We live in a world where schoolchildren can use Facebook to communicate with their grandparents. The platform has become an indispensable utility for communication. Facebook has over 2 billion active users on a monthly basis, and it’s inevitable that some of them live near your business. Are you taking full advantage of Facebook as a customer communication and recruitment tool?
What To Talk About And When To Talk About It
First and foremost, you need to focus on what your Facebook presence is saying to your customers. Posting consistently and thoroughly branding your messages will establish you as an authority in your niche. Getting customers to view your page is only half the battle – the other half comes in encouraging them to stay. Your content is crucial to retaining your audience.
Crafting The Right Posts
Facebook posts should be both short and valuable. While a Facebook post doesn’t have to be as short as a tweet, it shouldn’t take more than a minute to read. Long posts clog up people’s feeds, and you don’t want to risk valuable information being hidden beneath a “read more” link.
Every update should have a purpose. If you don’t have anything new and interesting going on with your business, you can always share relevant facts or bits of light humor. Sometimes, a picture of what you’ve done that day is enough to keep your customers interested and informed.
It’s true when they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and a video might be worth thousands more. When possible, include an image or video with your post. Visual elements draw eyes much quicker than text will, and people are more likely to share posts if they find the accompanying image or video to be interesting.
Getting Them Out On Time
You can post whenever you want, but unless your business specifically caters to night owls, there may not be much use posting at 3 AM. You want your posts to go up at a time when your customers are more likely to see them without scrolling through their entire news feeds.
People have a tendency to check in on social media while they’re drinking their morning coffee, during their lunch breaks, after they’ve eaten dinner, or before they call it a night. Making your posts around these times boosts their potential visibility.
If you don’t know whether or not you’ll be able to make your posts at these times, you can always prewrite them and use a social media tool suite to schedule your posts. You might want to play around with your timing and adjust your scheduling to match times where you page tends to see the most engagement – every customer base is different.
Making The Most Of Facebook’s Ad Feature
While it costs nothing at all to post on Facebook, you might want to consider backing up your posts with targeted ads. Facebook’s ad tools allow you to specify people of certain genders and ages within a specific radius of your business. This is much more efficient than general advertisement, because you know the people who will be exposed to your ads are the people who are the most likely to find them relevant.
Finding The Right Balance
A combination of posts and ads might be the ideal scenario. Posts are no good without ads, and ads are no good without posts. While ads are an effective tool, you may not necessarily need them. If you concentrate on building a strong Facebook audience organically, targeted ads might have little effect on your ultimate outcome.
It never hurts to launch an inexpensive ad campaign to see what happens. If you see worthwhile results, you might choose to run a larger campaign the next time. If you find that the draw is negligible, there’s no reason to continue running ads.
Measuring Your Results
Your social media strategy should all come down to the results you get. Do what works. When you find that certain kinds of posts get higher engagement levels, use those posts as the basis for your future posts. Posts that get shares are among the best – word is being spread about your business, and your customers are doing it on your behalf.
Listen to your customers. They know what they like, and they probably know what their friends like. Simply responding to feedback is one of the best things you can do. Giving people what they want and creating a strong brand voice can carry your business to new heights.
Please call Tucson SEO Pros today to find out how your business can benefit from a more robust Facebook presence.