Of all the social media networks, Facebook reigns supreme as one of the most widely used online platforms. With over 2.9 billion active users per month, the platform provides brands and businesses with the opportunity to maximize their online visibility — a key component of any Facebook marketing strategy.
However, one of the hardest parts of implementing a Facebook marketing strategy is simply getting started. In this post, we'll provide you with 5 tips to help get your marketing on Facebook up and running to make your brand successful.
So read on to ensure you’re getting the most out of this powerful social media marketing platform by incorporating these Facebook marketing tips.
Why Is Facebook Marketing Important?
How much does Facebook marketing cost?
5 Facebook Marketing Tips to Include in Your Strategy
Avoid Violating Facebook Page Terms
Conclusion
Why Is Facebook Marketing Important?
To be honest, there is quite a long list of reasons when it comes to answering this question, but two of the biggest include:
- The number of active users on the social media platform. The average Facebook user checks their account multiple times a day.
- Marketing your brand and business on Facebook can truly help you reach new, potential customers. Facebook users exist all over the world—and many of them may not have heard about your brand yet!
It's also very likely that your current customers are spending most of their time on Facebook. In fact, around 80% of all internet users use Facebook on a consistent basis.
Beside's knowing that your ideal customers are likely active users of the platform, the benefit of marketing on Facebook for your business is that the platform offers the opportunity to engage or retarget them, which helps you to boost website traffic and drive sales. There is real potential, and value, for marketing on Facebook.
You might also be surprised to hear that Facebook can be just as powerful for brands wanting to utilize the social media platform for B2B marketing and running successful campaigns. If you thought LinkedIn was the only place that you could achieve this, think again.
In fact, business decision-makers spend 74% more time on Facebook than other people. The B2B space is quite competitive, but maybe B2B marketers could leverage Facebook more to help differentiate their advertising strategy from their competitors'.
How Much Does Facebook Marketing Cost?
To put it simply: marketing on Facebook costs as much as you'd like to spend. You tell Facebook how much you would like to spend to reach or engage a certain audience.
You can run Facebook ads on any budget. The exact cost to have your Facebook ad shown to the audience you want to reach will be determined by how much you are willing to spend to reach that audience.
Facebook goes into greater detail when it comes to their pricing, but you can expect to pay as little as 70 cents to $10 per click in 2021.
The figure above is just an estimation, so you'll probably have to test out a few combinations of targeting features and ad types to figure out what pricing looks like for your industry or audience. Once you know your budget though, then you have a number of options to choose from in regards to how you spend it on Facebook marketing. And if you are not sure if you want to spend $10 or $1,000 a week, Facebook says, "If you're not sure what to bid, we can automatically bid for you with the intent of spending your budget evenly throughout your ad's run time" This can help you determine a baseline or reference point for understanding how many people you reached or how much traffic you received for a certain price.
Facebook Marketing Tip: You also have to keep in mind that when choosing to use Facebook ads as part of your marketing strategy, you are not the only one competing for ad space on the platform. From competitors to other advertisers, there are likely a number of businesses looking to reach a similar target audience to yours. Who gets their ad displayed on the Facebook News Feed depends on your budget and how much you bid on your ads. Again, how much you spend on advertising on Facebook—and how it gets spent—is up to you.
5 Facebook Marketing Tips to Include in Your Strategy
So you have a Facebook Business Page; that's great! But with Facebook being a wildly popular social media platform for individuals and brands alike, you’re going to need a really good Facebook marketing strategy to help your company stand out among the millions of other businesses on Facebook.
While Facebook ads are one of the ways you can reach audiences, you also need to think about the content you are going to post on your Facebook page. When it comes to marketing on Facebook and other social media sites, content truly is king .
Here are the 5 Facebook marketing tips to include in your strategy and strengthen engagement!
1. Set your Facebook marketing goals
The first step to any marketing strategy, especially for social media, is to set—and outline —your goals or objectives. Having a roadmap for you to reference and compare your results against can help you determine whether or not your Facebook marketing strategy is successful. However, in order for you to set realistic marketing goals, you need to do some research first to determine what your Facebook marketing strategy should be.
As Facebook states, some of your marketing goals could include the following:
- Building brand awareness
- Growing online sales
- Generating leads
- Retargeting existing customers
If you don’t have any existing Facebook goals, you can use the ones listed above as a starting point. Or, look at your company's business objectives to see how the goals you've set for your brand could inform your Facebook marketing goals.
2. Understand your Facebook audience
Do you have a clear understanding of your Facebook audience? If not, you might want to take the time to get a breakdown of what your current audience looks like, because this is going to be important to determine the marketing strategy you should use to reach your audience effectively. You can use Facebook Analytics to get a high-level overview of your audience demographics.
Facebook Marketing Tip: If you want to better understand your audience on social media, Meltwater's Audience Insight Reports provide a thorough analysis of your audience's interests, affinities, and personality. You can use this report to get a better sense of your Facebook audience.
3. Schedule regular, relevant content
Creating and posting content is an important part of any social media strategy. When it comes to Facebook, you aren't very limited by the types of content you can share. From posting Facebook Stories to hosting live videos, sharing user-generated content to running polls on your Facebook page, the platform supports several content types. Just make sure that you regularly schedule and post content to the Facebook platform. Maintaining a consistent posting schedule is a great way of increasing your online visibility.
