We all know that Facebook was launched in 2004 and its main aim according to Facebook founders mark zuckerberg it was to make it easy to form connections and make the world more open.
The statistics about the number of daily active users is astounding and most of these people are mobile users. Some more interesting and encouraging statistics for marketers on Facebook is that more than 70 % of the adult population is using this awe-inspiring social networking website and the average amount of time spent on Facebook by this population is 40 long minutes.
An important statistic to add to the list of many an impressive statistic is that millennials are very active on Facebook and 8 out of 10 of them use the network daily and for the age group of 18-34 Facebook is the most used social platform.
Another important statistic is that more than 40% BRB companies and more than 60% B2C companies have earned customers because of Facebook.
Facebook marketing is very undervalued and under estimated because Facebook really is a great way to market your business.
Who is on Facebook?
When Facebook started it was not open to all but now anyone over the age of 13 is allowed to use Facebook. This age limit is the same for Gmail and Yahoo mail users.
The users who frequent Facebook the most are under 29 and this social networking site although used by adults in the age bracket of 45+ is not that famous among them.
Different Ways to Increase Facebook Engagement
Facebook Page
You must be thinking that when you want to market something then your profile should be “business only” but that is not the case. It is recommended that you link your personal profile to your business page.
When you use log in details of your personal account then you can access your business page via your personal profile. To check whether you are logged in as your page just look at the URL and you will know.
When making a page it’s always better to have a name which is search friendly. It’s always better if the name cannot be confused with.
An important thing to keep in mind is that you get to choose a custom URL once your page gets 25 likes. But once established you cannot change the name of the page so choose wisely.
Your “about the business” section is your one chance to create an impression so fill all the useful information such as your area of expertise, your contact details and hours of operation.
The next important thing is to have a cover photo and a profile photo which reveals something about your brand and stands as your brand’s symbol. You can also use your logo as your image.
What increases the credibility of your business page is if you have a back link to your Facebook page provided on your companies blogs and website.
Do not forget to add a call to action button using which the customer can sign up for your newsletters, or start shopping
Facebook Ads
These ads are the best way to make most out of your pay per click budget.
I’ll give you a few tips about what makes for a good advertisement on facebook.
- A good advertisement is visually appealing and relevant plus it could contain within it a value proposition like a discount.
- The call to action button should be a masterpiece of a good copywriter.
- Before creating an advertisement you should have a clear business goal in mind and you should have a reason in mind for which you have decided to invest in an advertisement. Keep in mind how much you want to invest in the ad on either a daily basis or throughout the ads life.
- You should have a clear idea of who you are trying to reach and what your target audience is.
- How you should go about an ad is that you should first build your presence then generate awareness about your brand.
- While you are doing all of that always have your target audience in mind. You can reach people of different age groups, in different locations and with different hobbies. Apart from your core audience you should also target what is called look alike audience. These people are similar to your audience and hence the term look alike.
- The good news for all Facebook advertisers is that for every five minutes a person spends online there is one minute spent on Facebook.
- Let us look at what is called the desktop news feed advertisement. These appear on a person’s news feed unlike right column ads and would cost you more than the latter but that’s okay because the engagement rate of these ads is higher.
- You should also know that mobile news feed and desktop news feed ads are different from each other.
- To reiterate my earlier point of having a clear goal I would like to add that you should know if you are just aiming at likes or you want the traffic to be diverted to your website. You could be looking at inviting comments and build a community or the reason could be that you want to start a debate.
Facebook groups
If you are wondering whether you can use a Facebook group to market your products then the answer is a yes.
Wondering who to add to the group and where to start then let us take the example of a group for those who recently purchased a product of yours. Send welcome emails inviting the customers to join or you could leave a link on your sales page looking at which more buyers can join. This group can be used to follow up with your customers or answer their queries about the purchase.
You could also start a group and give interested people all the current news in your industry.
You could also introduce people to a product using a group just to see the kind of response that is being generated.
It is also a good way to promote events and it could encourage team members to speak up.
The underlying point to note in this entire thing is that Facebook groups can very much be used to market products.
