Podcast Description
On this podcast, I will go over what a digital footprint is and how to use its power to build relationships with your potential customers. The Facebook game is a long game.
You do have to understand how and why it works but if you’re not patient enough to work hard at it for a long time you might end up disappointed. Being patient will pay off in a big way. So keep pushing.
Podcast File
Digital Footprints on Facebook and Instagram
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Podcast Transcription
Welcome to another episode of the Facebook Marketing Ninja Podcast. Your host Manuel Suarez here one more time with you. Today, we’re going to talk about a very, very important subject so stick around because it’s going to be awesome, awesome. Again, my job is to keep you guys informed of these different opportunities that we have today and how to take advantage of them.
A few weeks ago, I did a very good episode that if you haven’t listened to, you definitely should and you should have heard before you hear this one because it was all about building relationships on Facebook. I basically explained how and why most people that are doing advertising on Facebook or have done advertising throughout the years using the power of Facebook and Instagram gave up after a week or two or a couple of months or $1000 or $10,000 of ad spend and they claim that Facebook ads didn’t work for them was because they actually didn’t build relationships. If you are not familiar with the Facebook advertising platform, if you don’t understand how it works, if you are not familiar with Instagram and the Facebook Business Manager, you will probably not understand how you can actually build relationships because you may be asking yourself, “Manuel, if I actually put a video out there and I post it on social media, on the Facebook page, on the Instagram account, what happens next? How do I know if people follow me, if they saw the video, if they saw three seconds of it, ten seconds? If they saw the whole thing, how do I have that data that you talk about building relationships? Well, how do you expect me to do that when I don’t have a clue how to build those relationships on Facebook?” Well, there are very, very, very simple ways to build those relationships and that’s what I am going to explain on this particular podcast because the way to win on the game of Facebook advertising, on Instagram marketing which is a powerful platform. If you are not jumping all over Instagram marketing right now together with Facebook, you are leaving so much money on the table. I mean, you are going to take the condition of becoming irrelevant as a businessman. No matter if you have an Amazon brand, e-commerce, lead generation business, service business, no matter what it is, actually, using the platforms that are being used by most people today shouldn’t be an optional thing if you are an entrepreneur. Does that make sense?
Let me explain to you how you actually create and follow digital footprints with the power of Facebook’s data. If you haven’t set up your Business Manager on Facebook, that is the first thing you need to do. You need to go, pause this podcast, or keep on playing it on the background and go to your computer. Go to business.facebook.com and set up your Business Manager. Once you are in Business Manager, there is a section on the menu, the top left has a menu that has a drop-down menu on it that’s going to open up a bunch of different options. One of those options is called Audiences and this is something that I explored on my course fully. Obviously, I have a series of mini-courses and I have my advanced program which I have hundreds of students that are going through that particular program. This is something that I’ve dived deeply into. But, at the Audiences level, you can create audiences that are now on this particular bucket of people that you can continue to communicate with. That’s what a digital footprint is.
Let me give you some examples about audiences that I created and that I used consistently to communicate with people over and over again because if you post something on social media, on Facebook, on Instagram, it goes into oblivion, right? It just goes downfield through another thousand posts, you basically bury it, right? Deep, deep, deep and it disappears from the feed. That’s what happens to any post. If I post something today at 9:00 am and I have a thousand fans, if I am lucky, a hundred of them see it. That’s about 10% of the actual audience. I am talking about organic reach on Facebook, all right? So, that’s 10% of the audience, right? On average right now, only 2% to 8% of your actual fans, page likes, are actually seeing your content. On Instagram, there’s a higher percentage. It can go up to 20% organic reach. But, in reality, most of them are not going to see it. And, whenever they log in to their Facebook, your post which was posted so long ago, that is nowhere to be found, it’s nowhere to be seen, it’s gone, it has disappeared from the face of the earth, no more and you’re not going to see this thing again.
So, how do you know what happened to that post? How do you know if somebody saw it, didn’t see it? Well, just because you see some people, that Facebook is showing you a video views number in there, is that enough for you to have something? Well, now, what will I do with that? What does 1,248 video views mean to me? It means absolutely nothing unless you have built a bucket of people based on that data that you can communicate with again, that you can actually grab that bucket and send them a second message, a second video, a third message, a fourth video, et cetera, on and on. That is how you build relationships.
