Pushing more than 2 billion users, Facebook has successfully established itself as the largest social marketing powerhouse. If you operate your own business page on this platform, you might be familiar with their effective and user-friendly marketing tools. Page admins can boost their post engagements by targeting a specific group of people using Facebook ads. Facebook groups and videos also help businesses build direct relationships with their target audiences, merging outbound marketing with the nurturing aspects characteristic of inbound marketing strategies.
With such an enormous platform as this, it’s no wonder the competition is so fierce. Millions of companies compete for the 2-minute limelight of our attention spans every day. With a new mass of viral videos repopulating the page every time we hit refresh on our newsfeed, it’s going to take more than just the average video campaign or image carousel to win over the Facebook market.
If you’re willing to take on the challenge, here are five ways you can dominate the social scene, win likes, and increase your brand presence:
1. Form a Community of Like-Minded People
Transforming your Facebook page into a hub for like-minded folks is almost an art form. Businesses that successfully create such a community have a much easier time achieving high levels of engagement because they already have a captive audience. Many businesses enter into Facebook with too broad a goal. They want to target everyone, but ultimately fail to capture anyone’s attention. The goal is to focus on winning over one particular group first. That group will become the foundation of your highly engaged community.
Here are some of the most effective ways to establish your own trusting community on Facebook:
- Hold Contests – As many as 35% of Facebook fans like a page in order to participate in contests. The reason why this works so well is because the reward of liking the page is potentially much higher than the cost. Believe it or not, asking Facebook users to like your page counts as a huge cost. You’re asking them to click on your link and commit to seeing your posts from here on out. For such a commitment, the reward should outweigh the costs significantly. If you offer an irresistible deal in exchange for a page like and share, you’ll gain quick exposure and a better business reputation. Just make sure what you are giving away correlates closely with your brand or you could find yourself building an untargeted, unengaged community of people who just wanted something for free.
- Join or Start a Group – Facebook groups are goldmines for marketers. Imagine your entire targeted community gathered into groups based on their specific interests. That’s essentially a Facebook group. Most groups have thousands of members, while others break the hundred-thousand mark. By joining a relevant group or starting one of your own, you can build relationships with your group members and introduce them to your brand in a genuine way. Facebook groups are also great for promoting contests and giveaways. For example, I’ve found great success with this technique by forming a group for my Girl & The Word site. I was able to reach out to my members without spending a dime on Facebook promotions. Each time a group admin submits a new post, everyone in the group receives a notification! In a way, this bypasses Facebook’s algorithm by boosting your engagements without demanding any funds in return.
- Interact with Other Brands – By interacting with other brands in their comments sections, you will be feeding off of the engagement from their posts while making your own brand values known. The most effective cross-brand comments are supportive, encouraging positive conversations. Original, high-quality copy is absolutely imperative for this strategy because your company will be compared with the reigning competitor. If done excellently, this would be a great way to gain quick, positive exposure.
2. Optimize Your Videos for Facebook
Each social platform favors specific video qualities, and Facebook is no different. To optimize your videos for Facebook, make adjustments that sync with the auto-play feature. Unless you have the feature turned off in your settings, Facebook automatically plays any video you scroll over without sound, so create videos that come with convincing copy, subtitles, and thumbnails. Take, for example, this viral video by Nas Daily:
The quick second where users see your thumbnail could determine whether or not they’ll stop by to give your video a chance. If they decide to let the video auto-play, the next step is to make sure that subtitles are present. The reason why so many viral Facebook videos don’t feature voiceovers is that auto-play requires users to manually turn the volume on and restart the video if they want the full experience. Give them the full experience without having to turn on the volume. This is especially useful if you choose to post videos during your audiences’ normal work hours.
In addition, videos that are uploaded directly onto Facebook have significantly higher engagement rates than YouTube links. Facebook and Google (the owner of YouTube) aren’t exactly partners, to put it lightly. As a result, videos uploaded directly onto Facebook have a thumbnail that’s 16 times the size of YouTube thumbnails. If you don’t want your videos to get completely ignored, upload them directly onto Facebook or upload a screenshot of the video and paste a link in the caption.
3. Engage in Conversations
Perhaps the most popular Facebook marketing tip of all time is to engage in conversations with your audience. Facebook was designed for networking, so you have all the necessary tools to nurture your sales leads and build relationships with your potential fans. Don’t be afraid to ask and answer questions, take polls, and spotlight regular fans. Doing this consistently will boost your reputation and increase your levels of engagement. When companies or organizations take the time to reply to their Facebook fans, it sends the message that they care about their fans’ opinions and suggestions. This is the ultimate form of customer service—giving people your time. If there’s a guaranteed marketing attribute that will win over your audience, this is it.
97.1 AMP Radio does this perfectly by constantly engaging with their commenters. Half of their posts revolve around music, as they should, and the other half are random viral videos that their fans absolutely adore. This opens up opportunities to engage with their audience in a genuine way.
4. Reward Participation
Like we mentioned earlier, whenever you ask your audience to do something, whether it’s liking your page, sharing your content, or even leaving a comment, the reward should be 10 times the proportion of what’s being asked. If you happen to host a contest, reward the winner with an irresistible gift, but also don’t forget about everyone else who participated. The contest, after all, was not for that one winner, but to attract everyone else who signed up. Reward their participation by sending out a limited time discount or some sort of special content that only they can view if they signed up for the contest. By rewarding participation, you will ensure a higher sign-up rate for the next contests you’ll host. Everyone wins!
In this Facebook ad shown on Boostlikes, Just one click allows the participant to enter into a $100 gift card giveaway.
That’s a huge reward for a seemingly small cost. Giveaways like these tend to be the most successful because of the high reward/low cost ratio.
5. Post and Promote Consistently
Lastly, the most valuable trait to adopt in social media marketing is consistency. Consistency is important because it’s the only way to build a recognizable brand. You can do all of the above excellently, but if you only do it once or twice, it won’t make much of an impact on social media. Facebook, specifically, is all about learning how to sustain your audience’s attention so that they won’t go looking elsewhere for better content.
In this graph by Kissmetrics, we can see that the more consistent they were about posting high-quality pieces, the more people engaged with their posts. Not to mention, their audience reach skyrocketed as a result of consistent posting.
In order to promote consistently, set a schedule for yourself. Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays are generally the best days to post, so figure out which content needs to be uploaded on which day. Since you can schedule posts ahead of time through the business interface, posting consistently shouldn’t be a problem. Consistent posts will also allow you to perform A/B tests with your various campaigns. It’s crucial that you keep track of your results and analytics in order to make relevant improvements each time you employ a new Facebook promotion. Both web and call leads need to be properly tracked and scored consistently to ensure optimal results each time.
You Can Do It!
In your quest to win over the Facebook market, we hope that you will apply these five simple but crucial marketing strategies. If you do, there’s no telling how fast your influence will grow on this high-potential platform.