This was all about creating groups but you can join groups and find clients too. Your niche could be anything and you would find groups that cater to your niche. These groups are a great place to market your skills. Find a client and do good work for him and get referrals. Yes-it’s that simple.
Facebook events
When you are hosting a promotional or any other kind of event you could start a Facebook event wherein you get to choose the type of event it is. Instead of duplicate listing of events and promotion efforts because there are two or more hosts what you as hosts could do is to list both or all organisations involved as hosts on the event page.
On the event page you will have to add a link to the website where tickets are being sold because Facebook so far does not have the ticketing option.
- The best part about the Facebook event page is that you can invite specific people who can in turn share the event on their timelines and also on their business page when you want them to help promoting your event.
- The fans could be encouraged to subscribe to your event post from which they will get notifications every time an update is made by you.
Tips FOR Facebook Events
- Let me give you a few more tips on how to make the best of the event feature on Facebook.
- Every event name should be creative and full of imagination and should have a celebratory feel to it.
- Copywriters are made for this job and you could probably hire one when deciding the name and description so that more people attend. Basic information that should be there is the price of the tickets, the date, time of the event, and if some celebrity guests are going to be present then that information.
- You can choose a venue from the drop down list on Facebook. Add photos and keywords to finish.
Facebook offers
- Facebook offers is another way to market your product and you should not mind paying a small fee or it. There are different kind of offers and your fans would absolutely love them because it’s not expected and it’s like their brand loyalty is finally paying off.
- The first kind of offer is in store only and to avail these offers one either has to take a print out of the offer or present it displayed on their phone. Another type of offer can be redeemed both at the location of the store and online.
- The last offer exists when one is shopping online and not otherwise. But the deal is that before you can create an offer you should have 400 or more likes on the page.
- A good offer is substantial, and clearly lays down the terms and conditions. One should not use the display picture as the offer picture and should make the language simple and use an expiry date that is reasonable.
- Most importantly your staff should be able to understand your offer and answer related queries and help the customers avail the same.
Facebook pixels
- Facebook pixels are a part of the coding which helps you measure cross device conversion. Cross device conversion means that one saw the ad on maybe their mobile and later made the purchase using the laptop.
- Facebook Conversion Tracking – Facebook Pixels helps you get to know which campaigns are getting converted and which are only getting clicks. Pixels make sure that your ads are getting noticed by the people who are likely to take an action such as buying your product or filling a form.
- Facebook Retargeting – Pixels are mostly used for retargeting which means pixels drop cookies to track a visitor on your website so that advertisements can be shown to the visitor later. How this works is that you can show an ad for the product that was added to the shopping cart but not bought or when a product was added to the wish list but not bought.
Facebook audience
- The main thing about Facebook audience is that you get to target a very specific audience. For example if you are targeting those who want to buy a car then you could look at their ‘likes’ for car related pages or cars related ‘groups’ they have joined.
- On the Facebook ads page you will find the button saying ‘tools’ next to the ‘manage ads’ button from where you can select the audience insights and this will allow you to divide your audience in different segments on the basis of age, their job, the pages liked by them, and even household income.
- Once you reach the audience insights section you have to select your audience. This audience could be all of Facebook, or people who have liked your page or only people who are on your mailing list.
- Your side bar will show how you can restrict your audience by adding location, age, gender and interests. Once these steps are followed you will be redirected to the page which will show the top categories which interest your audience along with top pages in each category.
- Keep changing the restrictions relayed to location, age etc till you get to see the best results in top categories and pages that were liked.
- Start ranking pages according to relevance and note down the details related to particular interests, community pages, brands and anything else that could help with defining the target audience.
29 Tips to increase Customer Engagement Via Facebook Marketing
- First things first. Have a clear Facebook Marketing Goal in mind before you advertise. You could be aiming at more likes or more website visits or anything else but whatever it is it matters
- The next important thing to keep in mind is Facebook Posting timing. The time to reach a home maker is presumably different from the time to reach a teacher. Either you could time your posts differently for each segment of users or you could post during non peak hours. Posting during non peaks hours can help because amongst 1500 stories everyday your story could get ignored if it was not for your posts during non peak hours. If the peak hours are till evening you could post in the night.
