How to make Facebook work for your business

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you are a not for profit, or socially-minded business struggling during this coronavirus pandemic, now is the time to take control of your digital marketing to effectively market your business. It’s never been more important to find different ways to engage with your customers. People are engaging more with social media, there’s been a 76 per cent increase in usage during this coronavirus pandemic.

You will need a digital marketing strategy to help drive your customers to your business. And using platforms like Facebook and Instagram has never been more important.

What many not for profits don’t know is that Facebook has changed its algorithm and if you don’t know what the changes are you could be impacting your business in a negative way. Now is the time to put the changes into practise to have a competitive edge.

And it’s never been a more important time to do this because organic (free) reach is declining. The reason for this is that on average more than 1,500 posts could appear on a user’s newsfeed. However, rather than showing all this content Facebook only shows content that it feels is relevant to the user – so you usually see up to 300 posts.

So, if you want to improve your organic reach you will need to be aware of the following:

Facebook ranking signals:

Ranking signals are data points about a user’s past behaviour and the behaviour of everyone else on the platform. Ranking signals that matter include:

• How long a page has been active on Facebook.
• Percentage of followers engaging with posts and the page.
• Consistency of posts.
• How actively the page engages with followers.

Other ranking factors that you should focus on include:

Great content:

This is a no brainer, but plenty of businesses still post for the sake of posting without thinking of the user experience. Think about what content users would find inspiring, funny or interesting. What would they be willing to share with others? If you can get this right it will improve you ranking.

Videos also perform really well, but they need to be high quality videos. If audiences watch videos past a minute it will improving your ranking. Videos that are three minutes or longer can also boost your ranking but only if audiences engaged with that content.

If you are going to use links, try not to use outbound links, you will be ranked negatively for this.

Post when your audience is online:

Once again, nothing new, but many businesses don’t use the insights tool and just randomly post, so they don’t get the best engagement results. If you want to rank well with Facebook, it’s important to get this right.

Focus on timely interactions:

Facebook wants to see business pages responding to messages in Messenger within 24 hours. The same applies to comments. Always make sure you respond to feedback from customers in a timely fashion.

Leverage low-cost ads:

As mentioned before, organic reach today is very low (less than two per cent), you can improve your reach if you do follow Facebook’s ranking signals. However, if you want to perform well you will need to advertise – this can help to boost your organic reach. Some things to note include:

• Don’t be tempted to boost adverts as the conversion rate is very low. It also doesn’t target users most likely to purchase – it just targets any user online at the time.
• Facebook is also limiting the number of adverts that a page can run. Facebook has said it will only impact a small percentage of pages. From a business perspective it’s important
  to prioritise your most important ad campaigns.

Inform your followers:

Encourage your audiences to make your page a “see first” when they like or follow your page – this let’s the algorithm know that your posts are important to them.

If you’re already following all of these steps, then great you’ll be ensuring your audiences are having a great user experience and no doubt your business is performing well as a result.

If you haven’t, why not take these simple ranking steps into account and start putting them into action today – especially if you have some free time on your hands.

For further information or digital marketing training on how you can engage more effectively with customers to help grow your fan base, raise vital monies or increase your brand awareness get in touch with Redhead Digital Marketing. We provide a one-hour free consultation.