Powerful Facebook Marketing Tips

There are a few basics to understand before getting started. These might be obvious to some, but to others who are just starting out these are very important.

First, you’ll need to have a personal Facebook page/account. Having a personal account will allow you to create a business page for your company. A business page will allow you to grant other employees access to make posts and respond to comments and messages. It will also allow you to create advertisements, analyze traffic to your page, and much more.
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Once you are set up with your account you are ready to start posting and engaging with others! Here are few things you’ll want to keep in mind when posting:

Use High Quality Photos 

• Facebook and Instagram are both highly visual social outlets. Be sure you are including eye catching, high quality images in your posts. You might consider hiring a local photographer to spend and hour or two with you at your business, a local coffee shop, or wherever compliments your brand so you can create a little stock pile of images for your use. If you do this, try to plan out some props and poses ahead of time and ways you’d like to use your photos so you aren’t left saying, “I wish I would have gotten a picture of this…” You may also want to check out a stock photo site like Pexels.com. This is a spot where photographers submit their photos for public use – so no need to worry about copy right, and the photos are free to download.

When posting, consider which types of post will get the most engagement.

• Post original content that is relevant to your audience. This may include a quick business update, behind the scenes photos, positive stories about how customers/clients have impacted you and more.
• Post self-promotional content approximately 10% of the time. Facebook is a social site and likes to put their focus and emphasis on that. It may not seem like that lately, but they are going back to their roots to focus on making Facebook more of an individual and personal experience. So, you’ll want to get customers to engage with your other posts so you stay relevant in their feeds. You can sneak in a promotional post about a service or upcoming sale when you need to, but you won’t want this to be your focus.  As a business, your focus should be on creating a connection and familiarity with your audience and bringing them value.
• Keep content varied. Mix it up with questions, business updates, sales, helpful tips, contests, etc. This will help keep your audience engaged.
• Share user-generated content. User-generated content are posts that your customers are sharing about interactions with your brand or product. This is some of the best marketing you can do; sharing posts that happy customers have shared themselves without prompting will speak volumes to potential customers about your quality of work!
• If you are sharing a link, be sure to remove the URL link from your post. Once you have written what you want to post, simply paste in the URL you want to share and Facebook will automatically create a clickable image and link. Once Facebook does this, delete the URL you just put in and you are good to go! This will give you a more professional and polished look.
  

Format Your Posts Appropriately

• Facebook is a crowded place. Make sure your posts are easy to read and stand out. For the most part, short and simple wins the race, but if you do have a longer post you can utilize paragraph spacing to make it easier to read and digest.
• Posts paired with high quality photos are drastically more likely to be seen. Like we mentioned above, Facebook is highly visible. Give your customers something nice to catch their eye and they’ll want to hear what you have to say.
  

Schedule your posts ahead of time through Facebook.

• Facebook favors posts created and shared through Facebook – go figure, right? Studies have shown that the use of third party scheduling sites like Hootesuite have negative effects on posts. Luckily, it is very easy to schedule your own posts right on Facebook. They’ve changed the way to do this slightly recently, but currently all you need to do is write your post, then instead of hitting “publish” use the small drop down arrow and select “schedule.” It will then allow you to choose a date and time and you can do this for several posts at a time!
• Facebook does not like links that take traffic away from their sight. So, be mindful of the frequency you do this. You can link videos that play right through Facebook – but this is more difficult to do with things like websites and blog posts.

Use Facebook Page Insight to analyze content, engagement, traffic, and your audience.

• Analyze things like page likes, post reach, and engagement to recognize growth or areas of improvement. Engagement measures the total number of unique people who engaged with your page and posts.
• Know that timing matters. Facebook allows you to analyze what time your followers are online each day of the week. In addition to analyzing times and engagement, you can also see who your audience is made up of. Facebook will break down demographics like age, gender, and location for you.
• Lastly, you can evaluate how your post did organically and through paid content/ads. See below for more information!

Utilize Facebook Ads

• Setting aside a small amount each month to boost posts that are performing well or for posts that you’d like to increase audience reach with can help spread your word to many more people. Even if you are setting aside $10-20 this can help your content to reach more people. You will need a credit card on file to do this.
• Facebook allows you to set a certain spending limit, promotion length (1 day, weeks, you name it), and it lets you target specific audiences. For example, you may only want to spend $15 on an ad that will run for 7 days and target people ages 25-65 within 50 miles of your city; you can do that!
• Making your post more targeted will help make sure you are reaching the right people. You can target by location, interest, age, gender, and more. But, you’ll want to make sure you aren’t creating an audience that is too narrow so you are still reaching people.

Engage with Others!

• Simply put, treat others as you would like to be treated. Go to their business pages and interact with their posts. When you are mindlessly scrolling through your newsfeed, take a minute to comment and lift up another friend, entrepreneur, stranger, or whoever will listen! These people will love that you are engaging with them and other people who are commenting on the same thing will see you comments and are more likely click on your business page too! Win win!