Before you consider the “how”, you must first define the “why”: what is it that you want to achieve?
Some common business goals for Facebook brand pages include:
- Drive traffic to a website, landing page(s), blog, etc.
- Boost brand awareness.
- Relationship building with target markets.
- Customer service.
- Generate leads and conversions.
These goals must be aligned with your broader marketing strategy so your social media efforts actively contribute to business objectives. If your social media marketing strategy supports business goals, you are more likely to get executive buy-in and investment.
Be SMART.
That means when goal setting, your objectives should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant; and
- Time-bound.
Utilised properly, social media is an exceptionally powerful marketing tool; however, all too often marketers forget social media is about dialogue. Ensure your goals (strategy and implementation) reflect this!
Knowing this, it stands to reason that it is particularly useful to learn who you are talking to before you start a conversation. Audience/target market profiling can be a challenging task, however, it is made all the easier thanks to Facebook’s built-in analytics.
When data mining your audience profile it is useful to go beyond those instantly gratifying, “vanity” metrics (i.e. Likes), and instead look at the more advanced information such as leads generated, web referrals and conversion rate.
Ultimately, playing for Facebook’s algorithm leads to poor decision making. Again, strategy comes to the fore here, ensure you have a sound, well-developed strategy and your efforts are more likely to be valuable to and resonate with your audience.
Determining the type of posts that work best will depend on your business. If your product or service lends itself to lots of visual content, then photos and video will be your main content currency. However, if your goal is to start conversations, then plain text status updates will most likely be more effective. It is worth keeping in mind, however, that as a rule, high-quality visuals and relevant links often generate more attention and greater engagement. The message here is: make your content your own!
Your to-do list:
- Develop a strategy.
- Define your goals.
- Monitor your performance.
- Be responsive: do more of what works. Do less of what doesn’t!