Commentary: Facebook’s lowest hanging fruit
Today I want to tell you about Facebook’s lowest-hanging fruit, a two-minute trick that will yield long-term benefits to your email acquisition efforts.
Really, it’s the simplest thing, yet in the hundreds of Facebook audits I’ve done for publishers it remains overlooked by a significant number of page administrators.
It’s the Facebook call-to-action (CTA) button.
The button appears underneath your cover photo, and as you can see above is very prominent on mobile, which is what most readers are using when they surf Facebook.
Over the years, Facebook has exposed the CTA in other areas as well: search results that match your page, page recommendations, etc. As is Facebook’s way, it never stays anywhere for long, but it remains a very visible asset and where it turns up on any given day may surprise you.
This button has a number of preset options to choose from, like “Shop now”, “Contact us” or “Play game” — most of which are pretty boxed in about how you’re allowed to use them. But the most effective of all? “Sign up”.
“Sign up” allows you to send users to any URL you choose. That makes it very helpful to feed your email acquisition and paid conversion efforts.
But which should you emphasize? Paid acquisition seems like a natural choice, right? Send them straight to that payment page and get that cheddar, baby.
But wait. Let’s think about that use-case for a second. The person most likely to see that button is someone visiting your Facebook page. Who is doing that? It’s not your page followers who know and trust you — they’re already getting your posts in your feed. It’s someone who has seen a post of yours that a friend shared, or found you through a page recommendation or search. They’re not your loyal readers, most likely to convert; this is someone new, and looking to learn more.
Signing up to an email newsletter is a far more likely outcome, and by getting that email address you now own a way to reach this fickle Facebook reader over and over, on your own terms. You can build up loyalty, and make your donation, membership or subscription pitch during more touchpoints than a passing glance on your Facebook page.
These CTAs won’t yield a tremendous number of signups, but with very little effort you can get a few more email addresses a month with no additional lift. Converting even one of them to paid surely makes that 2-minutes worthwhile.
Here are the instructions to edit that button. Adding a UTM code to the link will help you track conversions. If you don’t have a page on your site or a Pico page designated specifically to signing readers up to your email newsletter, just hit reply and BlueLena will get that taken care of for you.