On Facebook, you do not do sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, just like they do on the flee markets. On Facebook, I’m telling you, man, after millions of dollars of Facebook ads spent, meaning that I have all that data and I can tell you that I have tried direct selling and I have tried to nurture. I have tried to build relationships and I know what works and I know what doesn’t work. That’s what you get from me more than anything because when you hear me talk, when you see my videos, when you do my course, when you do my podcast, when you hear me anywhere even in my live seminars, you are going to get that data that I am giving to you based on the data that I am observing. That’s what I am looking at through my agency because you will think that I am just a content creator because you see me a lot and I am all day long doing podcasts and doing interviews and seminars and articles. No, I actually invest 90% of my time on my marketing agency. AGM Marketing is my life, it’s my agency. That’s what it’s all about. That’s where I put all of my attention. And then, you guys get 10% to 20% of my attention through my course, through my training, through my blog, through my podcast, through my seminars. That’s basically how I grabbed that information from my agency and I hand it over to you so you, if you are smart with it, can cut the line. My job, my main goal is to help you cut the line so you don’t have to spend years and years and years like I have – researching and trying to understand how the platforms work, what works, what doesn’t work, strategies, what is working right now better than anything else out there, what are the best opportunities, what type of campaigns should I go after, how should I find my audience. You don’t have to do any of that stuff. If you follow my content, I tell you, what is working right now, all you’ve got to do is grab it and implement it. Isn’t that cool? Well, I have done that throughout the years. Like my initial trainings as an Amazon seller, I had one teacher. That one teacher gave me everything that I needed in order for me to be successful. His name is Ben Cummings. A very good friend of mine today still, all right? So, I grabbed this information and I have implemented it. And, instead of me searching around on this sea of confusion and tried to find out something that works and doesn’t work, I will just focus on this one person that I knew was doing it himself, that I knew had data, and I just grabbed that data and implemented it and saw the results. That is what I am offering you. I am offering you this data from 90% of my time as to what is working today and what’s not working as well as to where did I waste money and where did I make money. Because trust me, I have not been perfect. I have wasted a lot of money along the way. I have invested a lot of money of my own money wasted trying to find out what things are working and what things are not working as much. That’s the reality, okay?
Let’s take advantage of that. That’s just something that I want to just point out because in reality, when you have data, when you have information that is actually applicable and practical, that is so valuable because in reality you can save so much time, so much energy, so much money, and so much frustration overall along the way that, trust me, I have gone through, okay?
So, when you put a post on social media, on Facebook or on Instagram – we’re talking about these two platforms. I want you guys to understand that data is permanently stored on Facebook’s world, permanently. It’s a digital footprint. Just like if you want to find out about somebody, let’s say that there’s a lost horse on a ranch that is full of snow or something, you can find out exactly where this horse is at just by following that horse’s footprint. The same thing happens with every single one because one thing that you’ve got to understand is that these cell phones, these devices that are being used by these guys consistently every single day for hours a day are tracking every single activity. Meaning that if they comment on something, Facebook has that data. Again, Facebook and Instagram are the same company, all right? Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, they are the same company, and Whatsapp, too. So, whatever you do on these platforms are permanently stored in their databases. If you liked a post, if you don’t like a post, if you say that you love it, if you comment, if you share it, if you actually interact with it, if your thumb stops on that particular post, they know you’re interested.
Have you ever wondered for example on Instagram, let’s say that you’re watching something that pulled your attention. You’re on the newsfeed and then there’s this person that you are following. Suddenly, you, wow, I’m interested in this particular subject. Let’s say exercise and you opened this person’s exercise account in which they’re teaching different tips and tricks about losing weight using the power of fitness or whatever it is and suddenly you go back to Instagram and you keep on surfing around and you start seeing more of fitness. Have you ever noticed that? Same thing on Facebook. Let’s say that you comment on your friend’s post that has kids and babies and you’ll say, “Oh, that’s so cute. My son…” And you engage in a conversation. Have you ever noticed that now, you start seeing more parents, more people with children, more interaction with kids? They have that data and the algorithm uses that data to give you more of what you want. That’s the beauty of it. I mean, some people might find it freaky and a little bit scary. But, in reality, the algorithm was actually created to give you what you want. That is the purpose and that is what has made Facebook and Instagram the monsters that they are. That is what actually made a big difference. If you look at for example the Instagram explosion, boom! The Facebook explosion throughout the last few years, boom! But, at the same time, it’s not that the economy is great, look at Snapchat, boom! Look at Twitter, boom! Look at LinkedIn, surviving, but barely, right? Great platforms that have not figured out this incredibly smart algorithm that gives a user more of what they want.
