge breadth of approved social profiles. It also allows you to get very granular on how you monitor and interact with those various profiles.  Its sheer volume of options and connections make it an easy pick for a social management tool.

2. Buffer

• Free: 3 social profiles, 10 scheduled posts per account, image creator and video/gif uploader
• $15/month: All free tier items plus, 8 social profiles, 100 scheduled posts per account, RSS feed, a social media calendar, and social analytics

I use Buffer for my personal social media management and I love the interface on both the website and their mobile app. I’m also a big fan of their “suggested times”  posting method. This allows you to take the data about which times your posts do the best and turn them into slots on your schedule for posting.

This means when I’m writing out tweets or posts I can simply hit schedule and it will move it to the next predetermined time to be released. I’ve found it takes a lot of the guesswork and anxiety out of deciding when to post your stuff and that in turn saves m a bunch of time.

3. CoSchedule

• Plans starting at $20/month

One of the things we most struggle with is organizing our content ideas into an easy to read and actionable calendar. Spreadsheets are the old standby, but I think that adds another layer of work I’d rather avoid.

CoSchedule’s main draw is its great scheduling and calendar system. Not only can you schedule social posts, but you can also tie in WordPress or other blogging systems. This allows you to post your site content and social content in the same place.

4. Zoho Social

• Plans starting at $10/month standard – $50/month professional

For those who use Zoho CRM ( as we do), the social application has been a very pleasant surprise. It provides analytics, customizable feeds, and post-suggestion times that are very similar to Hootsuite’s.

What we love about it is that it’s included in the cost of the overall Zoho product which saves us an additional subscription for the month. If you like the feature set though Zoho Social is also available as a standalone product.

5. Sprout Social

• Plans starting at $99/month

Sprout stands out from the crowd for two reasons.

One is their messaging. They appear committed as a brand to helping drive social engagement in a much more organic direction.  This emphasis making your engagement more effective means it’s not just a scheduling tool it’s a knowledge base.

The other thing that sets Sprout Social apart from most social tools is that they are also a full-featured CRM. This allows you the ability to turn your social contacts into customers much more easily.

Wrap Up

To delight and inspire your audience, great content is a must. This is content that is engaging by being funny, informative or novel. Through embodying these requirements, you can gain new fans and increase loyalty from existing fans.

Managing social can be a full-time job based on the scope or level of your page. I would say that with social, consistency is key. Consistent content and consistent engagement with your fans is always rewarded.

If you are a business and receive a message from someone looking for customer service help, then a responsive and engaging brand page will receive greater affection than a page that doesn’t respond at all. In the end good social media management is often simple but not always easy.

What’s Covered In This Article

• What is a DIY Graphic Design Tool?
• Top 3 Reasons to Use a DIY Graphic Design Tool
• 3 DIY Tools That We Love
• Wrap Up

Top 3 Reasons to Use a DIY Graphic Design Tool

Cost Savings

Marketing budgets are often consumed by design fees for regular content. You can save a lot of money by mastering DIY programs that generate high-quality content easily and regularly.

Graphic designers who can deliver stunning visuals for your online platforms are often very expensive. They also take time, money and management investment.

You also save money by not having to manage designers and ensure timelines are met. This helps you avoid creative differences or divergences in creative vision. Which result in huge amounts of lost time and investment.

Faster Content Turnaround

If you’ve managed an online presence, you know how hard it is to create great content on a consistent basis. The struggle is not only brainstorming new content but also turning ideas into reality.

For anyone who needs content on a regular basis, using DIY graphic design tools allows content to be generated and distributed much faster than traditional graphic designer generated content.

Working with a graphic designer can require a brief, then they send an initial graphic followed by several rounds of revisions.  If you want to be fast and reactive to news or certain topical events, having the skills to create content around these things fast is key.

For simple, regular content as well as special ad hoc pieces, DIY graphic design tools offer the best solution for success.

Develop a Deeper Skill Set

Design skills are always in demand. Learning DIY graphic design tools can gives you firsthand experience creating content. This can lead to the development of a set of design skills.  This might spark an interest in mastering deeper levels of graphic design, which can enhance your ability as a marketer even further.

