In the world of social media marketing, Facebook is an obvious choice for advertising. Especially in this day and age when more people are working flexible jobs and are able to stay home. Let’s face it – most of us are logged on and checking Facebook daily. This is exactly why Facebook advertising is so competitive. If you skip a few crucial steps, you might not reach your target audience or end up wasting your money.
Fortunately, there are steps that can be taken to achieve success. Most of the basic social media marketing rules apply to Facebook. For example, no matter the algorithm you’re dealing with, people like authenticity. You might be the best at what you do and can tell your audience this until you’re blue in the face, but unfortunately, they still might choose someone else over you. Why? Because your competitor was authentic, relatable, and found a unique way to appeal to their target audience. With this in mind, we’re going to hit on 15 Facebook marketing tips that will help you build a solid foundation for your content and advertising efforts.
Ready?
1. Be Intentional With Your Content
Random posts won’t get you anywhere. Sure, a TGIF post might be briefly relatable for your audience, but it’s not something they’ll remember. In fact, this is a great example of a post that will be forgotten about as soon as they scroll to the next one. You want to make sure you’re posting with intent. Your posts should be aligned with your business goals, be informative, and give the impression that you actually care about your audience. Not only will this strengthen your relationship with your audience, it will grow your audience. Keep in mind that people spend time on things that are meaningful to them, rather than wasting it on content that doesn’t speak to them, educate them, or relate to them. Once you start being intentional with your posts, your brand will stay in the minds of your audience when it comes time to make a buying decision.
2. Refine Your Audience
As tempting as it might be to try and appeal to a widespread audience, the simple truth is that you just won’t. After all, you can’t please everyone. This is why you should take the time to refine your audience to the ones who best meet your buyer persona. You can narrow down who you’re targeting by age, gender, location, and language. After putting in the effort to be more intentional with your posts, make sure relevant people are seeing them.
Fine-tuning your target audience has benefits beyond improved ROI. The more relevant your posts are to your audience, the higher the engagement and the more visibility your posts will get. And for brands trying to get more out of organic content, higher engagement is key.
3. Encourage Comments & Leave Replies
After putting in the extra work to post intentional, creative content targeted at a relevant audience, you’ll want to see some engagement. One of the best Facebook marketing tips we can give is to encourage comments on your posts. If you don’t ask for comments, you may never get them. It could be as simple as “What do you think? Comment your answer below!”
Plus, Facebook’s algorithm loves comments, so your post will get more visibility in the feed of not only the commenters but also those who haven’t commented.
And don’t forget to reward your audience for their engagement! Make sure you reply quickly to their comments in order to build trust and to show the algorithm that you’re active on the platform. While encouraging and engaging in conversation with your audience benefits you from an algorithm standpoint, it also helps to build community and authority for your brand.
4. Optimize Your Posting Schedule
It’s no surprise that it’s best to post to your Facebook page when your audience is most likely to see it. Similar to email marketing which is most effective when emails are sent at times you know your audience is likely to check their email. Otherwise, you risk your posts getting buried by newer posts in the feed. For the best results, test different days and times of the week to find a schedule that works for your specific audience. There isn’t a perfect formula here, especially if you have customers in different time zones for example. As long as you find the times that work for the greatest number of people, or post content that targets different subsets of your audience, you’ll have an optimized posting schedule.
5. Don’t Forget a Call to Action!
After taking the time to create your content, ask yourself what you want your audience to do once they read your posts. This is why adding a CTA to most of your posts can make a huge difference in engagement. We mentioned the importance of encouraging comments and leaving replies earlier, and this tip piggybacks off of that.
The more people you have interacting with your content, the better your posts will perform on Facebook’s algorithm. Adding a CTA is also one of the more effective tips in terms of boosting sales conversion rates. Whether you invite your audience to visit your website and include a link, encourage them to call you, or request their feedback in the comment section, you’ll quickly find an increase in post engagement.
6. Change Up Your Cover Photo
Have you had the same cover photo since you first created your account? It’s easy to forget about – we get it. But you might be surprised how changing things up every so often can actually grab people’s attention. Especially since it shows your audience another way you’re staying active on your page and that you care about what they’re viewing.
A good example of when it makes sense to change your cover photo is with new marketing campaigns or promotions. If you’re running a special on a particular service, highlight that in your cover photo. This does mean you have to get creative, but it’s worth the extra effort to keep your audience engaged.
This is a good example of something a marketing company can easily help with. Utilizing different creative software, we’re able to create personalized images for a variety of applications – including cover photos.
7. Keep Your Images Interesting
And not only interesting but high quality. Again, this is just another way you can show your audience that you care about the impression you’re making. Whether it’s an employee spotlight with a quality headshot, a product overview, or a series of images that reflect the services you provide, quality matters. Again, this is another example of how some people miss the mark on what and how to post. We mentioned avoiding those generic ‘TGIF’ type of posts before. Well, you also don’t want to copy and paste generic photos you found online to your Facebook page. In all honesty, most people scroll right past those because they don’t stand out, aren’t original, and don’t really have anything to do with your brand.
