According to a study conducted by The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, 70% of Fortune 500 Companies are on Facebook. Small and medium sized businesses can also take advantage of a Facebook business page to generate leads and drive traffic back to their website.
Image by Sean MacEntee
If you already have a Facebook Page, this Slideshare deck will show you how to amplify your social messages on Facebook. If you don’t have a Facebook Page setup, we hope you find some insights in here as to why you might want to create one. This is best if you have a small marketing budget, and don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on traditional advertising.
1. Create Great Content That People Will Love
You might have heard of the phrase “Content is King” and the importance of having great content that people would love to read and share. Nowadays, companies not only need to create content when a new product is introduced or a promotion is launched, but they need to constantly produce new content. Most people think they need a Facebook strategy for their business page, but what you need is a killer content strategy that will amplify your messages. Great content can help you drive new traffic to your website, move your leads down the sales funnel, and get people’s attention.
As HubSpot suggests, there are two types of content you need to include in your content strategy: Direct Content and Indirect Content. The best practice would be a balance of both, where not every piece of your content is about selling and converting. There are other measurements that you can use on your Facebook posts (Stay tuned for this in a future blog post!).
- Direct Content - These can be ebooks, whitepapers, templates, or checklists which are attached to a landing page with a form requesting for additional information to gain access.
- Indirect Content - These can be photos, photo albums, blog posts, YouTube videos, industry news and articles, or event invitations. This type of content will let your fans know what your company does and how it operates.
2. Use Visuals (photos & videos) To Increase Engagement
More and more people are visual learners. a more visual marketing world. Since the roll out of Facebook’s Timeline, a lot more posts are focused on the sharing of photos and videos. Posts with photos and videos generate 35% more likes and comments than an average status update or posts with generated links.
Highlight your product or service in pictures. Show the culture of your company with photos of your staff. Share your story with the help of visuals. You don’t need to be a graphic designer to make great pictures. Take your camera with you everywhere and capture visuals you need as you go on about your day.
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3. Use Ads & Sponsored Posts
Facebook advertising and sponsored posts are the most cost-efficient ways to increase Impressions and Likes for your Page. You can use this method to amplify your message to a wider audience outside your fanbase. We can discuss how to create the best ads for your page in another post, but in this post we will identify the difference between ads and sponsored posts.
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Facebook Ads - Ads can be created to target a niche audience and demographic that is best suited for your products or services. These ads will show up on the sidebar of the users’ Facebook profiles and News Feed.
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Sponsored Posts - These are ads that can also be created to target a niche audience and demographic. Unlike, the average ad, these sponsored posts will show up within the users’ News Feed. Sponsored posts can be any posts within your Facebook Page. You can boost a specific post to gain Likes and reach of that post. The best practice for a sponsored post is to pick the ones which already have numerous Likes and comments on them. Posts with Likes and comments are more likely to show up at the top of the News Feed.
4. Host Contests, Sweepstakes and Giveaways
A big part of social media is to engage with your fans and audience. Hosting contests on Facebook can help you increase your engagement level, and at the same time increase your fanbase. This may be a photo or video contest where you encourage your fans to submit a photo of themselves using your product, or a sweepstake or giveaway of a huge prize requesting your fans to enter some personal information to be eligible to win. The winner of those contests could be by votes or random.
The goal of a contest is to get people talking about you and sharing it with their friends. The more people like, comment and share your contest, the more you will get out of the contest campaign. You don’t need to be super fancy and technical when creating a contest for your Facebook page. The new Facebook contest and promotion rules will now allow pages to run contests and promotions on their own Timelines.
Many free basic tools are available to you, no design skills required. My favorite right now is Pagemodo, but you can give others a try, such as ShortStack, Woobox, and Wishpood. If that is just too much for you, you could always hire a specialist to get the job done.
5. Use Hashtags
You may be already familiar with hashtags (the pound symbol followed by a phrase, ie. #inboundmarketing) on Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest. Well, Facebook has recently rolled out hashtags in their platform too. They are very useful when you are trying to gain more reach to your posts and content. Using the appropriate and related hashtags, your content can be found by users who are searching by those hashtags on Facebook.
Another good use of hashtags on Facebook is to track your promotion or contest campaigns. You can create an unique hashtag referring to that specific campaign, where you can track the performance and engagement of that campaign. This is a great tool for exposure, but be sure to keep it relevant to your campaigns. A unique campaign is best practice for your Facebook marketing campaigns. However, if you are looking to share other content such as industry news and articles, be sure to use a hashtag that is already in place for those topics. Check out this amazing infographic on hashtag etiquette.
This rule goes for everything else, unless you’re running a special campaign and want to track your performance:
What are you doing to amplify your Facebook business page? What has worked and what didn’t do so well? Share with us below, your Facebook marketing stories!
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