Owned media is any media your business generates on any platform you control (web site, blog, social channel) including a social platform like Facebook.

Owned media has two primary ROI measurements: engagement: the “likes” “comments” and/or “shares” via organic status updates and conversion metrics, tied to specific revenue or desired activities.

Every business should track both of these owned media metrics and adjust your content marketing strategy and community management accordingly.

How to Optimize Owned Media on Facebook

1. Know at the outset your organic status updates posts will only reach about 10-20% of your community: Facebook is an Ad Platform.
2. A simple Facebook Post is the first step in building owned media: your sharing content that will show up in your consumer’s Newsfeeds and it should stand out.
3. We see 20-30% higher engagement on Facebook depending on time of day. This may not be during prime time; later at night may work better for some brands. Track your engagement times.
4. Content curation is the name of the game on any social channel including Facebook: source, create and share great content that resonates with your community. It’s a very competitive eco system today!
5. Content format is crucial: mix and match posts with links, video, text and images.
6. Have a clear call to action embedded in your posts to drive your desired outcome.
7. Understand what’s working organically (driving “likes” “shares” “conversation” and then advertise these updates. Don’t advertise a status update until it’s resonated with your community. Most businesses do just the opposite.
8. Your content should be snackable, shareable and searchable (remember Bing indexes Facebook content, which means Google will eventually “find” and display it).

Our Can’t Live Without Facebook Advertising Tools

• Power Editor is a must use; only accessible via Google Chrome.
• Custom Audience for Stellar Targeting.
• Lookalike Audience (only accessible with Power Editor) - upload emails via Spreadsheet for matching behavioral & demographics.
• Core Audience again for very targeted Ads and available without Power Editor.
• This is a great overview of Facebook Ad Techniques and Processes by Jon Loomer.
• WishPond has great ad tools and services that help to improve ROI for Facebook Ad Campaigns and their customer service is excellent.
• There is a huge number of ad platform vendors that leverage Facebook’s Application Programmer Interface (API) to proved advanced functionality. Facebook refers to them as PMDs (Preferred Marketing Developer).

Facebook Works Best for Branding, Retailers and/or Business with a Target Demographic

Savvy brands and marketers will track a page post through the entire engagement cycle: News Feeds of Fans, “earned media” in the News Feed (organic and paid) of friends of Fans and paid ads in the New Feeds of non fans.

In our experience Facebook works well as a brand awareness Ad Platform, especially for retailers, bigger sites with lots of content and smaller businesses with a clearly defined customer demographics.

As content marketers, we know and measure what drives ROI for our clients: blogging, Twitter ads and for some small businesses, Yelp should also be considered as alternatives to Facebook organic status updates and paid advertising.

Be bold and stand out on Facebook when/where you can. This ad for Fox is a great example of an image that stands out and drives brand with the right consumer.