What is Facebook marketing and how do I use it?
And you won’t find a larger audience anywhere else, as Facebook says;
“Over one billion people like and comment an average of 3.2 billion times every day. When you have a strong presence on Facebook, your business is part of these conversations and has access to the most powerful kind of word-of-mouth marketing – recommendations between friends.”
Here are 6 basic steps to help you get started:
1) Build a free page for your business.
Go to the Facebook business pages to set up your account. Choose a category, page name and description, images and Facebook web address that are relevant to your business and memorable.
2) Connect with your current customers.
By getting them to ‘Like’ your page, any posts that you create will be shown to them as newsfeeds. Facebook quote their users as spending 40% of their time on newsfeeds so your posts will get plenty of visibility. Top tips are to keep them short (posts between 100 and 250 characters get about 60% more likes, comments and shares) and visual. Make sure you go through each step of the ’Build audience’ tool in the admin section of your account to reach as many of your contacts as possible.
3) Build new connections.
This can be done virally through your current audience – as when a ‘Like’ interacts with your page, their network of friends will then be able to see it in their newsfeed as a story, and so on. 80% consumers say they are more likely to try new things based on a suggestion from a friend in social media.
Or you can invest in Facebook Ads – paid messages to your target audience. You target and bid within a set budget for ad impressions in a similar way to search engine advertising. Or you can sponsor newsfeeds and stories where you guarantee their visibility to your ‘Likes’ and their friends.
4) Update your content.
You are aiming for regular and positive interaction with your fans. So try and communicate with them 1 or 2 times a week, using a variety of methods: share videos and photos, respond to comments and messages (both negative and positive), ask questions, run competitions and special offers with the ‘Facebook Offers’ service and give access to exclusive information. Don’t treat it purely as a sales platform – this approach does not work well with social media users.
5) Measure your results.
Check the Facebook ‘Page Insights’ tool to see which of your posts are the most shared and when the best time is to interact with your target market. And use the ‘Ads Manager’ analytics tool to measure the success of your paid campaigns. You can then adjust your efforts to reap the most rewards.
When done correctly, Facebook marketing will create a community of targeted followers, in a short period of time, who have a high conversion rate to paying customers. Having said that Facebook as a marketing channel will be more successful in some industries than others, so if you want to make your Facebook page a better marketing tool for your business please contact us here at Varn.
