Facebook Marketing - Quick Guide

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Facebook Marketing - Overview

Utilizing Facebook for your digital marketing strategy is without doubt one of the best ways to connect and grow a social following online. Being one of the largest social media platforms, it provides insight into its users’ interests, likes, dislikes, personal life and buying behavior. This large database of information can be tapped into by your business or organization to generate high quality leads, sales enquiries and traffic to your website.

Types of Facebook Pages

Facebook pages assist businesses, brands and organizations in sharing information and reaching out to people. Users like the pages that they are interested in. With this, they can stay in touch and get updates about different activities. There are a number of different pages you can create depending on what sort of organization you are starting.

Following is a list of the types of Facebook pages that you can create −

• Local business or place
• Company, organization or institution
• Brand or product
• Artist, band or public figure
• Entertainment
• Cause or community

How can posts be effective to grow your business

Facebook is a fantastic way to reach out to your audience on different levels. By posting information, photos, videos and stories, the content you share can −

• Personalize your brand
• Drive users to your blog
• Generate more traffic directly to your website
• Educate and create awareness about your industry
• Promote the culture of your organization

Facebook marketing is completely scalable as you create campaigns that are realistic and relevant to your brand. All of this is completely measurable by utilizing Facebook analytics, giving you the ability to test, evaluate and adjust the strategy that you are currently implementing.

Facebook Marketing - Profile Page Setup

We will discuss, in this chapter, how to choose the most optimized page that will suit your venture.

Choosing which page suits your venture

The first step to ‘create a page’ on Facebook requires you to select the page category. While all of the pages have the same look and feel, they have different information and features that you can highlight and promote.

Once you have decided what type of page you would like to create, you need to add in the basic details and sub-categories to get the page up and running. For each page type, different information is required.

The following is a snapshot of what information you put in to begin the creation wizard. You can change the page whenever and as many times as you would like after the setup. The only thing to keep note of is that if you change from a business or local place you will lose your reviews, maps and check-ins.

The image above is what the information fields look like when you click on one of the categories in ‘create a page’.

Adding page details

The Facebook wizard will guide you through the process quite easily when you are creating your page. If you have decided that your page is a Local Business or Place, you can add tags that help improve the ranking of your page (which will increase visibility when people are searching interests related to your business).

You can also add a detailed description, website link and a custom Facebook web URL. You will also be required to confirm that you are the authorized representative to create a Facebook page for the business. Once you have finished this step, you will then be asked to add a profile picture, add the page to your favorites and have the option to claim any duplicate pages relating to your business.

The last step to getting your business or place page set up is to choose your preferred page audience. This will let Facebook know what demographics should see your page. The setting up of Facebook pages for other categories are fairly similar.

Once you have completed the Setup Wizard, you will be directed to your new page. It will look empty except for the information you put in during the setup.

Facebook Marketing - Page Navigation

After completing the initial setup, you will be redirected to your new Facebook page. Apart from the information you provided in the setup process, it will look rather empty. In this chapter, we will show you how to navigate through different areas of the page so that you are comfortable with modifying and utilizing the functionalities

In the ‘About’ tab, you can ensure that all your business details have been entered correctly. The areas you can update/modify include −

• Address
• Contact details
• Website URL
• Operating Hours
• Price Range

You can also include a brief description about your business.

Adding a display picture and a cover photo

To add a display picture and a cover photo, you will need to click on the camera icon located within the designated areas (see picture below). In general, the display picture should represent your business with either a logo or icon that people will familiarize with your brand. The cover photo is a great way to show off what makes your brand shine by giving your users a graphical image that promotes your service. Depending on the culture and values of your organization this can be professional, creative, informative or a mix, there are no set rules, it will depend on how you want to market yourself.

