Is your business on Facebook but nobody seems to know you or care that you are there?
Visibility on Facebook is about time, money, and playing the game.
Where do you start and how should you spend your time on Facebook?
Research is your first, second, third, and….. step in creating a successful Facebook marketing campaign. Research should be done before, during, and after any marketing campaign and yet most businesses don’t include it in their marketing timeline.
See also: 4 Reasons to make your Small Business Social Media Savvy
What do you research?
- Target Audience
- Competition
- Industry Leaders
- Popular Facebook pages and content
Target Audience
We don’t like the phrase “target audience” because it denotes a one-way interaction, businesses targeting and talking at people, but for expediency sake we will use it here. You should actually be thinking of your target audience as a community, and your goal is to get that community to like, trust, and interact with you on a daily basis.
In order to connect with your community you need to know what they like, don’t like, and the best time to reach them. It is like dating, the more you show true interest in the other person the more likely you are to build a long lasting connection. If all you want is a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, then throw out your best game, knowing that it will be a short, costly interlude. You will get some quickie interactions, but they won’t last and the cost to keep going after a quickie is high.
To research what a targeted community likes, we look at pages that are similar in content to ours, we look at pages that are not in our industry but interest our target, and we look at behavior on other networks like Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
In our research we also look at demographic saturation and topic interest in Facebook’s ad platform. We do mock ads and start selecting our demographic based on age, gender, location, and interest and we see what the numbers look like.
See also: Facebook Buys LiveRail To Boost Video Ad Business
Facebook Marketing Development & Testing
A Facebook business page is a canvas for us, a blank white wall that we can paint our masterpiece on. When someone scrolls down one of our Facebook business pages I want that person to be drawn in. I want people to lose track of time because they can’t stop scrolling, I want them to enlarge the images, click to read more, and keep coming back.
Before we invite anyone to like our page we post for a couple of weeks to get the canvas just the way we want it. We select certain posts to boost in the newsfeed and see what the interaction is. We come up with some broad topic categories that our community will find interesting, inspiring, entertaining, informative, and share-worthy.
Facebook users want to be entertained so it is our job to find a way to entertain them while still keeping business conversion goals in mind. Turning Facebook fans into customers or clients is not a fast process and in some cases is not our upfront goal. A good product or service is sold after we create the interest. Our job is to get and keep people interested so they can be pulled into the sales cycle at some point.
Facebook Strategy Execution
When posting to Facebook we look at personal pages and business pages. For some small businesses or solopreneurs we may recommend that the personal page is the place to focus the majority or your time. We still feel a business page is important but it will not be the quantifiable element of your Facebook strategy, it is used more to own your brand and push targeted content.
Facebook Personal Profile for Business
Using your Facebook personal profile as the primary driver of your Facebook marketing is more about getting face time to create familiarity, furthering your in-person networking, and accelerating the know, like, and trust process. To quantify our efforts we look at how many people engage the posts, talk about your Facebook posts when you see them in person, and contact you through your profile for business purposes.
- Post to your personal profile daily but no more than twice a day
- Facebook Business Page
A Facebook business page should be treated like a community forum; it should be educational, informative, fun, and spark conversation. Forums are more about the community and less about the organizer. When you look at your Facebook business page are you posting content that is you-centric or are you sharing content that your community is interested in? The likes, comments, and shares will answer this question for you.
- Post to your business page 1 – 2 times a day
Facebook changes their algorithm based on user engagement and their own revenue goals. Facebook will show content that entices users to spend more time on the network and from what they have found is that seeing posts and activity from friends and family is what keeps people on Facebook. Because of this and to boost revenue your business page posts are shown to about 6% of your fan base.
To increase the visibility of your posts you will need to boost them. Boosting a post, to use Facebook’s terminology, is to put money behind a post to make it visible to more people. You can boost a post to your fans and their friends or a targeted audience. We recommend boosting it to a targeted audience, because not all of your fans are going to like the same posts, so target it to the demographic it was intended for and you will hit those fans and more.
- We boost 2 – 3 posts a week
- We spend anywhere from $10 – $50 a post
See also: Make the most of Facebook with these Keyboard Shortcuts
Facebook’s Fun Factor
The Facebook experience should be centered around enjoyment, people use Facebook because they enjoy it. They enjoy sharing, searching, stalking, and socializing. For some reason in marketing most businesses do not think about fun, they focus on the end game first which of course is the sale, and because of that the promotions are lack luster and a bit stale.
To be successful on Facebook you need to think fun first, you want to be the most interesting person at the party to attract prospects. You can not fake fun, so if you do not find anything about Facebook marketing and community building fun then pass this piece of your marketing off to someone who does.
Happy Facebooking!
