Facebook Marketing: The Complete Guide
Facebook is home to over 2.38 billion monthly active users, and over 1.56 of those logs in every day! Facebook users are spread across the globe with India, the US, and Brazil being the biggest markets, thereby enabling you to reach out to potential clients and customers in all corners.
Steps to Master Facebook Marketing
So, if you want to create a Facebook presence, you need to go through the entire process of creating a page and find the content that people will engage with. As a marketer, you need to invest a lot of effort into building and nurturing a Facebook audience.
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This is why this Facebook guide gives you an overview of the building, growing, and maintaining a Facebook page, along with some tips on using some features like Facebook Live, Facebook groups, and Facebook ads.
So, whether you are a novice or experienced, this guide will help you make the most of basic Facebook functionalities and make you a pro. So, what are you waiting for? Let’s dive right in!
Step 1: Building a Facebook presence
The first step is to create a Facebook presence! So, head over to the official page creation website of Facebook and create your Facebook page. To complete the process, you will need to go through a lot of steps. These include choosing the right page category, giving your page an appropriate name, and adding the duration of the operation.
In addition to these, you are also required to write a detailed page description and a great cover photo that is dedicated to your brand. These two things showcase to your visitor what your brand is all about and influences them to give your page a like, follow, or even check out your products. So ensure that you put in extra time and care into this step of creating your page. Doing so will help you leave a long-lasting impression on your audience and give you a kickstart to build your Facebook audience.
Therefore, we recommend that you lay emphasis on all of the information that is required for you to fill in. This gives you the highest chance of ranking in Facebook search results.
Step 2: Get started with Facebook marketing.
Now that you have created a Facebook page, you can get on to the fun part – creating and posting content to build your audience. Let’s now run through creating special content types that can yield massive growth.
Kind of content you should post on Facebook
It is imperative to understand that there are two main types of posts – page posts and stories. Let’s look into what these are.
Page posts
Page posts are the standard posts that appear on the Timeline. You can add photos, texts, videos, and they will be shared organically with your audience. Even though Facebook does not pay attention to organic reach for pages, it is still a very crucial activity when it comes to marketing and creating brand awareness.
In fact, page posts are what people see when they come across your Facebook page, and it is also visible to them as a page feed or news feed while they scroll.
So, you must incorporate images and videos in almost all your Facebook page posts. Studies have shown that posts with images and visual presentation are 150% more likely to be engaged with as compared to only text posts.
Facebook stories
Another great feature is posting Stories to Facebook. Stories are also quite like a second Newsfeed. You can post vertical images and then add filters, texts, stickers, and any other visual content using the editor. Stories can be viewed at the top of the messenger app as well as from the Facebook feed.
These stories stay active only for 24 hours from the time of posting. So you should use bite-sized content in your stories. Think of this as an opportunity to make sales accouchements, product reveals, etc.
Facebook Live
Facebook Live has taken the world of marketing by storm. This feature lets any Facebook profile, page, or group start a live video feed from any smart device. So you can host Q&As with your audience, conduct influencer interviews, and even showcase your product or insights on particular topics.
The live stream is a huge market of opportunity for marketers. A recent study showed that around 80% of social media users prefer watching live videos rather than read a blog post, whereas 82% of them prefer live video over a brand’s Facebook posts.
We, therefore, recommend that you use Facebook Live at least once to twice in a month to gradually grow your Facebook page. This will help you engage with people, get them involved in your product, and help you build momentum.
Facebook Events
Creating Facebook Events is a great way to increase your engagement. To create an event, simply head over to the Events page on Facebook and click the new event button. Then you need to fill out all of the content and information. You must ensure that you select your brand’s page as the host of the event. When you fill out all of the information asked for, it lets you categorize your event so that you can show up in event suggestions. This, in turn, brings you more attendees and helps you expand your reach.
Facebook Polls
Do you want to know a quick and easy way to get engagement and understand your audience’s views? Then you should run a Facebook poll! Social media polls are amazing and give your audience members a great opportunity to engage with you. They don’t even need to type anything at all. All they have to do is just click on the option that they wish to vote for.