Display picture size − 180px x 180px

Cover photo size − 851px x 315px

Create a ‘call-to-action’ button

Creating a call-to-action button on your page enables your audience to straight away be taken to a desired location. This is a great way to start generating leads, get traffic, bookings, subscriptions and much more. You will be able to choose what type of button you would like to have displayed and where it will take someone if they click on it. You can create call-to-action buttons for desktop, iPhone and Android.

The image above is to create call-to-action button.

The image above shows the different types of buttons you can have displayed on your page.

Setting

The settings tab gives you the access to monitor and perform adjustments on your page. In the general page, you can choose whether your page is public or private. In the initial phase of setting up your page, you may wish to change the status of the page to private until you are ready for people to start finding/seeing what you are up too. Here you can also set who can post on your wall, you can choose to either just let the admin post or let your fans and people who find your page, post and comment on your wall. You can also set who can tag photos, message you privately, restrict age to see the page and which countries it will be available for. You can also merge duplicate pages you have or delete the page entirely.

Other notable areas in the settings are −

Page roles − Choose to add new people in to your page as either an admin, editor, moderator, adviser or analyst.

Messaging − Show your average response time in getting back to private messages. You can also let people know that you will be either just as or less responsive outside of business hours.

Preferred page audience − Change who finds your page by optimizing the age criteria, location, gender and users’ interests.

Facebook Marketing - Ad Options

There is a lot of flexibility when it comes to choosing the types of ads you want to produce for your Facebook page. This will depend on what you are offering for the campaign and the type of audience you want to promote. Over the last couple of years, Facebook has spent a great deal of time and effort to adjust the types of ads it offers to really be tailored to suit the needs of business owners and users.

The first question you want to ask yourself is what is the objective of the advertisement that you are going to post. Different types of ads serve the following purpose −

• Generate traffic to your website.
• Boost likes and engagement for your page.
• Install and promote your mobile and desktop applications.
• Direct people to your business, ecommerce platform or event.

Get traffic to your website

Following are some of the ways to generate traffic to your website.

Send people to your website

This option is utilized to set the destination when someone clicks on the advert to a custom URL of your choice. This ad simply displays a title, short description, and the URL of the link you wish to display.

This option is best if you want to direct someone to your homepage, online store, contact page or any other page on your website that you want people to see.

Increase conversion on your website

If you choose to implement and increase conversion on your website campaign you will be given a short code. This code is added to the page that you wish to track conversion on.

For example, if you want to track how many people subscribe to a newsletter on your page, you should add this to your newsletter confirmation page. You can then optimize the ad to reach out to people in your audience that you would like to convert.

Boost likes and engagement for your page

Boosting your post will create an ad from a post that you have already created on your page. This is best used when you want to get a wider audience to see what you have posted. The goal for a post boost is to increase the number of people viewing, liking, commenting and sharing the content that you have published.

Promote your page

Promoting your page gives you the ability to custom set and optimize a campaign to reach out to people in your target market. The primary goal of this is, getting users to like and follow your page. When you have a user liking your page your posts may appear in their news feed organically. This option is best used when you want to grow your support base.

Get installs for your app

This option creates an ad specifically for mobile and tablets. The ad contains a link that sends the user directly to the app store where they can install your app. This is great when you want to convert Facebook users to mobile app users. These ads can be optimized for the type of operating systems you want to target (For example, iOS/Android) and whether you want to target mobile or tablet.

Increase engagement in your app

This option sends users that click on your ad directly to specific areas of the app that you want people to go to. This can be integrated into the app with the Facebook SDK to measure how successful the campaign is going to be.

Raise attendance at your event

You can direct people to your business by creating localized ads. For this, you need to set a custom radius and target people in locations where you operate. This option is great for brick and mortar businesses to increase their in-store sales and local foot traffic.

Get people to claim your offer

If you want to create an advert with a couple or discount/deal code, then the best option is the “Get people to claim your offer campaign”. This ad can be optimized to choose the audience that sees your ad. You can also set a limit on how many people can claim the offer.

Reach people near your business

Reach people near your business by creating localized ads targeting people around where you operate by setting a custom radius. This option is great for brick and mortar businesses to increase their in-store sales and local foot traffic.

