6 Tips to Help You Boost Your Facebook Marketing Game
You may not know a whole lot about marketing, but I bet you’ve heard of Facebook.
In fact, you probably have a personal profile there, if not one for your business. It’s the most visited social media network in the world—businesses just like yours are finding success marketing themselves on Facebook through paid advertisements or their own active pages.
However, there are right and wrong ways to market on Facebook.
Facebook ads manager interface
This article will give you six actionable pieces of advice that can serve as solid Facebook marketing tips. Use them at your discretion to build a marketing base for your business on the world’s leading social media network!
Here are the Facebook marketing tips we’ll cover:
Tip 1: Join Relevant Facebook Groups
Tip 3: Less Is More and Timing Is Everything
Tip 4: Learn How to Make and Livestream Videos
Tip 5: Utilize Facebook’s Unique Tools and Analytics
Tip 6: Save Time Through Automation
Tip 1: Join Relevant Facebook Groups
Joining relevant groups gives you access to interested customers who are more likely to read what you post.
Before you even begin your marketing campaign, there’s something simple, quick and free that you need to do: join relevant Facebook groups.
Whatever goods or services your business provides, there’s almost certainly a Facebook group dedicated to that thing as well as to local businesses in your geographical region.
A minimal amount of research should provide you with a plethora of groups like these which will be relevant to you and your customers.
An example search of Facebook groups (with the search term chosen completely at random without any bearing upon my own personal interests/obsessions)
Joining these groups will allow you to interact with your specific customer base, according to Joe Delbridge, the CEO of GeekSmash (an internet marketing firm focusing primarily on geek industry companies). You will be able to “see what they need and want, and drive traffic back to your website.”
Jeffrey Hensel, marketing director at North Coast Financial, further advises that once you join these groups you should “share your most valuable content (with eye-catching images) with the group. Make sure to only post content which the group members will find helpful. Posting content that is perceived as solely promotional will have a negative effect.”
Tip 2: Post Unique Content
Your posts should focus less on trying to sell something and more on providing consistent customer service and offering engaging content.
Nobody signs into Facebook in order to be sold things, so you need to appeal to your potential clientele through means other than the hard sell. One way to do this is to focus on customer service.
According to Betsy McLeod, a social media lead at small business digital marketing agency Blue Corona:
“Social media is the next platform for customer service. What this means is you need to be vigilantly watching for people commenting or leaving posts on your page, responding to reviews and engaging with people that have posted on your page or indicated they like your posts.”
Betsy McLeod, social media lead, Blue Corona
McLeod further notes that your posts should be “visible, memorable and entertaining/relevant in order to provide value.”
The kinds of posts you should be sharing include:
Easily digestible facts (often in the form of shareable infographics)
Behind-the-scenes photos (to humanize and describe the company)
Braggable posts (including charity and donations, client testimonials, and positive feedback from manufacturing partners)
Short videos (to reach a broader audience)
Mike Allton, a content marketing practitioner at The Social Media Hat, advises that sharing only images or video, instead of text and links, can help you reach ten times as many viewers: “If you want to share a link to an article, just make sure that you upload an image and include the link in the text description.”
Tip 3: Less Is More and Timing Is Everything
Don’t over-post, and make sure you’re posting at a time of day when people will read what you write.
When posting to Facebook, it’s equally important to consider the amount and the timing of your posts as it is to fret over their content. You don’t want to overload your Facebook followers with too many posts, nor do you want to publish them in the middle of the night when nobody’s awake.
According to Allison Baker, social media and marketing coordinator at H2O Media Inc, you should, “Post at least once a day, but no more than three times. Your followers don’t want to feel bombarded.”
Note how Software Advice’s Facebook postings come staggered many hours apart
Danyal Effendi, digital marketing team lead at PureVPN, points out that the majority of the posts you’ll be competing with (posts from users’ friends, celebrities, brands etc.) are posted during the workday. Set your own posts to go live during “non-peak but effective hours.”
As Effendi explains, “The non-peak time strategy is tried and tested by many professionals and results show a 25 percent increase in engagement if the post is published around 7a.m. and 11p.m., i.e. one hour before and after the peak time.”
