Social Media Advertising: Best practices for marketing on Facebook

Social media is a low cost but highly effective marketing tool. If you do it right, it can be a great source of traffic to your website and content. It also allows you to track statistics, depending on your goals. There are many channels to choose from, and the more networks you join, the more engagement with your brand you receive.

This doesn’t mean that you need to be on every social media platform. What works for one business may not work for another. At the same time, what works for your business on one channel will not necessarily reflect the same elsewhere.

Each social media channel has its own best practices for marketing your business. For the purpose of this article, we will provide some hacks for advertising your small business on only a few of the larger networks, as well as their pros and cons.

Facebook: Simple Best Practices

This is the cool kid from school that everyone knows. If you had to choose only one social network for your business, Facebook would be it. It sends more traffic to one’s website than any other platform, plus it has members from almost every generation (especially if you want to reach millennials and Gen X). Most users spend more than 20 minutes on Facebook every day for entertainment and news, making it the most popular network to reach potential and current clients, depending on how you use it.

Best practices for marketing on Facebook:

• Keep your post copy short and sweet.
• Don’t overdo the hashtags – if you have to use them, no more than two per post.
• Add an image whenever possible and a video now and then (video content is slowly growing on social media networks).
• Use a link that refers users to the original content of the post.
• Avoid posts that present overly promotional copy.
• The best days to post are Saturdays and Sundays, followed by Thursdays and Fridays (especially upbeat content that will make people smile).
• Posting from 12h00 to 13h00 will get you more shares while posting at 15h00 will get the most post clicks.
• Keep in mind: the half-life of a typical Facebook post is 90 minutes.

Facebook is broadly used on both desktops and mobiles, at work and at home. So when you make use of this platform to drive traffic to your website, make sure it is readable on mobile as well.

How to create a Facebook marketing strategy in 9 easy steps

Now that you understand the different kinds of Facebook posts, let’s look at some Facebook marketing ideas to help you build a solid strategy for this powerful social tool.

1. Define your audience

To engage your audience effectively, you have to first understand who your target audience is.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• How old are your target followers?
• Where do they live?
• What kind of jobs do they have?
• What are their challenges and pain points?
• How and when do they use Facebook?

To start, make sure you understand the basic Facebook demographics. Once you know who uses the platform and how that maps back to your target customer, take a look at Facebook Audience Insights.

Use Audience Insights to drill down into the nitty-gritty details about potential customers. You can use this tool to find information on things like:

• Age
• Gender
• Education
• Relationship status
• Location
• Language
• Facebook usage
• Past purchasing activity

This is one of the most important Facebook marketing tips for using the platform successfully: Always have a clear idea of exactly who you are trying to reach.

2. Set goals

It can be tempting to focus on vanity metrics, like racking up Likes. But unless those Likes are part of a broader marketing plan, they’re not going to provide a great return.

For your Facebook marketing strategy to be effective, you’ve got to have clear goals tied to real business objectives.

The goals will differ for every business, but they should all focus on actions that have a real impact on your bottom line. For example:

• generating leads
• increasing conversions on your website
• improving customer service.

These broad categories are a good place to start. Next, you need to make your goals much more specific and measurable. Here, we recommend using a recognized goal-setting framework like S.M.A.R.T. goals or the O.K.R. goal framework.

We explain both of these goal-setting systems, along with examples of how they work in practice, in our post on social media goal setting.

Everything you do on Facebook—every post, every comment, every ad—should work to support your goals. To keep things on track, it’s a good idea to distill your strategy down into a Facebook mission statement for your brand.

Having a clear picture of your goals will also help you craft an effective Facebook style guide for your brand. This will make sure you maintain a consistent brand voice that works to support the goals you choose.

3. Plan your content mix

Once you’ve set your goals, you need to create a plan for how to achieve them.

A key part of that plan is determining the right content mix. We recommend starting with either the 80-20 rule or the social media rule of thirds.

If you follow the 80-20 rule:

• use 80% of your Facebook posts to inform, educate, and entertain
• Use the other 20% to promote your brand

Remember that using Facebook for business is all about building relationships, and self-promotion is not a great way to do that. But if you provide enough value, your audience will be open to learning about your products and services in the 20 percent of posts that are more sales-focused.

The social media rule of thirds also prescribes a good mix of valuable content vs. promotional posts:

• one-third of your content should share ideas and stories
• one-third should involve personal interactions with your followers
• the remaining third can promote your business

The goal is to provide more value than promotional material to keep followers engaged.

