Social media marketing on Facebook is on the rise. Despite pretty much being the birthplace of social media marketing, Facebook has retained its spot as a top contender, with more daily visitors than any other social media platform.
With over two billion active users, every type of audience is present on Facebook. And any business owner would be foolish not to take advantage of the great marketing opportunities the platform provides.
Are you ready to dominate in 2019? Keep reading for five tips to kill it with social media marketing on Facebook next year!
1. Match your marketing strategy to your overarching business goals
The possibilities are endless when it comes to social media marketing on Facebook. It can be easy to get lost or overwhelmed. So the best way to start when forming your social media marketing strategy is to align it with your business goals.
It’s best to keep your goals as specific as possible. Here are a couple of examples on how to effectively match your business goals with Facebook marketing strategies:
- If you have a new business and your goal is to increase brand awareness, consider growing your Facebook followers through page like ads. You should also engage with your audience through the use of frequent, high quality posts. You can boost posts to encourage more engagement and measure results using specific benchmarks. It may be something like a goal of 300 new followers per month or a minimum of ten likes per post.
- If your goal is to promote attendance at a specific event, consider boosting a Facebook event page. Maintain a specific goal for how many attendees you would like and how much you are willing to pay in advertising for each new attendee.
- If your goal is simply to increase profit for your ecommerce store, a conversion campaign on Facebook Ads Manager would be best for you. Be sure to track your cost per conversion and ROI.
If you’re not sure where to start, ask yourself the following questions:
- Do you want a short term or long term strategy?
- How can you improve your business from where it was last year?
- What can you do to make your business more attractive than your competitors?
The answers to these questions can help you determine your call to action and form relevant goals for social media marketing on Facebook.
2. Invest wisely
Anyone with a Facebook business page has probably noticed the steady decline in organic reach over the past couple of years. Currently, posts from Facebook business pages are often only seen by 1-2% of their followers unless they are boosted.
There’s no point in putting all your hard work into killer Facebook posts if no one will even see them.
As Facebook becomes increasingly more of a “pay to play” platform, it is becoming more and more necessary to invest your money wisely if you want your business to succeed.
An advertising budget is a necessity to succeed with social media marketing on Facebook. But you could be wasting a lot of money if you’re not careful about how you use your Facebook budget.
For example, there is no sense in spending $10 to boost every post you make to an audience of 100 followers. It is wise to grow your followers through the use of page like ads and posts boosted to external audiences before you begin putting money behind posts boosted towards your followers.
Generating followers with page like ads and engagement with boosted posts can be done with a relatively low budget. However, ads geared towards generating sales and leads tend to require more money to be effective, especially in highly competitive industries.
When it comes to conversion ads, you have to be willing to spend money to make money.
Of course the end goal is to ensure the profits outweigh the costs to get a positive return on ad spend. But sometimes new campaigns have to start off in the red during the initial stages of the optimization process. Then work towards the break even point, and ultimately, profit.
Don’t worry if positive ROI does not happen immediately in the Facebook advertising process. Sometimes it takes months of A/B split testing to find the right message and the right audience! But once your campaign has been fully optimized, Facebook can be an amazing resource for generating sales at a relatively low cost!
If your Facebook ads are not performing as well as you would like them to, it may be time to call in an expert. Our experienced advertising specialists have the knowledge and skill it takes to execute an effective, results-driven Facebook advertising plan.
3. Use analytics and learn from them
It can be easy to get lost when it comes to social media marketing on Facebook. The good news is, there are a lot of built-in road maps to help you succeed!
There are a lot of generic statistics out there making broad claims like Wednesday and Thursday being the best days to post on Facebook. These stats can be a great starting place. But every business is different, and falling for generic rules of thumb can be detrimental.
Using social analytics to your favor can ensure that you optimize your social media marketing strategy based on what is best for your particular business.
For example, it’s commonly known that the best times of day to post for maximize engagement are:
- Mornings when people first wake up
- Afternoons when people take their lunch breaks
- Evenings when people get off work
That being said, that rule does not work for
all businesses. What if you are located in the U.S. but the majority of your followers and customers are in Asia? You would have to adapt your posting strategy to account for the times when your specific target audience is most likely to be active online.
Similarly, if your target audience is retail workers or security guards, they might have a totally different workday from the average office worker.
By testing out many different posting times and days and analyzing which posts receive the most engagement, you can get a better idea of what posting schedule works best for your business.
This goes for more than just days and times to post. You should also pay attention to the types of posts your followers interact with the most.
Do they respond well to posts that ask open-ended questions?
What about article shares or giveaways?
Pay attention to every detail of the posts that receive the most engagement and see how you can adapt future posts accordingly.
For example, if posts with images of people in them outperform posts with landscapes, focus on more lifestyle photos with people. Likewise, if you notice article shares from certain websites get a lot of likes and comments, consider sharing more content from the same source in the future.
According to this customer focus marketing article
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2019/06/customer-focus.html Facebook ads should also be optimized based on analytics. Facebook Ads Manager makes it easy to track data and adjust your ads accordingly. Some important metrics to look at include cost per conversion, relevancy scores, and cost per click.
You should also pay close attention to the difference between an ad’s reach and number of impressions. If the impressions become over three times the reach, it may be time to refresh your ads or expand your audience.
Facebook ads manager also offers much more in-depth analytics to help you optimize your Facebook ads based on the demographics most of your results come from. These demographics include everything from age groups and genders to the devices and operating systems people who engage with your ads are clicking from.