Tip 4: Learn How to Make and Livestream Videos
Videos and livestreams are the most popular formats on Facebook right now, so learn how to do them right.
Simply posting a little bit of text and a link to your site isn’t enough to capture people’s attention on social media anymore. The biggest trend in Facebook marketing right now is posting video content. Justin Kerbey, managing partner at Cave Social, highlights just how important it is to get comfortable creating video posts:
Video on Facebook accounts for just 0.9 percent of all posts. . . . [T]hese same 0.9 percent of posts account for 7.15 percent of all reach on the network. And that number is growing.
Justin Kerbey, managing partner, Cave Social
Even simpler than shooting videos, and perhaps more effective, is one of Facebook’s newest and hottest features: livestreaming, or “going live.” Leon Sun, the owner of SocialLia, points out that “Facebook Live offers a user friendly platform that makes producing content like product briefings, tours, tutorials, launch events and more easier than ever.”
A snippet from a Facebook Live video of Jimmy Fallon warming up the crowd for The Tonight Show
By live-streaming branded events, you can create accessible, instantaneous content that will allow your followers to feel like they have a more direct relationship with you.
Tip 5: Utilize Facebook’s Unique Tools and Analytics
If you use Facebook advertising, take advantage of the advanced set of tools the platform will give you to tailor your advertisements and analyze their success.
If you choose to pay for ads that will appear on customer’s Facebook feeds, you’ll be given access to a variety of useful tools and measurable analytics provided by the platform itself.
These tools can give you vital information you might be surprised by.
As Beth Brodovsky, president of Iris Creative Group, Inc., explains, “Often, the age, gender or other demographic of the people who sign up for your offer is different than your general fan base. This information can be used to create better targeted ads and help you focus your language and marketing throughout your business.”
Brandon Ackroyd, the founder of TigerMobiles.com, notes that you can create these targeted ads using one of Facebook’s own features. With “Facebook Advertising Pixel + Custom Audience,” you can track visitors to your website and “retarget” them with specific ads that will appear on their Facebook feed.
Facebook ads can be customized for a variety of audiences, including:
People who have visited your site in the past 24 hours
People who have visited your site in the past 180 days but haven’t been back in 30 days
People who have visited a specific page on your site
People who have visited a specific page on your site but not another specific page
People who have purchased from you
People who have made it all the way to cart but did not convert
When you pay for Facebook ad placements, wide-ranging insights become available. Be sure to spend some time exploring all that’s available to you if you decide to go the paid route.
Tip 6: Save Time Through Automation
Finding the right marketing automation software will make all of your Facebook marketing efforts easier.
Facebook itself isn’t the only place to go to find tools that will make your job easier when marketing on the social network. Plenty of outside software will integrate with both Facebook and your larger customer relationship management (CRM) system in order to automate your marketing efforts.
Marketing automation (MA) software, especially social media marketing tools, can help you with Facebook marketing, as well as with the rest of your marketing campaigns.
These tools will help you publish your content, locate conversations where you might promote your brand and measure the relative success of your various campaigns.
They provide useful templates, can set automated alerts for certain key terms on social media, and give you analytic tools to see what kinds of a response your posts are getting.
The “Conversations” deck on social media manager Hootsuite
However, while Alayna Frankenberry, manager of content strategy for BlueSky ETO, recommends Hootsuite, Hubspot and Buffer as great go-tos for scheduling posts, she nonetheless issues a warning. Be sure to strike a balance between a human’s touch guiding your brand values and goals and the time savings that MA tools will provide.
As a final takeaway, here’s a handy checklist highlighting the biggest points from each of our six main tips!
Facebook Marketing Checklist
Follow these steps to create a successful Facebook marketing campaign that will boost your business!
](https://software-advice.imgix.net/wordpress/other_pages/marketing/Facebook-Marketing-Checklist.pdf)
Email me at andrewfriedenthal@softwareadvice.com if you’d like more information. I’m happy to help you figure out what your own marketing (and marketing software) needs might be and connect you to one of our expert software advisors for a free, no-obligation consultation!