Social media evolves and changes every second. It’s a 24/7 environment that never sleeps. It can be hard to keep up with the ever-changing social media world, especially when you also have to take care of your business too.
That’s why we’ve created a four-part guide to social media for your business in 2019, with insight, research and some top tips on what is likely to work for your company this year on four different social media platforms. Firstly, we will be looking at Facebook and how one of the biggest presences among social media can help your business in new ways this year.
Why Should I Be Using Facebook?
In a transcript from a conference call with Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook claimed that, ‘Facebook now has more than 2.2 billion monthly actives, with almost 1.5 billion using it every day’. Therefore, there has not been a better time to climb on the Facebook bandwagon than now.
Different social media platforms have different benefits to your marketing, depending on your objectives and goals. Facebook is one of the best platforms for advertising, sharing quality content and engaging with your community. Thus, Facebook can aid in social media objectives such as website traffic and brand awareness. It has lots of different interesting and interactive features for Business pages that other social media sites just cannot seem to keep up with.
What Should I Be Doing on Facebook?
Vary Up Your Facebook Posts
Facebook has provided brands with lots of options to share different kinds of posts to their audience. There’s a whole range of different post types for you and your business to explore, apart from the usual photo and video share. There are polls, milestones and the options to ‘Write Notes’, tag a product, check in to a location and share how you feel or something you’re excited about. You can even organise a ‘Watch party’ and gather your audience to watch a Facebook video together.
Varying up posts keeps your audience interested and steers away from the usual photo and copy routine. By using more engaging post types like polls, you are encouraging individuals to participate with your brand and get involved on your Facebook page.
Create A Facebook Group for Your Business Page
Facebook groups are a place for your community to go and share. They are essentially an open forum, if you choose them to be, for your audience to communicate to your brand on a more personal level. Facebook groups have the same post types as normal business pages but create a more unique experience for your audience.
Facebook groups are a place your audience can communicate with each other and your brand. They not only attract new customers, with this sense of community and transparency, but also help to build and maintain relationships with your old audience too.
Facebook Live
Facebook Live is becoming increasingly more popular with businesses using the feature to share announcements, company news, new products and services and showcasing the back story to their company. It’s another easy way to connect with your audience and create engagement and the video saves to your feed after, so your audience can continue to watch it long after the stream has finished.
Listen to Your Audience
Facebook is the perfect platform to hear your audience’s opinions of your products and service. You can share news on what’s happening with your company, create event pages for any occasions your business is holding and get feedback on potentially new products and services, without even leaving your house.
Facebook creates an open floor for your customers, where they can leave reviews on your Business page or start a conversation in the comments. In 2015, customer complaints made via social media increased tenfold, and the ability for a dissatisfied client to share their opinion to the rest of your audience has only been made easy and more popular to do.
Share Videos
According to Hootsuite, each Facebook user’s visit lasts ten to twenty minutes on the social media site, so you’ve got a limited window in attracting an individual’s attention. Videos are one of the best post types to share, as they dominate on average engagement rate.
Plan Your Content and Schedule Ahead
Businesses can get hectic, especially at the start of the year when you’re trying to figure out the strategy for the rest of the calendar months. The best way to get ahead of the game is working out campaigns and posts, at least a week in advance. Luckily, Facebook gives businesses the ability to schedule ahead, and even backdate a post. This means you can use the feature to plan, so you do not have to worry about logging on to post every day and even catch up on old posts if you missed them.
Track Your Metrics
The only way you will know what is working and what is not is by checking in on your posts and advertisements and see how well they are performing. Facebook has an informative Insights feature that can give you a lowdown on who your audience are – their age range and gender etc., when your fans are online and checking their social media and what your engagement and reach has been like in the past. The information is also in handy graphs, shown below, that help you analyse and compare your monthly results, alongside a comparison of what came from a paid input or an organic one.
Advertising
Companies can take advantage of Facebook’s advertising tools that make life easier for advertisers and businesses. Advertising features like Facebook Dynamic Creative do all the hard and tedious work, like creating multiple variations of a single ad for optimisation purposes, for you. In 2017, it was found that more than five million businesses used Facebook to advertise, and you can see why when you look at their ad features, that include the engaging carousel ad, the ability to target behaviours, interests and demographics and Facebook pixel, which will help you optimise and find out more information about your audience.
As social media specialists, we help businesses all around the world reach their digital marketing objectives. If your business needs help with advertising or social media marketing on Facebook or any social platform in our four-part guide to social media for your business in 2019, please get in touch today.
