We all know that social media is a must for business success and there are still lots that a brand can get from using Facebook. However, most business owners are not aware of how to take the most out of their Facebook Fan Pages. What they do is to share content from time to time and never see any tangible results from that effort.
What’s more important they are not sure how to measure ROI from social media channels and Facebook in particular.
The answer is simple: engagement. When it comes to social media, your main purpose should be to engage with your target audiences and earn the loyalty of your customers and fans. I know, it is easy said than done, but it’s definitely worth your time.
Here are a few keys and tactics that could help you gain a competitive edge over your competitors and drastically increase your audience’s engagement.
Understand who your audience is.
How can you connect to your customers if you know nothing about them? The truth is, you can’t. You need to find the answers to vital questions such as: who are your customers? What are their most pressing concerns? How your customers perceive your brand and what exactly your product does for them. What influences their buying decision?
Armed with all that data, you will easily paint a picture of your ideal customers and decide on what strategy will reach them most effectively.
Provide Useful Content
The content is still the King but you should stay away from creating content without setting goals. You want to create content that adds value, solves problems, or entertains. Content that your audience will find useful and shareable.
– Your content should reinforce your brand image. You can’t just find something funny and share it with your audience. If your brand has nothing to do with pets, you can’t just go and find a popular video about a cat and share it just like that. The number one rule: all your content should be tied to your brand.
– Use the data to analyze your audience and see what your audience is likely to view, click and share. Through trials and errors, you will gradually figure out what your audience’s preferences are. Do your customers prefer images to a 30-second video? Are they interested in quick tips or do they find more evaluable long posts?
By evaluating your educated guesses, you will soon get to know your audience and will start serving it better.
– Visuals, visuals, visuals.
Posts with images receive 94% more views. Twitter and Facebook content with images receives nearly twice as many views as text posts. Whatever you want to say, you will have to find a way to make it visually appealing.
The image you share should be creative, eye-catching and engaging. And if you don’t know how to create it, then DigitalOcto.io is the best platform for you. It allows you not only to create stunning visuals for your post (no design skills required), but you can take advantages of the ready-to-use, high conversion templates it offers. Once created, you can post them directly to Facebook, or download them to use them for any other purposes – for example as an image for your blog, for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest. Anywhere.
According to research from BuzzSumo Instagram posts being shared on Facebook get 23% more interactions.
– Host Videos on Facebook
Latest research from BuzzSumo discovers that videos that are hosted on Facebook directly get nearly 10x more engagement than those that are on YouTube but shared to Facebook. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t post your content on YouTube as well. But if you want engagement on Facebook, post it there directly.
– Keep it short
Despite the fact that Facebook allows you to post long content, statistic shows that posts shorter than 150 characters receive much more engagement than longer posts. In fact, the best performing posts have fewer than 50 characters!
– Ask questions
According to QuickSprout, the best performing type of post on Facebook is a question post, with an image. These types of posts receive approximately 616 interactions – significantly higher than other types of posts. However, it is important to note that a simple question post, without an image, receives an average of 144 interactions. So don’t forget to find the best image for your question.
Keep an eye on the competition
Some brands are doing an amazing job on social media. Try to find companies in your space that are using Facebook better than you and analyze what they do. Then come up with ideas how to beat them.
In order to monitor the companies whose performance you would like to emulate, you can use Facebook’s ‘Pages to Watch’ feature. It is very helpful and will allow you to constantly tweak your strategy accordingly.
These are just the basics when it comes to harnessing the power of Facebook. Use them as a foundation to build your Facebook presence, stand out from your competitors and attract more customers and fans. With more luck (and work), your post may even go viral … it is just a matter of time.