Still on the fence about Facebook advertising? If you haven’t added the social media platform to your digital marketing strategy yet, it’s time to give it serious consideration. With over 214 million users in the US and more than 1.8 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide, which translates into endless possibilities for marketers. Additionally, Facebook is a pay-to-play model for businesses, so if you’re not advertising, you’re missing a big opportunity.
In January 2018, Facebook announced changes to it’s algorithms for business posts. This change prioritizes posts from users’ family and friends over what Facebook refers to as public content. In their announcement, they stated that “Pages may see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease.” This means businesses have to be more strategic about the content they post in order to gain attention in news feeds. However, even with these change Facebook advertising still remains one of the most cost-effective forms of advertising offering the ability to target your ideal audience.
Tips and Tricks for Facebook Advertising
Ready to dive into Facebook advertising? Here are our top 10 tips and tricks:
- Complete the ‘About’ page. The about page is critical, yet many businesses leave them blank. This is a mistake, mainly because the about page is where many users head to after a Google search. If there’s no info, they will often bounce off your page within seconds. Make sure all of your contact information is complete including your contact information, website, and other social links.
- Know your audience. Facebook makes it easy to target your ideal audience, but this is only helpful if you know which audience segment you want to target. Audience Insights is a great place to start, and gives a huge variety of targeting options, such as age, location, gender, education, relationship status, and interests.
- Have a measurable goal. What are you trying to achieve with your Facebook campaign? The more specific you can be when answering the question, the better your results. Facebook offers many ways of measuring your ads based on audience, brand, and sales outcomes.
- Set a budget. Start on the low end of your budget and test, analyze, and tweak your campaign. Allocate additional funds to what works. Spending can be budgeted by individual campaign or by account to cover spending across all the campaigns you’re running.
- Take advantage of Facebook’s ‘Lookalike Audience’. From your Ads Manager, upload email contact lists to target. From there, Facebook will create a ‘Lookalike Audience’, allowing you to target Facebook users who share common characteristics with your existing contacts.
- Choose to pay for clicks over impressions. When aiming for conversions, choose to pay for clicks over impressions. That way, you’ll only pay for results. If you’re targeting website conversions, be sure to have a specific landing page for better conversion rates.
- Use videos when possible. Videos often generate a better user response over pictures, so go with video when it makes sense. And whether you choose video or pictures, make sure the text associated with it is compelling and prompts users to take immediate action.
- Boost great content. Have a particularly catchy or useful piece of content? Promote that content with Facebook’s ‘Boost Post’ button. It allows you to quickly create a Facebook ad using your post, and can appear in several places on Facebook, including Desktop NewsFeed, Mobile NewsFeed, and Instagram. You also have the ability to target a specific audience based on things like location and interests.
- Update/change your Facebook cover photo. Your cover photo can act like a promotional billboard for a contest or giveaway. Highlight prizes and include a link to the contest that all your visitors can see.
Use these tips and tricks to begin your adventure into Facebook advertising. It can be a powerful marketing tool, but just like any other marketing platform, it will take time, experimenting and testing for maximum return. Facebook is always changing, so be sure to stay on top of the changes as they often affect results.