3 DIY Tools That We Love

1. Canva

• Free with $12.95/month premium plan for more indepth features

Canva is my favorite of the tools I’ve tried. It has a diverse set of templates that lets you create nearly anything you can think of and all of its basic features are completely free.  Paired with a free image library like Pixabay offers its a very powerful weapon in your arsenal.

Canva offers templates for menus, flyers, brochures, Facebook posts, blog posts and multiple other pre-prepared templates. This makes it very easy to develop content for whatever platform you require.

Once you decide what medium you need your image for, it’s simply a matter of choosing what the look and feel of the image will be. This is made easy through the huge image library and readily available icons, pictures and stock imagery that Canva have.

Canva also offers high-quality photo filters if you need to edit or beautify images you captured. If you need to design something frequently then Canva might be the best option for you, as you can pay for specific images and icons on a piece by piece basis.

2. Stencil

• Free – $12/month

Stencil is an easy to use graphic design tool that is focused on speed and simplicity. Stencil offer a blank canvas that can be designed with a wide range of graphics, photos, templates and icons that they have in their library.

Stencil have huge amounts of ready to use imagery. Designing a perfect graphic is simply a matter of choosing what you want based on their wide range of options.

Stencil’s free plan is much more limited than Canva’s , but their paid teirshave a lot of intriguing options.

If you need a photo, you can choose from their photo library. If you need an icon then just search the word for the icon you need. When Stencil say that are dedicated to speed and simplicity, they really deliver with their easy user interface.

Stencil also benefits by having social sharing in mind. With Stencil, they offer easy to share features across all the major social networks.

This makes it easy if you manage multiple social profiles to distribute your content.  Another interesting aspect of Stencil is that they offer all-inclusive pricing for their image assets. Without needing to pay for assets on an image-by-image basis, one simple fee allows usage of hundreds of thousands of high-quality images.

3. Adobe Spark

• Free/$9.99 monthly plans/Included as part of Adobe Creative Cloud

Adobe’s entrant into the DIY graphics world is a full-featured beast. It includes similar graphic design tools and templates as the other sites on this list, but it also has the ability to create landing pages and even videos.

Adobe also has a leg up in how it handles uploading and importing images. Spark hooks into Unsplash and Pixabay’s giant free library of images. All you have to do is search for a relevant image and essentially drag and drop into your design.

It also allows you to upload your own images, import directly from Dropbox or Google and if you want to license images from Adobe Stock.

I’ve yet to put the web page builder and the video editor through their proper paces, but on the surface, they both add a lot of value to an already valuable service.

Wrap Up

What’s Covered In This Article

• What is Keyword Research?
• Why is Keyword Research Important?
• Strategies to Find Great Keywords
• Best Tools for Keyword Research
• Wrap Up

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research identifies the level of interest in whatever topic or are people are searching for. The more interest that exists for something, the greater the number of people that will be searching for a certain word or phrase.

If you have Google Analytics set up in your website, I recommend you take a look at the search queries that are already providing traffic to your website. This is extremely valuable as it might indicate what keywords you are performing strongly on and what keywords need to be discarded from your website.

Strategies to Find Great Keywords

Best Tools for Keyword Research

Moz Keyword Explorer

The popular digital marketing website Moz has created their Keyword Explorer tool to simplify and boost how you as a business find the optimal keywords.

This Keyword Explorer tool supplies up-to-date search data based on volume, an estimate of how challenging it is to rank your keyword, an approximate CTR and a value based on ranking potential.

Moz’s tool also offers similar related keywords to research. As this tool takes away a lot of the heavy lifting associated with keyword research, and that it is free to try, it’s recommended as a good starting point.

Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner

Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner is a popular tool to begin keyword research. This tool has the dual benefit of recommending keywords as well as supplying estimates around search volumes and the estimated costs of incorporating paid advertisements for these.

Finding a keyword’s volume requires using the [Exact] Match Type and looking for Local Monthly Searches. The amount of traffic you receive from these keywords will be lower depending on how your rank as well as the click through rate.

Wordtracker

Wordtracker is a powerful keyword research tool specifically focused on highlighting long tail keywords. This tool incorporates Google, Youtube and Amazon keyword data all in one place.

