facebook business

How To Get The Most Out Of Facebook Business

How to Get the Most Out of Facebook Business

Social media has become a huge part of many companies’ marketing strategy over the past few years. From tweets to Instagram posts to Facebook ads, social media has a lot of ways to gain engagement and catch someone’s attention. Facebook, offers several ways to engage with customers and get your product out in front of potential customers as well. Their suite of products; Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network work together to promote your business and engage with your audience. Let’s examine a few ways Facebook Business can enhance your brand, along with a couple of new changes that could potentially harm it.

Facebook Ads

Facebook ads can make it easy to find the right people, capture their attention, and to get results. Whether you have a hefty marketing budget or a less than modest one, you can find your audience through a carefully constructed Facebook ad.

  • 2 billion people use Facebook every month
  • 1 out of every 5 minutes people spend on mobile is either on Facebook or Instagram
  • 500 million Instagrammers use the app every day

With Facebook ads, you can choose your audience based on contact information, demographics, or behaviors. Facebook gives you a variety of powerful selection tools to find the perfect audience for your ad. There are three main avenues to choosing your audience:

  • Your Core Audience –

    Whether you’re a startup restaurant looking for more local traffic or a major big box retailer looking for people who want your products, core audience targeting allows you to choose people based on their demographics, location, interests, and behavior.

 

  • Custom Audience –

    Custom audiences are good for finding your existing customers or contacts on Facebook. Targeting those with which you already have a relationship on Facebook is a great way to foster those relationships and generate sales. You can reach out to current customers, those who visit your website, or anyone who uses your mobile app.

 

  • Look-a-like Audience –

    Lookalikes are those who resemble your customers or contacts. It uses insights gained from Facebook to increase your chances of finding people interested in your business and reaching out to them. Using someone’s interests and behaviors, Facebook finds new audiences that might be interested in your product or service.

Regardless of whether you want to use photo, video, or text for your ad, Facebook has an ad style that will suit your needs. Their formats put your business front and center and are loadable from any device or connection speed. Ads are available as photos, video, slideshows, and collections. You can choose to make a lead ad, dynamic ad, or link ad. Each type of ad targets specific results.

  • Lead Ad

    – Collect leads through mobile.

  • Dynamic Ad

    – Promote all your products in your catalog to the correct people automatically.

  • Link Ad

    – Point people to your website so that they can learn more.

 

So, you’ve made your ads and they’ve reached out to Facebook users. Now what? Did the ad work? Was it worth it? Do you need to tweak anything? That’s where Facebook’s Ad Manager comes into play.

Audience Outcomes measure reach, targeting, frequency, and cross-device performance so that you can optimize and understand how to connect with your audience.

Brand Outcomes measure ad awareness, brand awareness, ad recall, and brand perception so that you can find out your media can personally impact your business.

Sales Outcomes measure installs, purchases, leads, conversions, returns on investment (ROI), and more so that you can learn how your marketing decisions will directly impact your sales goals.

 

Audience Network

Audience Network allows you to deliver video ads across many different platforms that aren’t Facebook. It targets sites and apps where people spend a lot of time. You can use in-stream video across many trusted publishers on any device. Ads followed by other content can give you a new way of advertising to your audience.

  • 70% of in-stream ad impressions on Audience Network are viewed to completion
  • 90% of in-stream ad impressions on Audience Network are delivered with sound on
  • 15% fewer conversions on average when you remove Audience Network as a placement

Facebook Pages

Facebook pages allow you to connect with your audience and tell them about your business, right on Facebook. Creating a page for your business makes a place for potential customers hang out and discuss your business or purchase products. A Facebook Page for your business also allows you to:

 

  • Join A Community – There are more than 60 million active business pages on Facebook
  • Connect With Customers – Did you know that over 1 billion people use Facebook Messenger? Messenger is automatically integrated into each Page, allowing your audience to connect with you directly at any time.
  • Create A Mobile Hub – Over 1.1 billion people use the mobile version of Facebook every day.

 

It’s simple to setup a Facebook Page of your business…and it’s FREE! The Page will look great on both desktop and mobile, so you don’t have to worry about multiple versions.

You can build up your audience by engaging them on your Page and promoting the Page to the right people. You can stay in touch with customers right from the Page with Messenger, making it quick and easy to engage with your audience. Pages make it easy to build a community around your business. From Page management tools to ads, there are numerous ways to promote your Page and get it in front of whatever audience you wish.

 

Newsfeed Engagement & The Snooze Button

Recently, Facebook made a change to the way your content will show in the newsfeeds of your potential audience. While this may directly, or indirectly, affect your business and the way you do posts on Facebook, it’s not all doom and gloom. Basically, they are working to make sure that posts from “friends you care most about” are relegated to the top of the feed, while demoting things like clickbait headlines and fake news.

 

Facebook is looking to make our news feeds more meaningful, even at the cost of lower engagement in the short term. Unfortunately, what is considered meaningful content differs from person to person, so it will hard to measure what gets your ad or post through. But in the meantime, we have a few tips to help you out, and keep you on the meaningful side of the algorithm:

  • Use your posts to inform your audience. Don’t hold back information in a post, forcing the user to click a link to get the rest of that information. That’s clickbait and will only get your post demoted.
  • Make sure to set appropriate expectations. Don’t use super dramatic language, make impossible claims, or use extreme words. Don’t tell them that you’re changing the world or have the greatest thing since Facebook if you don’t.
  • Make your headlines clear and accurate. Users have told Facebook that misleading and exaggerated headlines frustrate them. Facebook listened. Any post that violates the two previous points will suffer “Decreased post distribution for your Page”.

 

To go along with changing newsfeed engagement, Facebook is also rolling out a snooze button. You can decide you don’t want to see posts from a page or individuals for a while, and Facebook will move them off your feed for 30 days. If a user snoozes you on Tuesday because of a post won’t see your post on Friday that they would have engaged with. This can hurt a small business. But by following the points above, you can avoid having your audience hitting that dreaded snooze button.