As new social media platforms go, Facebook is practically middle-aged at 10 years. It has outlived many of its original rivals, and with over 1.71 billion users and around 500,000 new accounts created every day, it is hard to see how it could now fail. In short, Facebook is by far the most important social media platform. But, with so many people using it already, how do you make your business known?
We have been promoting businesses on Facebook for several years now, and as a result we have learned a few tricks, which we can share with you today. This blog post will not cover everything that you can do to promote your business on Facebook, but it will share some of the best tips. If you are looking for the best Facebook strategy money can buy, make an appointment to speak to our social media manager today.
The Growth of Social Media
Before we share our big tips, let’s remind ourselves why Facebook is so important. As well as the 1.71 billion active users already mentioned, business has been growing rapidly across all social media platforms.
In 2016, we expect to see profits across all social media platforms to hit $10 million. Almost all of their revenue comes from business advertising. Today, around 40% of businesses and organisations dedicate more than 20% of their total advertising budget on social media.
Social media is not only about reaching out to the younger generation. On the contrary, people aged between 55 and 64 years tend to engage with brands twice as often as teenagers and twenty-somethings.
Social has rapidly changed in the last few years alone. Text posts were soon superseded by image based posts, which are now being replaced with video posts. Facebook serves 8 billion video views every day – that’s more video views per day than people on the planet!
Of the 40 million active business pages on Facebook, around 2 million of them pay for Facebook advertising to reach a larger audience. This is the key to winning on Facebook. Now we can share our Facebook Marketing Advice.
Create Emotive Images
Facebook is currently an image-led platform. Facebook seems to give preference to posts that display only an image, as opposed to posts that show only text. Video is starting to overtake this trend, but for now, images are working best – this is mainly because images are also much easier and cheaper to produce than good video.
Facebook prefers images to have no more than 20% text on them. While you can publish an image with any amount of text, if you want to give it a boost (a paid promotion on Facebook) it needs to be at least 80% clear of text. Because of this, it is generally best to keep text to a minimum, say below 15%.
Images should be emotive though. Posts which trigger an emotional response always perform better. Ideally images should make people happy (which is why comic posts are so popular), but pictures that make people feel warm inside (kittens), or angry (political) or sad (charities) all perform very well. What is more important though is not upsetting your audience.
Use Automatic Bidding
When boosting your posts, it is important to use automatic bidding, as this helps Facebook to optimise your campaign by delivering more adverts at the times when conversions are highest. This is why it is also important to keep delivery type set as Standard, so that your ads are shown throughout the day.
Automatic Target Placement
Facebook’s new automatic target placement system is giving some businesses good results. Facebook will now show your adverts in places where they are likely to reach not only the largest audience, but also the right audience. This means Facebook may pick one, or a combination of Mobile News Feeds, Instagram, Audience Network, Desktop News Feed or Desktop Right Column.
Avoid Ad Overlap
It may be tempting to create a series of similar ads, but it is actually far more productive to design adverts for narrow market segments. Do not allow your ad sets and audiences to overlap, as if you allow two adverts to compete for the same audience or market, you will be competing with yourself. It is much better to have ads that are not competing with each other.
Test One Change At A Time
Ad optimisation is vital to get the best return on your advertising spend. However, it is important that you only make one change at a time, as it may be the smallest change that results in the biggest improvement. Likewise, if you make too many changes and your ads perform worse, you won’t know which element caused the problem.
Use Reach Campaigns
If you want to reach a specific audience size, you can specify this – this is known as a Reach Campaign. This is best when used to increase brand awareness, but you can also use it to drive sales. Just be sure that your CPA and conversion rates are sufficient for the big spend.
Set Lifetime Budgets
Facebook allows you to set a lifetime budget, which means rather than running an ad for a specific duration, you can set a sum of money for the campaign and allow it to run until the funds have been used. This is a great idea if you have a set advertising budget for a specific promotion as you will guarantee that you use up the whole budget. But again, make sure that your advertisements are converting well before committing the whole budget!
Monitor Daily
A good campaign needs to be monitored daily – it is very dangerous to set one up and leave it running, as you may quickly burn through your budget without making a single sale. Keep a close eye on conversion rate, when your conversions most often occur, and also on how people are interacting with your paid promotions.
Remember, paying for a promotion is just half the story on Facebook – your audience should hopefully be liking, commenting on and sharing your posts, which builds the organic reach. A well-planned paid promotion can literally springboard your organic social media campaign to new heights. Also, Facebook Pages which generate a lot of natural engagement tend to also drive the most sales – this is why so many pages alternate fun post shares with product placements.
Facebook is without doubt the most important and most complex of the social media platforms. If you want to take full advantage of it, speak to our social media managers today.