As we all know, Facebook is a great place to advertise and promote a brand. With 1.49 billion monthly active users, Facebook can launch a company to success in no time flat.
Facebook ads are a great way for businesses to raise brand awareness, social presence, and ultimately conversions. Many smaller companies. however, just don’t have the funds to launch a successful ad campaign. But ads are not the only solution to boosting awareness and social following.
With all sorts of great information and tools available online, marketers and business owners are capable of building a meaningful digital existence without having to break the bank.
Here are 5 tips and tricks to getting your posts seen by a larger audience while never spending a dime.
1. Analyze Your Top Ten
Facebook’s page insights is an invaluable tool for gaining intimate knowledge about how certain posts are received by your audience. By utilizing this tool you can rank your posted content by likes, comments, and shares to understand how successful the post actually was.
Once you have established a post ranking, seek out patterns and trends of those that were most successful. Is subject matter similar among top ranking publications? Were these posts accompanied by images? What kind? What can be learned from the comments section of the updates? When all of this information has been harvested, you can then use that knowledge to influence upcoming updates. And this leads up to our next tip:
2. Post Awesome Content
While this is obvious to most, many still commit the marketing sin of posting sub-par content that is riddled with keywords in hopes of ranking well. This simply doesn’t work.
Once you understand what posts have been working well for you and your audience, you can replicate this formula to develop more highly shareable posts. But you don’t simply want to match previous successes, you want to surpass them. In order to do so, take the success blueprint that you have already established and ask yourself a few key questions:
- What gets people talking and excited?
- What is currently trending in your niche?
- How can your post be useful and valuable to your community?
3. Target with Intent
One of the beautiful things about Facebook is the ability to target posts. Administrators of pages that have over 100 fans can target updates to specific audiences based on various different categories; gender, age, relationship status, educational status, location, and more.
For posts to be targeted organically, be sure to select the “Allow targeting and privacy options when I create posts on my Page” option within your page settings. Once selected, a targeting icon will show at the bottom left of the publisher. This essentially means that posts that pertain to fans in a specific location or whatever else won’t be hidden by fans outside of that segment. In turn this allows for a higher percentage of folks targeted by these posts to like, comment, and share them.
4. Timing Is Everything
There has been a massive amount of research conducted around this topic. IT doesn’t matter if you are simply trying to create more local hype around your brand or establish a global social media presence, the timing of your Facebook posts is a critical element.
Typically, early mornings and nighttime (around 8PM in the time zone you are targeting) are the best times to post since this is when most people are not working and have time to browse their newsfeeds.
But generalizations just won’t do here; what time is best for your fans? To find out when the optimum time to post is for your audience, check out the Posts report within Facebook Insights.
Additionally, your brand should be frequently posting on the weekends as well. Generally speaking, most people have much more free time on the weekends to surf Facebook and other social media sites, so this is a great time to post. Plus, most brands don’t post as heavily on the weekends so this will give you an edge as well.
5. Email Marketing Tie-In
Many brands have a substantial email list that blasts are regularly sent out to. This is a great opportunity to tie-in and help promote one of your top ranking posts by linking to it in the email. Since this content is already “fan approved” your email subscribers are more apt to like, comment on, or share it with their Facebook friends as well.
As you can see, there are many ways to leverage Facebook’s marketing muscle without spending tons of cash. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. The key is knowing how to utilize and optimize their existing tools.
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