Among all social channels, Facebook is the one that has the most monthly active users, 2.23 billion.
This means more than 20% of the world’s population is active on Facebook every month.
Can you guess how many Facebook pages exist? 50 million? 60? 70?
Not correct.
As of May 2018, there were more than 80 million Facebook business pages.
And we as marketers have to try to be more unique than the other 79,999,999 marketers. Yeah, probably that sounds something impossible. Well, instead of being different, let’s try to give the best value we can to our audience.
Eight effective tips to help you as a marketer to get the most from your Facebook business page for 2019
1. Get rid of promotional content and make more educational, fun content
When people start complaining that their page posts are not getting enough engagement, I just take my phone, search their business name on Facebook and start analyzing their latest posts.
Post number 1: Promotional
Post number 2: Promotional
Post number 3: Promotional
And I’m like, well, you really think, that the people who’ve liked your page are interested in seeing only promotional and sales oriented posts from your page? And they’re like, “Hmm, what else should we post, if we just want to get new sales for our business by using Facebook?”
In such cases, I start explaining to people that users really don’t like seeing such kinds of posts because their feed is already filled with so many ads, that advertisers put on Facebook for promoting their products or services.
Promotional content isn’t something, that will engage your customers and make them hit the “Like” or “Share” buttons. It’s something, that will make them scroll down through their news feed or even browse your page and unlike it. 
Source: WritersWrite
And the reason why so many pages on Facebook fail, is the fact, that we want to get value from someone without giving it. Not fair, is it?
Promotional/sales oriented content isn’t valuable in most cases. The good thing is you can promote your product or service and at the same time provide valuable content for your audience.
They love to hear your company story more than what you are trying to sell to them. So, get rid of the promotional material from your page. Instead, start educating them with valuable and entertaining content.
Renderforest reports, that 86% of marketers are satisfied with their video marketing results and consider them successful. This means that you can use lots of videos in your content marketing strategy and have success in it. What about starting to produce videos right away?
2. Only use Facebook ads for selling your product or service
You read it correctly.
We’ve already talked on the first point, that you shouldn’t put any promotional content in your organic posts. People hate that.
Instead of it, you can run engaging ads on Facebook and get new users/sales for your product or service.
Of course, I agree that lots of small businesses might not have budgets for Facebook. But well, if you’ve started a company, then you should have at least $100 for testing Facebook ads.
And you may want to read carefully as I’m going to tell you an easy trick on the next line for not wasting that $100 on Facebook ads.
Let’s split the $100 into two $50. What’s your business about? Do a little research or analyze what ads your competitors currently run, if you can’t come up with an idea.
Think of that content and create content for two ad campaigns. Once you’re finished, start running the promotion at least for a week for each campaign.
Seems easy, right? Wait, you’re not done. Instead of sitting and smoking a cigar, while your ads run, start analyzing how they perform.
After your ad has been in the process of running for several hours, you may start optimizing it. By optimizing and measuring your ads every 24 hours, you can at least get your invested money back after the campaign ends. You can do this several times while you find out which ad type works the best for your product or service.
And this whole idea means that you don’t have to invest thousands of dollars to start Facebook ads. All you need to kick off is $100.
3. Conduct webinars and provide valuable information to your audience
Webinars can help you to:
– Stay connected with your current customers
– Make announcements about your products or services
– Talk about niche related topics
– Connect with a wider/new audience and tell them about your services
Webinars are a little bit underrated among Facebook marketing, but they can become a huge weapon for increasing your engagement and driving more sales.
And here comes a question. How to start conducting webinars? Well, the first step is to choose a topic, that can bring value to your audience.
Let me tell you some interesting webinars topics that might be interesting for any audience:
- Invite experts in your industry and conduct QA sessions with them
- Do a QA session by yourself during which the viewers can ask questions
- Announce new product updates and introduce why you made it and how it can help your customers
- Pick interesting news in your industry and go deep with it
These are really basic ideas that you can start with, and then you can make your webinars a big part of your digital marketing strategies.
After deciding what topic to choose, you have to think about the environment and the time you are going to shoot it. Be sure to make everything in high quality: Setup lights, camera, and voice.
There are lots of tools, which will help you stream your webinar in a professional way on your Facebook page.
After setting all these things up, it’s time to go and create an event for your webinar. Write an engaging description, pick an eye-catching title, create a beautiful cover pic or cover video for your event. Don’t forget to choose the right time. You have to understand your audiences’ timezone and pick a time that will be convenient for them to participate in your webinar.
