More than 40% of U.S. business use Facebook as part of their marketing strategy. While these business owners continue to market through Facebook, statistics indicate that, regardless of whether they’re advertising pet care services, food, online casino or any other type of product or service, they don’t see that FB is as effective as they had hoped. In fact, only 45% of survey respondents felt that Facebook marketing was working for them.
Marketers point out that the business’ marketing team needs to understand on which practices and strategies they should focus when marketing through Facebook. The best practices is broken down into 7 main components:
- Optimizing the business’s Facebook Page for likes and SEO.
- Using Facebook groups effectively to engage with the target market.
- Encouraging social sharing via Facebook’s plugins and buttons.
- Getting your posts seen.
- Optimizing FB ads.
Optimizing your Page
Via your personal PROFILE you can build your business PAGE. The page is the FB site where your customers and prospects should be able to find you when they search through their FB account.
You should make your Page as easy to navigate and informative as possible so once a potential client finds that PAGE he’ll get the information that he needs to proceed to the check-out. To do this you’ll need to
- Choose the username carefully. This is the FB webpage for your Business Page but it will indicate to your potential clients who you are and what you do.
- Pick your keywords carefully. In the “About” section you need to use keywords that will drive searchers to your page. Those keywords need to be in the “Keyword” section as well. Add your home website to your About Section to drive traffic to your site.
- Set your category accurately – again, this will help drive traffic to the site.
- Add in the best photos that you have. Make sure that your cover photo is your best and is the required size for maximum effect (your profile photo should be 160×160 pixels and cover photo should be 851×315 pixels).
- Change your pinned post regularly to generate more interest and show your Page visitors fresh content
Interact with FB Groups
Join FB groups where your potential clientele might be hanging out to reach your target audience. You’ll establish yourself as an authority by posting useful advice and tips and, when people search for your product or service, other group members will suggest you. You’ll get exposure in exactly the niche that you want.
Social Sharing
You want to keep your Facebook Page and your website working together so that traffic is funneled from your FB Business Page to your website. The best way to do that is to ensure that people who see your site will be able to share the content.
Make sure that the Like and Share buttons are functional on your posts (you can look up how to make that happen in Facebook’s FAQs).
Getting Your Posts Seen By More Of Your Fans
You should post on Facebook at least once a day. It can be a tip, something funny that happened to you or a new event or offer. Your promotional posts should be kept to a minimum – only one out of every 8 posts should be promotional.
There’s no firm evidence about the best time to post but it seems that posts that appear in the early afternoon, and on weekends, have the best chance of being seen by the largest numbers of people. You can schedule your posts so even if you won’t be next to the computer at the time that you want to post, your post can go up at the time and on the day that you wish.
The more likes and shares you get the more likely that those people will see your future posts. And, obviously, if a person likes or shares your post, their FB contacts will also see that post. Basically, the more popular your posts are, the more they’ll appear in users’ feeds and the more chances you’ll have to reach new FB users. You can up your chances of making it into users’ feeds by
- Using images and videos. Posts with videos draw the largest number of users, significantly over-reaching text-only posts.
- Make sure that even your promotional posts contain valuable and relevant content. Facebook limits the reach of posts that are found to be “too promotional” – so if your posts contain more useful information, it’s more likely that they’ll be seen by more people.
Facebook Ads
Facebook makes its money through its paid ads. That means that hundreds of thousands of business owners have found that it pays to market through the paid ads. Yet not all of these business owners are fully optimizing the paid options.
You can use the paid ads to extend the reach of your page posts by
- Boosting a post
- Promoting a post
- Paying for an Ad
Boosting a post increases the post’s visibility in users’ newsfeeds. You can target your boosts to include people of specific age groups, genders, location, interests, etc.
Promoting a post takes place through the FB ads manager. The promotion tool gives you more targeting and budgeting options than boosting but it’s a little more complicated to set those parameters. It’s suggested that you promote a post when you want to meet a specific goal such as selling a product or driving traffic to your website.
You can take out an ad to promote your page or send people to your website. You can make an offer through your FB Page and then take out an ad to market that offer.
Some FB ads best practices include:
- Target your audience carefully so that you spend your marketing budget on the population that’s most likely to buy from you.
- Change your ad on a regular basis. No one is going to click on an ad that’s appeared on their newsfeed day after day, week after week.