Facebook Marketing - Ad Management

To create a new advert when you are on your Facebook page, click on the dropdown arrow next to the notification toggle and go down to “Create ads”. This will open up the ads manager toolkit.

The first step will be to choose the objective that you would like the ad to perform. If you want to use a campaign that you have completed previously, you can click “use existing campaign”, which is located above the campaign objectives on the top right side of the screen. This will give you an opportunity to choose from the list of your previous campaigns. You can edit/modify them to be reused again to serve your next campaigns purpose.

Once you have chosen the objective for your campaign, you can then begin to build the campaigns purpose. This is broken down differently depending on the type of campaign created, but each campaign will give the option to set the −

• Name of Ad
• Target demographic
• Age
• Location
• Users interests
• Costing of advertisement

Facebook Marketing - Page Promotion

Let us now discuss in detail about creating a Facebook Social Media Marketing (SMM). When looking to promote your page, you need to clearly define a strategy on what you are looking to achieve. This can be done by −

• Clearly defining your goals and objectives.

• If you already have a Facebook page — Conducting an audit to find out what is working and what is failing.

• Conducting research and competitor analysis.

• Creating a content plan.

The two best ways to promote your page are to either promote the page itself or boost your posts.

Boost your posts

• Create the post that you would like to promote. Once you are happy with the post and it has been published, click the ‘boost post’ button. You can schedule posts for a future publish time and still organize a paid boost campaign for when the post becomes active.

• Choose an audience that you have already created or select ‘create new audience’. If you choose to create a new audience, the following pop-up will be displayed. Here you can define who the post will be targeted at.

• Choose budget and reach. You can optimize the boost to how much you want to spend and how long you would like it to run. Playing with these options will alter the reach of how many people will be estimated to see the post.

Promote your page

To promote your page, you will need to open up your Facebook Ads Manager Toolkit. In the toolkit, select the ‘Promote your Page’ option and the page you would like to promote. Then, click ‘Set Audience and Budget’.

This will open up an area where you can define the audience you would like to reach. This can be optimized by location, age, gender, language, interests as well as people and groups that you want to exclude.

The following is a stepwise procedure that we need to walk through to promote a page.

• Target a specific location.

• Set the age between 28-40 as we want to target the young, and the active business owners on social media.

• As the posts will all be in English, we have set English as the primary language of people. This sees to the promotion of page among native English speakers too.

• As the page is called “Local Business and Place”, we need to match the interests of small business owners and people interested in small business.

• We have also excluded the page boost to be shown to anyone that already likes the page, as we need not direct the campaign budget on people who have already joined.

This defines your audience and limits your potential reach with the goal of getting a higher conversion of people liking the page.

The image above illustrates all that is mentioned in the steps above.

Facebook Marketing - Personal Branding

The actions that you do in a public domain, shapes the way in which people perceive you. No matter how much we try to ignore the fact, people do judge others around on what they see. They may judge you based on your actions. This has become more apparent with the actions that you perform on the social media platform. The posts that you share, the photos that you upload and the content that you share does affect your personal branding. It is always important to create a strategy that is aligned with the way you want to be represented.

Define yourself

To define yourself, you need to figure out how you want to be represented online. This should be consistent across all the platforms with all your social media profiles. The most important part of defining yourself is being genuine. A great way to do this is to think about who you are and create a list of your interests and the best qualities that define who you are. This way you are planning ahead and ensure that your actions will be consistent with how you will be perceived.

Think about a branding strategy

As funny as that sounds for a personal profile page, you are a brand. When someone comes on to your profile page they will be walking through the content, posts, pictures and videos posted on your page. You should analyze how you are being perceived and what your current brand stands for. You can look at your previous posts, games you are affiliated with and pages you have liked. See if these are truly aligned with your strategy. Removing things that are not necessary and seeing which content you are interested in, will assist in changing your profile’s brand.

