For years, Facebook has been one of the best places to build and reach your audience. Over that same period of time, though, it's become much more of a pay-to-play channel.
In the earlier days of Facebook, you could create a post and count on your audience seeing it. Now, you're lucky if that content reaches even 4% of your fans. Even if you can cut through the noise and reach them, though, can you say with confidence how it helps your business? Valuing your Facebook audience has been a black hole for many marketers. It's hard to tie that audience to activity further down the funnel.
Facebook wants businesses to keep their audience on Facebook properties. Posts that link out to external websites often see lower reach than those without.
Messenger might be the key to monetizing your Facebook audience in a delightful way. Using channels together make them work better together. In other words, Facebook + Messenger = $ is the same thing as 1 + 1 = 3.
With over 1.3 billion monthly active users, there’s a good chance your audience already uses Messenger. Facebook continues to invest in building new ways to reach your audience. One of those is "Comment-to-Messenger". All a visitor has to do is comment a specific keyword on one of your Facebook posts. Then, a Messenger chat opens up, even if it's the first time you've talked.
This is a powerful way to send automated, contextual follow-ups to your audience. There's lots of potential here across Marketing, Sales, and Service. But if you're trying to monetize your audience, you need to be using it for conversational marketing today.
Our Facebook audience loves watching videos on marketing-related topics, like SEO. And the only thing people love more on the internet than watching videos are taking quizzes. It's one reason that BuzzFeed continues to dominate engagement.
For a video on SEO myths, the post description said to comment "SEO" to test your knowledge in Messenger. More than 2% of people who viewed the video commented that keyword on the post. That's a good baseline to shoot for as you start running these tests.
Here's my approach for creating great Messenger quizzes:
- Write for the channel.
- Messenger is a more personal channel than email. Use gifs, emojis, and shorter copy to make the experience feel more natural.
- Use progress markers.
- Use these throughout the quiz to let people know how far along they are. There's nothing people hate more than a conversation with no end in sight. Once a user completes half of the questions, give them a "you're doing great -- we're halfway there" to set expectations.
- Provide feedback.
- If someone's taking a quiz, they want to see how much they know for themselves. When they answer, let them know in a contextual way if that was right or wrong.
- Keep it simple.
- Make users think about what the answer is to the question, not how to answer the question. If you can avoid it, don't make users type in text responses. Use features of the Messenger platform like Quick Replies to give users an easy way to move forward.
Incorporating those guidelines helped create a quiz that users loved to take. In fact, 95.31% of people who started the quiz answered all 5 questions and got their score. That’s 86.88% higher than the average completion rate, according to AdEspresso.
After they finished the quiz, they received a contextual card with their score and a next step. Because they were already engaging with us on SEO, it was natural to ask them to download an ebook on the same topic.
We turned our traditional lead generation form into a one-to-one conversation. Instead of asking users to fill out eight fields at once, we asked them questions one at a time and made it feel more natural.
It was a much more delightful way to download an ebook. We met users on the channel where they spend their time. And we gave them an experience that felt natural and human-like.
68.89% of people who started downloading the ebook converted and filled out all the information. You don't get conversion rates like that anywhere other than messaging.
Re-engagement was a big part of the success for both the quiz and the ebook. If someone started but didn't finish, they got a message to come back in and finish getting their offer 24 hours later. This persistence of identity is invaluable compared to web traffic. With web forms, if someone only fills out a few pieces of information, you have no way to contact them again.
People went from viewing a Facebook video to becoming a lead in less than two minutes -- without ever leaving Facebook. Growing an audience on Facebook will be a top priority for marketers for years to come. It's more important than ever that you have a plan in place to monetize them over time. Messenger's the key to doing that.
