Are you using Facebook to market your business, but struggling to create momentum?

Would you like to finally make sense (and take full advantage) of this social giant?

Sure, there’s no one-size fits all solution. But there are proven ways to improve your Facebook marketing results.

But like any marketing venture, you need to know where you’re headed before jumping in.

In this article, I’m going to share a Facebook marketing strategy you can’t afford to miss.

And none of it is theoretical or speculative. It’s the strategy we follow daily at Post Planner and one we’ve shown successful over the years.

In fact, it’s the exact one that helped grow our Facebook Page by 193% in 2015. Pretty crazy, right?

Just take a look at the Post Planner Facebook Page and you’ll see what I’m talking about. That growth is what launched a case study by Simply Measured into how we did it and the tactics we used.

Ready to do the same with your Page?

Below are nine tips to help you market your business on Facebook and ignite growth.

PLUS, grab a copy of our FREE eBook that outlines every step we took to grow our Facebook Page!

9 Proven Ways to Improve Your Facebook Marketing (a Growth Strategy Guide - FREE Download #Ebook) via @PostPlanner

9 Proven Ways to Improve Your Facebook Marketing

  1. Define Objectives and Key Results

If I asked you why you you’re using Facebook to market your business, could you tell me?

In other words, Facebook should be one pillar of your marketing strategy. Knowing how you expect it to benefit your business makes it much easier to leverage.

Not sure how it’s helping you achieve your goals? Think about it this way.

You get in the car for a cross country road trip. A few minutes in you realize your phone is dead which means you have no GPS.

With no idea how to get from where you are to where you want to be, you’re going to get lost pretty fast.

So, what have you done? Set yourself up for failure.

The same holds true for Facebook marketing. If you don’t know what you want out of Facebook, you have no business setting up a Page and throwing out content.

Your first step is to determine what you want to achieve.

At Post Planner, our Facebook objectives support our company goals. This means everything we do rolls up into a larger key objective.

Yours should too.

For example, you might be eager to:

• Build brand awareness
• Familiarize people with your product
• Attract new customers
• Improve customer service
• Engage previous customers
• Establish new relationships

Each one is doable with the right Facebook strategy in place. Your next step is to assess your current usage of Facebook.

  2. Analyze How You’re Using Facebook

When was the last time you looked at your Facebook newsfeed for the first time?

If you say never, you need to get busy.

Sit down and take a good hard look at your content from the eyes of a new (or potential) fan.

Now you’re going to conduct a deep dive into who you’re speaking with.

  3. Know Your Audience

Want to stay relevant and viable in the mind of your audience? Get to know who they are, what problem you solve and how you can be the solution.

Do this by looking at things from your customers point of view. What do they need when seeking your product or service?

This is a chance for you to spell out specifics.

Here’s what that might look like for Post Planner. Our audience includes marketers, business owners and entrepreneurs.

Each has used Facebook for 2-3 years to market their business and has more than a basic understanding.

When they seek us out, they are eager to:

• Find great content without wasting a ton of time.
• Grow a fanbase through predictive content designed to improve current results.
• Get more interaction and engagement on content shared.

Have you defined your target market and the why behind their connection with you?

Once you do, finding and sharing the right content becomes terribly easy.

How to Make This Work in Your Business

Answer each one of these questions:

• What is the intent of your audience?
• What are they struggling with?
• How do you solve that problem?

  4. Mine Data for Top Opportunities

Facebook can be used for many different reasons.

Everything from marketing, analysis, research, sales, human resource and customer service are top uses.

Mining your data to better understand how your audience interacts your Page, offers valuable insight.

Look to your Insights to see relevance and engagement statistics and patterns.

  5. Choose Your Core Topics

These will act as keywords (or the intent of your audience) that will help with search optimization.

In short, create topics that you would want your business to be known for. At the same time, those topics will attract and keep the attention of your fans and potential customers.

This can be helped immensely by the use of images and catchy graphics. Something that still to this day creates massive engagement.

Before you venture into your main content, you should write down the topics you want to cover.

The easiest way to do this is to think of customer FAQ questions. Answer those in a clear and concise way.

  6. Select Your Success Metrics

This involves determining how you will measure and evaluate the effectiveness of your social media plan.

You’ll also determine how to grow an engaged and loyal legion of fans.

Because despite what many social experts claim about ROI, it can be measured.  

This process will require a better understanding of your customer lifetime value (CLV) or the average revenue generated by a customer during their entire engagement period with your company.

Use this figure and compare it to the results you’ve generated across each Facebook campaign.

  7. Measure Facebook Results

Set up all the things that you will need to measure your results base on the objectives of your business.

It is also important to make the process of measuring your results easy.

You can do this by tracking your results by use of a landing page or even a unique promotional code.