Set your privacy settings

Setting your privacy filters is very important as it ensures that you have set controls on who gets to see the information that is there on your profile. Depending on what you want different people to see, you can choose who has limited access and who has complete access to your profile. You can choose for people you are not friends with to only see very limited information. For example, you can choose to show only some basic information and work history to people who don’t know you (unclear, please rephrase).

Create your vanity URL

Your Facebook vanity URL is the domain link you can share with people to find your profile. For example, if your name is John Doe, you can set your vanity URL to www.facebook.com/johndoe.

Fill in all professional details

Facebook gives you the opportunity to create your professional details and work history. Rather than just putting the position in, you can put the dates you worked there and information about what you did in the role. When someone visits your profile to see who you are, this area is a great way to showcase your work history and as such, promote your personal brand.

Network and increase your friendship base

You can network and increase your friend base by engaging in conversations and posts made by people in your current network as well as posts on pages that you like. By getting involved in a meaningful way, you can create dialog with new people and add to your current list of friends with people you are connecting with on issues that interest you/that you choose to discuss.

Create posts/share content

By doing this, you are making the people in your current network aware of the things that interest you. This could be an opinion, current situations going on in your life, photos of places you have been, information of an event you are attending and much more. This could also be sharing an article or video that you found interesting. Just remember, everything you post and share can affect your personal brand, for the good or the bad!

Facebook Marketing - Identify Targets

Identifying your target audience is important as it helps you narrow down on the people who see your posts to the ones that care the most. When you are using the ad creator, Facebook assists you in breaking down the target audience based on location as well as demographics like age, interests, and gender. You will also be able to target your ad based on what people do on the Internet outside of Facebook.

You get full control over the audience you want to reach. Depending on your business needs and the strategy you are currently implementing, you can choose from either one or a combination of the targeting options.

Choosing the right audience

When looking to identify your target, you will need to choose the right audience you want to reach. Before working out the right target market, ask yourself the following important questions −

• What device do I want to reach my customers on? Desktop, mobile, tablet or a combination?

• How many campaigns will I be setting up? Will there be relevant messages that I want to target to specific groups of people?

• How will I get the most value from my advert?

Targeting options to choose from

We can choose from the following options when finding an audience −

• Location, age, gender and language
• Interests
• Behavior
• Categories
• Connections (People who are already connected to any of your pages)

Identifying your target market is very important, as the better you have this defined, the more successful a campaign will be. This can make your Facebook marketing much more cost-effective. If you do not choose any target market, your cost per user acquisition would be much higher. For example, with no defined target audience, if 100 people see a boosted post maybe only 10 would be interested. If you targeted the post specifically for those 10 people, it would save you the cost of the 90 other people that would have no interest in seeing the post in the first place.

Facebook Marketing - Quality Posts

Creating quality posts plays a very important role. With this, you reach out to the people who are interested to follow your page and stay up to date with the content that you have to offer. There are different ways you can keep people engaged and entertained and it is necessary to offer a range of different formats that will keep people coming back and wanting more quality posts.

When you are creating your SMM strategy, it is good to have a knowledge of and plan for the type of posts you want to publish. By creating a content matrix, you can plan out on the type of posts you will publish. Knowing that roughly −

• 40% of your posts will drive the users to your blog.

• 30% of your posts will be curated from other sources, for example, sharing photos and videos.

• 25% of your posts will be enterprise content.

• 5% of your posts will show of your brand’s culture.

The posts you publish should −

• Promote your business, attract readers to your website, and generate profit.

• Share content from thought leaders in your industry.

• Initiate personal interactions that will build your business and compliment your businesses culture.

Types and Quality of Posts

Being consistent in the quality and types of posts you create helps people know what kinds of messages to expect from you and how they are related to your business.

Create link posts to get people back to your website/blog

In the post creation tool on your Facebook profile, you can add a link to either your website or a blog post and then press enter. This will take the title, description and a picture that you have entered in the link page and organise it on to your Facebook post. You can also add a caption with some information about the link you are posting. It is good to keep this caption simple and precise, no more than one or two sentences.

