Your Facebook Marketing Strategy: 4 Mistakes That Might Be Costing You
When it comes to your Facebook marketing strategy, the pressure to create good content is through the roof. We get it. It can be incredibly easy to lose sight of your goals and expectations in the midst of just staying afloat, leading to mistakes you might not even realize you’re making. Take a deeeep breath; we’re here to help!
The Facebook Algorithm
Before we dive into what mistakes you should avoid making with your Facebook strategy, it’s important to understand how the platform works to begin with.
To start, let’s look at the bigger picture with Facebook. Yeah sure, it’s a social media platform, no different from the others. But how does Facebook operate? How are they making money in the first place?
In 2020 alone, advertising accounted for 98% of Facebook’s revenue, totaling to $86,000,000,000.
Why is this important? Facebook needs advertisers in order to operate, and advertisers need users to see and interact with their ads. Therefore, Facebook’s ultimate goal is to keep users on the platform for as long as possible.
The more time users spend on Facebook, the more ads they’ll see, and the more money Facebook makes. Those are the rules we’re working with, so it’s important to keep that in mind as you are strategizing your Facebook efforts.
Now let’s get down to some things that might be keeping users from seeing your content.
1. Posting Impersonal Content
Why are we all on social media? For the most part, it’s to connect with friends and family and to stay up to date with the world around us. Many marketers lose sight of this and interrupt that experience with overly promotional and impersonal content. The reality? Most people don’t care to see that, and Facebook knows it.
This kind of brand-generated content is no longer serving much of a purpose. It doesn’t drive much engagement, and it doesn’t stand a chance against Facebook’s algorithm. Your audience likely won’t even see it thanks to that algorithm. However, we marketers still have a goal of promoting our brands on social media that we need to meet, so let us show you how to correct this mistake.
Tips to Fix This
Disguise your promotional content.
We understand. You still need to promote your brand somehow, but there’s another way to go about it. Let’s take a look at an example:
This is an actual post of ours promoting our branded promo products. We’ll put ourselves on blast for a second. This is a stock image, it’s a little impersonal and only generated 5 engagements. So, to correct this, we tried this out instead:
We’re still promoting our branded promo products, but we did so via a video that was shot at our office, with our own employees, and made it a little goofy and quirky. You can see that it reached a lot more people, and generated a lot more engagement.
Is promoting a water bottle on Facebook super cool and fun? Eh, not really. But our goal was to get the word out about it, so we did our best to make it super cool and fun – and hey, it worked.
Another Tip: Maintain an 80:20 cultural to promotional ratio of what content you are posting.
Take a look at your Facebook page and conduct your own audit of your content. Is the majority a lot of impersonal, promotional content using stock images? Realistically only about 20% of your content should be comprised of those promotional posts. Try to shoot for 80% of authentic, real content that makes your brand much more personal and showcases who you really are.
2. Not Interacting With Your Audience
One of the biggest mistakes we see marketers make time and time again is treating a Facebook page as a soapbox – posting to the page and wiping hands clean after that. It’s important to remember that one of the reasons you should be on social media is to engage and connect with your audience. To do so, you need to interact with them as much as possible.
Be sure you are responding to every message, comment, and review that anyone contributes to your page – even the negative ones.
Many users nowadays use social media as a customer service tool; either via reviews, their comments, or direct messages to your page. Be sure you are capitalizing on this opportunity to not just connect with your audience, but to show them just how personal and responsive your customer service is! Lurking potential customers could be watching.
It’s important to note that you should also take a proactive approach when it comes to interacting with your audience. Not only should you be diligently responding to the interactions that come your way, but get on out there and create some conversations yourself! Scroll through your brand’s social feeds and comment on others’ posts as your page. It’s a great way to demonstrate your involvement with your community, strengthen your relationships with other brands, and a big plus – it’s great for your engagement and reach.
Create a community, not a soapbox!
3. Posting When Your Audience Isn’t Online
Obviously we post to social media with the intention of reaching our audiences. But when’s the best time to reach them?
Believe it or not, there are times throughout the week that are and aren’t great for reaching your audience. For example, posting on a Saturday night when people might be out and about on the town might not be a great idea. Try to think of appropriate times that your audience will likely be online to see your content.
It’s hard to provide a rule of thumb on when to post that will apply to every brand on social media. Because your audience is unique to you and only you, it’s important to take some time to think about their behavior. For example, are they business professionals working a 9-5 job? Maybe it’s a good idea to be posting first thing in the morning before work, or later in the evening when they’d be scrolling in their downtime.
A great way to get an idea of your audience’s online habits is through the Facebook insights tool. Under the Post insights tab, you can actually view when your followers are most likely to be online:
From here, you can view online activity by the day of the week and even the time during the day. In this example, you can see that there’s a decent-sized audience online from 5-6 PM. With this audience, it’s more effective to be posting around those times rather than any other time during the day.
You might risk the chance of your content getting lost in the algorithm when you don’t post at the right times. You don’t need any train-rex because of that! (See what I did there?)
4. Not Maintaining Realistic Expectations
Social media plays a significant role in the marketing funnel, but that role might vary from brand to brand. Some might use it as a selling force to drive sales while others take advantage of it to increase their brand awareness and online presence.
Ask yourself – what do I want to achieve with social media?
- Are you wanting to increase brand awareness?
- Are you trying to drive sales?
- Are you wanting to increase brand loyalty & customer retention?
Choose a goal and stick with it. Once you have reasoning and purpose that is more concrete, it’s easier to create realistic expectations from there.
For example, are you wanting to increase brand awareness? Stick to that. Pay attention to your reach, impressions, and ad recall to evaluate the effectiveness of your social strategy. If you didn’t drive sales, that’s okay. That wasn’t the purpose. Just be sure you’re using another marketing strategy to bring those sales home, but keep your focus on brand awareness for social if that’s what your goal is.
Questions? Need a hand? Let’s brand together. Learn more about Systemax here.
Author Info
Hi there! My name is Allison Lovdahl and I serve as the Digital Marketing Specialist here at Systemax. My role is to work closely with clients to help develop digital marketing strategies that help meet their business objectives. Outside of work, you can catch me belting some Johnny Cash with one of the two local bands I play with!