That is all because of digital footprints. What you like, what you comment, what you’re interested in, what you don’t like, what you engage with, what pages you like, what other things you like, what makes you stop, what makes your thumb stop from scrolling on your Facebook news feed, on your Instagram news feed, what makes your thumb suddenly stop the motion. Do you know that Facebook actually has a term internally called “Thumb Stopper”? Meaning that the promotion or the ad or the publication or whatever it is that you’re posting causes the individual to stop their thumb and pay attention to what you have to say. That is a digital footprint by definition. What Facebook does is they do a couple of things. Number 1, the user gets more of that particular thing that they stopped to consume, that they share, that they comment, that they like, that they watch. They get more of that stuff. Number 2, if you produce content that makes people stop their thumbs, users stop their thumb, if you produce content that makes people engage, comment, and share, Facebook rewards you for it. They’ll say to you, “Very well done on this piece of content. I’m going to actually help you reach more people. Instead of you reaching 10% of your audience, because people really liked your content, I’m going to help you reach 25% of them. Very well done. Keep on producing content like this that engages.” That is exactly what Facebook tells you. As an advertiser, the message is a little bit different. As an advertiser, they say to you, “That’s great that you produce this piece of content. I want to say thank you, people are liking it. It’s engaging. They’re commenting. They’re engaging with it. They’re sharing it and they’re watching it and it’s stopping their thumb. In exchange for your quality content, do you know what I am going to do? I’m going to lower the cost of advertising for you. Very well done. Congratulations.” So now, instead of paying ￠5 a 10-second video view, now you start paying ￠1 a video view. So, you get 5 times as much for your dollar. Instead of paying ￠55 for a website click on your website, you start paying ￠10 for a website click to your website.
Very simple. This is the reason – Facebook is all about user experience, uex, user experience. You’ve got to understand that Facebook’s goal is to keep people on the Facebook platform. If people jump out of it and they go to Snapchat, and they go to YouTube, and they go to other places that are not owned by them, Facebook loses money. So, they want to keep people on the platform. Sometimes they have many changes to protect the user experience like changing the algorithm and other things that people have complained about along the way. But, those changes have been made with the directed intention of protecting the user experience. Because if they protect that, it’s better for us advertisers. Why? Because people stay on the platform. So, that data is really, really important. Actually, Facebook rolled out this week, they announced it, that they’re going to be penalizing advertisers that produce bad or low-quality content. Meaning, ads with images that are not very nice, videos that are not engaging, products that are being in some way, shape, or form being communicated in a bad way. For example, if you have something that is clickbait like “You won’t believe your eyes what the universe is bringing to us. Click below.” If you’re doing that sort of advertising, Facebook is going to recognize that and is going to penalize you for it. If you’re doing clickbait, if you’re doing engagement bait like “Comment below and tell me what are your thoughts about this and I will enter you for a chance to win a billion dollars.” If you do those stuff of things, Facebook is going to find out because that is destroying the user experience. In the end, that’s what you want to focus on. The better the user experience is, the lower the cost of advertising is.
I have seen, to give you guys a particular example, I have seen advertising on Facebook, two advertisers. One of them that invest money on ads, let’s say a thousand dollars, and every single 1000 people, they’re paying $2 to reach them. That’s it, $2. And then I’ve seen another one that produces a really bad content that all they do is sell, sell, sell, sell, that they are not really interested in providing value, and instead of paying $2 for a thousand, they can actually pay up to $50, $75, which is even more expensive than television ads, the newspaper ads which is incredible in this incredible era. Why is Facebook doing that? Because the system, the algorithm will penalize you for producing low-quality content that does not engage with people or that somehow cheats the actual individual, okay? So, that’s what you’re trying to go after.
In reality, what you want to do is focus on quality content, consistent content, and content that produces value along the way and helps people improve a particular aspect of their lives. So, that’s how you, like what I’ve talked about on a couple of episodes ago, we talked about building relationships. You build relationships by providing value to people, by educating them. And then building these retargeting audiences, okay? I hope that makes sense.
