If you are thinking about how to market your business on social media, Facebook is one of the first platforms you should consider since it enables you to have access to a large audience and get your business noticed. It’s not a platform made for personal social networking only; nowadays, many businesses have set up their Facebook profiles to satisfy their marketing objectives and fulfill customer needs more easily and effectively.
Once you’ve made your Facebook business profile for which there are several elements that improve your presence, you need to engage prospects with your contents to convert more of them into customers.
Below tips will help you get the most out of your marketing on Facebook by boosting your page engagement:
1. Optimize content
Avoid using incomprehensible words and expressions that may drive your viewers away. You get more people to read your content if you use clear and simple language even for deep and technical topics. This way, you will cover a broader range of would-be customers for your posts.
Moreover, variate your post types by including quizzes, statistics, infographics, user-generated contents or videos and make a reasonable balance between promotional and non-promotional posts. Make sure there is value is whatever you are sharing. Does it entertain your audience? Is it inspiring? Does it inform or educate them? Think about it and write from your audience’s perspective.
Another point that I should mention here is that it’s wise to use 3 to 5 hashtags per post, not more. Hashtags will make your post easily discoverable and let people know what it is about; however, it’s not common to stuff your content with hashtags.
2. Answer comments and questions
Show your respect or gratitude by responding to comments. MAC cosmetics is a famous brand for makeup products which is active on Facebook. If you visit their Facebook page, you will notice that it actively replies to its followers’ comments and questions and even sometimes clearly explains the reasons they can’t afford to help such as in below comment.
See how MAC Cosmetics brand replies to comments
As shown in the above photo, a fan from Sri Lanka is asking if they can send her favorite product to their location and MAC thanks her first, expresses regret they can’t ship it there and then shows her the possible solution. I think this cosmetics brand is fully aware that caring for the audience and giving them truthful answers are key elements in growing their customer base worldwide.
There are many more examples of how brands are successfully considering this strategy in their social media marketing to increase their Facebook engagement rate and so their visibility. People always value the attention they get and start to give positive feedback on social networks and as a result, more social proof is produced to gain credibility for your brand. So don’t miss the chance!
3. Use Facebook Insights
Track the performance of your Facebook business presence by consistently checking and evaluating the analytics data provided by this powerful tool: Facebook Insights.
Note that on Facebook there are differences between a profile, a page, and a group. A profile is a personal page in which you showcase your interests, information, photos or videos to your friends and family mainly. A page is dedicated to a brand and business and in which you are free to advertise your activity. This page can only be created by someone who has a personal profile and this point holds true for groups, too. In groups, people can share their opinions and have say freely. Facebook Insights is only available for a page or in other words, for businesses or brands.
This image was taken from http://digitalresources.nz/article/U78aKOj
Facebook Insights analyzes your page based on page likes, post reach, engagement, etc, in the “overview” tab. On the “posts” tab, you can discover when your fans are online and the best time of day to post on Facebook, as well as which days of the week, are perfect for sharing contents. This is crucially valuable if you want your brand to be visible to as many prospects as possible and rise to popularity efficiently.
What is more, you can see the data for each post separately and so find out which types of posts are more appealing to your audience and produce more of them in the future. If there are available data for 100 of your followers or more, Facebook Insights also categorizes them based on gender, location or age. That’s interesting!
With respect to the above piece of information about Facebook Insights, you can see that this tool tremendously helps you analyze all social media metrics and is essential for your Facebook marketing plan.
4. Use Facebook ads or sponsored posts
If you think you are not getting the desired results from your organic activity on Facebook, try using Facebook ads. It’s cheap and will expose your business to exactly your target audience based on the information you give such as location, gender, age, interests, etc. It’s important that you use a brand new catchy image, video or slideshow for your ad that matches your brand’s identity and write your messages in it clearly. What’s interesting is that you can choose where you want your ad to be shown. It can be on feeds or stories of Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger of your target audience or other placements as determined by the Facebook business.
You can also promote a post by boosting it so that it will reach out to more people or drive them to take action by putting a CTA button. The reached level depends on the amount you pay and of course the targets you choose.
This image was taken from https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/
You can see all Facebook ads or sponsored posts in its ads library no matter you are logged in or not and check how pages are advertising their activities using paid promotion approaches. For instance, right now, National Geographic Travel and “Brand Hong Kong” (a program that promotes Hong Kong as “Asia’s world city”) are both having a sponsored post, as shown above, about Hong Kong’s biggest celebrations: The Tin Hau Festival. This boosted piece of content can tremendously attract a large audience to this event in the future and make their traditions be known globally.
5. Get traffic from other social media platforms
While you can use Facebook to drive traffic to your own website or blog posts, other social media platforms can also be used to direct even more people to both. Put their links wherever and whenever they fit.
One of the places you can put URLs is the link in bio on your social media channels. On Instagram you are limited to only one single link in bio and, if you meet certain conditions, on stories but you are not even allowed to use clickable links in captions. iLink helps convert all your desired links into one, no matter how many, and place it on bio to send followers to a multi-link page. This link can also be used in other social networks such as Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest and even on Facebook itself.
Final thoughts
Reach a quality Facebook presence by infusing the above-mentioned tactics into your social media marketing strategy. There is also no harm in diving into how successful brands and businesses are working on Facebook to engage more effectively with their audience and make their posts reach out more to their targets. We would be happy to know about other helpful ways so feel free to share them below with us.