Wednesday morning saw huge numbers turn out at the Burleigh Surf Club to hear The Digital Junkies’ Sonja Ceri address the NEIS program about the changing world of advertising on Facebook.
100-plus local business
To see 100-plus local business owners and budding entrepreneurs bright eyed at 7am keen to learn how to harness the power of social media is a great sign for the Gold Coast generally.
NEIS (New Enterprise Incentive Scheme) is a government-funded scheme that provides job seekers with accredited small business training, business mentoring, and income support to help them turn a business idea into a viable business and help them to become a self-employed business owner.
The Media Junkies are passionate about helping start-ups, micro businesses and budding entrepreneurs, old and young, so it was a match made in heaven and enthusiasm levels in the room were high.
After an introduction from NEIS’s Ian Grace, each person had 30 seconds to explain who they were and the bare bones of their business, which helped people figure out who they wanted to interact with during the networking section of the event. The variety of business ideas and the raw enthusiasm of the participants, even at this early stage of the morning was nothing but positive.
After a great breakfast and some coffee, juice and networking, Sonja took the lectern and engaged the crowd about the absolute need for a solid social media plan and the changing face of Facebook advertising. You could see instantly that the crowd were soaking in what she had to say – social media is a difficult area for some businesses. Not everyone knows what to say, how to connect with a potential audience or what voice to use on what platform. Sonja’s natural confidence and complete understanding of social media as a necessary cog in the modern marketing machine was refreshing and engaging.
Australians are still HUGE Facebook users – Sonja explained that of social media users in this country, a whopping 95% have an active Facebook account. We are using our mobile phones and tablets more and more to access our social media platforms – put simply, we are accessing social media from wherever we are whenever we want – gosh!
Sonja explained that the algorithm Facebook uses to let fans see content changed in early 2015 – these days only 20% of your fans can actually see your organic content, hence the need for an effective and targeted Facebook advertising campaign as part of a broader overall social media marketing plan.
Sonja provided some client examples of just how cost-effective and powerful well-placed and timed Facebook ads can be and emphasised the importance of split testing to ensure maximum return for your ad dollar.
Thanks to some tweaks from Facebook’s targeted ads, Re-targeting is now an option. This is when someone visits your site and leaves without making a purchase – through re-targeting, you are now able to specifically target that person on Facebook and present ads to them, thus bringing them back to your website to purchase. People are using Facebook (and social media in general) more and more when researching a product.
Overall, the message was that social media has become an invaluable tool when finding and connecting with an audience for business, and Facebook is still the jewel in the crown.
If you want to learn more about Facebook Advertising, make sure you book into one of our upcoming bootcamps!