The main point of differentiation that Wordtracker claim to have vs. Google’s Keyword Planner is that Google is designed for AdWords while Wordtracker is focused on SEO. Therefore, SEO competition and other metrics are only provided for paid search in Google’s platform. Wordtracker’s proprietary data set can result to up to 10,000 keywords generated per search, including related keywords to allow effective page optimization to outperform competing websites.

Wrap Up

What’s Covered In This Article

• What is a Heatmap?
• Heatmaps Show Where People Are Clicking
• How To Use Heatmap Analytics
• Top 3 Recommended Heatmap Tools
• Wrap Up

What is a Heatmap?

A heatmap shows where visitors have clicked on your page. How far they scroll down. And at their most advanced even track where your user’s eyes are going. This is displayed using a color-coded system to represent different values.

Often, this data is represented, through bright red and yellow visuals highlighting key areas of visitor interest. This data is powerful, as it gives greater insight into what your visitors like or dislike about your site.

Heatmaps Show Where People Are Clicking

Heatmaps provide a depth of insight that is often lacking in standard Google Analytics data. Bounce rate or average time spent on a page are useful tools, but these metrics don’t offer much insight into the reason why visitors behave the way they do.

Heatmap analytics structure your thinking about your website’s goals in a very clear way. They illustrate that how you layout and layout your website plays a key role in converting consumers.

The places of greatest attention should have the most important content. For example, if consumers pay a lot of attention to the area just under the end of an article. It’s useful to place a call to action that focuses visitors on beginning the sales / conversion process.

If you know what part of a page received the most attention you can start your sales process there. Which is why having the right analytics is so key. Heatmaps highlight where consumers’ attention is most drawn to.

How To Use Heatmap Analytics

Using heatmap analytics successfully requires planning and asking important questions.

Determine Your Goals

Before running your heatmap analysis, it’s important to understand what the most important goal is for you to achieve.

Setting a clear goal for each page is key to figuring out what you want your website’s visitors to focus on. Some goals that are often chosen include:

• Email sign ups
• Add to cart buttons
• Product buy buttons
• Any other clear call-to-action (donate now buttons, registrations, share buttons etc.)

Install and Run Heatmaps

Setting up and running heatmap analytics is made easy with the many tools available to website managers. We’ve put together a list of our 3 favorite tools below.

While implementing heatmap analytics is slightly different depending on service provider, I recommend checking the tutorials and resources provided online through a simple Google search. Here is one from CrazyEgg:

https://youtu.be/VyUVNiiBXCU

Review the Data

Reviewing the data collected during the analytics is crucial for success. As with all kinds of analytics, the higher number of visitors you have, the richer the data will be.

If you receive only a small amount of traffic, I’d recommend running the analytics over the period of a few weeks, to ensure an accurate picture of results.

In my opinion, the major question of the analytics review boils down to:

Did the thing you wanted visitors paying attention to receive attention?

Adjust Your Approach

There can be many surprises when visitors focus on areas that are unexpected. Once you see the results of your analytics, you can then ask:

• What is the area of the webpage that receives the most attention? Could the key call-to-action be placed at the most popular location in the page?
• What is the most popular image or visual of the page? Could the key call-to-action use the most popular image on the page?
• Are there any distractions that pull visitors away from the core objective? Could you minimize distraction?

It’s necessary to act on the results of the data. Action involves updating your website in order to find the optimal combination of location on the page and visual impact of your goal(s).

The analysis of the data should be seen as an iterative process, where lessons about visitor behavior are constantly implemented into the site to help you achieve outcomes, which can be anything from sales to collecting email addresses.

The more often you run a heatmap analysis and implement the results, the closer you will likely move towards your goals.

Top 3 Recommended Heatmap Tools

CrazyEgg

• 30 Day Free Trial (credit card required)
• Plans: $29/month-$189/month
• Plans Include: A/B Testing, Heatmaps, Scroll maps, unlimited users, and unlimited domains.

HotJar

• 30 Day Free Trial (no credit card required)
• Plans: Free-$589/month
• All business plans allow Unlimited users, unlimited reports, 365-day data storage and the ability to remove Hotjar branding.

Freshmarketer

• 30 Day Free Trial (no credit card required)
• Plans: $99/month – $479/month
• Offers: A/B Testing, Heatmaps, Scroll maps and session recordings

Wrap Up