Shama: Hi, I’m Shama Kabani, CEO of the Zen Media Group, and the number one question that I get and the team gets here is Facebook marketing related. How do we engage people on Facebook? What’s the best way to get our business out there to people and so Facebook tends to be a big question mark for a lot of folks out there and perhaps even yourself. Today we’ll talk about Facebook marketing. There are six things that you should be doing if you are engaging and participating in Facebook marketing and this is my list to try to make it easy for you as possible.
The number one is design. A lot of people overlook the importance of the Facebook timelines, the cover timelines that they have. While Facebook gives a lot of importance to the visual aspect, and so if you can get your brand across in a visually appealing manner and it doesn’t matter if you’re B to B, doesn’t matter if you’re professional services. Remember you are trying to design to be able to reach out to your brand audience. Whatever will resonate with them will be best for your brand, but you do want to think about the visual element of design and conversions when it come to Facebook marketing.
The second is content. It has to be relevant to your audience. What will you share? I highly recommend putting together a content calendar for your Facebook marketing strategy. Nothing fancy. Just take a regular calendar. Break it down by month and date and figure out what types of information you’ll share based on that calendar. Having just a little bit of framework for that Facebook content can go a long way.
Number three, promote. There is no guarantee that just because you have a Facebook page and you have fans that those fans actually are able to see your information, because according to a lot of studies out there only 3% to 5% of all your Facebook likes and fans actually see your information when you put it out there, and so to help improve those odds you can of course promote.
You can do this through Facebook advertising using promoted posts, sponsored stories, and you can target your fans and the people who’ve liked your page specifically to try and promote specific content. You don’t have to do this all the time but especially if you have an event coming up, something really juicy, a great status update, you want to look at how you can promote the page.
Of course, if you have an offline location, a retail location, you have a booth set up somewhere, you’re going to an event, make sure that you are promoting your fan page across all your channels. Can’t tell you how many web sites I see that don’t have their Facebook page connected to their web site or even worse, they have their wrong Facebook page connected, so just make sure that you are promoting the page across your other networks and giving people an option of where they want to connect with you.
Number four is engagement. Very important. People spend all this time setting up a fan page. Companies put a lot of effort into it but then I look at some of these pages and I see comments that have not been responded to for 48 hours and that have just been sitting there for weeks, maybe even months. You really want to make sure you have a strategy there to engage with people, respond to their comments, have a policy for how you’re going to deal with the tougher situations if someone has some negative feedback for you. What is going to be your approach. You want to make sure that you are engaging.
Number five is measurement. Facebook analytics give you some great, well analytics. Facebook insights gives you some great analytics to look at how you can best measure your efforts. It’ll show you how many new likes that you are getting on a weekly basis. It’ll show you how long someone is spending engaging, how many of your posts they’re really liking and so you want to look at those insights and measure. You also want to look at your Google analytics and look at how much traffic you’re getting from your Facebook efforts. Those were too big numbers to be looking at.
Number six, most important, scale, scale, scale. When you find something that resonates with your audience, when you do it well, you want to do more of that. If you know pictures work well do more pictures. If you know that questions work well to engage your audience go with questions but remember to scale. That’s Facebook marketing in a nutshell.
