You've seen the Facebook stats: 845 million active users (161 million active US users), 2.7B daily likes, 60% of all internet users in the US and UK are on Facebook, and 2 billion total registered users. The social media site we've been use to for the past 5+ years has grown and evolved - and your marketing strategy should as well.
Improving your Facebook marketing strategy over time requires a bit of trial and error. Heavy testing is involved and is my - 1st T: TEST. If you aren't testing now, you're missing out. Having your social media team utilize Facebook Insights is crucial to your success. Test and monitor your messaging strategy in the following ways:
- Time & date of successful status message updates
- Type of content and it's success - pictures, video, etc...
- Trends in weekly total reach - look for cyclical patterns and spikes
- Friends of fans count - look for spikes to help you determine your most influential fans
- # of engaged users and reach per message
There are key sets of data you can obtain by testing, as you can see above. Utilize this information to target your messaging in a better way to your audience - T #2: TARGET. It makes sense that messaging strategies that target your demographic are going to be the most successful, but surprisingly many Facebook admins update their status messages 'willy-nilly', often forgetting who their real target market is.
With T #1: TEST, you'll get a good idea of how your current fans engage with your page. Use this information to target your messages. Do Q&A type of posts work better? This type of messaging, when asking the right questions, can target users in certain buying cycles and help push them over the edge to make purchases. Is more engagement on posts targeted to a certain type of fan? Status messages catering to a female demographic, if you have more female fans than male, can produce higher engagement scores. Do you have a lot of international fans? Page admins can target messaging by location or language. Look at the data and target - enuf said!
And on to - T #3: TAG. It's surprising to me how few brands actually use tagging. This is one of the best features on Facebook that allows you to cross promote your page and engage as a brand with other pages. Start using tagging in status message updates to highlight business partnerships, give shoutouts to employees, highlight an awesome charity or shed light on a new cause. Start using tagging to engage with other pages and you'll find the fans of those pages will slowly follow.
Something else to remember when using Facebook to market your business is - T #4: TRENDS. I use Facebook both personally and professionally, so it seems I'm logged in quite a bit. Over time you start to notice trends in the messages of your friends. Whether it's things they're talking about, types of questions they're asking, events they're reporting about or even content they're sharing - these are all opportunities as marketers to get great ideas for your business page.
For example, the "meme" trend and caption photos are pretty hot right now on Facebook. As a business page you can utilize this trend and make your own memes or caption photos. If you weren't following the trends, however, you may have missed this type of messaging on Facebook. The "Doppelgänger" fad from a few years ago is another example. Using these trending topics to engage with your users can help improve engagement and the effectiveness of your efforts.
Well there you have it, the 4 T's to help improve your Facebook marketing strategy. Can you think of a few more T's to add to the list?