Surely you’ve heard about the benefits of social media marketing to reach your brand’s target audience and generate customer excitement, which (hopefully) leads to sales. Using social media channels like Facebook to grab the attention of your customers is not a new idea, but first there are several things you should know in order to make these efforts successful.
Do you have questions about Facebook marketing? Read on for the answers!
4 Things to Know About Social Media Marketing
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Different Networks = Differing Approaches:
Social media marketing tactics aren’t all automatically the same on each of the major networks; you’ll need to take differing approaches depending on which network you’re publishing updates on. For example, Twitter updates should be short and sweet, while Pinterest updates rely heavily on graphics.
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Post Regularly:
To develop a solid fan base on social media, it’s important to post new updates regularly. Whether you click “publish” weekly, daily or several times a day, be sure to remain consistent.
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Shareable Content is King:
Shareable content includes updates that are timely, relevant to your audience’s lives, include videos and images, and aim to educate your fans; these types of updates are well-suited to sharing on social media. Think about the last video you shared with your friends on Facebook; was it a boring and stilted company announcement, or was it relatable and more humorous?
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Use Visual Content:
The use of visual content is crucial to the success of a social media marketing campaign and for encouraging positive fan engagement. According to Inc., “81 percent of people only skim the content they read online.” Using visuals is an excellent way to catch their attention and encourage them to interact with your brand. You can use images to showcase your brand’s personality, from using colors consistent with your logo to choosing unique type fonts.
7 Common Facebook Marketing Questions, Answered
At Three Girls Media, we use a powerful tool called Buzzumo in order to research our content, generate new ideas, reach out to industry influencers and monitor our results. This tool helps us to provide relevant content for not only Three Girls’ fans and followers, but also for each of our clients.
Susan Moeller from Buzzsumo recently wrote an awesome article detailing the answers to 56 common Facebook marketing questions, as answered by both Buzzsumo and the “Queen of Facebook,” Mari Smith. Here is a look into seven of those common questions, their answers and some of our own insight.
Are you integrating Instagram and Facebook?
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What is the best way to share from Instagram to Facebook?
Mari Smith’s Insight:
“You can link your Facebook page to your Instagram account via “Settings” in your Instagram profile. Select linked accounts, then Facebook. The default is to share to your personal page, but you can change this to any page you manage by selecting “Share to,” and choosing the page.”
Three Girls Media’s Insight:
While we definitely support repurposing content via multiple social media platforms, it’s important to do it properly. Simply linking the two accounts together and sending identical blasts isn’t sufficient. We recommend tailoring each update specifically to the social media page you’ll be posting to; not changing up the messages published to each platform can look like spam.
For example, if you are sharing a picture of your team members in action on Instagram, you’ll want to include lots of hashtags like #ILoveMyJob, #ADayInTheLife and #MeetTheTeam. However, on Facebook, you should limit hashtag usage to a maximum of two, since too many hashtags on Facebook reduces your updates’ visibility (we’ll go further into that later on). You should also tailor the post to be a bit more conversational; be sure to include background information about who the employees are and what job tasks they are preforming.
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Is the best time to post 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. every day?
Buzzsumo’s Insight:
Buzzsumo’s research found that posting updates between 10:00pm and 11:00pm in your audience’s local time zone is the optimal time to click “publish,” while Sundays are the best day of the week. They did stress however, that this is a starting point and each company in each industry should monitor results and tweak their strategy as necessary based on Insights provided by Facebook.
What time of day are you publishing updates?
Three Girls Media’s Insight:
We think it’s important to pay attention to research from many sources and stay up to date on the latest insight into posting times. Besides Buzzsumo, some great resources for finding this information include Social Media Examiner, Social Media Today, Mashable and Hubspot.
As important as staying up on the latest research is being consistent. You should aim to publish your updates on the same time of day and same days of the week to boost your brand’s search engine optimization (SEO). This will also help encourage repeat fans to visit your page, as they know when to expect the latest information from your business.
