Do you know how many people are on Facebook?
The answer is over 2 billion users. That’s over a quarter of the world’s population. You can nearly say that everyone has Facebook.
This makes the social media giant an important opportunity for marketers. If you want to reach out to your target audience, you can’t neglect Facebook.
Most importantly, more than 50 percent of Facebook users claim to be “always on” Facebook, which shows that people are available to connect with at almost any time of the day.
What Makes Facebook a Powerful Marketing Tool?
It Has The Largest User Base
People have been talking about how platforms like Instagram and Snapchat are becoming more popular with younger users. But in terms of sheer user volume, Facebook still has every platform beat.
It’s worth noting that Facebook has had more time to build a devoted bunch of users. Some popular social media platforms have only been around for five years or so, Facebook has been around for more than a decade.
Facebook is by far the most popular social media platform with people aged 65 and above.
Retirees with money to spend won’t want to spend their time sending snaps, but they’ll happily post pictures of their grandkids and keep in touch with friends.
Advertising Costs Are Low
Running a TV ad on local stations can cost you several thousand dollars. A mailing campaign can cost you several hundred dollars. With Facebook, you could run a highly targeted ad campaign and only spend as much or as little as you’d like.
One of the big benefits of Facebook advertising is that it’s so inexpensive.
You’re In Total Control
One of the downsides of working with TV, paper, and other advertising methods is that you don’t have as much control as you’d like.
Let’s say that you’re doing a mailing campaign, but you want to make a change in the text or the images. You’d essentially lose money on what was printed, then you’d have to go through a long editing process with the publisher.
With Facebook ads, you’re in total control of the messages and content. You change the message, imagery, budget, and target in a matter of minutes.
You Have Measurable Results
In the past, measuring the success of marketing campaigns was a little tricky. You’d put money into advertising, you may see an increase in sales, and then assume that what you did worked.
Facebook makes gauging the success of a campaign incredibly easy. Nearly anyone with a plan can run a campaign and be able to easily understand its effectiveness thanks to the metrics Facebook gives you.
You can log in and easily see how much the campaign costs overall, how much you’re spending on clicks, and how many conversions you had as a result of the ad.
This can help ensure that you don’t spend extra time or money on a campaign when it doesn’t truly need it. You can closely monitor your campaigns and make sure that you’re getting results that matter the most.
Our Top Facebook Marketing Tips
But, how can your business make the most of the opportunity to market on Facebook?
Here are our top 10 effective Facebook marketing tips and strategies to help you to stand out from the crowd. Let’s go!
1. Think Carefully About Your Profile Picture
40 milliseconds!
That’s how long it takes for people to form a judgment of your business based on the photo in your profile picture, according to researchers. You may be surprised how much your profile picture can reveal about your business.
It’s one of the first things you decide on social media but can have a lasting impact on how others perceive your brand.
You only have 180×180 pixels for the profile picture. This should be a warning to you to keep your photo simple.
You need to upload a high-quality photo. If you’re a solo start-up, then a profile picture of your face would make sense. However, if you’re a bigger brand, you probably want to use your logo.
Whatever you do, think carefully about your profile picture.
2. Same Goes With Your Cover Photo
The same goes for your cover photo. This is a fundamental part of promoting your brand to your target audience.
You must know that the cover photo already covers much of the Facebook page. The design and colors used in your cover photo determine the rest of your social media post.
You can also take advantage of the cover photo to promote your brand slogans or special offers to other users.
You can either hire a graphic designer to professionally design your business’ cover photo. If you want to save your marketing budget, you can also do it yourself with digital tools, such as Landscape.
Facebook has also recently introduced cover videos instead of cover photos. This allows you to really bring your Facebook page to life.
The cover video can last between 20 to 90 seconds. It also uses 820×312 pixel quality. Therefore, there is plenty of room to reach out to your customers with a killer cover video.
3. Take Advantage of Native Video
The number of people accessing social media via mobile devices continues to grow. Therefore, you can expect to see an increasing demand for video content.
Facebook has long been the place for video content. Users can scroll down their newsfeed watching short and engaging video clips.
Linking your followers to Youtube video clips is a great way to encourage brand engagement. However, you shouldn’t overlook the importance of native video to marketing your business on Facebook.
