Facebook has become a universal spot where people connect with friends and family daily. We couldn’t imagine a life without Facebook today. With more than 800 million using Facebook daily; it is an essential tool in the B2B marketing toolbox. Facebook enables your business to be available 24/7 to “real” people on a trusted, popular platform and fans can see interaction between your brand and other fans. This sets the stage for you to build strong and immediate relationships. The key for business’ success on Facebook is to strike a balance of offering content that is relevant and adds value, with content that focuses on entertainment. The two questions that always need to be kept in mind, are one, does this help the brand’s likeability? Two, is this interesting, engaging, useful content? In fact, doing anything but this, and just posting for the sake of posting, can actually hurt you chances of being seen.
Breaking Down the Format
With Facebook’s timeline format there are a number of elements that, broken down, can help guarantee your company build awareness, create loyalty, strengthen inbound marketing, and create peer-to-peer sharing. The “scrapbook” style profiles allows you to prominently display key snapshots of your business’ brand, marketing focus and give you the ability to story-tell and highlight key milestones. Interactions about your company appear in a user’s timeline and “Likes” appear in a box at the top of the page, keeping you prominently top of mind. The ticker (newsfeed) shows a live stream of friends’ activities and also lets users “Like” a page without having to leave their newsfeed. Because of this, Facebook users can easily see when their friends are interacting or talking about a brand. The timeline offers more branding and lead-capture options. The addition of a cover image can capture the eye of a potential customer and get them on your page. Keeping in mind that all content posted on your page is a “make-or-break” component, you must become aware of a tool called EdgeRank. EdgeRank is Facebook’s algorithm that personalizes users’ newsfeed and highlights posts it thinks will interest them.
Measure Your Marketing Tactics
When it comes to using Facebook for marketing, you can use two metrics to measure your success: engagement rate and the “buzz” metric.
– A high engagement rate helps you build your EdgeRank and gets you seen more often. Your engagement rate can be determined by dividing your total “Likes” and comments by your total number of fans.
– Your “buzz” metric measures who’s talking about you or your posts on their pages and can be found in your page’s Facebook insights as well as on your page.
Creatively Interact
The next question asked is, how does a business increase their interaction and sharing? For interaction, businesses need to post often and engage with consumers in a two-way dialogue. More than 70% of interactions occur during the first hour after a post is made. Keep up interaction by posting often and being available and online right after you post. Also, posting “questions” tends to drive interaction. To show up in as many users’ top newsfeeds as possible people must be actively “Liking” or commenting on posts. In turn, your content must be fresh, engaging, current and compelling. As people are interacting with you, make sure you are tracking engagement. Visual content is also key when aiming to achieving to be seen. People love sharing visual content, so make sure you are leveraging something that is visually stimulating.
Utilizing Paid Services Facebook Offers
Promoted posts are a feature that show up as a sponsored story and a paid for on a weekly or lifetime (one time) basis. Promoted posts show up to more people than a regular post so you must be sure to choose a post that is strong, current and compelling to promote. By using this feature you can call attention to posts that you feel will generate the most impact for your company. Post a clever message with a fun visual and tie it all back to a strong offer or piece of content. Facebook suggests using Promoted Posts for any of the following to get you more exposure:
– unique, vibrant and interesting photos and videos
– Offers
– Exclusive events or news
– Questions
Facebook ads can be useful, when using eye catching pictures and compelling language. Make sure that your ad stands out, as you’re competing for attention in a noisy environment. Facebook gives you the option to feature up to twelve apps. Four of these apps are shown by default, with the remaining apps under the fold and only visible by clicking and expanding the tab on the right. It is important to optimize these three apps shown above the fold and rotate them frequently with fresh offers. This is actually one of the most interactive and engaging portions of the timeline and your best chance to showcase content that will get consumers to convert.
Learn the ways that your business can best utilize your Facebook profile and create (if you haven’t already) and design a long-term plan for your company’s page today. beMarketing can help you do this and come up with a dedicated, integrated plan that will get your Facebook page on the map. Call Brandon today at 484-351-8820.
