You can use freebies and incentives to get a lot of free traffic from Facebook. Make a Facebook post telling your followers about the freebie and link to a landing page on your website. You can ask your visitors to opt in to your email list to receive the freebie. Facebook likes people to spend time on your site when they click through so keep this in mind.
If you are not sure what freebies to offer your audience then ask them to tell you. Make a Facebook post with a number of different ideas that are numbered (e.g. 1 to 5). Then ask them to type in the
number of the incentive that most appeals to them. Typing a number is easy so you should get a good response from this.
Once you know what your audience wants the most tell your audience in the comment thread. As your audience helped you to choose the best incentive they will be a lot more likely to click through to get it.
In the next chapter we will discuss how video can bring you a lot of free Facebook traffic…
People just love videos. YouTube.com is the second largest website on the planet with billions of views each month. Facebook users love videos too and there are more than 8 billion video views each day on the platform.
It is so easy to watch a video to learn something rather than read text. People are lazy, so you need to help them as much as you can consume your content. The problem with video is that it takes time and effort (and money) to make them. But the results that you can get make this investment very worthwhile.
In this chapter we will look at the best way to create video content for Facebook users. Most marketers make mistakes here so please follow the advice below to get the most from every video that you post.
Use Square Videos and Upload Natively
There is a lot of research out there that shows square type videos outperform landscape (YouTube) style videos for engagement, reach and views. You need to remember that the vast majority of Facebook users will view their Facebook feed using their mobile device and square videos just look better.
The bias towards mobile is so great that estimates now suggest that over 92% of Facebook users are on mobile devices. More than half the video views on Facebook happen on a mobile device and a square style video takes up almost 80% more real estate in mobile news feeds.
These are statistics that you simply cannot ignore!
Another thing that you might want to test is the use of vertical style videos because now Facebook provides larger previews for vertical videos in mobile news feeds. Making videos that work well in Facebook is much easier now with online tools such as InVideo and Animoto available.
A lot of marketers use links to YouTube videos in Facebook and only get mediocre results with these.
The truth is that the interaction rate with Facebook native videos is far higher. In this instance the term “native” means a video uploaded directly to Facebook).
So we recommend that you make separate videos for Facebook. You can make short videos which provide value and then you can provide a link so that the user can get more information on your website or another external site (your YouTube channel perhaps?).
You have 3 Seconds to grab attention
When you upload a video to Facebook it will auto-play to grab the attention of the user. Facebook wants their users to watch more videos. So this means that the first few seconds of your videos have to really grab the attention of Facebook users even without the sound on.
One of the best things that you can do to get attention to your videos is to add a custom thumbnail.
Go and create an eye catching thumbnail using a free graphic design program like Canva.com and then upload it during the Facebook native uploading process. Make the first few seconds of your video really count!
