It seems obvious, but your content should always be relevant to your core audience, the people you want to build a community around, the people who are buying your products or using your services. Don’t post because the marketing exec in the team likes the content theme, post because it’s what you know your audience will respond to.
And if you don’t know exactly what your audience will respond well to, look into audience profiling. A key part of any digital media strategy that we implement at Tuskany is audience personas and profiling. By segmenting typical users, finding out what motivates them, challenges them and what they respond well to, takes the guesswork out of your target marketing, meaning you can provide more on point and meaningful content.
It goes without saying, but we’ll say it anyway, clickbait will be the death of your social marketing. Users, or the majority of users, are wise to cheap marketing tactics nowadays, and will not only, not click on the content you are cheaply promoting, but a lot of the time will leave negative feedback! These are not the kind of signals you want to send to Facebook.
This doesn’t only count for clicks, though. Engagement baiting is also a cheap tactic that will only end up having a negative affect on your business. This includes posts that include “please like and share” or “we will follow back everyone who likes”.
Which leads to our next point, start meaningful and interesting conversations. Don’t offer a reward for a random comment as a way to enact engagement, instead, do your research, look into what the audience are passionate about. From here, build out authentic posts which spark conversation.
Once you have got the organic posts performing well, don’t be afraid to ad a little monetary investment. Remember, Facebook’s algorithm places value on content that performs well organically, so it’s safe to say that content that already has strong organic traction will equate to lower CPCs/CPEs.
On the other hand, if an organic post is performing badly, don’t place any spend on that post. If you haven’t already implemented an “ad strategy”, which you definitely should, you may not know yet that Facebook ranks ads just like they do with organic posts, so if you already have a poorly performing organic post, it is almost certainly going to be a poorly performing paid post.
It’s no secret that poorly thought out content doesn’t perform well, but the bar for what Facebook deems as strong content is constantly being raised. Conventional wisdom tells us that Facebook prefers it’s users to stay on the platform, meaning brands are now needing to produce richer content that engages the user for longer on Facebook, as opposed to sending them elsewhere with an external link. This doesn’t mean that you can never link back to your website, of course it is necessary (for blogs like this for instance), but it does mean that you need to start varying the types of content you are publishing, try not to post link after link.
While brands should certainly focus on improving their organic reach, there’s no denying the power of Facebook ads and the success they can bring. And no, we don’t mean a simple $10 boost on an organic post.
Data from Sprout Social shows us that Facebook ads “produce an overwhelmingly positive ROI with 93% of marketers already on board”. The depth of audience targeting is paramount, combined with an abundance of creative formatting options. Facebook ads offer an almost unrivalled method of reaching your audience creatively.
Proper paid promotion can be a daunting task though, especially if you don't have a digital marketing background, so if there’s any element of paid promotion or digital strategy which you’d like to chat about, remember, we’re experts :).
And hey. because we wrote this on a Friday, here’s a bonus tip:
Facebook has been quoted stating that video drives higher engagement and interactions from its users than any other type of content. So it goes without saying that video needs to be introduced and maintained somewhere within your marketing mix.
And we know what you’re thinking, and no, video doesn’t have to be an expensive affair. There are so many solutions to inhouse video creation nowadays (nothing that a little Google search can’t help with). On top of this, look to evoke user generated video which you can then repurpose for your feeds!
