5 Facebook Secrets you can use to Boost Your Business

With more than 2.4 billion users and 1 billion people logging on daily, Facebook is by far the most popular social network. If you have a Facebook Business page, there are a few things you can do to increase your brands presence in the newsfeeds of the worlds most used platform. Let's look at 5 things you can do on Facebook to drive leads and increase sales.

WAIT! Before we dive into things; there's something you need to know. The first thing you learn in 'Facebook school' is the difference between organic content and paid content. Let's look at that first...

In short, organic content is viewed (mostly) by your existing followers. A horrific stat is that on average, organic posts only reach about 2% of your followers. However, getting your posts liked, commented on and shared extends your reach; which is the number of people who see your posts. This is where an engaging content strategy comes into play, which we discuss here.

Paid content on the other hand is the sponsored posts you see in your newsfeed, the ones company's *pay* to put in front of you. The main difference for a business is that paid content is viewed by people who are interested in your offering, but don't quite know or follow you just yet. These people are otherwise known as potential new customers, a.k.a the people you want to be marketing to.

Organic and paid content should go hand in hand, a sound organic strategy helps improve you authenticity online, while strategic paid execution increases your brand’s reach and awareness to targeted audiences.

If you want to venture down the path of paid social media, here are 5 tips to help you create an optimised strategy.

*DISCLAIMER - Recently Facebook allowed ad placements across Instagram and Stories as a single campaign, so the below relates to all these platforms.

1. Use Audience Targeting for your Facebook Ads

Using ad targeting, your ads will reach people who are most likely to find them relevant, particularly those who fall in to one of three categories;

1. Your core audience, which are people of a certain age, location or gender, or those with certain interests your business can relate to,

2. A custom audience, which are people who have engaged with your business in some way (we'll revisit this in point 3),

3. Or your lookalike audiences, or those who are similar to your existing customer base.

Using these 3 targeting strategies is key to running a successful paid social media campaign, putting your content and your business in front of those who need it.

2. Facebook Ads are Better than Boosting

More often than not, this is true for your business. Boosting may be better if you want something quick and simple, but if you want better results and more leads, here are the reasons an ad campaign is better:

• Ads can be posted across Instagram and Stories

• An ad campaign can feature multiple images and videos

• Ad bidding is optimised which means cost efficiencies

• Ads can be scheduled by time

• Ads can be targeted by consumer behaviour

An effective ad campaign does require a bit of expertise to set up, but the return on investment from a well executed ad campaign will likely be in your favour.

3. The Pixel

As mentioned in point 1, a way to target people who have already engaged with your business is with a custom audience. This is where The Facebook pixel comes in. The pixel is a code that goes in your website back-end that allows you to show your ads to people who have visited your website before (hence re-marketing). Not only that, using things called dynamic ads, products that visitors have viewed on your website, or related ones, will reappear on their social feeds. How cool is that!

4. Call to Action Buttons

Those buttons you see that say 'Learn More' and 'Sign Up' are known as call to actions buttons. They are tools which prompt visitors to do something like visit your website or contact your business (we explore the importance of a strong CTA and the effect it has on driving leads here). You can now find these buttons are all over Facebook and Instagram in places such as ads and on profiles. When setting up your business page or ad campaign, these should not be ignored, as they are great ways to encourage people to take the action in line with the goal of your campaign.

5. Exciting things coming to Messenger... maybe

If you've been keeping an eye on the Facebook news, you may have heard that Mr. Zuckerberg plans to merge the chat functions across Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. This would allow for more seamless cross-platform communication for these sites, which is awesome news if you generate leads and enquiries through DMs.

However the FTC is trying to prevent this for happening, so watch this space.