Yesterday I hosted a free webinar for ProBlogger readers on the topic of using Facebook to help you grow your blog. In the webinar (attended by 1000 people) Amy Porterfield packed in over an hour’s worth of rich content.
I learned a lot from it myself (I’ll share one thing that instantly had results for me below) and we had literally hundreds of comments from those attending saying how worthwhile it was. Here’s just a few of over 250 comments:
Based upon the amazing feedback and the fact that over 2000 people registered for the webinar but we could only fit in 1000 – we’ve decided to release the recording to those who missed out.
We’ll leave this recording up for a week or so so don’t miss out on listening in by doing it today.
You can listen to the hour of teaching and 20 minutes of Q&A (which was great too) here.
You will need a notepad and pen or a word doc to make some notes with because there is a heap of rich information to take in.
One Tip I learned that Instantly Increased My Facebook Results
As I said at the end of the call – there’s so much to learn when it comes to using Facebook to market your blog. I myself am taking a course that Amy is running to learn more. As I listened to her yesterday I jotted down a number of action items.
One was around the use of images. Amy mentioned in the webinar that images are the number 1 thing that people are sharing on Facebook. While I knew this I hadn’t really acted on the information. So this morning here’s a little experiment that I did:
Normally when a new post goes up on my photography blog I post an update like this:
What you see there is the status update on our page as it happens if you simply add a link to the status update box. It automatically pulls in an image from the post, the title of the post and the first line or two. I do these updates manually each day and they drive some pretty nice traffic. You can see in this case that after 25 minutes of being live that update was ‘liked’ 3 times and shared once. I’d estimate that around 100 people came and looked at the post in that 25 minute period.
Taking Amy’s teaching on board today I decided to do a followup status update with the same post a little while later – this time I decided to upload the same photo that you see above and to write something about the photo (including the link).
Here’s how it looked:
The photo is bigger and more eye catching and you can immediately see what happened as a result. 18 times as many people ‘liked it’. 7 people commented. While there were no shares I’ll bet that this type of update will typically get shared more than the other type. Interestingly since adding this update I saw a spike in traffic coming to that post that I’d estimate was around 400 people.
Update: the ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ are continuing to come in one this one.
Key take home lesson? If you have an visually interesting image in your post consider uploading it and adding the link in the description of your image rather than just sharing the link and letting Facebook pull in the image. I’m certainly going to experiment some more with this technique.
Listen to the Full Webinar for Free Here
This is just one action item I picked up from Amy in the above webinar. I’ve got another 10 action items that I’m going to implement in the coming week.
Enjoy the full webinar for yourself here and learn how to tap into the billion plus people on Facebook.
Awesome tip! Will the webinar ever be converted to MP3 or podcast so I can list via my ipod?
If you’re using Firefox, install the DownloadHelper add-on for free. Can download the video or audio straight from the link provided. I tend to do this with most webinars and keep them in a separate file just in case. If you’re not using Firefox, I’m sure you could find a similar add-on for your browser.
Thanks! I’d spent ages trying to download this :)
That was a great seminar yesterday Darren, there was so many good tips in there. I’d highly recommend people have a listen. I took 41 screen shots as Amy was talking so quickly.
I remember Amy talking about keeping the FB post simple asking a very simple open ended question asking for a one word answer.
I tried that on a FB page I manage it is has radically increased the engagement. We have over 1,000 fans on the page and I posted the post at the worst time of the day on purpose to see what kind of engagement we would get. Really high response. I’m going to test it also at the high engagement times and see if it has the same affect.
Thanks once again for yesterday.
Hi Darren,
Thanks for sharing this stuff! I’ll be watching the webinar…
I was fortunate enough to attend the webinar live: thanks to you and Amy and Luke for putting it together.
I agree that the tip Amy provided about posting great images was a revelation. Thanks for providing your example from Digital Photography School: what a difference!
Fantastic, and so simple. Thanks for the quick win, great webinar too. (And I usually HATE those!) :)
That’s great advice. It makes sense that a larger image would be more visually compelling to most people. And thanks for the webinar!
Thanks for making the distinction so clear Darren. I was in on the webinar but a bit late & missed that part…. gonna try that with tomorrow’s post.
Such a simple, yet very effective, tip! Thanks for sharing Darren. Will definitely be trying it out on my next blog post.
you’re welcome Jools
What a great and easy tip! I never would have thought of that, but I’ll definitely have to try it out–thanks!
