On average, your potential customers spend around half an hour every day on Facebook. That’s the highest amount of time they spend on a social media platform. This is according to statistics published by Statistica, a leading market and consumer data provider. Such huge traffic is enough proof that Facebook is still relevant in 2022. Businesses like yours are leveraging this traffic to engage with their prospects. Ultimately, this engagement is part of a larger goal of promoting their businesses using social media marketing strategies.
What Is Social Media Marketing (SMM)?
Social media marketing is digital marketing but on social media platforms. It’s an inexpensive yet effective form of marketing that uses content as a marketing tool. Goals such as lead generation and exposure are some of the main reasons businesses market themselves on social media.
Social Media Marketing on Facebook
Facebook alone has 2.5 billion active monthly users. As such, there is a high probability of your business attracting new leads and getting more exposure. Regardless of how modest it sounds, cracking Facebook can prove to be a challenge. The Facebook algorithm is ever-changing, and competition is becoming stiffer. Nonetheless, businesses that stay ahead of the curve continue to succeed.
5 Tips for Using Facebook to Promote Your Business
Out of the three types of Facebook accounts, a page is the most suitable account for a business. Facebook pages have broader reach capabilities, more advanced features than a personal profile, and provide engagement analytics. The following tips are focused on how you can maximize the use of a Facebook page to promote your business.
1. Define Your Audience First
Since social media promotion is usually done via content, you need to know who is consuming this content. Finding your audience is essential because it shapes your content format, creation strategy, and distribution. Defining your ideal customer is a hassle-free way of determining your audience.
What if you have no idea who your customers are? Simple. Conduct avatar research. This process seeks to profile people based on their interests, occupation, gender, location, age, and several other features. When you classify people based on these attributes, it becomes effortless to craft messages that communicate effectively to them. You will have an idea of what kind of content they might be interested in, when they are likely to be active on Facebook, and much more crucial data.
2. Create Strategic Content
Strategies that outline content planning, creation, delivery, and governance are essential to achieving marketing goals. This definition is a general outline of what content strategy entails. The content strategy for Facebook borrows a lot from this description. However, for Facebook, emphasis is laid more on the content format. Still, this does not disregard other similarly vital facets of content strategy, such as planning and creation.
Visual content types seem to get more organic reach and have higher engagement on Facebook. Several studies have revealed that video content gets the most engagement on this platform. But as much as the data says so, you also need to consider if videos will work for you. Then again, it does no harm to create content in multiple formats. If anything, this approach helps with experimentation and creates variety for your audience.
3. Try Current Facebook Marketing Trends
Facebook has rolled out many great features that you can take advantage of to promote your business. These features include sponsored stories, reels, and Facebook Live. Since these features are a way to diversify your content formats, they give you an edge on delivery.
Features like reels and Facebook stories are a great way to share quick and short-form video content with your audience. Furthermore, Facebook is bent on making these features primary on the platform; therefore, your content has better chances. A/B testing your content on Facebook is also an approach you can take to learn more about what works well for you.
4. Polish Your Facebook Page
When potential customers stumble upon your Facebook content, they are highly likely to visit your Facebook page. They could do this to learn more about your business and look for external links. Unfortunately, you will lose leads if your page is not optimized for such scenarios. Fortunately, you can make a few modifications to your page to avoid such occurrences.
Start by rearranging tabs to show the most relevant ones first. In this case, Review, About, and Post tabs should be the first ones a Facebook user sees on your page. If you have an important post on your page, pin it as the first post. Use high-quality graphics as the profile and cover photo. Doing this significantly increases the conversion rates on your Facebook page. Besides, better user experience is one factor that contributes to high conversion rates.
5. Create Performant Facebook Ads
Perhaps you have tried using Facebook Ads and failed to see positive outcomes. If that’s the case, it could be for many reasons. Facebook Ads that do well have some specific characteristics that make them perform. For instance, these Ads are non-intrusive, evade hard-selling, and are aesthetically pleasing.
Achieving the above aspects is manageable but not easy. Already, most Facebook users dislike Ads. A HubSpot report revealed some interesting statistics about why people block Ads. In the report, the majority of the respondents said that they do not want to see Ads that seem intrusive and disruptive. These responses immediately contradict the characteristics of performant Ads we highlighted above.
Additionally, there are numerous ways you can make your Ads perform even better. Social Stand founder Bernie Wong recommends using the Facebook Ad library to find inspiration for your next Ad. Similarly, you should target specific audiences, primarily people you know will be excited to see a particular advert. In summary, don’t think of Facebook Ads as sales magnets but rather as a way to effectively reach more people with content. Facebook has a ton of resources to help you further.
Conclusion
Facebook enables millions of SMEs like yours to achieve marketing goals with powerful tools. As we have seen, it does not help to do things instinctively, especially now when rapid changes are shaping trends on the platform. Your part is to learn the best practices to make the most out of these tools. A few tweaks in your approach will translate to positive results with time.
SwingPointMedia is a marketing company focused on using content marketing, such as written articles, videos and podcasts, to attract their customers’ ideal audiences. This approach has proven to attract higher-quality customers while simultaneously reducing the sales cycle by as much as 70%.
SwingPointMedia serves local businesses in Southern California and can be reached by calling 760-422-5176.
You are invited to also attend a free weekly presentation, providing you the tools and strategy to roll out your own content marketing program for your company or see exactly what SwingPointMedia does for its clients to achieve success. It can be viewed live on SwingPointMedia’s YouTube channel Wednesdays at 11 am pst.