Riding the Wave of Facebook!
As part of a social media marketing strategy, most businesses would benefit from using Facebook and though it was a platform that was primarily used for business to consumers, B2C, it is now rapidly growing as an excellent platform for business to business, B2B, especially in regional areas.
So what is social media marketing?
“Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. This involves publishing great content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media advertisements. The major social media platforms (at the moment) are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat.” - Source: Buffer.com
Why Facebook for business?
Facebook is a free platform that can reach over 3 billion people per month globally. In Australia, just in the past few months since Covid-19 hit, monthly unique visitors increased from 16 million to 18 million, ( Source: Jane Murray, klyp.co). It is a low cost marketing strategy, should you decide to boost posts or advertise on Facebook. You can specifically target your audience and then through Facebook Insights see and measure the results. If the advert is not working you can quickly change it. Facebook can drive traffic to your website and online shop and it makes it easy to engage and talk with clients all around the world.
Facebook for business has a myriad of extras that can really help you create brand awareness to your followers and potential clients. Such things as Groups, Job Adverts, Messenger, Chatbots, Face Time, Facebook Live, and more recently, the Facebook Business Suite. The possibilities are endless in relation to how you can now interact with current and potential clients in real-time and never before has there been such a level playing field in relation to competing against larger companies than now.
Video is king and the engagement with, 'Facebook Live', is 178% higher than the average post engagement. That is phenomenal and makes it well worthwhile for business owners to invest in creating their own videos on a regular basis. Remember that the video content should be related to your business but it doesn’t hurt to throw in a cat video or similar occasionally, and see what results you get.
It can take up to 25 engagements before a customer decides to buy, so posting consistently is important. The organic reach of a post is now less than 5% so consider boosting your posts and see the difference in results. If you get above 1% engagement its is considered a good post but I prefer to aim for al least 5%. Some excellent Facebook pages you can review to perhaps get some ideas from are Macquarie Medi Spa, Gang Gang Gallery, and Gazza’s Takeaway.
On the flip side, Facebook does have its challenges such as changing their algorithms and security settings regularly, and on occasions making arbitrary decisions on a particular page with little or no recourse for the owner. However, their recently released Business Suite should help with these issues and you can engage a local Social Media Consultant to look after this critical side of the business for you.
Steve Semmens - The Persuader