Hmm, I haven’t gotten into FB yet, so I’ll listen to your webinar and take those things into account. Being active on Facebook and Twitter are my goals for Jan :)
Very interesting, i can see why it would work. Its amazing how things so simple can be such big difference makers. Going to be giving it a try. Thanks Darren!
Awesome! I did it once a while only when Facebook somehow fails to get the image + description from the link, but I never really noticed/observed the effect
Will try it out starting from tonight :)
I joined the webinar last week and I also thought it was such a good session. During the reply I took heaps of notes and added this to my website > fbinfluence-review.com if anyone is interested.
Enjoy the weekend!
Ralph
Enjoyed Amy’s presentation and ordered the program. Learning a great deal already that I am applying to my existing page, and will help me with the new one I’m designing! Good stuff :D
I’ve always wondered for a long time how to increase likes to a Facebook fan page. I knew that you could get traffic from the images with Google with images, but never thought of implementing that same action on Facebook. I’ll have to try that out in the future and see how it works out. Thanks so much Darren for putting out this useful information :-)
You’re right :) and good quality image is also necessary :) As said, one picture worth thousands of words & may be thousands likes :)
Thanks Darren !
Been following your advice for the last two years!
Registered for tonight’s webinar for 18 hours French time. (live in France).
Just added a photo on status for FB page per your suggestion. Wonderful idea from Amy.
Cannot wait to hear more on FB tools.
Merci beaucoup!!!
that’s true! people naturally react to what they see and i’ve been really trying to improve my visual content on my facebook page.
I joined the webinar yesterday and still “chewing” upon the information and creating action plans. But this information about what you did is a good example of one thing that can be done right away that brings immediate result. Thanks!
This works. I tested it last night and got 3 times more action on the post with the uploaded photo than we normally do. Thanks for the tip, Darren!
Totally Awesome! .. A must to read
FANTASTIC idea re: the larger photo. You know, I think bloggers concentrate on words way too much. How a blog post or a FB post actually looks can make a huge difference. Think about photos, headlines, subheads. If they’re not working, then people aren’t going to be reading!
Wow, posting pictures with links instead of links with pictures is the best easy-to-implement Facebook marketing tactic I have heard all year. It seems so obvious, but I hardly see anyone doing it!
I should’ve thought about that sooner myself, because I could’ve “leveraged alot more Facebook traffic” than I thought in the beginning. Well, as they say, life is an everyday learning experience! =)
Hey Darren
I found this webinar INVALUABLE. The biggest things i took from it was using a bigger image with more info for my profile photo, the welcome page & using custom tabs to promote things youre selling (im still to make these changes) and putting short status asking simple questions to engage your fans. I did this last thing both yesterday and today.
Yesterday i asked people what they were up to – it had 3 likes and 42 comments and today (about 40 mins ago) i asked people what their favourite xmas movie was. so far this status has had 10 likes and 48 comments!
Just in case your interested in seeing: http://www.facebook.com/rocknrollbride
so yeah, as you can see im a very happy customer. thank you to everyone involved in making this webinar possible.
Sounds very interesting, I am going to listen to this for sure !
Thanks for this, Amy and Darren. I multi-tasked through much of it — but just got the most responses from a FB post than ever before. For the record — no photo! — just a “you” question.
That is great advise. Also, thanks for sharing the webniar
I tried this technique on a fan page. The picture displays large on the fan page, but it did not display any larger in the news feed, where fans are going to see it. Does anyone know why that would be?
And while Darren’s results in this example are impressive, I wonder what the impact is on the clickthrough rate. You’re giving up your two biggest links (the bold page link, and the hyperlink on the picture itself) in exchange for a bigger picture. This technique would seem to be appropriate only for a small fraction of posts, where the picture is a big enough hook that people will be willing to hunt for the post link, even if their first click brought them to a larger picture instead of the post.
I like the creativity and the idea; I’m just wonder whether, to accurately assess the impact of this technique, we’d need to determine whether any clicks are being lost, and whether the extra sharing (which obviously gets the Facebook post in front of WAY more eyes) is enough to compensate for those lost clicks.
I’ve experimented with this one a few times now and each one has driven good traffic – better than normal. I suspect it’s partly because people are ‘sharing’ the image which means it is going beyond the normal reach it gets. The images also appear at the top of our page in our featured images so I guess people are clicking them there too which extends how long the posts are featured.
I’m not doing it on every post – just the ones witch the images that I think will be shared most.
