While social networks like Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter have gained immense popularity over the recent years with both younger and older audiences, Facebook still dominates the social media landscape.
With an astonishing 2 billion monthly active users, there’s no wonder as to how it is the largest social media network today. Thus, businesses and organizations on Facebook are able to tap in and reach a mass of people like never before.
The opportunities businesses have on Facebook are endless. Brands can effectively generate sales, drive engagement, build brand awareness, increase website traffic, and boost conversion.
Are you not seeing an increase in ROI and not getting desired results from your Facebook marketing efforts? No worries… Whether you’re a seasoned Facebook marketer or a rookie, these tips are surefire ways to ensure you get the most out of your efforts.
1. The Basics
First of all, ensure that your company’s page is a business page and not a personal one. This makes a huge difference in getting special access to specific tools for businesses and organizations. You can choose among these different page types:
Edit your “About” section to briefly cover an overview of your brand, any important contact information, and business hours. Also make sure you include an optimal cover photo and profile picture on your page:
Follow the optimal dimensions of profile and cover photos:
For your profile picture:
- 170×170 pixels on computers
- 128×128 pixels on smartphones
- 36×36 pixels on most feature phones
For your cover photo:
- 820 pixels wide x 312 pixels tall on computers
- 640 pixels wide x 360 pixels tall on smartphones
- Does not display on feature phones
- Needs to be at least 399 pixels wide and 150 pixels tall
To make your Facebook page more easily searchable, edit your URL to include your company name. This will make your URL go from one like facebook.com/pages/1623824 to facebook.com/xyzcompany
2. Start with a Solid Strategy
It’s crucial to have a social media presence but it’s even more important to ensure that your presence is active and valuable. This involves creating a strategy that makes your brand relevant and engaging on Facebook.
Every good marketing campaign starts with a good strategy and set goals. Before you start posting any content or running ads on Facebook, define your objectives and key metrics you plan to measure. With clear-cut goals in place, you will be on the right path of implementing an effective strategy.
Give yourself some room to test out different approaches when you first start marketing on Facebook. If you have a team, ensure that all goals and objectives are clearly understood by everyone.
A solid and well-defined Facebook strategy is your roadmap for successful results. By implementing a carefully planned strategy when approaching Facebook advertising, you can see results that are unparalleled by any other digital advertising platform.
3. Take Advantage of Facebook Advertising
FTo get the most out of your Facebook marketing, you should attempt an organic and paid approach. Facebook’s advertising platform takes being able to reach new audiences to a whole new level. Instead of wasting ad spend on channels that don’t bring in much revenue, use it toward targeting users on Facebook.
You’re able to reach and target a wide audience and hone in on a specific one based on certain demographics. You can build highly customizable audiences based on location, age, gender, income, interests, education along with lookalikes from your custom audiences. You can customize your advertising strategy by choosing to run ads on desktop or mobile.
Use Facebook advertising as additional way to boost your organic posts. If you see an organic post has performed well, boost it with an ad.
4. Create Buzzworthy Content
Content still remains king and when it comes to content on Facebook – quality trumps quantity. You can spam your page and audience with endless posts but if they aren’t high-quality, they essentially have no value.
Facebook’s algorithms have a unique and sophisticated way of gauging the quality of posts through engagement and will filter out one that are of poor quality. It will recognize pages and posts that receive a lot of engagement and will push your posts to reach more people if they get a lot of love.
Social media is all about cutting through the noise and capturing your audience’s attentions. You want to create content that’s highly shareable and compelling enough to catch people’s attention. Remember that you’re competing against a sea of content. From a quirky cooking video to Grandma’s first status update, you’re going against a lot of other content.
Optimize your content for shares to drive engagement. It has to be a thumb-stopper – something that will make users stop scrolling when they come across your post.
A great example of quality content is media company Blossom and how they managed to create the most shared
video on Facebook:
With over 300 million views and almost 12 million shares, they made this organizing hack video into the most shared video. This is a great example of shareable content – something that’s quick and to the point. It’s also super educational and entertaining for those who need a little bit of DIY cleaning hacks in their lives!
5. Use Compelling Visual Content
The rule of thumb for high-quality content goes for visual content as well. But unlike text, images, videos, and other visual content performs significantly higher.
Video is one of the most compelling forms of content and something Facebook highly encourages for businesses. 4x as many consumers would prefer to watch video about a product than read about it. Live video is especially engaging in that users spend 3x more time watching live videos than traditional ones and get a boost in Facebook’s algorithm.
Make sure to post compelling visual content on your page and especially when running ads. Including various images like screenshots and infographics, and videos can help your post drive engagement and key metrics.
6. Don’t Overdo Your CTA
People hate being sold to and the last thing they’re on Facebook for is hardcore sales pitches. They’re on there for entertainment so it’s important your brand isn’t too aggressive with your call to action. If you constantly shove your CTA or promos in your audience’s face, they’ll disregard it and possibly ignore any future posts from you.
Rather immerse your audience in such great content, they’ll hardly notice your CTA and if your posts are really that great, they’ll go looking for more information on your brand! Build a good mixture of content that combines promotional posts with content that is entertaining and interesting.
7. Track Results
Take advantage of Facebook’s sophisticated analytics tools like Page Insights to gauge the performance of your marketing campaign.
Monitoring your efforts is just as important as creating a strategic plan. If you aren’t watching how your strategy is performing, you won’t know which parts of it are successful or not. By having a watchful eye, you will see what tactics work best and drive the best results.
8. Post at Optimal Times
While there isn’t just one particular answer to when the best time to post on Facebook is. However Hubspot offers some general best practices to abide by supported by some data:
- Sundays and Saturdays – both draw 32% higher engagement
- Thursdays and Fridays – both draw 18% higher engagement
- 9 a.m.., 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. – 3 p.m. will drive the most clicks while 1 P.M. will drive the most shares
The most optimal times to post differ between businesses so you have to find what works best for you. This is where tracking your performance becomes especially important. You can see which posts reached the most people and got the most engagement to determine what times work best for your content and audience.
9. Engage with Your Audience
Don’t be a brick wall – engage with your audience to create a personal connection that makes them come back. People appreciate being recognized by brands so make yours stand out from the rest of the crowd by having exceptional conversation and engagement!
Keep in mind that Facebook rewards posts with high engagement. When people leave a comment on your posts, respond to comments to let them know they’ve been heard. If you don’t want to respond back with a comment, you can like their comment. Engaging with users and establishing personal connections is particularly important for brands starting off on Facebook.
Conclusion
The king of all social media networks is Facebook and by implementing these basic tips to help boost engagement and reach, you will see an increase in ROI. These are tips that are applicable to your organic and paid marketing efforts on Facebook.
Facebook is a gold mine for marketers and brands as it present brands with the opportunity to bring in significant return over a short period of time. Make the most of your time and effort by optimizing your Facebook marketing strategy to get the best results.
Unlock the true powers of Facebook today by using these tips to enhance your marketing strategy!