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There’s no getting away from the fact that Facebook, with its 2.6 billion active users, is the biggest social media platform out there. Even if you use every other social media, Facebook has to be your social media flagship. The past year has seen a massive increase in social media engagement and social sharing, but how come you see a significant reduction in your reach? If you’re wondering about your reduced reach and engagement, perhaps it’s time to refresh your Facebook strategy and find out what’s happening.
While having a social media strategy is right for your overall approach to social visibility, what works for Linkedin, Twitter, or Instagram is probably not going to work so well for Facebook. Facebook demands its own approach to get the most out of it. Be mindful that while super cool images and short videos work well on Instagram, and gifs and hashtags do well on Twitter, Facebook has a broader range of engaging media channels with which you can grab your followers’ attention.
So how can you shake up your Facebook strategy today? We have seven ideas to help reshape how your followers see you on Facebook, and how to reach more people.
Let’s get started!
Understand Your Target Audience
When was the last time you did an audit of your followers? Who are you reaching, who is engaging and, more importantly, who do you need to get to boost bookings and sales?
Even if you never intend to use Facebook Ads (but don’t rule it out completely), you can still use the Facebook Ad Manager to help you understand your existing audience, and target your future posts.
If you go into AdManager and Audience Insights, you can see who your existing followers are. Not specifically “who they are” but their demographics, Facebook interests, jobs (if they list them), along with gender, age, location, and language.
At the same time, you can see who you reach, who engages, and who your fans are.
Do those figures match your target audience? If these figures don’t match your target audience, you might want to alter
- Your ideas of WHO your target audience is.
- Change the content you post to attract the right Facebook audience.
- Broaden your targeting to include those you want and those you have.
I like the third option.
Use The Right Media For your Strategy
In the same way that a stretch of plain text doesn’t get much engagement, neither does a picture with no context. Words and pictures together tell so much more of a story – just look at the meme industry.
Your photos and pictures need context. Your followers need to know how it applies to them, your business, or your product – even how it applies to you personally.
The same combination of words and images is also crucial to videos and live streaming. A video without words, written or spoken, is just moving pictures with no context – and here is an excellent reason to include subtitles in video posts. People watching videos and slide shows without sound are increasing rapidly.
Be Current & Be Original
Viral posts are lovely. However curating a video, link, or an image that has already been around the world twice is not original or current. That’s not to say you can’t use older material that accurately reflects the current mood or situation.
Stay current in your industry-affecting news, keep a sense of humour, and know when to use it. An excellent habit to maintain is to have a posting calendar. Do you think that all the companies that post about International Women’s Day and World Autism Awareness Day do so on the day? No, they have a calendar and do it all in advance. This leaves plenty of time for you to be spontaneous and catch the trending content when it happens.
Exclusive Content & Promotion Strategy
Why should people follow your page, and keep coming back?
The answer should be that they get something extra for following you. They get regular updates about product or service offerings. They are the people who get the first (okay maybe second after your email subscription clients). Maybe your FB followers get entry into a competition or whatever promotion you think will work for your business’ target audience.
A Timely Facebook Strategy
The best time to post is when your followers are online. Okay, its an over-simplification, but posting when your followers aren’t online is pointless. Much as we hear about the addictiveness of scrolling through social feeds, it’s not worth betting your Facebook strategy on the assumption that your followers will scroll far enough down their feed to see what you posted five hours before they came online.
Getting more specific, you want to post when you receive the most engagement from your existing followers.
Timing your posts is relatively easy if you have a localised business. However, when you start to span time zones and international borders, your social posts’ timing can become trickier. It may mean posting multiple times per day to catch your audience in the right time zone. Although, you shouldn’t need any more than 2-3 posts to reach everybody at approximately the right time.
If you have to reach a diverse target audience, you might choose to use a social posting tool like Hootsuite to plan and time your posts in the appropriate time zones.
Boost Posts – but be strategic & selective
As I said earlier, even if you never intended to use Facebook Ads, post boosting has its place. Moreover, if you’re strategic and value-driven with your boosted posts, you can drive the expansion of your follower base, without blowing your marketing budget.
Boost the posts that offer VALUE. Yes, the bold caps are necessary. Your best posts will be those that provide value to your client, are sharable and likeable, and that have appropriate CTAs. If you have connected your SimplyBook.me system to your Facebook business page, make sure your boosted posts have a ‘Book Now’ button. Alternatively, your audience expanding boosts don’t need a Book Now. Perhaps they need valuable content and information about the service you provide (blog), your business ethos, or even a discount coupon for new followers.
The best part about boosting posts is that you can target the specific demographics, regions, and people you want to reach. By drilling down to the target audience, you decrease costs and increase your paid post’s effectiveness.
Test & Adjust (rinse and repeat)
Having a social strategy tailored explicitly to Facebook is the best way to ensure you get the best from it (and its vast number of active users). However, it’s not a one time deal. You can’t merely check once and expect the same strategy to work every time.
However, you need to have a little patience. A change in your Facebook strategy might have a positive effect, but increased feed display depends on the number of engagements, shares, and likes posts from your page receive. If your new strategy improves engagement, you will gradually get more displays in your audience’s newsfeeds.
The Takeaway: Use Your Facebook Page Analytics
There’s no point having all of these lovely tools available to you if you don’t use them. By refining your targeting, enhancing what works, and discarding what doesn’t, you can create a Facebook strategy that will cost you the least amount of money for the best return. No one said marketing would be free.
Audience and engagement analytics on Facebook will help you to discover:
- When you should post
- Which types of post get the best reactions
- Who you are talking to
- Who you need to target for increased reach
- Where you need to target more assertively
So spend a day pocking through your Facebook analytics to spot where you’re doing things right, and where you seem to be going wrong. You could identify an unknown follower niche and discover new ways to engage more clients.
When it comes down to the success of your Facebook strategy, you need to give it some time. However, set a deadline for when you expect to see positive results, and if necessary, do your analysis again. Marketing is about 50% maths and 50% artistry. You can follow the statistics all you like. However, unless you post what people want to see and touch them on a personal and emotional level, you won’t see the positive results you want.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with your content, and post different and diverse media, but use the statistics and analytics to guide your hand.