Source: RightMixMarketing
4. Use Facebook insights wisely and make decisions based on your data
Make the most of the data that Facebook Insights provides about your right audience for targeting and marketing. Here is a short list:
- Page views, reviews, likes, reach, recommendations, post engagements, and followers.
- Audience behavior, buying patterns, demographic, and geographic locations.
- Posts reach for both organic and paid strategy. Here you can also add custom timing, to better understand post reactions.
- Traffic source like Google or your website.
- Activity details such as “get direction clicks”, “website clicks”, and “action button clicks”.
- Post engagements and shares.
- If you often hold events, it will show “people reached”, “event page views” and more.
- Videos’ performance and engagements.
- There are also other statistics that you can find when going through Facebook Insights in order to make better marketing decisions.
5. Use Facebook polls and get feedback from your audience
Conducting polls is a very interesting way of engaging your audience. Why?
Let me give you a quick example. People love playing games everywhere. And why not think about a game idea and give your customers something each week?
Why will it work?
- It’s fun. People like to have fun on social media, and you can give them that opportunity by conducting one for them.
- They’ll get something in return if they win the game. You have to think of interesting rules of your game.
- Engagement rate for polls is really high. And if you make the content of your polls interesting, you really have chances for getting good results from it.
Facebook gives you the opportunity to create polls with texts, photos or GIFs. You can publish them in your story or news feed. They’re a really cool way to increase your page engagement rate.
Source: HubSpot
6. Build a Facebook group in your niche and discuss interesting topics there
Facebook groups are a little bit underrated nowadays. But I can’t really find the reason why.
WordStream reports that more than 100 million Facebook users belong to meaningful Facebook communities. Why not build another great community on Facebook who can ask questions, discuss some topics, and gather an active community around your brand name?
People love communities. They love to meet new people on social media and discuss their problems, ideas with others. And also they love to hear what other people talk about their minds.
And you can build that emotional relationship between them. And when your community will become a little bit bigger, you can do other cool things, including the following:
- Conducting meetups with your community and sharing information with them
- Gathering them and discussing how your product could be better
- Doing an event and giving awards to the most active members of your community
This list can last long. I just want to give you the idea of how you can use the community for making a stronger emotional connection with your brand. It will also help you to get your brand name more popular on Facebook.
7. Reply to any activity on your page positively
Whatever happens on your page you must react promptly before any other person․ Any activity should be under your control.
In the past, where bots or automatic answers weren’t available in Facebook, it was a little bit harder to react to all the activity happening on your Facebook page in a short time.
But now you can set chat-bots and automate the whole messaging process of your page.
We have to realize that people who live in the 21st century, don’t like to wait even a minute more. They want their issues to be solved ASAP. If you can’t give the best experience to your users, then the chances are high that you’ll lose your customers. Just be with your customer whenever they need you.
You can set an auto-reply for any recommendation you’ll get for your product. If it’s a positive recommendation and your customer is happy, thank him/her and tell them something awesome.
If the recommendation was negative, don’t mess up. You have to find out the reason why the customer is angry with you and left a negative review on your page. When getting negative feedback for your company, you must dig very deep for finding out the real reason why your customer isn’t satisfied. Maybe someone from your employees did something bad to him/her? You should know about it.
Even if it is the worst feedback about your company (in a professional way), don’t remove or ignore it. If someone else comes and sees bad and unanswered feedback from someone, that can hurt your business a lot. Also, you can’t remove negative feedback, so you have to answer as clear as possible, for not negatively impressing others.
8. Always analyze your competitors and keep an eye on them
Do you know what’s the ranking of your page among your Facebook competitors? There are several tools and ways that you can use to analyze your competitors for generating new ideas for your page.
If we start from the beginning, the first thing to analyze is the kind of posts your competitors making on their page.
You can use the Facebook “pages to watch” report and add your competitors there.
Source: Buffer
What about the ads they are running? You can see that information publicly by checking their ads and info section. By doing this, you’ll know where and how your competitors target their ads. And it can give you lots of ideas for your next marketing campaigns.
If you do this analysis twice per month, it will be complete enough for knowing everything about your competitors.
Conclusion
Facebook marketing tips haven’t changed a lot since the last year. Usually, marketers underrate some tools Facebook provides, such as groups and polls. If you understand how you can bring value to your audience by using these tools, they’ll be effective for you.
Roman Daneghyan is the Chief Marketing Officer at Renderforest. He can be found on Twitter @roman_daneghyan.
The post Eight tips to get the most from your Facebook business page in 2019 appeared first on Search Engine Watch.