On January 1st, 2015, Facebook changed its algorithm, which affects what shows up in users’ news feeds. These changes have had a tremendous impact on brands that were using Facebook as a medium to promote their products and services.
What’s the impact of this change?
The latest change in the algorithm means that your organic reach has been reduced considerably, which makes it pretty challenging for Facebook marketers to get their content seen. Businesses that use Facebook as an important marketing channel now need to promote their posts using Facebook ads, which will lead to more impressions, and hopefully more interactions as a result.
What does this mean for your business?
Whether or not your business has the extra money to spend on Facebook advertising, your content is going to need to be especially engaging in order to get likes, shares, and comments, which will ultimately help you reach a wider audience.
With that in mind, here are some useful guidelines for posting to your Facebook page:
Create awesome, share-worthy content
Create content that resonates with your target audience. Shameless self-promotion never worked very well, and it won’t really work at all with the latest algorithm changes. To be awesome and worthy of sharing, your content should:
- Educate
- Entertain
- Engage
If your content fulfills one or more of those objectives, user engagement through comments, likes and shares will automatically increase, which will also extend the organic reach of your post.
Analyze, analyze and analyze More
Facebook Insights is a pretty powerful tool for tracking user interactions and page performance.
It provides amazing information on likes, reach, visits, and even demographics of people engaging with your page. Analyze your Facebook Insights to understand what type of content performs the best for your audience, and then post more of that kind of content.
Consistency is the key
To build a successful brand on Facebook, consistency is the key. It’s important to have an editorial calendar that specifically includes Facebook, and stick to the schedule you set. Consistency isn’t just limited to frequency of posting, either – it also includes things such as:
- Tone
- Timing
- Messaging
- Interactions with fans
Starbucks uses minimal copy paired with highly creative and visually appealing images to connect and engage with its Facebook audience. Take a few of their posts for example:
Essentially, with the latest algorithm changes everyone needs to earn their space in the News Feed. If you consistently publish posts that are interesting enough to get likes, comments, shares, and clicks, your reach increases. Analyzing your Facebook page performance to positively impact ROI requires experience and expertise. If you do not have the in-house resources needed to achieve results, it’s best to get in touch with a competent creative digital agency.
Advertising on Facebook
With Facebook pulling the reins on organic post reach, brands are forced to resort to paid promotion through Facebook Advertising. If you are new to advertising on Facebook, it can seem a bit complicated and confusing.
The standard dashboard where you create and monitor your ad campaign is called Ads Manager. Your Campaign Objective, Placement, Budget, Target Audience, etc., are all defined through the Ads Manager interface.
There is also a tool called Power Editor, a browser plugin that gives you access to a few advanced features. Running successful campaigns on Facebook requires practice and proficiency.
Monitoring ad performance — and optimizing your ads to drive ROI — is the most critical part of a campaign. With Facebook advertising, it’s easy to exhaust your ad budget without driving meaningful results. Audience targeting, performance monitoring, and optimization need to be accurate to derive valuable, quantifiable outcomes from your ad spent.
Convert Fans to Customers
So you have an awesome and engaging FB page, great! But you just can’t stop there. You need to convert fans into customers to truly leverage Facebook for your business in the long run.
So how do you convert fans to customer? Some tactics that work well on include:
- Contests
- Gifts and giveaways for fans
- Special offers/coupons for Facebook fans
- How-to or DIY tips
It’s not necessary for a business to be on all social platforms, and not all platforms will be equally effective for your business. To accurately measure the amount of traffic coming to your site from Facebook, and to compare its performance against other social platforms or Google paid search ads, you have to tag the Facebook ad. That will allow you to clearly identify the referral source in Google Analytics.
Unless you have a clearly defined marketing plan with definite goals and objectives and competency to measure performance of integrated campaigns across all platforms, it would be difficult to calculate ROI from your digital marketing dollar spent.
The post Is Facebook Forcing You to Spend More on Ads? appeared first on Echidna.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Is Facebook Forcing You To Spend More On Ads?
More Digital & Social articles from Business 2 Community:
- Social Media Explained in Simple Math: Lessons Learned
- 14 Ways to Update Your Social Media Strategy
- Pinterest Stats & Facts That Will Make Businesses Do Cartwheels
- Conversion Rate Optimization: Why This One Metric Determines Your Ecommerce Success
- Data Protection – Not Only for Large Enterprises! [Infographic]
