As Facebook is a great tool for collecting testimonials and reviews, engaging audiences, placing ads prominently, and combating negative results on search engines, your business should definitely start marketing through this social network. There are, however, millions of brands on Facebook, which means that your marketing strategy should be a game-changer if you wish to stand out from the crowd.
To guarantee the growth and success for your brand, consider implementing the following FB marketing tips as part of your marketing strategy.
Celebrate Your Milestones
One of the best features of Facebook is that it allows you to celebrate your milestones. Milestones play a great role in calling attention to any content you deem important. They help you tell the story of your brand in the most creative way through words and images, while subtly marketing it at the same time.
Milestone posts stand out prominently in your Facebook timeline, attracting attention to your achievements. By populating your timeline with milestones, such as establishing the company and opening for business, the launch of a new product, and reaching one million fans, you can inspire your fans and boost your engagement levels with them.
When adding these milestone posts to your Facebook timeline, do so in a way that makes you appear greatly invested to your audience. While many businesses tend to create milestones, they mostly fail to see it as a marketing channel that can help them promote their brand. Hence, tactfulness is required if you wish to make the most out of this. Here are a couple of pointers that can help you:
- Include an engaging photo to ensure that your milestone stands out and captures your audience’s attention.
- Be sure to include a call to action, along with a link for further information, to drive traffic and conversions.
- Craft a striking headline and mention the date, location and other details that add to the milestone’s credibility.
Highlight Your Posts
By highlighting your posts on Facebook, you can draw more attention to specific content. Since Facebook no longer runs posts in a chronological order, you can highlight a particularly important post in order to give it more authority and weight on your timeline. Again, you need to be smart when highlighting a post to ensure that you get the most out of it. Here are some useful tips to help you out:
- Highlighting customer testimonials will make them stand out even more. Whether it is an image with your customer’s praise (along with their name and maybe a picture) or an excerpt of your customer’s review, highlight it to get the most from Facebook marketing.
- Highlight a Facebook post with a link to one of your most popular blogs to drive greater traffic.
- Highlight posts that introduce a new product/deal so that they remain prominent and do not get lost among your new updates.
In order to highlight a post, click on the edit icon at the top right corner of your post and select the ‘Highlight’ option.
An alternative to highlighting your post is pinning your post. Like a highlighted post, a pinned post increases the visibility of certain updates. The only difference, though, is that a pinned post is displayed on the top of your timeline, making it (perhaps) the first item visitors see when they visit your timeline. In other words, even if you continue to add more posts on your timeline, the pinned post will remain on top until its expiration date, which is up to 7 days.
Here are effective pinning strategies you can use:
- Pin a welcoming status with a video or image to make visitors feel warm.
- Pin special deals you are offering for a limited time.
- Pin behind the scenes pictures from your company to further humanize your brand.
Remember: the goal of a pinned post is to greet first-time visitors and make them feel welcome. So, always select the best content that helps you with this goal.
Use Facebook Tagging and #Hashtags
You can take your Facebook marketing a step further by using Facebook tagging. By including tags in your posts, photos etc., you can give shout outs to other organizations, brand ambassadors, celebrities, and other influencer you have partnered with. Doing so would broaden your brand exposure as the organizations (or celebrities) you tag will share your post with their followers, further expanding your reach. You can also tag any major conferences or events you are attending and even some of your most devoted fans and customers as they deserve some love too.
Tags aside, you can use hashtags to connect with your followers and prospective customers. In fact, they are a nice and easy way to connect with your audience and ensure fan conversions. The following are some tips on how you can use hashtags to boost your marketing efforts on Facebook:
- For a majority of your posts, create a hashtag or two and experiment them.
- Craft a different hashtag for each topic to categorize your posts. This will allow your fans to engage in topics they want to and avoid the ones they do not find interesting.
- Create a separate hashtag for your brand to easily track when your fans want to engage with you or post something regarding your brand.
Capitalize On Major Events and Holidays
You can capitalize on major events by using popular hashtags of those events to further your Facebook marketing. To implement this, upload a status and add hashtags like #Superbowl so that everyone searching for this tag can come across your content. You can do the same for holidays such as Easter and Christmas, be it to wish your fans on these holidays or direct them to a sale you have for these major events. These aside, you can use popular hashtags such as #ThrowbackThursday and #TGIF (Thank God It’s Friday) to connect with fans and engage them in a lighthearted way.
