Using Facebook as part of your marketing tactics can provide some great results, for relatively little cost. V Formation’s Jemma Taylor-Smith shares the reasons why organisations should consider Facebook for marketing purposes, along with some tips to ensure you maximise its effectiveness.
Why should we use Facebook for our marketing?
- Highly targeted for minimal cost: Facebook allows you to run ads and boost posts and target them at a very specific audience. This ensures you’re spending your advertising budget on reaching your target audience.
- Very measurable: The analytics tools on Facebook provide a range of information, you can monitor impressions, reach, engagement and clicks. These tools allow you to monitor your effectiveness of your activity, providing you with the option to quickly make changes if something isn’t working as effectively as it could. It also allows you to ensure you are posting content when your audience is most active.
- Reach: Facebook provides the opportunity to reach a massive audience that otherwise could be difficult to reach, without spending a small fortune on advertising across a number of marketing channels.
- Works particularly well for those who have a B2C focus: For those organisations whose products and services are aimed at consumers, Facebook works particularly well and used effectively can deliver great results.
As effective as Facebook can be, there are some restraints.
Facebook constantly plays around with its algorithms and in recent years it’s become more difficult for brands to reach their target audience and followers. Organic posts (those that aren’t paid for) are often only shown to a very low amount of followers and relies heavily on followers regularly engaging with your posts through liking and sharing in order for them to continue to see your posts on a regular basis.
V Formation’s tips for maximising the effectiveness of Facebook marketing
There are a few tips and tricks that you can use to give your posts the highest chance of success. These include:
Know your target audience: In order to effectively use Facebook’s audience targeting tools, you need to know who your target audience is and their interests and behaviour.
Post regularly: To give your posts the best chance of being shown, you need to post on a regular basis, ideally once a day.
Text heavy posts: Try and use lots of text in your posts, particularly organic posts. However, it is important to make sure what you’re saying is interesting and relevant for your audience.
Encourage engagement: Try to create a discussion so that your followers interact with your posts. The more engagement you get, the more chance future posts will be shown to more of your followers.
Consider creating a Facebook group for your target audience: Facebook is heavily focused on creating a community, so setting up a group that is relevant for your target audience will definitely earn you some brownie points!
Try not to be overly “salesy”: It’s important that you create content that adds value and is shareable. The odd sales focused post is fine, but try not to use them all the time.
Use images and video: Facebook particularly likes images and video and they often get better engagement rates than posts that are purely text. Being
creative and trying out different styles will allow you to see what works best for your brand.
Don’t always use links to websites: Facebook doesn’t particularly like you sending people off in another direction, so try and keep the discussion on your Facebook page rather than always sending people to your website.
Use a mix of paid and organic posts: Using a mix of paid and organic posts is the best way to ensure you are reaching as much of your target audience as possible. It will also help build your page followers.
Boost popular posts to get more followers: It’s worthwhile boosting some of your popular posts to enhance your reach. They’re obviously popular for a reason, so take advantage of that and ensure they’re seen by as many people as possible. It’s also another way to get more page followers.
Facebook continues to be an effective way of reaching your target audience, particularly if you create your ads and posts in a way that Facebook prefers.
V Formation’s marketing consultants can help you ensure you are using Facebook and other social media channels in the most effective way. Click here to get in touch to find more about how you can use social media to make more of an impact.