There are close to 750 million active users on Facebook. No matter what type of B2C business you have, marketing on Facebook has become a necessity as 76% of users log in daily. https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/.
As a b2c business owner you probably have created your own Facebook business page and have good products or services to offer but how will you keep your fans always engaged & active?
We talked to top Facebook Marketing Experts and asked their ideas on how an SME or a startup business within a limited budget can engage fans and keep them active on their Facebook brand page that will increase social ROI. Here are the actionable Facebook page engagement tips and tricks from experts to keep fan engage always.
Vladimir Gendelman
CEO and Founder of Company Folders
When you want a Facebook post to get liked, shared and clicked on, very little of it has anything to do with the words you say. Instead, it’s all about the image you use; it must be bold and eye-catching if you want users to pay any attention to you. Warm, bright colors like red are especially useful. Using text in your image can be helpful (especially attention-grabbing words like “free”) but remember to be careful of Facebook’s restrictions. Only a certain percentage of images on promoted posts can contain text.
It’s also important to make your content as valuable as possible. Provide a solution or answer to a particular problem or question that you know your audience has. Make it clear to them exactly what you’re offering and why they need it.
Ravi Shukle
Ravi Shukle is a social media and relationship marketing expert with over 10 years experience helping businesses to grow their results using social media. You can email Ravi your questions here
1. Don’t neglect customer service: A lot of businesses see customer service on Facebook as a secondary activity and focus all their time on creating the content. In fact, it’s the customer service on your Facebook page that is going to help you not only increase awareness but also provide you with the ability to generate new sales when you are able to help a customer with their question. To ensure you stay response on your page keep an eye on your inbox and if you want to scale the activity you can also look into using chatbots to help with initial interactions if the volume is very high.
2. Use tools outside social media: Now this isn’t a concept many marketers talk about but is often the most cost effective way to drive awareness of your Facebook page. In order to achieve this you want to ensure you share a link to your Facebook page in the following places:
– Your email signature
– Place social sharing icons on your website
– Place a Facebook fan page widget on your website
– Cross promote via other social media channels
– In your print marketing
– Even mention your Facebook page when networking face to face and on your business card
Debbie Friez
Debbie Friez, Social Media Lead TopRank® Marketing
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Post Engaging Content – People want to engage with great content. That content may be from your own blog or it might be curated content on subjects that are important to your audience. For example, we know TopRank Marketing’s audience really cares about the latest and greatest happenings around some of our core areas of digital marketing expertise, so we often share content on those topics.
In addition, visuals are so important for grabbing your reader’s attention. Consider how you might use them to enhance your posts. I would suggest using a visual for almost every post to stand out in your audience’s feed, instead of the thumbnail that pulls-in from the website.
When it comes to video, consider posting natively. Each Friday TopRank Marketing does a news roundup that includes a video segment. We post the video natively on Facebook to boost viewership and engagement. One way to easily share video content is to use Facebook Live, which will appear at the top of your followers app.
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Ask Engaging Questions – If you want audience engagement, you have to give them the opportunity. Consider asking thought-provoking questions to get them talking. Asking people their opinion (and everyone has one) engages people quickly.
If you have a select group of influencers or clients that you are most interested in getting engaged, you might consider creating a group from your page. Depending on the member’s preferences, they’re more likely to see the content in their stream. Social media PR maven Shonali Burke created the Social Media Posse group, where she poses professional and fun questions along with great visuals to activate the conversation.
Jason How
Senior Marketing and Advertising Strategist at J Social
Write everyday. Write to inform, entertain, sell – all in one. Build your page with good messages about your products, services, and mission. Stay focused on your mission.
Don’t get distracted by one-offs, cheap tactics, and anything else the short-term industries are trying to sell you.
Mike Gingerich
Mike Gingerich is an author of Social Media Lead Generation
- For free, you should start using Facebook uploaded Videos and Facebook Live Video on a regular weekly basis. These post types get the most reach to the most fans. You can introduce your latest blog post this way, share tips, and do behind the scenes product demos as simple examples.