Tip: Use a social media content calendar to make it easier for you to figure out what you are posting and when you are posting content. Having a plan will help you save time—and so will a social media management platform that allows you to pre-schedule your content in advance.
Post relevant content
Many companies insist on posting product and brand information, such as their prices and website links to their website. These posts often don’t create any activity or engagement. It’s okay to publish "salesy" posts once in a while, but keep in mind that users log in to Facebook to interact with their friends. So be friendly and engaging!
Include variety in what you post:
- Creative images
- Personal and entertaining content
- Behind-the-scenes views of your business
- Varied calls to action
- Questions
In order for your sales-focused posts to generate traffic (and hopefully sales) you need to have an engaging Facebook page with a lot of variety. Don’t forget to publish new posts frequently. The most successful company pages on Facebook offer interesting, engaging, entertaining and informative posts at least daily.
4. Determine the objectives of your Facebook ads
Now that you have a rough estimate on how much Facebook ads can cost (70 cents to $10 per click), the question is: do you really need them?
Well, given the decline in organic reach on Facebook, you may need to promote your brand to expand your audience reach. The Facebook algorithm has certainly changed over the years, and investing in Facebook ads could be the route you need to go if you are looking to raise brand awareness, drive website traffic, or obtain leads.
If you do incorporate ads into your social media strategy, make sure that you keep your Facebook ads relevant and best suited for your audience.
5. Measure your Facebook marketing efforts
If you can't measure it, you can't improve it. Our final Facebook marketing tip is to recommend that you monitor your performance regularly. To determine whether or not you are on track to achieve the goals you set out in Step 1, you will need to be reporting on your organic and paid performance.
When determining your goals, you should match each goal to a trackable metric. For example, if your goal is to increase website traffic, then you will want to track the number of link clicks your posts receive. By matching your goals to specific metrics, you'll be able to more easily calculate the return on investment (ROI) of your social media strategy.
There are a lot of different metrics you can track on Facebook that can help inform how your Facebook marketing strategy is working.
We recommend you benchmark your activity using the following:
- People Talking About This (PTA) – How many of your followers are active on your page?
- Response time / Response rate – How fast are you answering inquiries from your followers? Do you respond to all messages?
- Posts – Which posts do your followers like and dislike?
- Reach – How many followers see your posts?
- Fans – When does your page receive new fans or lose fans? What was the posting activity during that time?
- Traffic – How much traffic does your website receive thanks to your activity on Facebook?
- Sales/Conversions – Do your followers visit your webpage or store? Do they buy anything?
These metrics combined with additional listening and engagement metrics within the Meltwater social media marketing management will give you a solid 360-degree view of your Facebook engagement.
Let's look at a case story that explains why measuring your performance is important. When Google wanted to understand and measure its global footprint on social media, it turned to Meltwater. When discussing the value of measuring performance on social media, Katie Miller, Program Manager for the Cloud Developer Relations Team, stated, "Particularly for some of our major campaigns and initiatives, it's really important to understand the global footprint. What was the volume? How did it compare to similar campaigns? Did it reach the demographics we expected? And, what can we learn moving forward?" Measuring their efforts allowed Google to get a better understanding of where it could improve and whether or not it succeeded in reaching its intended audience.
When putting together your Facebook marketing strategy, make sure that you are continuously measuring your social media campaign efforts to see if you are on the right track, or if you need to improve to get better results.
Avoid Violating Facebook Page Terms
Don’t let your Facebook Marketing campaigns violate Facebook Pages Terms.
Social media promotions are a valuable tool for businesses hoping to increase brand loyalty and grow their online community. However, when companies run promotions, they often make the mistake of violating Facebook’s promotion guidelines, a part of the same Pages Terms they accepted when they created their company’s Facebook page.
When you create a Facebook page you agree not to place any competitions on your timeline and not to use any “Facebook features or functionality as a promotion’s registration or entry mechanism.” In practical terms, this means that you’re not allowed to post “Like this post in order to win x,” or something of the like. All promotions on Facebook, including sweepstakes and contests, must be administered within apps.
These “like our post” competitions violate Facebook’s terms, which could lead to the removal of your page from Facebook. They also tend to attract one-time buyers who are not otherwise interested in the brand, leading to a rush of irrelevant page “likes,” low engagement and often “unlikes.” In short: Don’t do it!
Meltwater can help you build contests and sweepstakes that comply with Facebook’s terms. You have the flexibility to post your promotion on a Facebook tab, on a mobile-friendly canvas app, as a standalone microsite or as an iframe on any webpage. When done correctly, a Facebook marketing promotion can gather important information about participants, encourage competition that spreads brand awareness via viral sharing, and drive more traffic to your webpage. And because it complies with Facebook’s terms, you won’t get your Facebook page shut down!
Conclusion
With these Facebook marketing tips, creating a marketing strategy for the platform will, no doubt, help you have a successful brand. Want to know which trends might impact your social media strategy? See the Marketing Trends to Watch in 2022 to start your strategy planning today. If you need help with Facebook marketing, fill out the following form. Our experts will get in touch with you shortly.
