Facebook is the social network that doesn’t need an introduction. It is arguably where social media marketing began. Facebook hasn’t lost relevance with the development of other social media networks, in fact, it has a lot to offer specifically to businesses (on Facebook pages) unlike on other social platforms.
Benefits of Facebook Marketing
1. Access to Facebook insights
2. Facility to run contests
3. Ability to appoint page admins/managers
4. Facebook tabs for business descriptions
5. Facebook ads and offers
Use those features, since you have access to them.
Apart from maximizing on the obvious benefits (mentioned above), there are 5 simple things that you could do to make a large impact on Facebook.
5 Effective Facebook Marketing Strategies
1. Capitalize on Your Free-of-charge Ad Spaces
It’s funny how brands go the distance to create and manage pages, but fail to optimize those presences for best effect. All it takes is a few fun, accurate, SEO-friendly words about the business, a smartly picked profile picture and cover photo.
Your profile picture could be your logo, business identity, but look at your cover photo as a free Ad canvas that you can change whenever you please.
Even if you don’t have a design team to create cool concepts to sell your business, you could always do it yourself –
Step 1: Write a simple and clear line to describe your business/product (Try to add a touch of humor, intellectual appeal or just plain and simple warmth to it). Remember to have a compelling unique value-proposition addressed to your audience. Adding a Call to Action, is a bonus.
Step 2: Pick a cool background (Something related to your business – your office, team or plain, colored backgrounds will do as well).
Step 3: Put the words on the background with visual tools like Canva or PicMonkey that are quite easy to use.
Step 4: Upload and your cover photo and change once every while to shake it up
2. Attract Your Target Audience with Exhaustive Information, Fun Facts and Humor
The next thing that you can control on your Facebook profile is the content that goes up on it. Imagine you’re a small business that trains entrepreneurs to successfully run their businesses. Then the audience you’re trying to pull on social media would be entrepreneurs, and the content that goes on your page, should resonate with that audience.
You could use content discovery platforms like DrumUp to search for relevant social media content for you. Of course, you’d have to pick the articles that finally go up on your pages, but using an app helps up your efficiency and saves you valuable time otherwise spent in manually hunting for high-quality content.
Every post that goes up should ideally be an answer to a question that your target audience might be asking. All descriptions should be addressed to them. Throw some humorous posts into the mix and just aim at being a reliable and fun friend as a business on Facebook.
3. Encourage Your Audience to Do the Talking
High-quality content requires high-investment in terms of time to create. But the good news is that you aren’t expected to create all of your content. Social media isn’t about continually pushing out content, even if it is useful and even if you are curating other people’s content, you can still come off as promotional. Social media is largely about crafting two-way conversations. And there are several ways in which you could do this on Facebook.
1. Always reply with open comments that could lead to further conversation
2. Ask a question, talk about something that your audience is passionate about
3. Create simple and easy to execute conversational contests around your product
Selfie contests work! So do “Tell us your story” contests and share or like contests. The idea is to encourage action from their side, and give them opportunity to express themselves. The content that comes off of exchanges like these are excellent for content marketing purposes.
You could use sentiment analysis tools like Brand24 to gauge which comments or responses require your immediate attention.
4. Remind Your Visitors to Check In on Facebook
There are several ways of getting exposure on Facebook without much effort on your part. Check-ins form one such method.
Every time a Facebook user checks-in to your location, the post or update pops-up on that users’ friends’ Facebook feeds. So instant impressions.
If that user has a great picture to go with the check-in, you can have an even stronger impact on the feeds you show up on.
So set up a cool looking selfie spot in your office, and encourage your visitors to check-in and you won’t regret it.
Check-ins also get updates on your company pages, and the more check-ins you have, the more credibility is attached to your business on Facebook. If people know that their friend and families have been to a place or bought something, they are far more likely to visit it themselves or do it themselves.
5. Engage with Your Target Audience on Facebook Groups
Participating in relevant groups is a neat, cost-friendly substitute to targeted audience acquiring on social media. The success of this strategy of course, is how well you identify the groups and the way you participate in them.
You could always create your own Facebook community around your business and invite people to join it.
The important thing to remember here is, social media in itself is a long-term strategy. Especially when youparticipate in groups, you have to engage and get to know people in the group before you make a sales pitch to them, or ask them to do something. Groups are excellent for collecting feedback and providing customer service.
Make participating in Facebook groups a daily activity. All it really requires is 10 minutes of your time each day to make a big difference over time.
When your audience is ready to buy, they should think of you, that’s the most viable and long-lasting ROI you could get out of social media interaction. Aim at building that for yourself on social media, and you are on your way to success.
[“source-smallbiztrends”]