Additionally, if you’re posting low-quality cell phone images all the time, you might turn off some of your viewers since the human eye is naturally drawn to high-quality, colorful, and interesting imagery.
8. Don’t Forget About Native Video
Video is a powerful marketing tool on every social network, especially Facebook. Make sure you’re sharing the most user-friendly video formats on your page. If you aren’t familiar with the term ‘native video’, it’s a type of video advertising that integrates branded messages into your existing content. It’s an in-feed, click-to-play video format making it easy for your audience to view, especially mobile viewers.
If you have videos on YouTube that you want to share on your page, make sure to natively upload them to your Facebook page for best results. That way, you don’t have to wonder whether or not your audience is actually going to click the link to view your video. Native videos perform better on the algorithm and are easier to view on Facebook. Give it a try!
9. Go Live!
Have you tried going live on Facebook? If not, you might want to consider this tip as another means of connecting with your audience and keeping them engaged. Live streaming on Facebook Live is a great way to make an impact on the algorithm and establish a relationship with your audience. Remember, Facebook loves connection, engagement, and community, so any way you can foster these things will help you perform the best. Facebook Live may not be as interactive as other options, but it’s still really popular. For best results, be sure to let your audience know ahead of time when you’ll be going live.
10. Create & Join Facebook Groups
Whether you join a group and engage with others as your Page, or you create your own Page-affiliated group to dive deeper into conversation with your audience, getting involved in Facebook Groups is a great idea! This is just another way you’re getting your name and brand in front of Facebook users and developing relationships. Depending on your industry, you could create a Page for tips and tricks using your products, how-tos, running polls, etc.
For example, let’s say you’re a landscaper. You could create a Page that touches on landscaping and gardening tips, while also getting involved in other relevant groups yourself. The more you initiate and participate in conversation with your audience, the better!
11. Use Facebook Messenger
Facebook Messenger gives businesses the ability to automate communication through Messenger Marketing and is an excellent way to keep in touch and initiate conversation with your audience. Messenger can also be used as a way to provide customer service, extending this tool beyond just a Facebook marketing tip. Take advantage of all the benefits Facebook Messenger has to offer!
12. Start Using Facebook Ads
This is a no-brainer when it comes to Facebook marketing tips. This is also another area where digital marketers come into the picture. Social media advertising is critical in your overall marketing strategy, especially on Facebook.
Facebook Ads lets you pay for advertising by placing sponsored posts in people’s feeds. Using the Ads Manager tool, you can set your target audience to make sure your ads are getting in front of the right people. Once you decide the amount you’re willing to pay, you can upload your ad or boost an organic post. While it sounds simple enough, there are some key things here you don’t want to mess up. Targeting the right audience is especially important.
If you aren’t familiar with Facebook Ads or aren’t sure if you’ve been utilizing it in the best way, don’t hesitate to reach out. This is our specialty, after all, and we’d be happy to get you on the right track with Facebook advertising.
13. Make Sure You’re Re-targeting Users Who View Your Content
Facebook Custom Audiences allows you to pick and choose who you target your ads to. This can include your website visitors, email subscribers, and anyone who has already engaged with your posts. If you know you’ve had a set of users already view your content, you should get more content in front of them. This is a common Facebook marketing technique that is both an excellent and inexpensive way of building a custom audience of people who are starting to know, like, and trust your brand.
14. Keep An Eye on Analytics
Analytics is a facet of any type of marketing that can’t be ignored. For many businesses managing their own Facebook pages and marketing, checking in on their analytics becomes an infrequent thing. Even if you think your ads are performing well, your content is engaging your audience, and everything is going good, you still need to keep an eye on your analytics. There’s an incredible amount of data available to Page owners that can help you improve your page and your posts’ performance.
Staying on top of analytics can be difficult, especially when combining your social media analytics with others like Google and your website. Digital marketers know how to get the most accurate view of analytics and performance, and how to make the necessary adjustments based on those numbers. It’s one of those things you can’t overlook or forget about, so if you think you’d benefit from having a marketing company oversee your analytics, give us a call.
15. Take Advantage of Audience Insights
Audience Insights is another great tool Facebook offers that can help you fine-tune your pitches. The data you get from this tool can help you analyze things like age and gender by city/country to help you better understand your audience and optimize content for them. This tool also shows you which segments of your audience are responding the best to your content and which ones aren’t.
Which Facebook Marketing Tips Are You Going to Implement?
No matter your industry, Facebook marketing should be part of your overall marketing strategy. Facebook is one of the, if not the, most popular social giants in the world, right along with other networks like YouTube and Twitter. With recent changes to Facebook’s analytics data and the overall complexity of the platform, it can be difficult to fine-tune your strategy. However, implementing these tips can help you achieve the best results on the platform. And if you’re ever in doubt or have questions, contact us. We stay on top of the inevitable changes that happen on these platforms and are well-versed in creating social marketing strategies that actually work.
As always, thanks for being here! And if you’d like to talk, click here.