Marketing your Facebook Page

The majority of businesses, of all sizes, have a Facebook Page in order to build their brand and market their products or services. For those just starting out, the key points to remember and focus on are:

• Posting content on your wall that is relevant to your target audience

– Posting content on your wall needs to be useful to your audience, as what you post will appear on their news feeds. Endlessly clogging up your audience’s news feeds with sales pitches will cause annoyance, and you’ll find that this would result in them ‘unliking’ or unsubscribe from updates from your page. Be more prudent with what you post; start with just one or two updates per day, from useful articles relating to your industry, new product or service announcements or running contests.

• Use the Info Tab in the same way that you would use the ‘About Us’ page on your website

– Here you tell your audience about your brand and the services you provide, structured similarly as to how you would on your website.

• Engage with your audience

– Always answer comments or posts made by your audience on your wall; the point of social networks is to connect with people, bridging that gap from a faceless company to a company that is accessible to everyone. You can even ask questions to your audience yourself, by asking for opinions or even creating Facebook polls (a great way to interact!).

• Use Facebook Insights to monitor the analytics of your Facebook Page performance

– Much like Google Analytics being a key performance indicator and optimiser for websites, Facebook Insights works in the same way for your page. Here you can see the demographics of your audience and an overview on how your audience is interacting with each post you make on your wall. You can also see your total reach, as well as the virality of your content (how far your audience has spread your content). This allows you to see what is working well and what you need to improve.

Another key point to note is that only a certain percentage of your audience generally sees on their news feed what you publish on your Facebook Page. The reason for this is because Facebook uses an algorithm to determine what content a user sees in their news feed. So say you had a Facebook Page that has 150 ‘likes’, a post you make on that page may only reach 40 of those people on their news feeds (generally it’s said that, on average, only 16% of a business page’s posts reaches its audience). You can see exactly how many people saw your post either in Facebook Insights, or just below the content you published on your Facebook Page.

Earlier this year, Facebook rolled out a new feature that gets around this predicament called Promoted Posts. Now, for Facebook Pages with 400+ Likes, you can promote any of your recent posts on your Facebook Page by selecting the Promote option below each post, after assigning a small budget towards this. What this does is expose your posts to all of your audience, giving potential to reach far more people – the more of your audience talking/interacting with your posts; the more their Facebook friends also see this interaction on their news feeds.

Here is an example of how much more a post can reach when it has been promoted. In the screenshot is a Facebook Page that I personally admin, which has 542 ‘likes’. For this particular post, of those 542 people, it reached 194 people. As you can also see from the screenshot, if I was to promote this post to people who ‘like’ the page and their friends, the estimated reach would actually be between 4000-8000 people, at the small cost of just £7.00! Promoted pages are promoted to news feeds for up to three days from the moment it is promoted. This budget isn’t a daily budget as you find with a lot PPC campaigns, but a ‘lifetime’ budget, so that the £7.00 in this example can be exhausted throughout the duration of the 3 days.

You can monitor the performance of your Promoted Post as it’s running, whilst also able to edit your budgets while it’s running too.

This is a tool that can be used very effectively for small to medium sized businesses and is arguably more successful than buying sponsored ads that run on the right of the Facebook website. With sponsored posts like these featuring in the actual news feed, it gives it a bit more credibility, particularly when people see their Facebook friends liking or commenting on the post.

Another advantage is that mobile users of Facebook will see these promoted posts too (as opposed to posting sponsored ads, which do not show up on mobiles). Though sponsored ads do still serve a purpose as well, helping to build more brand awareness, as promoted posts only reach people who ‘like’ your page and their friends, whereas sponsored ads can reach a much further and diverse audience.