It’s no surprise, then, that Facebook is home to some outstanding groups dedicated to WordPress in one way or another. Some are quite general in nature, while others cater to a specific niche. Here are six groups you’ll want to check out, depending on how you use WordPress.

Advanced WordPress

The Advanced WordPress group is one of the most interesting out there. It boasts over 30,000 members, and the list includes some of the most influential names in the world of WordPress. Like the other groups on this list, membership is closed – meaning a moderator has to approve your request to join.

Posts are also subject to moderator approval, which helps to keep the content relevant. And, as its name suggests, you’ll find some very advanced discussions regarding code, design and WordPress features. But don’t let that stop you from requesting membership. You don’t need to be a hardcore developer in order to learn something useful.

WordPress Freelancers

This is a small group focused on the business aspects of being a freelancer who uses WordPress. Topics of discussion are more related to tools, services and business practices – so don’t expect any sort of technical support.

But you will have a chance to connect with others who work in a similar space and are willing to share their experiences. You might just find a tried-and-true way to help boost your business.

WordPress Security

It’s critically important to stay on top of the latest security issues, as they affect all of us. Within WordPress Security, you’ll find links regarding all manner of vulnerabilities. The discussion can also be quite riveting and useful, as members often seek advice on issues they are facing.

This is a great resource for security issues and to see how other pros are dealing with them. When it comes to this topic, there’s never a shortage of content to digest.

WooCommerce Help & Share

With over 4 million active installations, WooCommerce is among the most popular WordPress plugins out there. And it also has to be one of the most oft-discussed, as well. If you’re using Woo, you’ll want to check out this group.

Members frequently post regarding technical issues, advice on WooCommerce extensions and all sorts of questions about selling online. Chances are, if you want some solid advice on Woo, someone here can point you in the right direction.

WordPress Plugin Suggestions

With the overwhelming amount of WordPress plugins available, it can be difficult to sift through them to find the perfect match for your project. WordPress Plugin Suggestions is a 12,000+ member group that exists to turn you on to the best plugins.

It’s as simple as posting the type of functionality or use you have in mind. Odds are, you’ll get a helpful suggestion or three of plugins that can get the job done.

WordPress ACF Users

This group caters to users of Advanced Custom Fields, a powerful plugin that enables you to highly-customize your site. Here you’ll find answers to some common issues faced by developers and a lot of technical discussion.

While a lot of the topics lean towards the advanced, novices can pick up quite a bit of useful advice.

Come Together

There is no shortage of great WordPress resources out there. But the beauty of the Facebook groups above is that they are very much an interactive experience. Depending on the group you join, you may even rub virtual elbows with the developer of your favorite theme or plugin.

Even better is that you have the opportunity to learn something directly from other experienced web professionals. And you might just find that you have some knowledge that can help someone else, as well.

The post 6 Helpful Facebook Groups for WordPress Developers appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

The software saw quite a few ups and downs along the way. It started as a challenger to Netscape and didn’t take long to become a market leader. But there was also a lack of support for standards, a push for proprietary code, and a monopolistic scandal.

For web designers, IE was the thing we loved to hate. If you tried to build a cross-browser-compliant website during its heyday, you likely ran into some trouble when testing in Microsoft’s browser.

Layouts could be messy, as support for newer techniques like CSS Grid and Flexbox were lacking. And it seemed like there was always that one client or customer who used IE – meaning you had to provide a fallback.

While no longer having to support IE is a reason to celebrate, its demise does bring about a bittersweet feeling. What will we do without our favorite nemesis? Who or what could replace it?

It just so happens that the modern web has several potential candidates. Here are a few who could take the throne.

Tech Companies with Outsized Influence

For a time, Microsoft had a stranglehold on the browser market. And IE could be considered a means for the corporate giant to put its mark on how the web would evolve. But as the browser stumbled, the company’s influence shrunk along with it.

These days there are a handful of companies that have a huge say in what happens on the web. A decree from any one of them can send web designers scrambling to account for whatever change they’ve decided to implement. Among them:

Google

It seems like everything Google does has an impact on our industry. For example, a change to its search algorithm means having to tweak SEO to stay relevant.

But it goes well beyond their search product. As the current top dog in the browser battle, Chrome is in a position to adopt standards and push technologies that potentially benefit Google. Competitors such as Firefox are struggling to survive, let alone take a bigger piece of the pie.