Post interesting copy, images and videos

Posting interesting information, images and videos that are engaging will get your profile more attention and assist you to make your brand message stand out in your users’ news feeds. These posts should also be short and succinct, usually between 50-100 words.

Publish posts that create conversations

Posting a question or story that will generate a conversation between you and the users is a great way to create unique, engaging and entertaining dialog. With this, the users will be able to spend time on your page reading and at times performing the required actions. This requires minimal input from you, the Facebook admin of the page, as it is the users who create the content.

Publish exclusive information

Reward the users who follow your Facebook page by offering them exclusive offers and deals that are not accessible anywhere else. For example, if you have an ecommerce website, you can create a coupon code that will give them discounts when used on your website. This can help to grow your audience as your fans may share this information with their friends and family.

Facebook Marketing - Post Frequency

Post frequency is something that does not have a definitive answer. Finding the sweet spot for the amount of posts you should make per week will strongly depend on how your audience is engaging in the content you share. On one hand, if you are publishing one post per week, this will probably be not enough to keep the users from recognizing your online presence. But on the other hand, if you publish five posts per day, users will probably find this annoying and this could detract them from staying as a follower.

Facebook’s algorithms have been designed in favor of fresh and unique content being shown on news feeds. If you post repetitive information, this will not be beneficial to your page and your users will not appreciate repetition on their feed.

At the end of the day, you need to ask yourself the following questions −

• How do I get more followers?
• What information should I share?
• What times should I be sharing this information?
• How often should I be sharing information?

Experimenting with post frequency can take time. We would recommend you start with approximately 8-12 posts per week and tinker with it till you find a sweet sport for your business. You will notice that the likes, comments and shares on your posts will stop growing and the count will reduce further when you post too much information.

Facebook Marketing - Likes Philosophy

Getting likes from the posts that you publish are great, to a certain extent. It is now undeniable that social media is a viable method of marketing and a great way to grow your brand and generate more traffic and income for your business.

The great benefit of ‘likes’ on Facebook is that they are quantitative and verifiable means of measuring success of the content you are providing.

For example, when on your page you post links to a new blog article on your website you can gain important feedback on how good and relevant the blog articles are. The more engaging and enjoyable the article, the more likes, shares, and comments the post should get. It can also provide you with the important feedback on the topics to choose for your future blog articles.

Although it is not binary, there are both active and passive Facebook users. If you have a lot of passive Facebook users as fans, they may not like as many posts or engage in conversation through messaging. Attractive active Facebook fans like posts more and are much more likely to click on external links to your website — which, if the end goal is to get a sale on your site, could be make or break method in generating revenue.

Likes also lead to insights. These insights provide detailed data on the activity that the fans are making on your site. This can be important for market research. If you have an ecommerce platform, by posting links to different types of items, you can see what kind of products your fan base likes more and can utilize this in your marketing strategy.

Another benefit that Facebook likes provide is that they show legitimacy and build a trust factor linked to your page. When someone visits your page and sees that there is a lot of engaging activity coming from your users, they will be more likely to trust your brand, which can help shape the brands identification on Facebook.

Facebook Marketing - Create Fans

With over 1.55 billion active Facebook users each month, it is important for your business page to be able to tap in to your target market and start growing a fan base. Although this may be a daunting task initially, as the page grows in good content it should also increase in popularity.

Growing a solid fan base is important because −

• It gives people a reason to trust you.
• It is an indication of popularity.
• The more fans you have; the more site traffic you should get.
• It helps with your SEO strategy.

Once you have created your page, utilize your own personal network and add as many people as you can from your private Facebook page. You can also ask people in your closer network to share the page with their friends.

Add the Facebook Like Box Plugin to your website

Adding the Facebook Like Box Plugin to your website will benefit your business as it will −

• Associate your website with your official Facebook page. This is a factor of SEO and helps in the identification and ranking of your Facebook page.

