The organic reach for posts on Facebook business pages is extremely low. Typically, you’re lucky if about 10% of your audience sees one of your posts. Spending time creating content for Facebook that no one sees isn’t going to benefit your business. … What you need to do is create brand awareness, educate your audience, show your community involvement, and build excitement about what you do through that content. This approach ties directly into level one of your local business ad strategy on Facebook, which is about creating a larger top-of-funnel audience that will be receptive to your offers when they’re ultimately presented.” Read this article if you’re serious about using Facebook to build your business.
Giving Reviews on Facebook
Best Option
This is the best method because reviews stay on the Reviews page forever.
Go to A’s Business Page
Click Reviews on the left side navigation
Click the Yes button under Do you recommend A?
A window will open to allow you to write a recommendation.
Confirm that the post is set to be Public.
Click the Post button when you are done.
You can only leave one Review per Business Page. If you want to change or update the Review, you have to delete the first review and re-do it.
Alternate Method
Go to A’s Business Page
At the top of the News Feed, click in the “Write a post…” field.
Write a recommendation.
You could add @person’s name so the post would show up on their personal profile
You can add hashtags, links to a blog post or website, etc. just as you would any post
This post will be sent out to the Business Page’s Likes as a normal post would be.
This post will work down the News Feed as new posts are added. It will only be seen for a short period of time.
Exchange Reviews
It’s a great idea to arrange mutual reviews with colleagues and business partners. They would follow the same steps on your business page. I recommend doing the posts 2-3 days apart in case you have shared Friends and/or Likes.
Facebook Ad Limits
Don’t worry about the news that FB is “limiting the number of ads a Page can run.” Much ado about nothing! FB is going to accept every advertising dollar you want to give them. The purposes of limiting the ads is to trim back on small, low profit test ads. Instead of running 4 different versions of an ad to see which works best, FB wants you to run only 2 ads that you have more confidence in so you pay more and run the ads for a longer time. That’s more profit for them in the long run and, hopefully, better ads for their viewers. We’ll see! Want more info? Watch this podcast
Hashtags
Facebook Changes
FB Friend Lists
How to Use Facebook to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog
This article does a really nice job of outlining how to use FB posts to drive traffic to your website. They are talking about blogs specifically but the same principles work to drive traffic to any page of your website. We’ve talked about these steps before but I thought it would be good to hear the “lecture” from someone new! LOL
Please take time to read this! If you understand the overall principles, you and I can do a better job implementing the steps. You can call me with any questions this brings up.
Facebook posts can be very effective. But they don’t work as a shoot and splatter technique! They have to be purposeful.
Social Media Examiner article: How to Use Facebook to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog
How to Connect Instagram to Facebook
At last week’s Friday Free-For-All, I was asked about connecting Instagram to Facebook so you could make a post on Instagram and have it show up on Facebook. Click here to download the steps!
3 Facebook Ad Types That Improve Sales
Depending on your goal(s) for your Facebook ad, here are 3 ad layouts that can help you gain prospects or sales. It’s important to try new things on Facebook and to do some original ideas to grab readers’ attention.
Click here to read the article.
Is Facebook Organic Marketing Dead?
Here is my synopsis of Michael Stelzner’s interview with Mari Smith.
Michael is owner/editor of Social Media Examiner, my favorite social media newsletter.
Mari is a long-time expert on Facebook marketing. She does great training sessions and provides excellent content on her Facebook page.
- Intriguing change to Facebook’s mission: Used to be “to connect the world.” Now it is “giving people the power to build community and bringing the world closer together.”
- Facebook is putting more emphasis on groups including making them more business-friendly and allowing ways to monetize the groups.
- The ability to boost a group post and other features for groups are in the pipeline.
- Facebook is working on end-to-end encryption and short-life content.
- Don’t link to your YouTube videos from Facebook. Since YouTube is a major competitor, Facebook isn’t giving the videos reach.
- Instead upload your videos directly to Facebook.
- Link posts which link to outside content get the lowest reach and lowest engagement per BuzzSumo’s analysis of 777 million posts.
- Average reach of a post is now 1 – 6%. It used to be 5-10%.
- Video posts outperform photo and still image posts by 73%.
- Question posts are popular with Facebook. They take up less space in the newsfeed and generate “community” conversation.
- Video is extremely popular with Facebook because they are trying to become a major player in the digital streaming arena.
- Advertising in video is growing and will be economically feasible for small businesses in a short time.
- BuzzSumo’s study revealed that the optimal length for a Facebook Live video is 3-4 minutes. Facebook will let you go longer if you have engagement from the audience.
My Conclusions:
- Successful organic marketing on Facebook is much harder, more expensive and more risky than previously.
- Paid advertising is required in combination with organic.
- You can’t ignore Facebook but you can limit the effort.
- Be clear about your goals for Facebook marketing.
- Increase your Facebook budget if you want Facebook results. This means more dollars for organic posts and more dollars for paid advertising.
- Consider other social media platforms that are used by your audience and expand those efforts.