Activate Sponsored Stories
Another way to up your winning stakes when it comes to Facebook marketing is to activate ‘Sponsored Stories’. These are social ads which display Facebook users’ recent interactions with brands in the form of ad. According to the social network, Sponsored Stories relies on all the viral features of Facebook, including check-ins, the like button, and sharing. Therefore, you can use it to reach friends of your fans rather than just your existing prospects and clients.
Despite having to pay for activating ‘Sponsored Stories’, it is worth the investment you make. This type of paid promotion is a great way to test your content without investing as much as you would on typical display ads. It is also an effective way to link back to your company, earning authoritative mentions. Finally, Sponsored Stories ensure higher visibility by placing your content in front of a new audience.
Utilize Multimedia Content
Content is the salient feature of marketing. Ideally, the content you curate and craft to post on Facebook should be downright flawless. The best way to go about creating absolutely fabulous content is to use multimedia content. Here are some highly effective ways to get the most from your Facebook marketing efforts.
- What better way is there to make fans happy other than giving them a good laugh? Memes are one of the best ways to get a chuckle out of your audience. You can also add a little of sarcasm as long as you know how to wield it without stepping on others’ toes.
- People like reading content that relates to their everyday lives and inspires them. So, consider adding a ‘Quote of the Day’ on Facebook and post life-affirming quotes for your fans.
- Videos tend to be really effective on Facebook. In fact, the social network accounts for approximately 4 billion (or more) videos a day. To get the most from this type of content, though, make sure that your videos are not too lengthy or your audience will lose interest. Also, put an eye-catching (yet relevant) caption and a brief description with your video.
Ask for feedback from Fans
Smart brands are aware of the importance of fan feedback and are already reaping its benefits in multiple ways. The most popular way businesses tend to boost engagement and generate feedback from their loyal fans on Facebook is by having them vote (for a certain thing) with a ‘Like vs. Comment’ or a ‘Like vs. Share’ button. For instance, you can ask your fans to choose among two products by coaxing them to vote for Product A with a ‘Like’ and for product B with a ‘Comment’. Not only will this help you generate fan feedback, it will engage everyone in a fun and lively way.
You can also create polls and get your fans to vote for what they think is best or what they agree on. Polls are an easy and seamless way to get to know what your audience wants, but there are other ways for you to garner crowdsourced content and seek insights to your audience’s mind on Facebook, including these four:
- Run a questionnaire
- Analyze comments on your posts and timeline
- Ask your fans to participate in a contest and send photos
- Assess what type of content your fans respond to
This crowdsourcing of answers is a great way to boost engagement. Because people everywhere love to talk about themselves and what they think, you can expect them to be quite active in these games.
Integrate Your Facebook Marketing to the Wider Marketing Strategy
You cannot keep your Facebook marketing separate from your overall marketing strategy. Doing so will cause the latter to impede and disrupt your marketing strategy on Facebook. One way to ensure effective integration is to create content that works across all channels. While it is not a bad idea to create Facebook specific content, doing so will exploit your time and resources.
On the other hand, if that content can be used for other marketing platforms and makes sense across the web, it will save your resources while connecting your Facebook marketing strategy with your overall marketing strategy. By ensuring that your Facebook content can be shared across multiple channels and platforms, you will also broaden your brand exposure and gain access to ‘new’ audiences.
Host Facebook Contests
Hosting contests, competitions and free giveaways on Facebook is another way to boost your brand. After all, if people love anything more than food, it is free stuff. If you are worried about costs, rest assured that your prizes do not need to be expensive and outrageous. Simple stuff like T-shirts, mugs, and keychains with your brand logo printed on them will make your fans giddy. In fact, it is one of the major reasons why people like branded Facebook pages.
Be sure to keep your Facebook contests simple though. There is no need to complicate them unnecessarily in hopes of generating a lot of engagement and consistent results. You will see that all of the costs incurred will pay-off well enough in terms of brand awareness (more Facebook likes) y and conversions (boost in traffic) with time.
As you can see, there are boundless opportunities and possibilities when it comes to marketing your brand on Facebook. Therefore, you should start marketing through this social network before your competitors catch on and benefit from it before you do. Once you have mastered social media marketing on this platform, you can later move on to others to ensure a more comprehensive strategy.
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