Let me tell you what to do. Let me give you something practical. You have to do a lot of content. You have to produce a ton of it and I mean quantities of it. Now, I’ve talked about that many times before in my podcast, I described that on many webinars, many trainings along the way. There’s a lot of ways you can produce content. You can do written content, audio content, video content, picture content/images. All those things can be done and should be done along the way. The more that you do, the better. So, you’ve got to do a lot of it. Now, what is a lot? Well, it depends on how bad you want it, how fast do you want to get there. If you want to get there in a year or two, you’re going to have to produce a lot, that’s a reality. I haven’t stopped working a single day in 5 years to get to where I am today. Now, I like my work so it doesn’t really feel like work. So, for me, it’s just fun all day long. It’s like playing Madden of playing Fortnite 24/7, right? These guys are having fun. I’m having a blast. I’m here talking to you, guys. Do you know how much fun this is? Do you know how much fun it’s actually teaching other people how to capture attention, grow their businesses, expand? I mean it’s a blast like people have fun going to a party. I don’t like going to parties. I like talking to you, guys. I like doing seminars. I like teaching. I like making money. I like growing businesses overall. That is what I like to do. But, it depends on you. So, if you have fun doing your work, it becomes easy. The question how much content should I produce should be answered by how fast do you want to get there. If you want to build it in the next year or two, well, you have to hustle and you have to produce a lot of content and be consistent. Let me tell you something, I don’t produce enough. I’m doing a podcast a week. Sometimes, every 10 days. I’m trying to do a podcast at least once a week. I do videos. Sometimes I get too busy with the agency because the agency is my life and still continues to be my life. I don’t do enough content. Now, I’m growing pretty fast but I want to get there faster so I need to push myself. So, you’ve got to do more of it. Now, once you’ve started getting into a routine of producing content (Facebook live, videos, images), you can go to different tools.
The other day I did a training talking about a tool called Veeroll. For those of you that don’t know, I’ve been using Veeroll for years. I’m not affiliated with it at all. It’s a tool that helps you produce video content just by pasting a couple of images. Technology has literally crushed and destroyed every single excuse that you have used throughout the last 5 years to not grow your business, every single one of them. There’s no such thing for it like not being able to grow your business today. V-E-E-R-O-L-L.com, you can just literally, this is free promotion for them, go ahead and create some videos in there by pasting some images and start running those. So, once you start building content, let me tell you the list of audiences that you’re going to make. This is just off on the top of my head, okay? If you go to business.facebook.com and you have it all set up because if you’re listening to this podcast, I’m hoping that you already have this whole thing set up, you are going to go to Audiences. If you haven’t set this up yet, you need to do my mini-courses, you need to do some of my training, listen to my podcast some more because it’s all out there. I guarantee you that I’ve talked about this in the past. You’re going to go to facebook.business.com and you’re going to go to Audiences. If your Facebook page is already connected with your Facebook Business Manager, you’re going to be able to create audiences, buckets of people that are different levels of engagement with you. For example, you can create a bucket of people that have seen at least 10 seconds of your videos, 25% of your videos, or they have seen only 50% of your videos, 75% of your videos, 95% of your videos, 100% of your videos. Each and every one of those audiences is a different audience. Somebody that saw a video of yours for 3 seconds is not the same as somebody that saw your video for 5 minutes. This is a whole different individual, right? So, you’ve got to understand that you’ve got to communicate these guys in a different way as you build your relationships along the way.
So, video watchers buckets is my number 1 most important audiences out there that I use to lead generation, purchases, Messenger subscribers, store objectives like visit people on my store. All those stuff, I do all those stuff based on people that have visited or seen my videos, okay? That’s one set of buckets that you can create. You can also create a bucket of people, again, Business Manager, business.facebook.com, Audiences, create an audience, you can follow these steps exactly like that. And, now you go to create an audience based on engagement on Facebook, based on video watching, based on Instagram profile engagement, business profile engagement, based on website data, okay? All this stuff is in there. So, other audiences that I would create: I would create an audience of people that have engaged with your ads or your publications on Facebook. So, if you’re posting a lot of content on Facebook or Instagram, anybody that comments, that likes, that engages, that shares, that likes your page overall, is going to be put in this particular bucket of people that are engaged with your Facebook page. And that bucket keeps on growing and growing and growing and now you have a bigger audience to get your message to and to sell and to build relationships to, okay?