• As you grow your Facebook fan base, a trust factor between the people and the website will be created.

• It can help grow your Facebook page organically, without paid ads.

Share relevant content

We have written about this in more detail in the previous section of the tutorial. Having unique, engaging content gives a reason for Facebook users to become fans of your page. The more relevant the content is to your demographics, the more likely they will share it with their friends.

Create a blog or newsletter

Creating a blog or newsletter is a great way for people to follow you and share your page with friends who would be interested in what you have to offer. This is also a great option as it drives users to your website.

Be original

There are so many Facebook pages out there with SO MUCH content. In fact, there are five new Facebook pages and profiles being created every second. Try coming up with creative content that people will be interested in. Stay up-to-date with the changes taking place in the market of the industry you are part of. And, be at the forefront always. Let the people know about the new and exciting things that might interest them.

Facebook Marketing - Engaging Fans

When you are looking to engage your audience, you need to ensure that you have content that will drive users to stay interested in your posts. Even if someone is a fan of your page, if they are not interested in your posts they can un-follow your posts from there news feed and will not see anything that you post.

Following are some tips on how to keep your fans engaged −

Headline of your post

Keep the headline of your post short and to the point. If you are looking to drive someone to a blog article with a link to the blog post, make the headline of the post the contention of the article. For example, an article relating to health and beauty tricks could be something like “10 health and beauty tips to keep you looking young and feeling good”. The aim of this statement is to drive more clicks, likes, comments or shares.

Keep a good range of different types of posts

When consistently all your posts bear the same look, it will be hard for your audience to stay engaged. Posts come in many different forms and styles. It is worthwhile experimenting to seeing what kind of styles your audience become more engaged in. These experiments can come in from −

• Link posts
• Asking your audience questions
• Photo posts
• Video posts

Have a brand identity that is stronger than the trending fads

When there is a trend in your industry, you can utilize it to create rich content. The people who are interested will definitely follow the trend. This is great because your users are likely to like, comment, share, and follow your posts as they will want to stay up-to-date. This can help you become an authority in the industry. But piggy backing on the trends is only temporary and if you want to ensure that once the popularity slows down, you need to have a strategy and brand identity in place that lasts much longer.

Express yourself in ways that your fans are most likely to relate with

The way you write your content plays a key role in users wanting to keep reading/following your posts. It is important to understand your fans and know what they find engaging. This could be by using certain terminology, emoticons, slang and photos that are in line with the demographic you are looking to get to follow your page.

Always check your Facebook analytics

Facebook analytics will provide you with the most important feedback you can get for your page. You will be able to see −

• How many people engaged with your posts?
• How many likes, comments and shares your posts got?
• Which country your likes are coming from?
• Which age groups liked your specific posts?

If you see a constant drop in engagement for a certain type of post, it will be an indication that you should start experimenting with different options to make that post type more successful.

Facebook Marketing - Call-to-Action

The main goal of the call-to-action button is to bring businesses’ most important objective to the forefront of its Facebook presence. You can utilize the call-to-action button to send your fans to any link that you desire. This is a great way for people that visit your page to straight away interact and gain access to your pages’ primary objective.

You can select from a group of call-to-action buttons depending on what you are looking to do. Following are the main call-to-action buttons −

Book Now

This option can be used by service-based businesses for your users to book appointments.

Contact Us

It is what it says; you share your business/brand contact details here. Make sure this button is linked to your website’s contact us page.

Use App

If you have a mobile app page or mobile app, you can drive users to download the app.

Play Game

This option gives the users the ability to play an online game or try a demo. Great when you have a new game and want to show it off.

Shop Now

The show now button can be used to direct your fans to an ecommerce store.

Sign Up

This is the best option if you are looking to build a database for email, newsletter, etc.

Watch Video

With this option you can drive your users to a video. This can be either on your website, Facebook, YouTube or any other online application.

