Before you contemplate whether your Facebook business page needs a facelift, consider this…Facebook is a continuously evolving platform that strives to anticipate the needs of its users and advertisers. Are you aware of the latest changes? To keep up, your Facebook marketing strategy needs to incessantly change. There’s a lot of incentive to do so. According to 2017 fourth quarter results, Facebook’s daily active users totaled 1.4 billion on average, which is an increase of 14 percent over the prior year. In addition, 42 percent of marketers report that Facebook is critical or important to their business.
What does this mean for your business’s social media marketing strategy?
The most recent changes affecting Facebook business pages and individual news feeds are perfect examples of why you should constantly update your Facebook strategy. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the Facebook feed is undergoing a massive transformation with regard to what reaches people. This shift includes users seeing more posts from friends, family and groups rather than news outlets and brand pages. Thus, your business page will have a decreased reach if you’re not evoking engagement in your posts.
You can no longer repeatedly post without getting people to like, comment, share and truly engage with your posts and page. Gone are the days of auto-posting from your blog or setting and forgetting. Accordingly, you will need to assign a human to ask questions, answer them and talk to those who like your page.
Facebook also wants to increase and deepen the conversations taking place on the social media platform. With this new evolution, your business page will need a little extra boost from Facebook ads. Advertising will become increasingly important for businesses to reach their target audience on Facebook, especially those using mobile devices. Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 89 percent of advertising revenue on Facebook for the fourth quarter of 2017, up from approximately 84 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016.
Here are a few ways businesses can give their Facebook page a facelift:
Create an engagement strategy.
Content is still king, but the way you go about distributing content needs an upgrade. Begin with the end user in mind and what will get them to comment on your post. This will require you to think about what you are posting and the emotion you desire to arouse.
Stop broadcasting messages.
Instead, start talking to and responding to users who comment on your posts. Be sure to do this in a timely fashion. Also, personalize your responses as much as possible and don’t make your posts predictable. Instead, post different content and add eye-catching graphics and video.
Use video, motion and graphics.
Look at how you’re using visual aids to help stop your audience’s eyes and thumbs from continuously scrolling. The number of videos on Facebook is increasing every day, so start looking to incorporate video into your engagement strategy. Facebook has its own set of video and image design specifications, so be sure to check them out.
Measure the engagement.
Pay close attention to the comments you receive on each post and do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. Although it sounds simple, many businesses that use Facebook are not paying enough attention to engagement. In working with small businesses, I notice that even when a business is paying attention to engagement numbers, it is not doing anything about them. Know your numbers, shift your approach and start talking to your audience.
A business should take a close look at its Facebook page on an ongoing basis and learn to leverage this social media channel to best reach and engage as many customers and prospects as possible.