Social networking can help your business reach a vast audience. Kevin Partner explains how to make it work for you
With more than 1.3 billion active users, Facebook is the world’s largest social network by some margin - and its commercial future is built partly on encouraging businesses to use it as an advertising platform. This makes it a welcoming place for companies of all sizes, but the challenge is to create a campaign that serves your needs, rather than merely lining Mark Zuckerberg's pockets.
One of Facebook’s greatest strengths is its broad spread of users across age ranges, educational levels, incomes and genders; unless you have a very targeted demographic to aim for, there’s a good chance of reaching some potential customers. Even if you primarily target other businesses, Facebook is a good place to start: employees of prospective clients will be using it even if their company doesn’t have an official presence.
Before you begin to plan a Facebook marketing campaign, it’s important to work out what you want to achieve. In almost every case, promotional efforts should aim to improve your bottom line; simply chasing follower numbers isn’t necessarily the correct strategy - it’s important to build the right audience rather than merely aiming for the largest possible one.
Your Facebook Page
First things first - don’t use your personal profile to promote your business. It may not be a bad idea for your online presence to reflect aspects of your personality, but exposing your customers to that drunken birthday party photo is unlikely to enhance your professional reputation. You should also avoid using Groups; these are designed for forum-type discussions on a given topic, rather than as a means to communicate with clients or as a promotional channel for businesses. The proper home for a business is a Facebook Page, which gives you access to features - many for free - designed to make your social media presence more effective.
Before setting up your Page, make sure you have all the media resources you need to populate it. Your Profile Picture should be square in shape (this would normally be your company logo). You can use your Cover Photo as an opportunity to promote your business, so be prepared to change it regularly to reflect the latest offers or new products. The dimensions of your cover photo should be 851 x 315 pixels for desktop browsers, but bear in mind that the image will display at 640 x 360 on smartphones, so make sure you fit promotional messages into that width. A free Facebook Cover Photo template is available at social media graphics service canva.com.
Keep clear in your mind what will appeal to your target audience and take care to reflect your company branding. Your Facebook presence should feel like an organic part of your overall online marketing, not an uncomfortable add-on.
Planting the seeds
Although your follower count isn’t the best measure of the success of your Page, a reasonably sized audience will give you credibility with potential customers. The first milestone to aim for is 25 Likes, because once you’ve achieved this, you can choose a custom, concise username. This is important: when it’s first created, your Page will have a lengthy address made up of names and numbers, which won’t fit easily onto your promotional literature. Once you’ve set up a username, you’ll be able to use a much simpler address such as facebook.com/username, or the shorthand form fb.com/username - even more business-card-friendly.
It should be easy to build a big enough seed audience to enable this feature by begging friends, family and business colleagues to Like the Page. (Just bear in mind that the only purpose of these followers is to secure your username; they’re not representative of your long-term target audience.) Once you’ve hit 25 Likes, go to facebook.com/username and select your Page from the list. Type in your chosen name and select “Check availability". Bear in mind when choosing your username that you can change it only once. It’s almost always a good idea to choose the name of your company.
Next it’s time to begin posting useful content and to work on attracting your real audience. Your first aim should be to get 100 Likes: the more Likes you have, the more credible your business will be perceived, and indeed the more likely it is that visitors will Like the Page themselves.
Those first loo followers are critical, because each of them will have, on average, around 200 friends, some of whom will share their interests and will therefore be interested in your business. Unfortunately, attracting their attention isn’t free: the days of being able to reach these second-circle prospects without advertising have long passed, and on average fewer than 10% of your actual followers will see your non-sponsored posts. Once you’ve posted a few interesting, shareable updates, click the Promote button beneath the best or most recent post to pay for this sendee.
The good news is that you can ignore Facebook’s grandiose budget suggestions: you need to spend only £3 per day to have your post seen by several hundred people. At the start, you’ll need to target users based on their age, gender, location and interests, but as you attract a following, you can switch to targeting their friends if you think they’re likely to share interests. This increases the effectiveness of the ads, since people are more likely to follow a Page that their friends have already Liked.
Once you have a few hundred followers, your Page should be strong enough to grow organically, so you can switch from spending money on attracting followers to focusing your attention on using Facebook as a means of driving buying traffic to your business website.
What should you post?
To drive interest in your Facebook Page, you should write regular status updates (at least daily). However, bear in mind that no-onc wants their newsfeed saturated with sales messages. So what should you post?
One successful type of update is the sort that gives insight into your company. The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) examined how top corporations and charities use Facebook to cultivate relationships with their followers, and it concluded that overall the most powerful status updates were those that gave a behind-the-scenes look at the organisation. In particular, consider posting photos and videos of the company at work. People are nosy, and with photos and videos you can make a real-world connection (you’re clearly real people working in a real company). By their nature, these types of posts are also unique to you and not rehashes of material visitors will have seen before.
The PRSA also discovered that successful posts were ones that demonstrated a keenness to interact with followers (and for those followers to interact with each other). You may respond to this by posting polls, quizzes, requests for help, and competitions. If your company makes a product, for example, then encourage followers to post photos of themselves using your product, which you can then share with the Page followers.
A final type of post that can achieve high engagement is an update that demonstrates you share the interests and values of your followers. The more positively you represent and reflect your community, the better. An equestrian centre may be reasonably expected to have a point of view on the welfare of horses, for example.