The last piece of the puzzle is to monitor the responses of your customers and pay attention to what times of day and days of the week you receive the most clicks, likes and page impressions. Facebook offers a great built-in monitoring section called Insights, which provide up to the day information on engagement, including readership graphs and demographics.
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Should I really post late at night or on the weekends?
Buzzsumo’s Insight:
As summarized by Neil Patel, yes you really should be posting to Facebook during these obscure times. While you may see a decreased audience size due to the time of day, the decreased social noise of the competition gives you a leg up in visibility. According to Patel, “Posts get the most engagement when the total number of posts is at its lowest.”
Three Girls Media’s Insight:
You can’t always be around to post on Facebook at 10:30pm on Sunday night (nor do we encourage you doing so!), but luckily there are several great tools that help you schedule content in advance. At Three Girls, we use Sprout Social and Hootsuite to accomplish this; it’s simple to draft a batch of updates and schedule them on a weekly or even monthly basis, freeing you from having to physically be on Facebook each time you want to publish a post.
As an added bonus, these tools come with monitoring options that may allow you a deeper look into engagement behavior and user demographics.
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Do hashtags hurt you on Facebook?
Buzzsumo’s Insight:
After analyzing 1 billion Facebook posts, Buzzsumo found those without hashtags did better than those with hashtags.
Three Girls Media’s Insight:
We agree; according to this article by Social Media Today, posts with 1-2 hashtags had an average of 593 engagements, while posts with 10 or more hashtags only experienced 188 engagements.
Hashtags don’t boost your posts’ visibility.
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Why don’t hashtags perform well on Facebook?
Buzzsumo’s Insight:
Unfortunately, it’s tough to tell why hashtags aren’t very popular on Facebook, and Buzzsumo is embarking upon more research. They do stress the importance of testing your social media marketing efforts with your target audience to see what works well and what doesn’t.
Three Girls Media’s Insight:
According to Social Media Today, it’s important to look at how Facebook evolved to learn why hashtags don’t help your visibility. “When Facebook introduced hashtags, they were looking to open up the platform, to make everything more searchable and connect everyone based on all the data Facebook has on each person. But users didn’t necessarily want that… Facebook’s more private [than sites like Twitter], more aimed at hosting discussions among your immediate connections and networks.”
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When posting a link to Facebook, does it make a difference if the actual link is left in or is it better to remove it and just use text?
Buzzsumo’s Insight:
Buzzsumo says, “In a new post, deleting the link doesn’t make a difference in what your audience sees. Once the nice, pretty image version is in place, you can decide if you want to leave the ugly, untidy-looking URL in place.”
Three Girls Media’s Insight:
We agree; it’s a personal preference whether you leave the link in the update or remove it once the URL has been applied and the preview image is visible.
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How long should my posts be?
Buzzsumo’s Insight:
After conducting research, Buzzsumo found that shorter Facebook posts perform better than longer posts; posts with 0-50 characters received nearly twice as many shares than updates with more than 300 characters.
Three Girls Media’s Insight:
We encourage showcasing your personality through your social media updates. If you’re in a highly professional industry like law or technology, it’s best to share longer updates that provide lots of detail, and even your own added insight. However, if your brand is fun, flashy and to-the-point, posting shorter updates may resonate better with your audience.
These seven questions have likely come up as your embark upon your social media marketing strategy. Still have other questions? Stay tuned for our next post in this series, where we will answer several more common Facebook marketing questions. In the meantime, you can also read these articles on our blog:
Facebook Marketing for Small Businesses
Facebook Marketing Tips: Part 1
Facebook Marketing Tips: Part 2
4 Social Media Marketing Tips from a Virtual Facebook Party
Social Media Marketing Statistics: Facebook
More questions still? We are happy to help! Contact our CEO Erika Taylor Montgomery today for a complimentary 30-minute consultation to discuss how you could be using Facebook to help your brand’s image soar!
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