Again, digital footprints. One trivia that I want you guys to know, okay? When it comes to video watchers, people that are watching your videos, you have 365 days total to communicate with those guys. So, if somebody watched a video today for 2 minutes, now, you can retarget that individual for a full 365 days. But, if that person has not seen a new video from you that is part of that audience, on the 366th day, you cannot retarget that person again. When it comes to website data, I am hoping that a lot of you guys already have your pixel data set up on your website. When it comes to website data, if you have your pixel set up, you can target people for up to 180 days. People that have visited the website, people that viewed a product page, people that have viewed your blog, people that have actually engaged – what Facebook calls the top 25% website visitors. That is based on the time spent on your website. So, for example, if you have 10,000 website visitors a month, then, you can tell Facebook, “Facebook, I want you to build me an audience of the top 25% website visitors.” So, now, you don’t have to communicate to 75% of people that some of them are bouncing, they’re not really interested in your content, they landed on your website accidentally. But, now, they are not interested in anything else. When you do top 25% website visitors, you’re communicating with the people that are actually surfing around on your website going all over the place, moving all over the place, and looking at the product pages, engaging with your products overall, purchasing your products and all that stuff. That is an audience by itself. Another audience based on data is also people that added the items to cart, people that purchased, people that actually have not purchased in the last 180 days but purchased in the last 30 days. There are a thousand possible combinations or maybe thousands of them that you can actually mix and match when you build these buckets of people along the way.
When it comes to Facebook, I would actually create one of them for each individual thing. For example, there’s an audience of people that you can create of people that engaged with your Instagram business profile. That by itself deserves a unique audience that you can communicate to because trust me, Instagram is blowing up very fast, and is very engaging, it is going to keep on getting better and better and you need to be a part of that, you need to make sure that you track those digital footprints that are going on Facebook and Instagram world nonstop. So, what do you do with that data? What do you do with those buckets of people that you can retarget for up to 365 days in some cases and up to 180 days in some cases? Well, you build relationships. You build a second point of contact. Like for example, “Hey, I want to thank you for watching my first video. Well, let me show you something else about what I do for a living and how I help people, okay? Or, you can create videos if you don’t feel comfortable in front of the camera and thank them for actually engaging with your first video or with your page or with your post or whatever it is and just build relationships and communications with these guys along the way, okay?
So, go ahead and build your audience. First of all, figure out your content. Start putting out a lot of content out there, massive amounts of content. Quantity is going to be way more important than the quality of your content. If you focus on quantity, then you can win the game. If you get obsessed about the quality, then you’re going to be slow and all your competitors are going to crush you because people are doing quantity right now to really stand out in the social media game. You can just look at my social media and I am not even doing enough. You can look at some of these guys that are pushing hard in conquering the world. It’s a hardcore push towards actually taking over this. I don’t know what’s wrong with people that get so impatient with the social media game. I don’t understand that because my grandparents, my dad, took ages to build a multi-million dollar business, my dad took about 15 years to build his first million dollars a year business. Why are we complaining after 1 year of posting content? “Manuel, but I’ve been posting content every day now and nobody pays attention. I only get 7 likes on my Facebook post.” This requires a strategy, a long term strategy, persistence and patience, and push towards accomplishing that particular end goal along the way. If you don’t have the patience, you do not belong in social media, you should get out because social media does not make people rich overnight. If somebody sold you that dream, let’s cancel that dream because that does not exist.
I have been doing this social media game for years. I have barely broke out in the last 2 years. After 2 and a half years or 3 years putting my head down and working in implementing and failing and succeeding a little bit. Failing some more and succeeding a little bit. It takes guts, patience, energy, dedication, study, long, long time of it, long hours, and obsessively, obsessively every single day looking to learn something new, all right?
So, I know I talked a lot. If you missed some of these, it’s a fire podcast so you should go back and listen to it again because in reality, first of all, you are going to build relationships. Number 2, we need to build those buckets of people that are watching our content, engaging with our page, stopping to see our content, thumb stopping to see our content. And then we’re going to build relationships by communicating with these guys again, all through the Facebook Business Manager, using the power of Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. All right, that’s it for the podcast. we’ve been talking a little bit over 30 minutes already. I hope that you guys have enjoyed it. If you have not given me the honor of writing a review for the podcast, please do so. You can actually stop this right now or keep on playing it. Put it down, go to the bottom of this podcast and write a review. It will mean the world to me. If this helps you somehow, I would love to hear your thoughts on that, okay? All right guys. So, I will see you on the next podcast. Talk to you soon.
