You know that your business needs to be on Facebook, but you’re just not sure where to start or how to develop an effective marketing strategy.
Sound familiar? You’re in the right place!
This Facebook business strategy for beginners is your no-nonsense guide to starting your Facebook marketing journey. Let’s jump right in!
WHAT CONTENT BELONGS ON FACEBOOK?
Facebook is an extremely versatile social media platform – text posts, images, videos, live videos, and links can all be posted to Facebook business pages. The best-performing types of content are:
- Live videos
- Videos
- Images
- Text posts that prompt audience participation (like, comment, or share)
Your target audience decides in split seconds what they want to read, look at, or watch when scrolling. Make sure your post is something that will grab their attention!
Your content on Facebook needs to be relevant, engaging, and valuable.
Relevant – Does this post match the theme of your page? If your business is creating personalized songs for special events, people that follow your page are wanting to see content about music and personalized songs. Videos that show your behind the scenes process? Relevant! Videos of your cat being cute? Not so relevant.
Engaging – Can your audience be involved in your post? Does it prompt them to take action? A great way to create engaging content is to ask questions, do live videos where your audience can participate, or use descriptive and enticing language to make them want to like, share, comment, or click a link that you’ve posted.
Valuable – Is your post something that improves the lives of your audience? Does it make them happy, bring them knowledge, or make their lives easier in some way? The best way to build a dedicated Facebook following is to post content that is valuable to your community. Think about it from an audience perspective: if you’re providing valuable content for free on your Facebook page, just imagine what incredible services you must be charging for!
You should also keep in mind the 80/20 rule – typically, only 20% of the things you post should be promoting your own products and services. The rest should be related and valuable content either from yourself that isn’t too promotional or shared from other Facebook pages. This gives your Facebook page depth and variety without seeming to preachy or in-your-face promotional.
HOW DO MY POSTS REACH MY AUDIENCE?
Facebook is constantly changing the algorithm that decides which posts people see, and business pages are low on the algorithm totem pole.
The best way to increase the number of people that see your content on their newsfeeds is to increase your engagement rate, or the number of people that like, comment, share, and interact with your posts. The foundation of increasing engagement rates is to post content that is relevant, engaging, and valuable.
STRATEGY: WHAT DO YOU WANT YOUR AUDIENCE TO DO?
When posting on Facebook, don’t focus on vanity metrics like post likes or followers. Instead, keep in mind one thing you want your audience to do that will translate into increased sales for you:
If you’re a blogger, you want your audience clicking through to your website to read your posts. You would post lots of links to your blog, and feature lots of blog posts in your content.
If you own a storefront, you want clients coming to your physical location to check out your products. You might target your Facebook posts to a limited location near your storefront or advertise deals so good that your audience can’t resist coming in to check it out.
If you offer some kind of service, you probably want clients to call or email you for more information. You might include your email or phone number in multiple places on your page, customize your call to action button to connect people directly to you, or prompt people to “call or email today!” in your posts.
DECIDING WHAT TO POST WHEN
This is the part that causes the most overwhelm – deciding what to post and when to post it! A simple strategy to fix this problem is to sort the types of things you post into Content Buckets.
Content Buckets are categories of posts that go further than just video, image, or text – they are specific to your business type and strategy. Here are some example Content Buckets for a business offering personalized songs for special events:
- Videos of personalized songs
- Client testimonials
- Graphics with short, poignant lyrics from custom songs
- Live videos with improvised songs inviting audience to participate in the songwriting
You should be sure to use a variety of content types including video, live video, pictures, links, and text when picking out Content Buckets to determine what type of content performs best for your page.
A major part of running a successful Facebook page is posting regular content. You should have a Content Calendar detailing what you will post when to make sure your page remains active. How often you post on Facebook is totally up to you. Posting once a day or once every other is a great start for most small business owners.
Your Content Calendar doesn’t have to be fancy! It can be anything from an Excel spreadsheet to a scrap of paper so long as it works for you and your process. You simply write write what Content Bucket you’ll be posting on the day you’ll be posting it. A sample Content Calendar filled in with Content Buckets might have “client testimonials” on Monday, “videos of personalized songs on Tuesday”, etc.
MY CONTENT CALENDAR IS FILLED: WHAT NOW?
Once your Content Calendar is filled, you need to actually create and schedule your posts.
Head to your Facebook business page, click on Write a Post, and write or upload your content. Instead of clicking Share Now, look for the button that says News Feed and click the Post Options link under that. You should see text that says Share: Now with a dropdown menu when you hover on Now. Hover over Now and click Schedule, then schedule your post for the corresponding date on your content calendar. Your post will automatically publish at the date and time you select.
EVALUATION AND GROWTH
Facebook is not a set and forget kind of tool. As you continue in your social media journey, take note of what posts are performing well and which posts aren’t. Experiment with different kinds of content, Content Buckets, emojis, posting times, etc. and see what brings you the best results. Make a list of competitors in your industry and investigate! See what kinds of posts are working well for them and see if you can apply some of those strategies to your own business.
As you spend more time analyzing and tweaking your feed, you will find you’ve created a streamlined process and an effective strategy for marketing your business on Facebook.