Facebook’s algorithm boosts native video content over Youtube videos. According to Forbes, native video receives 10x more shares on Facebook compared with Youtube clips.
Facebook Marketing Tips: Make sure to use captions on your videos. Videos on Facebook do not auto-play with sound, so having captions allows people to understand your video without having to listen to the sound.
4. Diversify Your Facebook Content
How can you beat the network’s algorithm?
One of the tricks of effective Facebook marketing strategies or in any marketing trade is to diversify your content. Too many brands stick to posting links all the time.
You can reach out to more users with a variety of different content types. That means you need to include text posts, image posts and video posts on your page.
You shouldn’t concentrate too much on self-promotion either. Your target audience doesn’t want to hear about your latest products and services all the time.
If you write a blog on your company website, you should definitely promote this via social media platforms. However, you shouldn’t focus exclusively on external links on your Facebook page.
Facebook’s algorithm encourages you to post within the walls of Facebook. So consider incorporating your content into Facebook rather than other sources.
5. Image Sizes Matter
Remember the importance of first impressions when it comes to designing your Facebook page?
Well, the same goes for image sizes.
Nowadays, over 90% of Facebook’s daily users access the network via a mobile device. It’s important to know this because impacts your design decisions.
You need to ensure your posts are optimized for mobile devices, as well as desktop computers. Therefore, don’t post images without thinking about the consequences for your mobile device users.
6. The Best Time to Post
Timing is everything on Facebook. People always ask when is the best time to post.
Why does this matter? Because you want to optimize engagement with your social media activity.
The truth is that it depends!
Research from Buffer indicates that the best time is Thursday’s and Friday’s between 1 pm and 3 or 4 pm. Thursdays around 8 pm is also a pretty good time.
People also seem to spend a lot of time on Facebook on Saturdays. Makes sense as it’s a day off for a lot of people. Try posting on Saturdays to get traction on your Facebook post.
You need to determine when your audience is most alert by checking out your social analytics information.
However, what all the experts do agree on is that you shouldn’t do it manually. Manually posting your social media posts is time-consuming and inefficient.
Instead, you should schedule your posts with posting tools such as Buffer or Hootsuite. This allows you to automatically set your social media networks to post at peak engagement times.
7. Quick Response Time
When people respond to your posts, how quickly should you reply? When people send you private messages, do you need to respond immediately?
These are the kind of questions many businesses are asking themselves. Response time is an important part of customer care on social media.
People ask questions and they want answers. They also want to know that the interaction of social media goes both ways. You need to recognize this.
Determine what the standard response time for your company will be. This allows you to set expectations for your customers.
According to experts, the sweet spot is somewhere between 4 and 24 hours. The important aspect is to stick to whatever you commit.
Definitely, don’t allow your messages to build up over time. You need to stay on top of your notifications on a day-to-day basis.
8. Benefit From Data Analytics
Who is your target audience? How can you deliver content on your Facebook page that your target audience actually wants to engage with if you don’t know the answer to this?
Use data analytics to discover which content is most shared, liked and clicked on by users. This allows you to optimize your strategy to hit as many users as possible on Facebook.
If you’re working and working to drive the number of fans on your Facebook page without any luck, then you should check out data analytics.
This way you can determine the changes you need to make to improve your social media strategy.
9. Use Facebook Ads
Did you know you can also pay for advertisements on Facebook?
You need to start by checking out Facebook’s ad creator. Facebook allows you to create targeted ad campaigns rather than random promotions to large audiences.
There are dozens of formats for advertising on Facebook from static ads to carousels. Therefore, you can choose the ad approach which works best with your target audience.
This means that you can target customers in a particular location or a demographic group. You can find out more about how to dominate your Facebook local business page here.
10. Promote Your Page Beyond Facebook
Promoting engagement with your Facebook page does not have to be exclusively achieved via Facebook.
You need to discover new sources of leads and web traffic for your business and page. This includes Facebook ads to appeal to users browsing Facebook’s newsfeed.
However, you can also promote your page via your company’s website. Always include a link to Facebook and other social media platforms on your website.
