Don't you hate it? Everyone, everywhere's telling you that Facebook is a great way to market your business. And yet, even after investing significant time and effort (and maybe even money) into a presence on the network, you still don't see results from it.
You're not alone. While social media marketing is generally considered one of the more effective marketing avenues, it's also among the most difficult to master. In fact, one survey found that 49% of marketers consider it the most difficult inbound marketing channel, more than any other alternative, from email to blogging.
When your Facebook efforts are failing, what do you do?
It can be tempting to give up and save your resources, but in doing so you risk losing out on the huge opportunity the platform provides. More than 1.79 billion users make it the world's largest social media network, meaning that a large portion of your target audience - regardless of your industry - will be active on Facebook.
So instead of abandoning your efforts, consider improving them instead. It's never too late to fix a failing Facebook Page and turn it into a reliable traffic and lead generator.
Here are five key steps to get you back on track.
1. Understand the Reason of Failure
The first - and perhaps most obvious - step is to understand just why your Facebook Page is not producing the results you're looking for. Facebook expert Jon Loomer has identified 7 potential reasons your Page may be failing. His article on the subject is a great start to evaluate your own effort and begin to draw conclusions.
Be careful not to look for symptoms, but the underlying disease instead.
In other words, things like 'my Page doesn't generate traffic' or 'no one's interacting with my content' are not reasons of failure. 'My followers don't match my target audience' or 'my content doesn't seem to provide actual value', however, are.
Try to find a single, overarching reason. Multiple reasons may overlap, and it's helpful to note them, but you should absolutely prioritize and focus on the issue that seems to be hampering your Facebook Page the most.
2. Quantify Your Resources
Next, try to analyze exactly what resources you currently put into the Page. These resources could range from being monetary (such as advertising money) to your time commitment. Then, try to determine whether these resources will be feasible to invest into the same project, but with hopefully more success, moving forward.
This type of resource analysis is absolutely crucial for any successful marketing planning - you can only develop and execute a successful strategy if you know exactly what you can invest into it. Your current problem on the network may be as simple as not investing the time needed to succeed, and this step should help you rectify that issue.
3. Focus on Your Audience
If you have a Facebook Page, you probably have a follower base. It might be small, but it still tends to exhibit a common set of demographics and characteristics - and you can find those using Facebook's free Insights tool.
Your first goal in this step is to make sure that your current audience on the network matches up with your ideal target audience. The second goal, of course, is to understand how to better match the two, and provide an experience that your audience is actually looking for.
4. Build a Content Strategy
Based on all of the above information, it's time to build your content strategy going forward. Facebook marketing ultimately depends entirely on the right content - if you can provide tangible value to your followers, they will engage (click, Like, and comment), which means they'll be more likely to see your future posts thanks to Facebook's News Feed algorithm.
Considering you should post on Facebook at least once a day for maximum engagement, coming up with reliably relevant and high-quality content can be difficult. That's why you absolutely need a content calendar to help you plan out your posts into a future, ensuring that you'll get a good mix of videos, pictures, links, and other types of posts.
Depending on your resources, you may also want to consider adding Facebook ads into the equation. They populate users' news feeds as sponsored content, providing a more integrated experience than regular ads. In-depth targeting capabilities help you reach your target audience and maximize your budget.
5. Set Analysis & Evaluation Benchmarks
Finally, don't close out your efforts without setting up the framework necessary to evaluate your strategy. Even following these steps diligently will not generate instant success. Building a follower base and reliably generating traffic takes time, and constant adjustments will be needed to eventually get to your goals.
That's why you should always build regular evaluation benchmarks into your strategy.
How many Likes and/or comments do you get in a given month? How about website clicks? Ideally, these types of metrics should show an upward trajectory month-to-month from the moment you implement your new strategy.
In addition, regular evaluations can also help you better understand how individual posts perform.
For example, you may find over time that videos consistently get a higher reach than picture sets. That information should absolutely inform your content strategy moving forward.
It's never too late to fix a failing Facebook Page - all you have to know is how to do it. The above steps should help get you there, but they do require work and expertise on the network. So don't be caught flat footed. Start putting in the time and effort now in order to have these resources available to you if/when the time comes to use them.