Don’t make the mistake of simply jumping the in with a sea of competition and discerning consumers without having any clue. Research is very important as basis for execution.

This will include an action plan for today’s top social media platforms.

Take time to check out what’s out there, scope the competition and understand your target audience.  

  8. Automate, Engage and GROW

Have a clear system that you can follow to stay on top of your updates while engaging with your customers. 

You can do this by automating your updates which will prove to be a success for consistently sharing of updates.

Apart from that, get involved in the conversation. Answer questions, talk back when they talk to you.

This will help build strong relationships with clients, customers and even prospects.

  9. Never Stop Testing

This means that after you’ve measured your results, you use this data to calculate and estimate how you’re going to improve.

What one change can you make to A/B test? What small tweak will increase your market reach and fan base?

This is an important aspect that should be done to perpetuate growth.

It also involves determining whether the previous goals have been attained. If you’ve met them, it’s time to set new ones.

If not, it’s time to re-evaluate. What’s working, what’s not, and what needs an overhaul?

Final Thoughts

To succeed on Facebook (or anything else for that matter), it has to be a long-term commitment.

One where you show up on a regular basis, rather than whenever it’s convenient.

But more than that, you’re developing a process that will give you purpose.

Ready to grow a profitable (and successful) Facebook marketing strategy?

To view the original article Click Here

11 Little Known Facebook Marketing Features You Can Try Today

When I first started diving into Facebook marketing for business I was happy to simply send out an error-free post.

No typos? No poorly-cropped images? No negative feedback? Sweet!

But with each new post came new learnings about Facebook marketing best-practices until it finally came to a point where I could explore all of the awesome features that Facebook has to offer.

For the more than 1.6 billion active monthly users on Facebook, scrolling through the feed and catching up with the latest news is easy enough. But for the social media managers and marketers managing successful Facebook pages, there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes – Making it tough to keep up with all of the new features they’re rolling out on a daily basis.

That’s why I think it’s important (and fun) for us to share all of this useful Facebook marketing information so that we can create a better experience for our audiences. Because at the end of the day, it’s all about the user.

In the spirit sharing, here are 11 hidden Facebook marketing features for social media managers and marketers to try today!

1. Pages to Watch

Though we’ve written about the Facebook Pages to Watch feature in the past, it still warrants a top mention here because of its awesome capabilities. Marketers can follow up to 100 different brand pages, allowing for a quick comparison of page activity (filtered by top posts over the previous 7 days), engagement and audience growth to your own.

To access the Pages to Watch feature, click “Insights”

Then find the Pages to Watch tab – directly under the “5 Most Recent Posts” section.

Add the pages you’d like to watch to your list. Once they’re added, hover over the name, click, and watch the magic happen. Facebook provides a detailed view of every one of their posts from the current week. This allows you to quickly check the top posts from every page you follow in a matter of seconds.

2. Like a page as a brand

A great way to support and show some love towards other brands on Facebook is to like their page from your personal page. But did you know that you can also like other brands’ pages as your business page? Yup!

This nifty little feature from Facebook allows marketers to support their favorite brands from their own business page.

To like another brand from your business page, search for the page you want to “Like” and go to their timeline. Then, click the small gear icon:

Next, click “Like As Your Page”

Then find your page in the dropdown menu and click “save.” Voilà!

3. Save an article for later

With Facebook’s “Save for Later” feature, you can save and bookmark some of the things you see on Facebook to view later, like the links or videos your friends post, upcoming events, Pages or photos.

I love this feature because I’m often on-the-go when perusing Facebook and so it helps me to save things I may want to share later and tag important news about marketing or social media that I should read.

To utilize the save feature:

From your news feed, click the arrow in the right corner on an update you want to save:

From a page click the “gear icon” and then select “save”

From an event click the “ribbon icon” and then select “save”

To view saved posts or articles:

You can go directly to www.facebook.com/saved or access your saved articles from your news feed on the left hand side as shown below.

Happy saving!

4. Audience Insights

One of my favorite hidden Facebook marketing features, especially with the prevalence of paid advertising, is Audience Insights. Facebook’s Audience Insights provides detailed information about your target audience so that you can create more relevant content. The more relevant content that you deliver, the further your Facebook advertising dollar will go.

It’s also an amazing tool to create interesting and engaging statistical graphics about the global Facebook audience or your specific page’s demographic information. SproutSocial dug into their demographic data to create a fun infographic for their blog and various social media channels – proving that the opportunities are endless.

5. Create custom app icons

I was so excited when I discovered this Facebook marketing feature becausecustomizing your page’s app icons really gives it a unique touch that many other brand pages don’t have.

Here’s how to take your Facebook apps from this:

To this!

First, add the apps that you would like to use on your page. At Buffer we currently have Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and MailChimp set up.