- Next Important Facebook Engagement matrix is frequency with which one should post. Reports suggest posting six times in a week should be ideal.
- Once your goal, timing and frequency are decided but you do not know where and with which feature to begin with then you could start a Facebook page so that you get likes. More likes make you look popular which in turn helps you get more likes.
- Facebook offers should do the trick when trying to make your existing fans happy. This offer could be limited to fans at first then could be extended to a wider audience.
- Next thing you could do is start using videos to market your product. Since videos of Facebook are on the mute mode by default you could benefit by adding captions to your video.
- The next thing that might work in your favour is when you ask your fans questions so that a conversation can be started and the feel of community maintained.
- Always add pictures because that is the USP of Facebook.
- Celebrating your milestones counts as good advertising. Reaching a fan base of 10000 can be one such milestone.
- You could benefit from starting a contest. Everyone loves the chance of winning something for free so contests are a win-win.
- Another strategy to get people to interact is by crowd sourcing whereby you ask your fans for their opinions, or ideas and since people love talking about themselves this could work. Boosting your Facebook posts still works wonderfully.
- Call to action should be a verb and could be a clever play with words such that it attracts the visitor.
- Facebook ads could be used to bring attention to deals. You could sponsor your story to increase its visibility.
- Use the Facebook targeting options to attract the right audience. You can restrict the audience in the Facebook audience section. If you are only reaching less than a 1000 people because of the restrictions then it’s time to change the restrictions.
- Another thing that you could do is to ask the page visitors to “like” the page before you display the most important information. This might mean a lot more likes than usual.
- Encourage people to comment and have a reply ready quickly. Maximum Comment will help to increase engagement and daily Reach.
- The length of your facebook post should be short and the information should be concise.
- Hash tags are crazily in demand and add class and substance to the post and fans get attracted in large numbers. Engage with fans by taking part in fun trends such as throwback. Everyone is doing a “throwback” so why shouldn’t you. We have seen hash-tags and throwback and now is the time for memes. Memes are the latest thing on Facebook so make some of your own.
- What is also becoming popular on FB is asking people to tag their friends in a post. This increases your brand reach.
- Quotes get a lot of attention especially inspirational, funny and love quotes.
- Brands do really well when they tell a moving story. Recently videos of a brand telling the story of a transgender single parent went viral and brands with causes in general do pretty well.
- We all know that we should never ask for ‘likes’ but still sometimes make a mistake so avoid doing that at any cost.
- If you have a blog page then on it add information of interesting stuff happening on your Facebook page.
- One question that comes to mind is that is there any right proportion in which to add business information. Some surveys say that your overall business content should not be more than 20 % of the whole content.
- Moving further you should inform your email contacts about your Facebook page. In fact tell everyone who is listening that you have a Facebook page.
- You could try being active on other Facebook pages and when you comment on somebody’s Facebook page you are increasing the chances of attracting viewers from the other FB page onto your own page.
- Next important thing is that whoever is writing on your company’s behalf should use a friendly tone which is liked by the people. Also, fans would be quite happy meeting the person behind the brand they have been loyal to over a period of time.
- Testing is important. You could upload two ads which have the same image on them but different headlines when you are using both ads to bring traffic to your webpage. Wait till both ads have been seen by 1000 people and notice which one brought more visits on your webpage.
- My last tip is quite important and it is that you keep an eye on the work of your competitor.
Conclusion on Facebook Marketing
On a closing note I would say that statistics are in favour of Facebook being a great marketing tool.
A business Facebook page comes to mind as the first feature that can be used to market your product besides Facebook ads, Facebook groups, Facebook events and Facebook offers.
Facebook pixels help track the visitor’s activity so that ads can be shown to him later. It is a highly valuable marketing tool. Equally powerful is the Facebook audience insight tool which tells you the age, interests and purchase behaviour of the ideal customer.
A good campaign on Facebook could lead to you having more fans, more people becoming your brand loyalists and more engagements besides more brand exposure.
Facebook marketing is not just limited to advertising but also includes customer relationship management.
Customer relationships is about making fans happy and in a way that attracts more people to become your customers. All tips and dos and don’ts aside there is testing.
We talked about testing before and that is what you should do to find out what works for you and you will find success.