Core Web Vitals now dictates what performance metrics we need to adopt. And its AMP project compelled publishers to participate – even if it wasn’t in their best interest.

Microsoft may have dreamed of such influence, but Google achieved it.

Facebook

With billions of users, Facebook controls mountains of data. And how they decide to use it affects both everyday people and businesses.

If you use the service, consider the typical items you see in your feed. Facebook has decided what’s relevant to you. It’s possible to see updates from friends and family, but you’ll also get a mix of posts from other sources – whether you’ve subscribed to them or not.

For businesses and non-profits, reaching your audience (even the ones who “like” your page) can be incredibly difficult. That is unless you pay to promote your content.

More directly of concern to web designers, implementing Facebook’s API into your projects means giving up some level of control when it comes to performance and privacy.

Like Google, Facebook’s services are often seen as necessary and unavoidable. As such, web designers have to deal with them – like it or not.

No-Code Tools

I know, we’re all supposed to embrace the no-code revolution. And there’s something to be said for tools that do some of the dirty work for us. Why craft a CSS Grid layout when a page builder can do it for us?

Many of these products do their job pretty well. The WordPress Gutenberg block editor, for example, has vastly improved since its initial release. There’s a learning curve. But once you get accustomed to how this and other no-code tools work, you can achieve some solid results.

But they can also be quite frustrating to work with. For example, if you want to implement a particular feature that one of these tools doesn’t offer, it can require an uncomfortable (and possibly unsustainable) workaround.

Performance can also suffer. Some tools add lots of overhead in the form of JavaScript or CSS. And, even if the code works, it can still conflict with other parts of your website.

While the right tool adds a layer of convenience, it may also require us to accept some serious tradeoffs. That could draw the ire of many a web designer.

Malware and Malicious Actors

Perhaps there’s never been a more dangerous time to manage a website. Malware is all around us and tends to rear its ugly head at the most inconvenient of moments.

And the people who create and spread this malicious code aren’t being effectively deterred. If anything, the market for bad actors is continually growing. Not to mention the increased sophistication of their attacks.

It has become a recurring nightmare for web designers. Cleaning up SEO spam, restoring infected databases, and attempting to harden code – only for it to happen again and again. It’s a real-life game of Whack-a-Mole.

Even worse is that solutions don’t appear to be on the horizon. Both web hosts and software developers are trying to level up, but key breakthroughs seem hard to come by. And now insurance companies are starting to take web security into account when selling policies. That’s not going to help.

The burden of securing the websites we manage is enough to make any web designer question their career choices.

The New Multi-Pronged Nemesis

When Internet Explorer debuted, the web was still a relatively new phenomenon. People were excited by the prospect of a truly global community and the information superhighway.

Save for Google and a few other services, IE was one of the last remaining relics of that era. And unlike those that are still around, it never quite evolved to the point of staying relevant. It may be that IE’s only claim to fame in the past 15-20 years was that it made web design harder.

This made it stand out in a way that Microsoft couldn’t have imagined back in the 1990s. It’s likely the reason they released IE’s successor, Edge. IE was simply too tainted to continue.

Today, there is no singular bogeyman. The web is multitudes the size and complexity of what it was back in the day. And, as referenced above, there are several companies, products, and maladies that impact us. You could theoretically pick a new one to curse each day.

IE was alone in its time and an easy target. In some ways, that almost seems quaint compared to the environment web designers face today.

A single nemesis that tries to ruin our good time? If only.

The post After Internet Explorer, Who Will Be the Web’s Next Nemesis? appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

But, today, we’re going to change the game. In this post, we’ll go over some tips as well as some real, actionable practices that will help you boost engagement with your Facebook ads and (better still) get more conversions! You’re probably thinking, Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ve heard that before. Ok, you have every right to be skeptical. Just hear me out-I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

1. Before You Go Any Further, Evaluate Your Offer

Before you go and spend hours and hours designing the perfect ad, you need to take a moment and consider the value of what you’re actually offering to consumers.

Even if you have a highly appealing ad that grabs attention, it won’t make any difference if your offer doesn’t interest the viewer. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to go around offer 50 percent off your merchandise (which wouldn’t be a very effective long-term plan, even if your products were flying off the shelves). Before deciding on your offer, it’s important to consider where the audience is in your marketing funnel.

