I MC'ed a great "Brainy Breakfast" for the Marketing Association this morning, with excellent presentations on Facebook. I've been looking after the Fast, Fresh & Tasty page on Facebook for around a year now, and I thought I'd share some of my insights to help you understand more about this massive channel. It occurs to me that people who use Facebook all the time (as a business) are always learning and forget how much they actually know. So here's six quick tips, if you "like" them, let me know and I'll share more.
1. Authenticity
When posting on behalf of a brand, be true to what that brand is all about. Stick to your topic and to your voice. Know your audience and speak to them, but in your own voice. I post only about food, local products, NZ ingredients, and what's in season. If you like those things, you'll like all of my posts. There's no chance of cute kittens or pithy quotes on the Fast, Fresh & Tasty page.
2. Be cautious about likes
Likes are a measure, but they shouldn't be your ultimate goal. You'll need some likes to have an audience to even talk to, but be careful how you acquire them. The very best likes are from people who genuinely want to engage with you, and who will welcome your posts in their news feeds. Asking people to like you in order to enter a competition may not be targeting the right audience (unless your audience is people who like free stuff).
You can run ads, just to acquire likes, if you do just be sure to qualify them. For example I occasionally run an ad (pictured below) which makes it very clear what to expect if you like my page, in terms of content and in terms of the app I'm promoting. It has a very high click through rate of .22% and I know I'm getting the right punters.
3. Look for deeper engagement
Within your page, keep an eye on the likes, but the volume and quality of the comments will tell you more, and the number of "shares" (where someone has liked your post so much they have physically shared it on their timeline - to all of their friends, with their comments) is a MUCH more powerful indication of your success. This example below shows 15 people (in a half day time period) that have shared my feijoa shortcake recipe. If each of those 15 have 200 friends - that's another 3,000 people I just got personally introduced to.
This deeper engagement is where my fans are now advocating for my brand; it's no longer me doing the advertising.
4. Be (very) targeted
If you do run ads, then use the filtering available to get quite targeted. Even by simply restricting my ad to, say, women (just an example, I'm not suggesting women do all the cooking!) 18+ who are interested in cooking, and are on iOs, there's still 400+k people to talk to - and I could zoom in more. (see below) There's no point in me advertising to an Android user about my iPhone app, equally there are probably smaller numbers of 13 yr olds wondering what they're going to cook for dinner tonight. Advertising to the wrong people simply contributes to the annoyance factor on Facebook and could do more harm than good.
Similarly you can also target your posts, where only specific people will get to see them. Before you can go down that path though, you'll need to set your page settings to enable that function (see below).
5. Measure everything
Try things out and measure what works for you. Facebook offers quite useful insights into your audience on your page (see below) and if you're advertising you will have seen the measurement tools there, which are even more detailed.
Ultimately though, make sure you're measuring business goals. For me that's app downloads. I very often have my live Google Analytics open while I'm doing things on Facebook to watch the click throughs coming in. I can then adjust and continue measuring until I'm happy I have something with the right impact. At the risk of repeating myself; it's not about likes.
6. Know when
Another advantage of Facebook targeting a NZ audience is that I now have a great feel for when my type of content is popular. I've noticed a dramatic increase in engagement as the weekend gets closer (and people's attention moves to more social things), and a wet weekend is my nirvana! If it's wet in one city, I'll often target that city with appropriate, in season, ideas for dinner that's suited to today's weather.
So think about your audience, how they use Facebook and offer them the right content, at the right time, to increase your effectiveness.
If you want to talk more about how to optimise which digital channels for your audience and your business, then make contact; we'd love to help you not just be liked, but be adored!