Although some of the younger demographics are passing up Facebook in favor of tools like Instagram and Snapchat, Facebook still dominates the market.
With 1.85 billion people logging in daily (a 16% increase year-over-year), it's still the most popular social network around. Not to mention, Facebook owns 60% of all social logins.
If you want your business' content to reach consumers, having a presence on Facebook is a given. But to make the most of your Facebook Page -- to attract and engage visitors, drive them to your website, and convert them into leads (and, eventually, customers) -- you need to optimize your Facebook presence.
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Social media is best known for its ability to help you connect with your audience. On Facebook, you can enter direct conversations with your target audience through comments, reactions, and even messages. By engaging with your audience, you'll increase brand awareness and help tell your brand story.
Now, when you're on social media, it's important that you don't just use the tool to talk at your audience without listening when they respond. To really leverage Facebook for marketing, you should use social media listening tools and track what people are saying. You can track mentions of your company and follow hashtags so you always know what's trending and going on with your customers.
A great way to use Facebook for your marketing purposes is to run contests and giveaways. Now before you dive in, make sure you develop a strategy. What kinds of things will you giveaway? How will your audience participate? It's important to think this through and make sure your decision aligns with what your audience wants from you.
Of course if you're running any online events, it's important to market that. Facebook is a great place to do that because you can create an event and invite your followers. This is a great way to get the word out about your events.
Facebook actually might be most popular among businesses for its advanced ads tool. If you're running online ads, Facebook is one of the best places to do it.
Now that you know how to use Facebook for business, let's dive into some tips and tricks to help you succeed.
First thing's first: You need to create a business Page -- not a personal profile -- to represent your brand. Pages look similar to personal profiles, but they include unique tools for businesses, brands, and organizations. Your fans can Like your Page to see updates from you in their News Feeds, which is something they can't do for personal profiles.
Not only will this maximize Facebook's business potential for you, but it's actually against Facebook's Terms of Service to use a personal account to represent something other than that person, like a business. If you've already created a profile for your business, you'll want to convert it into a business Page, which you can learn how to do easily here.
Setting up a page is simple. Just visit this page and follow the step-by-step setup instructions.
Once you've created your business Page, it'll get a randomly assigned number and URL, like facebook.com/pages/yourbusiness/123456789. To make your Page more shareable and easier to find, you'll want to create a recognizable vanity URL (e.g., http://www.facebook.com/hubspot).
To create a vanity URL, visit this page, then follow the instructions.
Facebook's page design lets you feature a 820 x 312 pixel cover photo at the top of your business Page. You'll want to optimize that cover photo to capture the attention of new visitors, encourage them to explore and learn more, and provide an effective mobile experience -- all the while ensuring you're following Facebook's Page Guidelines.
Learn all about do's and don'ts for your Facebook cover photo in this blog post.
Pick a profile picture that will be easy for visitors to recognize -- like your company logo, or a headshot of yourself if you're a solopreneur or consultant. Being recognizable is important for getting found and Liked, especially in Facebook Search. Your profile image is pictured at the top of your Facebook Page and is also the thumbnail image that gets displayed next to all your Facebook Page updates, so choose wisely.
When choosing a photo, keep in mind that Facebook requires your profile picture dimensions to be 170 pixels by 170 pixels.
Your "About" section is one of the first places people will look when they arrive on your Page. A preview of it is located on the left-hand side of your page beneath your profile picture, and people can also navigate to the full section by clicking on the "About" tab at the top of your page.
Explore the top trends in social media for brands to know and optimize your social strategy.
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Have you noticed that when you post a link to Facebook, it pulls in a brief description as well as an image?
The description gets pulled from the page's meta description, which refers to the HTML attribute that explains the contents of a given web page. It's the short description you see on a search engine results page to "preview" what the page is about, and it's also the copy Facebook will automatically pull in the populate the description of a post.
Without a meta description, Facebook may pull in the first text they can find, which doesn't make for a very good user experience. Plus, meta descriptions are your chance to sell your visitors on what you have to offer: informative, valuable content.
Your meta description should be compelling enough to get people to click, and it should be 155 characters or fewer in length. Read this blog post to learn more about writing effective meta descriptions.
Keep your copy succinct by removing the horrendously long URL you're sharing from the text in your post.
Your post real estate is precious, and you want to ensure any characters employed are purely for the sake of sparking a reader's attention. Plus, any user can click on the generated thumbnail or title for that URL to navigate to the blog post, web page, or any URL you're linking to -- so no need to include it in the copy of your post as well.
Facebook's timeline page design places more of an emphasis on visual content like images and videos. After all, Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than posts without images. One study found that Facebook posts with photos saw the most engagement over any other type of post, accounting for a whopping 87% of total interactions.
That's why posting compelling visual content is one of the most important things you can do to improve your Facebook strategy. Use this to your advantage posting your best visual content to your Facebook Page, or making more of an effort to make the content you already create more visual. (Click here to download 50 social media image templates for free.)
A successful social strategy will often include photos, videos, and screenshots of infographics or other graphs. In addition to being fun to look at, it's important that your visual content be compelling and relevant to your audience.
Another reason to post lots of visual content? It'll help auto-populate the "Photos" and "Videos" tabs, which are automatically added to every Facebook Page. You want those to be rife with visual content when people click on them.
Don't just post images for the sake of posting images. To give your users the best experience possible, you need to optimize your images for Facebook so that they're the right sizes and dimensions. (Click here to download pre-sized cover photo templates for Facebook and other social networks for free.)
Below are a few of the most common Facebook image sizes, but you can find a more detailed guide here.
The folks at Facebook know that people like watching videos on Facebook. The number of people watching video content is rapidly increasing. In fact, there are more than 4 billion video views on Facebook every day.
Facebook is continuing to tweak how the algorithm measures people's interest in video content on Facebook, but the main takeaway is to make your videos as visually engaging as possible -- especially in the first few seconds.
Why? Because although all videos on Facebook autoplay in people's News Feeds, they're on mute until the viewer manually turns the volume on. The more visually engaging your video, the more you can entice people to stick around. Getting people to spend more time watching your video will help your video rank higher in the News Feed because to Facebook, signs of user engagement with a video include spending time watching the video, turning on the audio, switching to full-screen mode, or enabling high definition.
In their continued effort to promote video content in the News Feed, Facebook launched Facebook Live, a live video streaming service that lets anyone broadcast live videos from their mobile device straight to their Facebook News Feed.
Facebook Insights is Facebook's internal analytics tool right that helps you measure and analyze your Facebook presence. The tool provides Facebook page administrators with analytics data about Page visits and engagement, which can help you understand which content is and isn't engaging to your fans.
Access your page's Insights here, or by clicking into the 'Admin Panel' on your Page. We've also published an informative blog post and video that walk you through how to analyze Facebook Insights to improve your content strategy.
Download the free template and user guide to manage your social media posts and strategy.
