So I’ve been talking about how social media can be a great way to increase traffic to your website, and now I’m going to let you in on a few of my tried and tested ways to use Facebook for internet marketing.
…….. If you missed my last article;
‘Social Media Traffic: Using Facebook to Gain Visitors’
….then check it out here
Facebook Internet Marketing
In a world dominated by social media, Facebook has come to rest at the top of the food chain.
Gone are the days where Facebook is simply a place to chat with friends. Most people now have a personal Facebook page which they check every day, and almost every successful business has a professional page. As well as being a fantastic platform for sharing photos, videos and updates, Facebook has become one of the top tools that businesses are now using to garner traffic and sales and to build their brand.
When it comes to internet marketing, it’s the little things that count. That’s why I want to help you brush up on your Facebook internet marketing. That’s why I have compiled this list of small changes you can make to how you use Facebook for your business marketing, to make you a smarter social marketer and produce the big changes your business needs!
My Top Dozen Facebook Internet Marketing Tips
Here’s 12 of my favourite tips you can use to boost your Facebook Internet Marketing:
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
It’s become pretty common knowledge that Facebook posts need to be accompanied by an image in order to do well. However, photos need to be interesting – and the more interesting, the better. Try photo collages or pictures that are self-explanatory and don’t need a description (such as a meme or picture quote). Adding variety and choosing your images carefully will help drive engagement and consequently, will equate to more ‘clicks’.
You may even want to consider using multiple images on each post. As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words…so why not have two pictures and let the images do the talking. You may even consider using a video instead – YouTube has just exploded in the last couple of years with crazy high engagement rates. For this reason videos are more and more becoming the medium of choice.
You Make Me Wanna Shout
Every great business person knows that networking can be an enormous driving for your business, so it makes sense that your Facebook page should be able to work a room just as well as you can at a party.
Using Facebook tagging to dish out ‘shout-outs’ is a great way of building relationships with other businesses and then advertising those relationships in front of your audience. Tagging other businesses is also a fabulous way to broaden your page exposure, as the other business will see the tag and likely share the post themselves. This can multiply your Facebook reach exponentially.
Tag events you are attending, locations you are going to, businesses and blogs whose content you are sharing and anything else you can think of. You can’t over tag, so if in doubt, tag everything!
Steal Candy From the Baby
No….I’m not encouraging you to pull a bank job. All you are going to steal is inspiration.
Stephen King once famously wrote that if you want to be a writer, you must first be a reader. Best-selling authors learned the tools they needed to create their own writing from immersing themselves in the writing of others.
This same formula applies to internet marketers. One of the best ways to find out works well on Facebook, is to see what works well for others on Facebook. Take a look at what is performing well on similar social media pages and try to incorporate some of these successful strategies into your own.
#Hashtags are the New Black
The time has come to embrace the hashtag.
Hashtags on Facebook don’t function the same as they do on other social media networks, but they can still be a fun way to personalise your posts. Use hashtags to express an emotion, a cause or to build your brand. Some businesses use it as a gimmick, posting their motto or business name after every post just to increase brand enthusiasm
Caption That!
A nice easy way to get your audience engaging is asking them to caption a photo or image. Make it fun, make it silly and make it too good not to participate.
Emoticons
Using emoticons might make you feel 12 years old again, but research actually indicates that the use of emoticons can increase audience engagement by over 30%! It has also been proven that on the whole, posts which include at least one emoticon get three times more likes than posts without. So whatever you are feeling, be sure to express yourself with an appropriate emoticon – but use sparingly. Nobody wants to be ‘that guy’.
Call Them in for Questioning
In the last article, I talked about the importance of including a question in each post. Let me just take a second to remind you of how important this is – according to statistics, Facebook posts which ask questions of their readers get a whopping 100% more comments than posts which don’t.
What most people don’t know is that the placement of the question is almost as important as the question itself. Posting the question at the end of your post will help your post to reach a higher interaction rate than if it is asked elsewhere in your post. Posting the question at the start or in the middle of your post content is a rookie mistake – your audience will continue to read and become distracted. Placing the question at the end is crucial – it compels fans to respond before moving down their news feed.
Time is Money
Another important thing to consider is what the optimum time of day is for reaching people through your Facebook posts.
A fantastic Facebook feature that you should take advantage of is ‘Insights’. Insights is a little tab at the top of your Facebook page which stores data about your page so that you can see what is working and what is not working, and see when and who is engaging with your posts.
By using this feature you can get an exact idea of the time window you should be posting on to ensure your post reaches the maximum amount of people.
Make them an Offer they Can’t Refuse
It’s human nature to love free stuff, or even the chance at winning something for nothing. Offering a give-away or competition for your Facebook fans is a fantastic way to produce high engagement on your page and will even get people sharing your page around if you make a condition of entry.
Still not convinced? Studies have proven that over a third of Facebook fans first ‘liked’ a page to enter a competition.
If you have a product then you may want to consider giving one of these away or you might render your service. Be creative and then promote, promote, promote!
Share and Share Alike
People love to get up on their soapbox and talk about their opinions on platforms like Facebook, so why not give the people what they want? Asking your fans to choose option A by ‘liking’ your post, or option B by ‘sharing’ you post can be a GREAT way to engage people, and also find out what your audience wants and likes, and what they want to see from you. Win-win.
All Talk and No Action
If you don’t end your post with a question, then be sure to include a clear and direct call to action. Every internet marketer wants something from their audience – whether it’s purchasing something, clicking something or sharing something, so holler out! If you don’t direct your fans to your desired action, then they can’t perform it. It’s as simple as that.
Keep it Short and Sweet
Shorter posts are known to fare better than longer ones so don’t start penning your first novel in your Facebook posts. Now you don’t need to be quite as strict as you have to be on Twitter, but be sure to keep your character count between 100 and 250 to get optimal engagement.
I hope you’ve found these tips useful, and that they have inspired you to try some new things!