Facebook’s algorithm will always penalize brands that push sales too hard. Facebook wants its users’ news feeds to be full of content they want to Like and share.

As a marketer, you should want that too. All those Likes and shares help extend your reach and put your brand in front of new eyeballs.

The final part of planning your content mix is to determine when and how often to post.

This will take some trial and error (using engagement data gleaned from Page Insights). But research generally shows that the best time to post on Facebook is:

• For B2B brands: between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. EST on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday.
• For B2C brands: 12 p.m. EST on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday

 

It’s important to post consistently. Create a content calendar to help balance your mix of content types and keep your posting schedule on track. We’ve created a free content calendar template you can use. The Hootsuite Planner is another great resource to help you plan and manage your Facebook content mix.

For more strategic planning ideas, check out our post on how to create a social media marketing plan.

4. Engage with your Facebook community

If you own a pet care company, people are talking about pets on Facebook. There are communities for pet owners and lovers.

Because someone is sharing their sweet experience with their pet and they live in New York doesn’t mean they can’t refer a friend who lives closer to your Los Angeles pet care company.

Facebook is the biggest social platform and information travels very fast these days.

Anyone can become your client.

Start engaging with people on Facebook. The more you do it with prospects, the more customers will flood your business.

5. Engage with other Facebook Pages

Even when you have a Facebook business page, Facebook allows you to like and engage with other pages. It doesn’t matter if they are related to your industry or not.

You need to start getting on the radar of other Facebook page owners. You can develop a solid relationship with them. That can open an opportunity to collaborate with content creation or even partner with them.

6. Optimize your Page for engagement

In order to achieve the Facebook marketing goals you set in Step no. 2, you need to make it easy for people to find your Facebook Page. And you need to compel them to Like your Page once they get there.

Start by making sure your Facebook Business Page is fully optimized for success, as explained in this video:

Tip: Put some extra effort into your Facebook Page cover image, since it’s the first thing people will see when they visit your Page.

Next, it’s time to get those views, Likes, and Follows rolling in.

First, make it easy for people you already interact with on other channels to find your Facebook Page:

• Link to your Page in your email signature, newsletter, and other channels
• Incorporate Facebook Like and share buttons on your website and blog to make it easy for people to find, follow, and share your Page in one click

Of course, if you want people to share your content, you need to make sure the content you post to Facebook is highly shareable. Creating valuable and entertaining content that followers will be happy to share with their connections is the best way to expand your organic reach.

It bears repeating here that Facebook is a social network. If you’re not engaged with your Page, why should your followers be? Followers who find themselves talking into a void will abandon your Page for more responsive brands.

Your mantra is reply, reply, reply. Reply to every message and comment. Answer questions.

Finally, make sure your Page stays up to date. Schedule a regular audit of your Facebook Page to check for and remove any outdated content. Make sure your About section is accurate, up-to-date, and on-brand.

You can find more detailed strategies in our guide to getting more Facebook Likes and this list of little-known Facebook tips and tricks.

7. Consider using other Facebook tools

Once you’ve started to build up your following, you may want to consider adding some extra tools to your marketing plan.

Facebook Groups

With 1.4 billion people using Facebook Groups every month, it’s an audience too large to ignore. Think of Groups as the online equivalent of your favorite coffee shop or community center. They are a place for people to share information and ideas.

You can also use Facebook Groups to showcase your expertise and provide added value to your fans. This is a great way to build trust and ongoing loyalty.

When you’re ready to add this tool to your Facebook marketing strategy, check out our  step-by-step instructions on how to set up your own Facebook Group.

Sometimes fans will create their own Facebook Group with a focus on your brand (search Facebook Groups for FitBit to see this in action). It’s a good idea to join these groups to make sure that the conversation is positive and factual.

In general, though, this is a great thing. It shows your brand has a dedicated fan base that’s really into what you do!

For now, Facebook Groups are all about organic interaction, but eMarketer predicts ads will come to Groups in 2021.

Facebook chatbot (a.k.a. Facebook Messenger bot)

Facebook users exchange 20 billion messages with businesses every month. Facebook’s own research shows users expect a business to respond almost immediately. One surveyed Facebook user said he would only wait 10 minutes for a response before moving on to another brand.

