Social media, and Facebook in particular, ranks among the greatest marketing tools ever devised. More than two billion users are active on the site, including men and women, as well as just about every age and ethnic group. If you’re looking for an audience, in short, you’ll find it here. And Facebook has gone out of its way to make life easy for any business wishing to maintain a presence on the network.
Facebook’s Page Manager offers an impressive depth of customisation – so much depth, in fact, that many SMEs end up drowning in options. It’s worth putting aside an hour or so a week to explore what’s possible, but to begin with, most of us simply want to know where the most important features are, and how we can quickly get the best from them. Here, we’ll look at exactly that.
Make Sure your Page Looks Great
- Set a Profile Picture
- Set a Cover Picture
- Include Contact Information
Your Facebook page is where the site’s users will come when they want to learn more about your business and what it has to offer. It’s critical, therefore, that it be as attractive and relevant as possible. If a user sees any of the placeholder graphics that your page comes with as standard, then the chances are strong that they’ll navigate away.
Your profile picture should be your business’s logo. Your cover photo, however, is what will take up most of the space on your page. It’s an opportunity to present your audience with more information, but too much text crowding the banner can look amateurish. Your online branding is a challenge which extends beyond Facebook; if you don’t have the right look, then consider bringing in a graphic designer who can take care of it for you.
Verifying your page will also lend your business a great deal more credibility. You can apply for verification via your business’s general settings tab.
Make the Right Posts
- Post Consistently
- Use Images
- Make posts Actionable
- Pin Important Posts
- Use a Calendar
To be visible on Facebook, you’ll need to upload the sort of content that people will appreciate. This means images, and often moving images. Even if your message is one that can be conveyed exclusively through text, the addition of a relevant picture, GIF or video will help it to ‘pop’ from a Facebook feed in a way that plain text never could. This has a proven impact on user-engagement.
The content you provide should come in a steady stream. That means regularly-spaced posts that can be digested in a few minutes. This will ensure that you’re kept visible. You can intersperse these posts occasionally with a more high-effort offering. This will keep your audience coming back for more. Particularly important posts can be pinned to the top of your business’s Facebook page, ensuring that new visitors see it first.
The most effective posts are those which contain a Call to Action: that’s a written (or spoken) instruction to do something. This might be to visit your website, to like or share a post, or to comment. When Facebook users are constantly engaging with your content, their activity will show up on other people’s feeds, and thus content that encourages engagement will spread more easily.
Planning new content in advance can help you to keep ideas fresh, and ensure that what you come up with is relevant to the other things appearing in everyone’s feed. A content calendar is a useful planning tool that’ll allow you to keep track of those obscure online occasions like National Book Day, while making it easier to plan high-quality content when business is slow. That way, you won’t have to think about what you’re going to post when things in the office get hectic.
Measure your Success
- Pay attention to the right metrics
- Decide your goals in advance
- Don’t be fooled by vanity metrics
Your approach to Facebook will evolve more or less constantly as you discover more about your customers and what they’re looking for. Changes in your approach to the site should be informed by reliable data – which Facebook provides in abundance.
Click-through-rate (or CTR) is among the more reliable measures of success. The average click-through rate will vary from industry to industry; retailers, for example, will have an easier time attracting clicks than education services.
Another important metric is specific to video, and that’s the number of people who watch more than 50%. This is more reliable than the related ‘three-second’ video view metric. A big difference between the two might mean that your video promised a great deal, but didn’t deliver on those promises.
‘Likes’ are at the other end of the scale. They don’t cost the user much effort to dish out, and therefore they’re not a very accurate reflection of what your customers are really looking for. Metrics of this sort are called ‘vanity’ metrics. It feels good when people ‘like’ your content, but it might not actually result in any substantial return for your business.
Boosting Posts
- Pay a little for the right sort of clicks
- Stipulate a Custom Audience
- Use paid posts to field-test ads
For a price, Facebook will present your posts to a highly-engaged audience. You’ll pay per click-through, meaning that you’ll get a predictable return on the investment. For smaller businesses who don’t have much time to spend devising a marketing strategy, this approach might be a winning one.
Facebook’s Ad service allow the business to create a ‘Custom Audience’, either based on arbitrary characteristics, or visitor data from your site. Using this data, it’s possible to make a ‘Lookalike’ audience, of people who share traits with those who are already engaging with your business.
One use of Facebook ads is quickly field-testing different posts, to see which can draw the most clicks in the shortest amount of time. This information can be passed to the people who are actually composing the posts. In the long-run, this can help ensure that the posts you’re making will be engaged with.