Facebook Strategy
Without question, Facebook dominates the social media field
It has close to 2.2 billion monthly active users and offers the most robust range of tools for sharing your content, targeting your audience, and analyzing the results. While most companies can thrive on just two social networks, Facebook will almost always be one of the two.
Facebook is where you go to hang out with your friends. More than any other network, people use Facebook to build a personal comfort zone exclusive to their friends and interests. The dialogue on Facebook is between you and your followers, and your goal is to reach your followers’ friends.
Use Facebook’s post scheduling feature to queue up your week’s worth of planned content in advance. These are the posts that you want to use to generate discussion and share your own commentary. Keep visuals appealing, ask questions, and have a little bit going every day. Don’t overwhelm their news feeds, though. If you take up too much space people will be more likely to unfollow your page.
What’s my strategy?
You will want to approach Facebook differently based on what sort of business you run. The ideal businesses for Facebook are client-facing: restaurants, service industries, retailers, and individuals with something to promote (bloggers, writers, artists, celebrities). Or, in short, anything people might want to consume in their off-hours when they’re not at work.
But that doesn’t mean B2B companies should leave Facebook behind; it will be a useful tool for creating highly-targeted advertising for almost anyone. So even though it’s a tougher sell, it’s worth keeping a channel open. Repost some of the content from your other channels occasionally (a few times a week), and keep a close eye on your followers. If engagement starts to climb, it may be worth shifting some of your resources toward that channel.
How do I make sense of my numbers?
Facebook analytics can be a little confusing to understand at first, but once you get used to the terminology, they’re easy to follow. Your goal is to drive engagement. This means you want your audience to like, share, and comment on your posts. The more your fans do this, the wider your reach.
Keep in mind, however, that some numbers can be misleading. A post with a modest amount of engagement can garner a huge number of impressions. However, an impression doesn’t indicate a great deal of meaningful interaction with your content: All it means is that someone scrolled past it while they were browsing their newsfeed.
How important is engagement?
Well, imagine you’ve paid to put up a billboard next to a highway. Thousands of people will drive past it every day, and in that sense it will bring you a great deal of exposure. People will come to recognize your brand, and over time they may think about looking it up and digging a little deeper. However, seeing your brand and being aware of who you are does not mean they are ready to bring you their business.
Engagements, on the other hand, are a much more meaningful metric. They show that someone has viewed your image, liked or shared your post, or clicked on your linked content. (You caught their interest. Good job!)
Of course, these specific actions can be broken down even further so that you can see exactly how many likes or shares (or anything else) you received. The amount of detail you can dig into is nearly bottomless, and you should pay attention to it eventually. But at the start, pay attention to the big numbers: how many people are seeing your content, what percentage of them are engaging with it, and what does that engagement convert into?
The bottom line:
Facebook is a place of big numbers, with a huge reach, exhaustive data, and the possibility of robust content. Don’t get overwhelmed…keep the content coming, and stay focused on your customer.
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