One tremendous problem that a lot of marketers run into with Facebook advertising is that they don’t use the appropriate offer for their audience. For example, if you’re advertising to new consumers who have never heard of your products or services before, it’s probably not the best idea to try to sell to them right off the bat.

Designed by EricWillis.me.

Because these are cold leads, you need to warm them up first. So, for new leads, try offering them something that will educate them on your brand and get them interested in who you are and what you do. Free content is usually the best way to do this. For example, you could offer them a free ebook or informational video in exchange for their email. Once you’ve engaged with them and gathered their contact information, you can start nurturing them for conversions.

On the other hand, audiences that have already shown an interest in your products or services also need a tailored advertisement. Instead of just showing a generic ad or offer, segment your retargeting audiences based on the specific URLs they visited. For example, if you sell WordPress Themes and icon sets, you’d want to separate your retargeting audiences into people who want themes and people who want icon sets.

Remember, these people have interacted with your products without converting. So, try offering them a discount or other promotion to help push them toward conversion.

2. Monitor the Right Metrics Before Making Changes

There are a lot of different metrics to look at when you’re using Facebook advertising. However, many of these are just “vanity metrics,” meaning they don’t really tell you much about how your ad is working with your audience and whether or not it’s effective. For example, just because your ad is getting a ton of clicks, that doesn’t mean it’s time to pop open the champagne.

Instead, you should be tracking how many of those clicks result in conversions. So, instead of obsessing over CTR and impressions (reach), start paying closer attention to the number of conversions and your cost per conversion.

To do this, you’ll have to install a Facebook Pixel on your website. This allows the social platform to track user activity on your site and count the number of events. There are several events that you can choose from when setting up a campaign, such as add to cart, initiate checkout, and more. In this case, you’ll want to setup your conversion event as a “purchase.”

Once your ads have had some time to run, take a look at the ones that have garnered the most conversions. You should be able to notice certain trends for what’s working and what’s not. When creating new ads, use your successful ones as a starting point-you should still aim for improvement, so feel free to keep making changes.

3. Sometimes, Great Ads Don’t Last Forever

Great ads don’t happen overnight. Even once you’ve had a couple of successful ads, you may not be able to reproduce them quite as easily as you might think. The really tough part is when an ad that’s been doing really well will suddenly start to choke. What’s with that? You didn’t make any changes, so what’s changed?

There’s another metric on Facebook’s Ad Manager that you should pay attention to: frequency score. This metric tells you the average amount of times that an individual sees your ads. So, the higher this number is, the more likely that people are going to grow tired of your ads (also known as ad fatigue).

To avoid ad fatigue, you’ll need to make sure that you have a good rotation of ads. You don’t want to allow the same one to run for too long-even if it’s doing well. Generally, you’ll want to keep this number under four. And, if you notice an ad’s performance start to dwindle, switch it off for a while.

Oh, and one bonus tip: make sure to exclude users who have already converted.

Final Takeaways

There, that wasn’t so bad, was it? Now, I’m not going to make any too-good-to-be-true, “diet pill” type claims here. But, applying the information outlined in this post will definitely give you a better grasp of how you can steer your campaigns in the right direction and avoid some common Facebook ad mistakes.

Just remember: no more vanity metrics, undefined goals, or obnoxiously redundant ads. Now get back out there-you can do this!

The post Three Facebook Ad Tips That’ll Help You Increase Conversions appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Once they’re up, how do you make the most of them though? How do you draw users back to your page again and again? How do you use social media to draw in all those new leads you’ve been hearing about, or to turn new client into a faithful customer?

In this great article, we take a look at 7 strategies to point your brand’s Facebook page in the right direction. Social media can be the powerful tool for your business everyone says it can be. You just have to work for it if you’d like it to work for you.

Image Source: Homepage of Facebook.com via Shutterstock.

Facebook pages are one of the most powerful tools for attracting potential clients and involving your regular customers in constant collaboration. It gives every brand an opportunity to augment the target audience and significantly raise business reputation as well as profits. Creating a Facebook page isn’t enough for desired results though – it takes work.

Below I’ll share some tips you should stick to if you really want your brand Facebook page to work for you. These strategies help you set up an engaging Facebook page and use it effectively.

1. Design Your Page in a Unique Manner

Brand Facebook pages start with a profile picture. Deal with it.

