Step 21 - Making A Facebook Ad for Alexander Technique

Most Alexander Technique teachers will not use Facebook to find students, or if they do, they won't use the facilities of paid advertising to do it. The more advanced teachers will open a business page, post some things, hope to create some engagement. This is good. But not enough. The Purpose of a Facebook Page 1.For those already in a successful practise, it is a meeting point for their clients to check in now and again. The numbers required for that to gain traction is usually in the thousands, whereas most Alexander Technique teachers will be lucky to be working with the hundreds. 2.Once they have navigated their students to Friend their page, a better and more effective use of the Page is to present paid posts in the Newsfeeds of their students about ideas, events and offers that are of genuine interest. Doing a workshop? Let them know in their Facebook Newsfeed. Why not? Many people look at it every day. I wonder ho many Alexander Technique teachers are going to do that? Not many, but people in my coaching group will. I am showing them how, and they are giving each other tech support. And emotional support - even more important. If mastering Facebook has been on your agenda, now's a perfect time to join in and try your hand for a month at building your practise. My mission with AT teachers is to increase the number who treat their practice like the small biz that it is. Eventually you will understand that spending a bit of time studying with us, then putting a few well positioned posts up in Facebook, is a clever way to spend your next month. Still a trainee you say? Bah! You don't need a certificate to start building a following. Get started here. [NOTE: This second half of my blog is a paid area getting more practical about my general comments above with the other teachers and students in my ATSuccess group. You can join anytime to be part of our discussions.]

How To Make Your Account You need a Facebook Page to open an advertising account - if you don’t have one yet, you need to do that first. With a good name, right? Facebook does not let you change your page name more than once or twice. Get it right the first time. See yesterday’s post about that. You need to make an actual add to open an account - Facebook want your credit card details. A fake add is fine - once you have created it, you pause the add. Or you set up the add with a $1 limit on your “lifetime” spending. I am not going to hold your hand through the technical aspects of setting up an account - instead, use Facebook’s helpful area that explains all that to you. They want your money, so they have taken care to create better instructions about how to make an account than I could explain in a text-only blog! Study with them this week, experiment on your own… https://www.facebook.com/business I will now walk you through the options that appear, but my main objective is to keep you alert to options that can end up costing you a lot on your credit card. Pay attention. What Kind of Add? Getting Likes Basically, your intention is to gather those people in your niche to Friend your Facebook page. So getting Likes from appropriate people is your first aim in advertising. This can cost as little as 1c and as much as $2 per Like, depending on how well you set things up. What To Do At Each Section IMAGES Facebook may pull in some images you already have on your Page, but don’t use that unless it is perfect for your needs. Use images that stand out in tiny boxes. A crowd scene will be lost, a CU of a face will not. You can upload images. Don’t fill in all 6 boxes - just have one. TEXT AND LINKS This is your add. Use USP, headlines - compelling, benefit-orientation message that lock onto their problems, not your service. It will display your add as you create it. Cool. The area you place your add depends on the kind of add you create. But for getting Likes, a Right Column add. Remove the others for now. Inside it, put a simple message: “Like Yoga Without Pain? Like me - we can show you how.” BodyChance Yoga Clinic Something really simply and punchy like that. Use News Posts (mobile and desktop) when you are delivering a useful piece of information that people won’t mind seeing in their News Feeds. You’ve seen them - which ones do you like? AUDIENCE This is a biggie, and luckily most of you now have Search Graph. People in Europe and Australia may have noticed that everything got switched around in Facebook over the last week. Lucky you - you just got access to Search Graph. This is Facebook’s search tool which deserves it’s own blog. It’s how you start targeting your audience. More on that later. Use your common sense. For example, I selected an audience with these selections: Japan, Tokyo, Female Only, Older than 23 who Like Yoga (typed into the Special Interests box). That came to 44,000 people, which is a decent audience to start my campaign with. Facebook will automatically deselect “Only people connected to YourPage” obviously - if you want likes, no need to advertise to people who have already Liked your page! Playing around with the other categories depends on the information you can unearth using Search Graph at a later date. Leave it blank for now. CAMPAIGN This section is divided into (as of March 14th, 2014) into Campaign and Budget and Bidding and Pricing. As these are critical, I will go through each step by step. Campaign and Budget (I will detail the 3 headings within this box) 1. Name I suggest you create a naming system. As you increase the number of ads, the ability to figure out which is which diminishes unless your names are systematic. I am a bit of a nerd - I also anticipate having many, many ads so this is how I named by add: YogaLikes•3.14•TokyoF23+•RHS Here’s what that means: 1. Aim = YogaLikes (my campaign is to get people to Like my Yoga Page) 2. Date = 3.14 (March 14th) 3. Audience = TokyoF23+ (Woman 23 or older living in Tokyo) 4. Type = RHS (right hand side) You may not need to be so exact, but think about a simple system before you start, and stick to it. 2. Budget Warning here!!! Facebook defaults to a daily spend - they will take your money every day. So kind, but no thanks. Change it now - using the drop-down menu - to Lifetime Budget and put in $1 or £1 or whatever limit you feel comfortable with until you are ready to spend more. 3. Schedule Make the end date tomorrow if you are nervous about your credit card being hacked to death by Facebook. If you did not select “Lifetime Budget” above, then you will see this: “Run my campaign continuously starting today” Change that to: “Set a start and end date.” However, selecting “Lifetime Budget” means this option disappears from view. That’s safer. Bidding and Pricing If you have set up limits to your lifetime spend above, you can safely leave it on Bid For Likes. They want you to do that so they keep price control, but later you can assume that job when you have more confidence. Now you hit the green button “Place Order” (you can Review it first if you like) and Facebook will ask for your Credit Card details if you have not already supplied them. You must complete this step or you will not get an adds account. Your add does not got live immediately - an actual person must check that it does not violate their guidelines. During that time, you can go into your new Facebook Ad Account and pause the ad. Then you spend no money at all. If you can’t find your newly opened ad account later, go to this url: https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/campaigns/ That’s it! I will give you all a few days to play - have fun with it! - and I will focus my attention to the forum, rather than writing more blogs, until it’s clear what you all need next. The brave can splash out and spend $20 on a Like campaign. Why not? https://www.facebook.com/groups/ATCSProMembers/