Today, Facebook has over 1.3 billion users worldwide; 50% of those users, according to Facebook, are online at any given time sharing 1 million links every 20 minutes. Of course the site’s original purpose was to network with friends, but boy have the times changed. The site has experienced a huge amount of success with platform applications. Ranging from games, to contests, to promotions. Facebook claims that more than 70% of its users engage with the variety of applications.
Successfully Marketing your Brand on Facebook
If you are looking to use Facebook as a marketing tool for your business, the first thing is to create a Branded Facebook Page. Using a personal Profile as a business presence is frowned upon, and Groups have limited functionality as marketing platforms. Facebook is the largest social network – and boasts endless promotional opportunities for your content. There are three main locations on the site that you can choose to display your advertised content:
· Newsfeed: The most popular of the Facebook advertising placements, these ads show up seamlessly in a user’s feed along with the content that they see from their friends and the people that they follow.
· Mobile: Earlier this year, Facebook stated that there were 1 billion mobile monthly active users on the social network – that is a crazy amount of people. If your content is optimized for mobile, this is an avenue that can greatly enhance your content’s visibility.
· Right-Hand Column: This placement can be seen below the “Trending” topics section. The benefit of this placement is that the ad will move down as the user scrolls through their feed.
You can also share exclusive discounts, promotions, or information through your Facebook posts to engage with followers or fans and encourage them to act fast! Even if they do not immediately buy or use your service, they will keep your brand in mind and search for your brand in the future when needed. As you gain new followers, reward them by providing exclusive information about your industry through Facebook. For example, promote an in-depth Free Guide or book and push those new followers further down the sales funnel.
Be Sure to Set Reachable Goals
Having set goals is critical to effectively measure any type of success. This can’t be truer with content marketing. Of course, we all want our content to be liked and shared hundreds of times on Facebook, produce thousands of website visitors, increase leads and boost our revenue stream. However, all these together are tough to achieve from just a series of content pieces, let alone a single piece. In order to successfully market your brand on Facebook, your goals must be reasonable and attainable.
Instead of working to achieve all of the above, set explicit goals for each content project. For example:
· Have X number of social media mentions in a week.
· Increase Facebook likes by X.
· Have X number of people fill out our contact form in a month.
· Have X number of people download our content piece each week.
· X% increase in traffic from social media networks over 3 months.
As long as X is reasonable (based on your own analytics data), more specific goals will allow you to accurately measure the success of each content piece.
Learn What Is Important To Your Audience
People use social media networks to express who they are, build their personal brand and connect with others. Because of this, the content people share on Facebook gives us a clue as to what is important to them.
Unfortunately, most people are not going to be passionate about the product you’re selling or the service you are offering. We can’t all be selling something sexy and appealing. But your audience still might be passionate about the results of your product/service, or about how your product/service affects or helps them.If you can promote content through Facebook that shows what is actually important to your audience, you are bound to find success.
Facebook Audience Insights
I can say this until I am blue in the face, but the more you know about your audience, the more effective your storytelling. With Facebook’s Audience Insights, you can measure which type of content is resonating with your Facebook followers. The tool is designed to help marketers learn more about their target audiences in order to create better content for the future. You can collect anonymous information such as:
· Demographics: Age and gender, lifestyle, education, relationship status, job role and household size.
· Page likes:The top Pages people like in different categories, like women’s apparel or sports.
· Location and language: Where do people live, and what languages do they speak.
· Facebook usage: How frequently are people in your target audience logging onto Facebook and what device(s) they are using when they log on.
· Purchases activity: Past purchase behavior (i.e. heavy buyers of women’s apparel) and purchase methods (i.e., in-store, online).
Marketing your brand on Facebook allows you to reach one of the largest audiences in the world; never before have we been able to reach such a massive following with precision and relevance.
Really dig into what your audience is talking about and discover what type of content they share, where they share and how often they share it. With this information you will be able to create and promote content that sincerely speaks to your targeted audience.
Make It Easy To Share
Even today, in this social world we live in, where you can’t go anywhere online without suddenly checking your own Facebook page every 5 minutes, you would be surprised how many times I have seen a great content piece but couldn’t find a social sharing toolbar, button… nothing.
Of course I could just copy and paste the link, but depending on the network, I may have to come up a description of my own, and with all of the writing I already do, the last thing I want is to do the work someone else should have done in the first place.
Don’t make your audience work to share your content – make it as easy as possible.Be sure every piece of content you produce has social sharing buttons that are easy to find, most commonly at the top of the page or directly underneath the content.
In Summary
Generally, there are a variety of aspects to consider when creating content you hope will be popular on Facebook. You can’t make content go viral – that’s a formula we still do not know – it must be relative and useful enough to go viral on its own.
In order to create content that is worthy, start by developing attainable goals, learn what your audience likes, create content that is useful, and make it easy to share.
Even though Facebook and Twitter are arguably the most popular of the social networks, diversification is a huge trend in this modern marketing landscape. Depending on the audience you're targeting, being active on a single network is simply not enough. According to The Content Marketing Institute, the most successful B2B marketers are active on an average of 7 networks.
Companies and content marketers need to start taking social media seriously, and become active in the various social networks related to the audience in their industry. Brands that can build a following by being genuinely interesting and posting engaging, entertaining, and relevant content create far more opportunities for themselves to sell to consumers.