Profile picture catches the eye from first sight and makes a potential visitor come and see what’s inside. Take into account that using your company logo makes a rather primitive profile picture. Instead, come up with something special. If you can’t create it yourself better ask professional designer to do it. Remember that it’s all about your company image.

Moreover, when visitors start browsing your page they’re likely to find something exclusive there as well. This means the Facebook page of a popular brand must not be just white-and-blue.

Fortunately, you can make use of custom design services without professional help by using one of the ready-made Facebook page templates. Use one that fits your purposes and design preferences. For example, your business Facebook page may look like this:

2. Share Relevant and Catchy Content

Every social media online presence should provide interesting content for its fans and readers. On Facebook this is even more important, especially on a brand page.

You must share the latest news, let your fans know about every event and novelty, and publish content relating to your business. Your task is to make the users return to your page because those who return are 90% paying customers, and those regular customers who return are likely to continue using your products and services.

To do this you must offer something that will captivate users. Particularly, quality and relevant content. You can make use of Google Blog Search, Google Reader or Google News in order to find some interesting piece of information to engage visitors to your brand Facebook page.

3. Use Applications to Make Your Page More Engaging

Facebook provides more than 55 thousand applications. Among them you can find the most appropriate ones to integrate in your page.

You must not underestimate the part applications can play in your brand Facebook page promotion and growth, as particularly these elements may be of a great value. For example, you might offer your visitors dynamic games, quizzes and other interactive content. This will let you win their attention at once. Applications serve as a call-to-action many users can’t help but get involved in and then they stay on your page longer, often even inviting other users to join. Thus your mission to engage users will be successful!

You might like to try these resources:
Top 10 Facebook Apps for Fan Engagement and Building Community →
Top Facebook Apps for Business →

4. Take Part in Conversation

Creating a Facebook page for your brand makes your company a conversation participant. A major Facebook user.

That’s why you must not stay aside, but take part in every discussion which takes place on your page. For example, if someone leaves comment on an entry, photo or video on your page you must reply to it somehow.

Remember that it doesn’t matter whether you run a small business or a huge corporation. You must talk to your customers. You must reply to questions in a timely manner, showing the quality of your services and how helpful and user-friendly you can be.

Sometimes it is even not necessary to wait until the users ask you a question. You can initiate conversation. Don’t be afraid and shy to ask your clients about your services or products quality. Ask them what changes might improve your work in their opinion. Ask about particular products and any other thing related to your business estimation.

Talk to your clients and they may become your regular customers in return.

5. Repost Information

Image Source: Black keyboard with Blue Like via Shutterstock.

What does this mean? Nothing more or less than simple reposting of useful information. Something like a retweet for Facebook.

Why is it important to share information this way? Because this way you show clients your appreciation and after it they may pay more attention to your brand. Reposting the content that other users publish has a great value for your brand Facebook page and business development in general.

Don’t over-do it. Reposting is significantly important, but only when it’s something relevant and not too obtrusive. Repost only the content which is related to your business and can be interesting for other users which are your brand Facebook page fans. Your page will attract attention by the quality of your publications, not the quantity.

6. Stay Active Regularly

Your brand Facebook page must be updated on the regular basis.

This means both new content sharing and checking your private messages and comment section and replying quickly to your customers. For example, if someone asked you a question and you replied a whole week later it’s impolite, so don’t count on getting much attention from that visitor next time.

One of your activity aspects implies some contest organization. For example, ask your customers to invent a motto for your brand and reward a winner. Your clients will be involved and you’ll receive lots of attention.

Also don’t forget to congratulate your clients on major holidays and you can even offer some discounts and specials.

7. Don’t Let Users Post on Your Wall

Though you need to talk to your fans, you must not let them post to your brands wall.

This is because you cann’t control the publications users can make. Not allowing them to post to your wall avoids spam messages which other users would rather not see. Communicate with your customers privately or in discussions. Leave nothing without attention.

You must control your wall and provide your page fans with reliable content. That’s why it’s better not to let new visitors post to your wall, and leave content that may spoil your reputation.

There you have it. Simple but critical strategies we recommend you must stick to in order to make your company Facebook page popular and profitable. Don’t be too lazy to work on your page, if you want it to work for you in future!

The post 7 Winning Facebook Page Strategies Every Company Should Know appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.