If you don’t do this, then users may not even realize you have a social media presence at all. You’re missing an opportunity for engagement here.
Implementing These Effective Facebook Marketing Tips and Strategies
Now that you have the top Facebook marketing tips in your grasp, it’s time to dive deeper into how you can use this powerful platform for lead generation.
Leads are the lifeblood of any business. It doesn’t matter if you run a Fortune 500 company with thousands of employees or a small local business that only has 10 employees. Leads are what keeps businesses running and growing and thus lead generation is a crucial step for any business.
Knowing that you need leads is easy, but learning how to get leads can be tough. Publishing high-quality content through a website’s blog has long been found to be effective in getting leads online and improve SEO, but there’s another effective way to find new prospects.
If you’re looking for a way to get leads, look towards social media strategies and platforms. Your business’ social profiles can access millions of people and could be a healthy pipeline for new business.
Facebook is the original social media money maker, and you can easily use your page and ads to drive more leads.
Curious about how to generate leads through Facebook? Read on to learn more.
Facebook Lead Generation Best Practices
Know Your Customers
How can you properly advertise to potential customers if you don’t know what they want?
Learn about what matters the most to them and how you can solve whatever problems or concerns they may have.
The easiest way to do this is to simply talk to your customers. Chat with them during check-out, or send them a survey via email. You can also stay on top of industry news and see other professionals.
Choose An Offer
If you want to entice people to click on your ads, you have to give them something in return.
When we talk about giving them something, we aren’t necessarily talking about a free give away. There are a variety of things you can offer users that can make them click your ad.
Offer them a way to sign up for newsletters, white papers, or free information downloads. Direct them to a page where they can get a free quote or more information about your business. Give them access to coupons and deals. Make form submissions brief and easy.
If you’re running a campaign that allows people to sign up for something on your website or through the ad, make it as simple as possible.
It would be great to have every possible scrap of contact information from a lead, but when you ask them for too much it can accidentally dissuade them from completing the form.
Think about what information is absolutely necessary for you to make a sale or establish a potential lead. Addresses, work title, and birthday may be nice to have, but they aren’t needed to follow up with someone.
Create A Good Landing Page
When it comes to lead generation, having a good landing page is everything. If there’s something that doesn’t work on your landing page or it’s poorly designed, you can easily lose a potential lead.
We just talked about making submission forms easy, but that’s only a small part of a great landing page.
According to the best SEO strategy, write a sentence or two of brief copy that reminds people why they’re on the page. Stress the importance of having them submit their contact information, and the importance of what you’re offering.
Have Clear Copy
While working on Facebook lead generation, the ad copy can be one of the biggest challenges. Your text should be brief, and your message should be absolutely clear.
Keep your message focused, and think about your ultimate goal.
If you want people to try a new product or service, have the copy solely focused on that. If people need to sign up for a newsletter or service, they copy should prompt them to submit their contact information.
Target The Right People
One of the big benefits of Facebook advertising is how detailed you can get with targeting. You can focus on any age group, geo-location, interest, or demographic you can imagine.
This is why it’s important to truly know your audience before you start advertising. You want to make sure that you’re focusing on the right people to target.
Behaviors, interests, and demographics are the main three targeting types of Facebook. Use a combination of all three to get leads that impact your business.
Point ads towards single moms aged 25-35 that love reality TV and have a child under the age of 10. Target early technology adopters that own startups and are interested in bitcoin.
The more targeted you can make your ads, the better the results will be.
Make Visual Ads Stand Out
The average Facebook page has a lot going on at any given moment. Your ad will need to stand out among regular posts from friends and other ads and sponsored content.
The easiest way to do this is to make your ad visually appealing.
Don’t go for muted colors, and try your best to avoid images that contain a lot of blue and white. Facebook’s blue and white color scheme will make it tough for those ads to stand out.
Go for dynamic reds, greens, and yellows. Just a hint of those colors in your add can help them stand out visually.
Time to Get Started
You can’t afford to take advantage of the marketing opportunities provided by Facebook.
You probably already have a company Facebook page. But, you need to question – are you getting the most out of it?
You need to decide which effective Facebook marketing tips and strategies are the best for you. This way you can optimize your social media strategy to reach out to as many people as possible.