OK you got me, just that little tip you shared about the photo upload was enough to make me wonder other great information the recording has to offer!
I have learnt three things from this post.
1. The use of picture to share links/posts on facebook.
2. Use of newly discovere tips on time.
3. Not wasting time in sharing results in a blog post.
Thanks.
Internet Investment Ideas
Hi Darren – thanks for sharing the webinar with those of us who missed it. It was very informative and Amy’s ability to provide real-life examples through Anthony Robbins, Liz DiAlto and Soda Fountain Photography showed us what works and how to attract our ideal audience. Will definitely be back for more webinars, tips and ideas!
facebook.com/metrofax
Darren,
Super tip! Just tried it. Missed the webinar, but I’m off to listen to the replay!
Thank you – Theresa :)
I absolutely love this tip, and I especially love the way you showed us a great example of how this worked for you. Amy’s tips are so practical, you can’t help but win when you put them into action. (Disclaimer: I’m her assistant, but I truly do, 100% believe in what she teaches.)
I have read quite a few places that creative images are the best way to go viral quickly on Facebook and from my experiences I’d agree with that assessment. Thanks for the tips.
A nice information… to improve my technique :)
I just finished listening it was great…didn’t remember the tip you just used though. You can tell your listeners to take screen shots during the slides…that’s what I did. Much quicker than taking notes and you don’t miss anything that way- Thanks again
this tip above wasn’t in the webinar – it was an experiment I did after hearing Amy talk about the power of images and how much people share them.
How do you do this?…I can’t seem to figure out how…please excuse my learning curve.
Thanks again
Matt
Matt – so in the status update on your page it should show a little camera icon for uploading a photo. Click it and choose which pic you want to upload. Then it should give you an opportunity to add a description of the photo – in that area you can leave a link to the post the image is from and some words to describe the post.
Thank you for these tips. I have actually fallen off of Facebook. However, this gives me renewed confidence in my ability to boost the visits and likes to my page.
Thanks for the webinar! Very helpful. I spent a long time yesterday working on my new facebook page. I found several tools for implementing a custom landing page, but after going through all of the steps in creating the page through my wordpress site I found out that Facebook will not pull the information from my site if it does not have SSL. Instead, it gives readers a scary warning that says “warning! this site is not secure” and tells the reader to allow unsecure browsing. Yuck.
I don’t do any monetary transactions on this site, so I’m not seeing the need to pay for the SSL on my site.
Any thoughts on this?
If you are curious you can check out the Our Homeschool Resources page on FB. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Our-Homeschool-Resources/258392060882755
Just deleted my latest blog post link from yesterday morning, posted an image from it instead (a drawing on toned paper of a Mongol man) and provided a link. Same image as before, but, as you said, it’s tiny when it’s only a link image. There had been no likes or shares or comments, so now I’ll see what happens. But I think I already know…
Thanks!!!
This almost seems to easy. I have a friend that paid some company in India for likes. Pretty pathetic
I got a company who need 100 likes in one day, I think this can help me out.
Wow! This is an educating one for me and I’ll be implementing for all my posts.
At last ……some hepful tips and advice for a novice blogger, and facebook chaos maker like myself – can’t wait to start improving my visuals. Many thanks
Darren, this is a excellent tip and it prompted me to watch the webinar. Awesome content in it’s own right, and suspect you’ll get a very high conversion to the fbinfluence program. You’ve sure convinced me! Look forward to seeing you in there. Thanks!
Wow, that’s really interesting! I’m going to try this for myself and see if it makes a difference. Thanks!
I listened to the webinar twice and loved it; I got so many tips that showed immediate results. Definitely a valuable use of mine time.
Thanks for this webinar found it really helpful and it got me thinking about how else users could ‘engage’. This may be helpful. Here http://on.fb.me/tesVDJ I used an arrow pointing to the reshare link – it increased post reshares.
The image was large on the FB page but not in the feed – What size image dimesions do I upload so it displays large (like above) in the feed?
yup.. I am noticing the small image in the feed, too. :(
jenetta
Great tip! I’ve been using it on a couple of Facebook pages I admin, when the web page I’m linking to has poor photo thumbnails to choose from. Instead I upload a relevant photo from elsewhere (either on the site, or free clip art) and add my text as the photo’s description.
Since I’m not in charge of the actual websites, this technique has given me much more flexibility about the images that show up on the Facebook feed. Thanks so much — it’s a simple tip, but easy to implement and very effective.