How to Nail Social Content on Facebook

Just about every business has a Facebook page now. If you ask many small and medium sized businesses why, very few are likely to say that it’s because they just love the social network. Many of these businesses are on the ‘Book because their competitors are, but they aren’t really sure if the time spent posting and interacting is producing a positive ROI.

Nailing your social content on Facebook puts your business in the best position to reach fans, drive traffic, and make new sales. It can be a bit of a challenge but if you follow some simple steps, it shouldn’t be as daunting as you think.

1. Ensure that your Facebook audience usage matches your goals. If you are a defense attorney, you probably don’t even need a Facebook page. Chances are, people aren’t going to Like your page since they don’t want it widely known to other people that they need an attorney. On the other end of the scale, if you are a cat or dog rescue organization, Facebook is your best friend – people can’t get enough of adorable pets.
2. Determine what makes your audience respond best. No matter what your market, remember that visuals are key. Almost all posts should have images – people are visual creatures. Figure out what your audience responds to and use pictures to draw them in. Happy customers using your product are great for social. For service businesses, put together some quick customer stories and find a way to make it visual.
3. Track your traffic. Your web team can help you track traffic coming from Facebook to see what these visitors do once they hit your site. There is some evidence to suggest that social can be great for brand impressions and that some social visitors will come back weeks or even months later through a direct visit or organic search. You can easily set up a segment in Google Analytics to track these folks, who are hopefully ready to make a purchase or contact you.
4. Timing isn’t everything. It used to be that you needed to strategically determine the best time to roll out a new post, but Facebook has gotten smarter. Who sees your post and when has gotten more complicated. Facebook has greatly ratcheted down the reach of posts from business pages. Posting during peak hours (and boosting the post, see below) is probably the best approach, but continuously test your post timing and measure how that affects your reach and engagement.
5. Measure both posts seen and posts engaged. You can look at Facebook Insights to get an idea of what posts are being seen vs. which ones are actually getting engagement. There can be a huge difference here. Seen posts just means someone saw it but didn’t engage. Engaged posts are being read and enticing people to do something.
6. You’ve got to pay to play. If you have a decent amount of Likes and interaction with your posts, you should be boosting the popular posts to get even more engagement. Your web team should be helping you determine what should be boosted for best engagement.
7. Go for the angle. It’s important to keep in mind that you can’t game the system. Facebook is smart and they know more about your fans than you do, so don’t try to figure out how Facebook thinks. Instead, go for the angle with your fans. Cater to what they want to see, not what you want to show them, and interact with them as they respond to your posts.