Facebook suggests chatbots on Messenger may be the answer to this need for quick replies. And they cite it as a reason why the number of bots grew 5.6 times in 2018 alone.

For example, Happy Socks used a Facebook Messenger bot as a kind of personal shopper, helping people find exactly the right gifts for everyone on their Christmas list.

To set up your own Facebook chatbot, check out our step-by-step guide to creating a Facebook Messenger bot.

Facebook Business Manager

Once you understand the basics of your Facebook Page, it’s a good idea to set up Facebook Business Manager. Facebook calls it “a one-stop shop to manage business tools, business assets and employee access to these assets.”

It’s a tool that allows you to manage your organic and paid Facebook posts. It also allows you to work effectively with team members and outside contractors and agencies.

We walk you through the set-up process in our step-by-step guide to using Facebook Business Manager.

8. Incorporate Facebook ads and the Facebook pixel

Just because you post something on your Facebook Page, that doesn’t mean all your followers will see it. In fact, you might be surprised by the percentage of followers your organic posts will likely reach:

• For Pages with fewer than 10,000 followers: 8.18% organic reach
• For Pages with more than 10,000 followers: 2.59% organic reach

This is because the Facebook algorithm prioritizes posts from users’ friends and family.

Fortunately, you can extend your reach without breaking the bank using Facebook Ads.

Like any advertisement, a Facebook ad is content you pay to share with a specific, targeted audience. It’s all about getting your brand in front of the right eyeballs and achieving your conversion goals.

Facebook has advertising options designed for business goals both on and off the network—from brand awareness and engagement to app installs and store visits. This video provides an overview of how to set up a Facebook ad campaign.

An important note here: Even if you don’t plan to use Facebook ads right away, it’s a good idea to set yourself up with a Facebook pixel now.

A Facebook pixel is a simple piece of code that you place on your website to:

• track conversions
• remarket to people who have already visited your website
• build targeted custom audiences for future ads

The pixel will start collecting data as soon as you place it on your site, so you’ll have remarketing and custom audience information ready when you start your first campaign.

9. Track, measure, and refine

Facebook marketing is not a set-it-and-forget-it strategy. You’ve got to track and measure performance so you can see what worked and what didn’t. This will reveal how you can improve your strategy in the future.

Facebook offers built-in audience engagement tracking through Facebook Insights. You can measure:

• likes
• reach (how many people saw your posts)
• engagement (how many people liked, clicked, shared, or commented)
• which of your posts result in people unliking your Page

These are the metrics you should watch:

• Fan Reach: This is the number of your fans who have seen a given post. This views occurred directly without any action from a friend or fan. The metric helps you measure the appeal of your content to your fans.
• Organic Reach: This is the total number of people who have seen a given post organically (fans and non-fans).
• Engagement: This is the number of individuals who clicked anywhere on your post. This includes liking, commenting, and sharing. It also includes people who viewed your video or clicked on your links and photos.
• People talking about this (or storytellers): A very few people understand this metric. This metric consists of only three actions: shares, likes, and comments. It’s totally different from the “engagement” metric because it looks at these three actions alone.
• Click-through rate: This is a metric that has been around on the web for many years. Click-through rate is the same thing on Facebook as it is in AdWords advertising, email marketing, and landing pages. It’s nice to know how many people have seen your content. And how many people act on it.

It’s important you pay constant attention to these five metrics. Make a continuous effort to improve them.

Beyond tracking your success, it’s important to use the information about what’s working and what’s not to make adjustments to your Facebook marketing strategy. The data will show you what you should keep doing, and which tactics you need to tweak.

Through a continuous loop of goal-setting, measuring results, and tweaking your strategy, you can improve your performance over time.

Conclusion

With over 2 billion active users worldwide, there’s no doubt that Facebook is one of the primary platforms you should be.

Marketing on Facebook is cheaper and more effective than Google AdWords. It’s very easy to gather high-quality leads on Facebook because they provide you with all the information you need.

It’s also easier to make fans trust you on Facebook. People are addicted to Facebook. They unconsciously sign in every single day.

That makes them exposed to your brand every day.

When you market through search engines alone, people will only get to see your website when they search for something related to your business.

But that’s not the case with Facebook. They get exposed to your brand every day. And that makes it easier to build brand loyalty among fans.

Facebook increases traffic to your website. No wonder content giants like the New York Times, CNN, and Huffington Post are doing more promotion on Facebook.

You should take advantage of Facebook to market your business.