How to add the call-to-action button

To add the call-to-action button, follow these steps −

Step 1 − Go to your Facebook page and click the ‘add action button’.

Step 2 − Select the call-to-action button option that is most applicable to what you are looking to do.

Step 3 − If you want to drive your users to a website, click website, otherwise if you want to drive your users to a mobile application, click app.

Step 4 − Click ‘create’.

Step 5 − Test to make sure it works the way you want it to and you are done!

Facebook Marketing - Video Promotion

Video promotion provides a different dimension to your social media campaign. Whilst content and images are static, a video can provide entertainment and education in a faster and for some users more interesting way. Even if it is not something you have initially done with your Facebook page, it might be good to try and create a video that is in alignment with your brand and see what kind of feedback you get.

Following are the different types of videos that you can create −

Videos that educate

Creating educational videos in your industry is a great way to show validation in what you do. This could be from picking a topic and teaching people about it to uncovering truths about questions people have been asking you on your page.

Videos that inspire

Inspirational videos convey the most powerful messages on the Internet and tend to be the ones that go viral the most. By telling a story or showing the story with music and captions, you can convey an inspiring story that people will remember.

Videos that entertain

Entertaining videos are a great source of fun. Especially, they tend to break the monotony of working continuously. These short videos give people a break from their routine work and bring smiles on their faces.

Promoting your video

After spending the time to create a video and putting it on Facebook, it would be a good idea to run a paid campaign so you can extend your reach. The goal should be such that the video is high on content value. This will lead people to like your page and share the video on their wall. Once you have posted the video, either go to the ads manager or in the video post, click boost photo. Applying the steps required to boost your page, you can also create an effective boost campaign for your target demographic.

With the steps required to apply the ‘call-to-action’ buttons, you can also create a watch video call-to-action on the top of your Facebook page. This directs people to the video post following a click.

Facebook Marketing - Tricks

There are many different ways to gain traction and get new fans on Facebook, the most successful campaigns have always been the ones that have been the most creative. The best advice to be given when looking to create a marketing strategy is to create a campaign that is unique and stands out from the rest but at the same time being concise and to the point of your brand identity.

Following are the different ideas that can be implemented to grow your Facebook page.

Offer a special deal just to Facebook fans

This is most effective if you have an ecommerce website. You can create a coupon code that can be used on their next purchase. This coupon code would be exclusive to people on your Facebook page. This is great, because the people who like your page are interested in your product, it may entice those who have not made the purchase to do so. It also has the benefit of being shared by people from your page to other people’s page. These people who may not know about you, as the person sharing, believe the discount would interest one of their friends, family, colleagues or themselves.

Ask your users a question

By asking your users a question, you can start a discussion on the post. People may also attach a friend of theirs to the conversation to get them involved.

Add multiple images to your Facebook Ads

When you post an ad with multiple images, it creates a carousel for users to go through. You can really be creative here and tell a story in your ads through images. This will engage the person looking at the ad to scroll through all the images to get the complete story. The final image can contain a call-to-action button to drive users to the page or your website.

Keep text under 20% on ad images

Facebook guidelines will not accept a boosted post if the image include more than 20% text. Ensure when you or your designer is creating the image is aware of this, if you plan to boost the post as a paid advertisement.

Create a contest

In the past, it was cumbersome to create a contest and the users going on it. The recent changes have made it easier now. Creating a contest or giveaway is a great way to grow your audience as you can tell people to share and comment on the giveaway post for a chance to win. This increases engagement and the shared post will give the opportunity for organic advertising on other people’s page.

Utilize hashtags

Facebook has the option to add hashtags to each post. This helps people to filter and find related and relevant content. This gives you an edge to get recognized organically. Although hashtags have not become as popular on Facebook as they are on Instagram, they still do provide an opportunity to gain more reach. When using hashtags on Facebook it would be wise to limit them to one or two well-defined hashtags rather than spraying the post with many hashtags that people won’t usually search.