Second, create your app icons using a program such as Photoshop, Sketch, orCanva. Facebook recommends that file size be 111 x 74 px and no larger than 1.2MB. Be sure to use recognizable brand colors and high-quality icons from websites such as Picons or dribble.

Once your app icons are created and your apps are installed, find the “Manage Tabs” option on your page under “More”

Then, click “Add or Remove Tabs”

There you’ll see all of the Facebook apps that you’ve installed. Hover over the app and click “edit settings” and then “change” next to Custom Tab Image. Upload your image and you’re all set!

6. Search previous posts for specific wording and insights

Many social media marketers are familiar with the standard post performance data under the insights tab. It’s a powerful tool for measuring performance on pervious posts with stats on: reactions, link clicks, shares, likes on shares, page unlikes, hide posts, and much more.

But some marketers may be unfamiliar with another great Facebook marketing feature that I like to call the Published “Post Search” tool under your page’s “Publishing Tools” tab.

I love this feature because I can easily search for posts around certain topics and see what wording, images, or a combination of both has worked previously.

It’s also very useful for brands that post content more than once throughout the year (which we like to do here at Buffer) as it helps to avoid duplicating poor-performing content.

Before posting an older article, ask: Have I posted this content before?

• If no – What other sorts of posts have recently been successful and how can I replicate that success?
• If yes – How can I repurpose this content to ensure that it reaches a brand new set of eyes?

7. Facebook Pixel

For social media marketers looking to measure ROI on social media, utilizing theFacebook Pixel is an absolute must. Facebook provides detailed instructions on setting up your Facebook Pixel for the first time. And have no fear, you don’t have to be a developer to easily set it up.

Here’s how:

• Go to your Facebook Ads Manager
• Click Actions > View Pixel Code
• Highlight the code and then copy the code
• Paste it between the header tags of your website
• Note: If you’re on WordPress you can use a plugin such as Google Tag Manager to easily host all of your website tracking codes such as Google Analytics and others.

The Facebook Pixel allows you to:

1. Build Custom Audiences from your website for remarketing
2. Optimize ads for conversions
3. Track conversions and attribute them back to your ads

If you’re spending money to advertise online, social media ads may very well earn you the biggest returns, but it’s important to closely track your results. 

8. Customize your ad preferences

There’s a lot of detail that goes into determining what advertisements Facebook serves up to you on your timeline, all of which is important for social media managers to understand.

According to Facebook, your ad preferences are based on information you’ve shared with Facebook, Pages you like or engage with, ads you click on, apps and websites you use, and information from our data providers and advertisers.

Viewing your personal ad preferences is often a fun and eye-opening experience for social media managers and marketers alike. I, for example (according to Facebook), am interested in “protein-to-protein interaction,” “Bonobos,” and “ViperChill” – Interesting!

Spend some time reviewing your own ad preferences and use that information to determine what sort of ads Facebook may most likely serve to your potential customers.

9. Pin posts to the top of your Facebook page

Pinning posts to the top of your brand’s page is a simple, yet extremely useful top-of-mind social media marketing strategy to point your audience to important company posts, announcements, and events.

On your timeline, find the post that you would like to pin, click the down arrow in the corner of the post, and click “Pin to Top.” It’s as easy as that!

One important thing to remember about pinning posts to the top of your page is to keep them fresh by rotating pinned posts often, especially if they are time-sensitive.

Mixing it up also allows you to showcase a much larger variety of posts. I recommend changing the pinned post once every two weeks or so.

10. View people and pages that like your page

Another useful Facebook marketing feature for social media managers is thePeople and Other Pages tab in your page’s settings. This feature allows you to view all of the people and other brand pages that like your page.

To access this feature:

1. Go to page settings
2. Click on People and Other Pages on the left had side
3. Use the dropdown menu to select between the various view options

A great article from Post Planner points out that using this feature can be useful for tracking follower growth during contests or page like campaigns – Allowing social media marketers to weed out the fake accounts from real ones.

You can also use this list to identify other brand pages that like your page – Opening up new content partnership opportunities, Facebook marketing campaigns, or even something as simple as a “thank you” to help build a relationship.

11. Facebook Page Tips

Facebook has made a push over the last few months to provide marketers with in-app tools and resources for getting the most out of their Facebook business pages. One fantastic result of that effort is the Page Tips section on the left side of your brands’ timeline.

The Page Tips section provides marketers with quick tips and best-practices on tactics such as managing your Facebook page from anywhere, successfully verifying your page, creating engaging images, and much more.

Studying the Facebook Page Tips along with the vast library of resources in their Facebook for Business library, social media managers have everything they need to create a killer Facebook page at their disposal. 

Over to you!

Did we miss any hidden Facebook marketing features above?

We’d love to know which features you use as social media managers and marketers to help make your page stand out from the crowd!

To view the original article Click Here