Images for Facebook
Bchind-thc-sccncs photos are easy enough to arrange - take the photo on your smartphone, tweak it as needed and upload it. But what about other graphics? The team at Buffer (bufferapp.com) has discovered that self-explanatory images perform far better online than those that need an accompanying caption for a status update. If you were planning to post and comment on a photo, for example, it’s better to build the comment into the image itself. This will make it much more likely to be shared - just make sure your Page name appears somewhere within the graphic so that you get the credit.
You don’t even necessarily have to take the photo yourself for this to work: copyright-free photos can be obtained from sites such as pixabay.com, which is ideal for generic images such as sunsets, beaches and PCs. Various stock libraries will have a much wider choice but will charge (however, you’ll need only a relatively low-resolution photo for Facebook, so the fee will be small). For infographics, a great free choice is easel.ly, or fiverr.com at a cost.
Running your Page
While social media is valuable, it shouldn’t be allowed to dominate your time - after all, you do still have a business to run. You need to find ways to update your Facebook Page with minimum effort. One such approach is to schedule your posts in advance, generating a day’s worth in one go - although this shouldn’t preclude spontaneous posts that reflect events as they happen.
You can do this using Facebook’s built-in scheduling feature. Write your post in the normal way, then click the spinner next to the Post button. You can now specify a future date and time - the default is ten minutes into the future. You can also backdate posts, which can be useful to allow you to post on Monday about events over the weekend, for example.
However, Facebook’s scheduling is clunky: you have to set a time manually for every future post. Buffer is a more convenient option, since it lets you set up a schedule and then queue up status updates to be posted to Facebook at the next available time slot. For example, you may tell Buffer to create slots at 9.15am, 11.15am, 1.15pm, 3.30pm and 4.45pm; then, if you’re posting at 11am and have no updates in your queue, that post will go live at 11.15am. If you add two updates, the first will be processed at 11.15am, the second at 1.15pm and so on. You can therefore ensure a regular stream of content without having to set a time for each update.
If you’re creating the right types of post, you should quickly receive some reaction from your community in the form of Likes, shares and comments on your updates. If you really want to build attention, your best bet is to respond to comments - something, according to social media analytics firm socialbakers.com, only a minority of business Pages actually do. People like to feel they have a relationship with you, so make a point of responding to comments and building a dialogue with people who show interest in your business.
Keeping track
You can use the Insights section of your Page to measure your progress and success. Click the Insights link to see a summary of recent posts, then the “See All Posts" link to open a view with the detail. Don’t worry too much about the Reach column - what matters most is engagement, since this gives an idea of how many people were interested in a post, rather than simply how many saw it. If your main objective with the post was to link followers to an external site, then check the Post Clicks Figure. Otherwise, click the downwardpointing arrow next to Likes, Comments & Shares and select Likes I Comments I Shares to break down the engagement figure into types.
Broadly speaking, shares are the most valuable engagements, since they encourage friends of your followers to Like your Page. Comments are the next most valuable, as they indicate that a follower is actively interested in your Page, and some of their friends will sec their activity. Likes are the least effective type of engagement, but they’re still worth having for the reasons discussed above. It’s a good idea to take a regular look at your recent posts and identify which have resulted in the highest numbers of shares, comments and Likes, so you can work out what works, and what doesn’t, for your audience.
Once you’ve established a community of followers, consider using Facebook ads to drive traffic to your website. This can be effective, but it works best when you have at least a few hundred followers: Facebook can then use what it knows about them to better target your ads. To begin with, you’ll simply have to focus on regularly posting useful, interesting and engaging content, along with judicious use of Promoted Posts, to build a community of interested supporters and champions.
As we said at the start, always bear in mind the bottom line: as with all marketing efforts, your campaign must result in more profit, one way or another, and not simply a vanity metric such as follower count. In Europe, Facebook makes around £1.75 per user in quarterly revenue - why shouldn’t you aim for at least as much?
Seven ways Facebook determines what your followers will see
Facebook decides which items will appear on a user's newsfeed based on a semi-secret algorithm, which reputedly feeds on tens of thousands of individual factors. Lars Backstrom, engineering manager for newsfeed ranking at Facebook, has publicly shared how some factors work to determine where items end up, and others have been worked out by marketeers, all of which you can take into account when planning your posts.
1. Facebook prefers the use of videos and photos in posts to plain-text updates.
2. The more interactions a post has - be they Likes, comments or shares - the more widely it will be seen. On an individual level, the more a user Likes your posts, the more they will see of your future posts.
3. If a user interacts with a particular type of post, they're likely to see more posts of that type in the future. In other words, if they tend to Like photos more than videos, they’ll see more photos.
4. A user is more likely to see your posts after they click an advert associated with your update. These aren’t your ads, but those that appear in the right-hand column in the desktop client, or in the stream on mobile.
5. Facebook takes into account what sort of device the user has, and whether it's operating over Wi-Fi or mobile data. This means videos are less likely to be seen by a community that accesses Facebook primarily via a smartphone.
6. The newer the post, the more likely it is to appear in newsfeeds.
7 Negative feedback. “Hides" and complaints reduce the likelihood of a particular post being more widely seen.