Share fan created/suggested content

Sometimes a fan will send you something interesting. Rather than dismissing it, maybe have a look at incorporating it into one of your posts and giving credit to that fan. This shows that your brand is a community that your fans are so passionate about. You collaborate and work with your fans, rather than just publishing or releasing information.

Facebook Marketing - A/B Testing

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a method of working out which part of your post works the best with your audience. It splits the post from its −

• Headline
• Body copy
• Images
• Call-to-action
• A combination of the above

When starting out a campaign, it is important to experiment with what will be most likely for the audience to engage with your posts, on which devices the posts work best for the audience that will eventually use your product/service.

Apart from testing post content you can also run tests on the following −

• Countries
• Precise interests
• Mobile OS
• Age ranges
• Genders
• Images
• Titles
• Relationship status
• Landing page
• Interested in

Creating a test

The best way to implement a test is to create two similar ads in your ads manager. Don’t post these ads to your wall but run a small paid campaign. In these ads, you may decide that ad A will have a short one-line sentence with an image and a caption. Ad B could have more content in the post but no writing on the image. You can run these ads with the same demographic type to see how people will react to the posts.

You also may want to try split testing the image itself. Think about what colors you are using, the psychology behind the colors and the way it makes the post feel. Keep the colors in an image to around three predominant ones as you don’t want the image to look too busy.

Although this type of testing can take time, it will eventually ensure that you know exactly who to target your advertisements to and how they should be designed.

Facebook Marketing - Analytics

Facebook analytics, also known as insights, provide you with very important statistical analysis of how your campaigns are going and what sort of engagement your posts are receiving.

Following is an image of the front page of the analytics section. It gives you an insight if your audience is large enough. In addition, it also helps you know the types of devices your audience uses and you can also have a track of the page/video views.

On the right hand side, there is a toolbar with the different sections that you can go through to find various insights. We will go through each area on what information you can get from them.

Likes

In this section, you will be able to see the total likes for your page. It will give you a graph with a 30-day overview and you can see how to track your progress. You will also be able to view your net likes, which shows how many likes you get for each day as well as how many unlikes your page is getting each day.

Finally, you can see where your likes are coming from — from people coming on your page and clicking like, finding you through ads and through the API.

Reach

This indicates how many people see your post. As seen in the following graph, it is separated with organic reach and paid reach. In this section, you can also find the graph for reactions and shares for all posts.

Page views

This gives you an insight into how many people are viewing your page on a day-to-day basis. This is great because, especially in the early days when you are testing different post types, you can see the analytics over a period of time and see which days are working better to get click through on to your page.

The following first graph shows you total views for each day, while the second graph gives you the ability to break it down by total page views, by section, age and gender, country, city and by device.

Actions on page

Page actions tell you what people are clicking on whilst they are looking at your page. Here you can see which people are clicking −

• Directions
• Phone numbers
• Website clicks
• Page call-to-action button

This is also broken down by the same insights as the page views (age and gender, country, city and by device).

Posts

This insight is great because it shows some important information. This brings you clear data sets and shows when your fans were online over the last 7-day period.

Underneath the graph of when your fans are online, you will see a list of all the posts you have made for your page. This breaks down all your posts and tells you how much engagement each post has had. It also gives you data on how much reach each post has received. There is a button to boost posts and to see the results of previously boosted posts.

Events

The events insight gives you statistical data on how much awareness your event has received. It also gives you information on the audience/demographic that are attending the event, how much engagement the event has received and if you have a buy tickets button, it will tell you how many people have clicked the link.

Videos

This insight is very similar to the posts insight. It breaks down how your video reach has gone for each video and a breakdown of the demographics.

People

This is a very important insight as you get a complete breakdown on the age and gender of your Facebook fans. You also get a breakdown of which countries your fans are from, the cities within the countries and the language your fans speak.

This helps with future campaigns as by now you have an idea of who is using your page.