To create a Facebook poll, create a new status update on your Facebook group and click on the poll. Then you can add your questions and answer options to the posts. We recommend that you post at least one to two polls a month about topics you or your audience loves. This will help you get engagements and even do market research by helping you understand the likes and preferences of your audience.
How frequently should you post on Facebook?
This is a very important aspect of sharing content on Facebook as a marketer. Studies have shown us that Facebook pages should post around at least 1 to 2 times a day, especially if they have less than 10,000 likes. However, if you post a lot in a day, it could be looked upon as spam, and you can lose your engagement.
So, we recommend following a 1 to 2 posts a day regimen at least initially, and then increase it gradually based on your engagement. If your engagement increases considerably, you can consider a slightly higher frequency of posts. And in the event that the engagement falls, you should come back to your initial routine of 1 to 2 posts in a day.
This will help you find and understand what works best for your audience. Since every page and every audience is different, you need to keep experimenting to find what works best for you.
Step 3: Use Facebook Ads to grow your reach
There has been a lot of speculation about Facebook’s organic growth. So let’s first understand what it is about. In 2018, Facebook’s algorithm changed and started prioritizing content from friends, family, and other relative content in the timeline. While this change was a win-win for many Facebook users, it kind of put brands in a tough spot.
Some brands saw that their reach had fallen by half or worse. So this meant that brands need to start using Facebook ads to get back in the game. Facebook has a hub of highly powerful tools that help marketers advertise to specific audiences. And since there is no minimum pricing to run a Facebook ad, anyone can do it.
Step 4: Start a Facebook group and grow your community.
Another great way to achieve an organic reach is by creating a branded Facebook group. Facebook has, in fact, added a lot of features that include giving brands the ability to create groups of their own. Branded Facebook groups are treated in the same way as any group newsfeed listing.
This is why we highly recommend that you make a branded Facebook group. Doing this will help you regain your organic reach and give you a larger platform to share your content with your audience. Your Facebook group is supposed to a place where other Facebook users can get together and discuss a specific topic. Additionally, group members can also post their own threads and engage with fellow members.
So, when you create a branded Facebook group, ensure that you make it about an industry or a topic of common interest. This will help spark conversations and differentiate your Facebook group from your Facebook page.
Step 5: Track your Facebook growth.
From everything that we have covered so far, it is quite clear that Facebook is indeed a complicated network with lots of methods to interact with audiences. However, it is equally important to track and monitor how your Facebook activity is performing on a regular basis. There are a few quite important metrics that help you determine the success of your posts. So, what metrics does Facebook track?
Reach
A reach shows the number of people who see your content on Facebook. If you look at your reach stats alone, you would be quite disappointed as Facebook no longer shows your posts to all of your followers. In fact, studies have shown that the organic reach is only about 6.4% of a page’s total likes.
In simple terms, Facebook will show your new posts only to around 6 out of every 100 people who press the like button on your Facebook page. This clearly shows that quality is more important than quantity. So you can only improve your reach with high-quality posts that engage your audience.
Impression
While reach tells you the number of people who have seen your post, impression tells you the number of times people have observed your posts. So if someone comes back to your post a second time or visits quite frequently, each of those visits counts as an impression while the first one counts as a reach. All in all, your impressions stats will be equal to or higher than the reach for a post.
Engagement
Engagement is a highly critical Facebook metric as it tells you how often people take an action as a result of your posts. These actions include clicking on a link, like a post, sharing the post, or even leaving a comment. If someone engages with your posts, it means that they are taking the time to read through your content and then sharing a reaction.
Audience demographic
You must also keep track of the people who are sharing your content. This will help you curate your content and ads based on parameters like age group, location, and gender. This will help you create further highly-quality content and boost your audience base.
Wrapping it up!
Although it is quite hard to get an organic reach on Facebook, Facebook marketing is a great way to reach potential customers across the world. Facebook has a highly active user base that can be used to create Facebook Ads.
In addition to these, the first step of creating a well-designed Facebook page is another great way to build, nurture, and grow relationships with your target audience. The more your audience understands your business, the more likely they are to respond well to your ads and convert to customers.
So, if you need help with Facebook marketing, this guide will help you set the basics in place to gain your initial audience base, and then you can grow from there.
Have you strategized Facebook marketing yet? What goals do you plan to achieve with Facebook marketing? Let us know in the comments below!