- Use your small budget to run some Facebook Ads. Start out by boosting your higher performing posts (like the videos above!) and target your ideal audience by demographics and interests. This can help you grow a relevant audience interested in your content.
- Use a 5-3-2 method each week. 5 posts that are engaging, educational, and entertaining that do not try to sell. 3 posts that are then inviting the user to your website to read more/see something (and have a soft lead capture opportunity on your website), and 2 posts that are more direct opportunities to consider your product/service.
Brian Fanzo
Founder & CEO of iSocialFanz | Millennial Keynote Speaker
1. Video, Video and more video: Document and create video both live and produced that highlight not what you do but why you as a small business do what you do and how you hope to impact others. The video will be 81% of all internet traffic by 2020 and Facebook is rewarding brand pages with video.
2. Highlight your employee’s stories through blog posts and Facebook page takeovers where you let them do a Facebook live video or a Facebook story or a day in the life facebook post where people can see behind the scenes of the brand giving them a unique perspective to what they can’t get on any of your other channels.
Péter Szántó
Peter Szanto, Productivity Hacker & Founder of Spring Tab. Watch his VLOG!
I’d try to interact with them on a 1-on-1 basis, use Messenger or Insta DM for it. Try to add value, give away anything for free as a hook. To do this, you could use an intern or a junior position people and all they would do 8-10 hours is DM-ing people and offering value.
There is a simple 3-step process: 1) connect first, 2) provide value, and then, only when the RIGHT opportunity presents itself, 3) ask. This is the whole concept of Gary Vaynerchuk’s book “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook”.
You can use hashtags or places to find new people on Instagram to target. Always check their profile first and figure out how you can bring them value. If you are a photographer, free photos for their insta. If you’re a chef, free meals for foodies, if you are a wannabe speaker, volunteer for other speakers or conferences.
The way you can get started is DM them. You can literally DM anyone on Instagram. Do this 10-50-500 times a day. Do it! Action!
Haven’t you started yet? Shame on you! If you are in procrastination mood, then learn examples from the master himself: https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/network-instagram-direct-message/
Jon Bingham
Jon Bingham is Director of Marketing at BKA Content
My advice for engaging with people on Facebook with a limited budget would be to create fun, company culture focused content. This can be done with short videos, pictures, contests, polls, etc. Social media should be used to show the human side of your business and should not be just another sales pitch. Our content that has received the most engagement without being “promoted” has always been something highlighting our company culture and fun environment. Sometimes we’ll make a short video on a holiday or just show what we’re up to. Whatever it is, make sure it is building your brand and connecting with your audience.
Antonio Calero
Antonio Calero is the Head of Marketing Services at AdEspresso.
“First: find out what works best for you, as each company is unique and what may deliver good results may not work well for others. Don’t trust data or follow tactics blindly only because someone has told you: experiment and find out what works for you in terms of creative, targeting, message, bidding, etc… Which brings me to my second tip: split test the hell out of everything !!! A/B testing (or split testing) is the key for successful advertising campaigns on digital marketing, and Facebook offers a range of great tools that allow you to take split testing to the next level”
Roy Povarchik
Roy Povarchik is growth and content marketing consultant for startups. Co-Founder of Cariboo.
Tip 1. If you don’t have a marketing budget and want to increase traffic and awareness to your Facebook Page and content, use other online real estates you have (blog, Twitter, Youtube,) to point traffic directly to a specific Facebook post with a call to action. Facebook will see the post is getting traction, and will organically increase its reach.
Tip 2: Leverage other brands and relationships. Either by asking them to share your content at first or by giving them value and mentioning their work.
Konrad Sanders
Konrad Sanders is the CEO and Content Strategist at The Creative Copywriter, and has a pretty darn creative noggin on his shoulders. His gang of word-slingin’ cowboys knows how to compel, convince and convert customers through the power of content. Follow him on Twitter, and read his delicious blog here.
Tip number one
Collaboration
Collaborate with industry influencers, i.e. experts in your niche who have a large social following or blog readership. But you can also collaborate with ‘micro-influencers’ and get a lot of traction. The idea is to create collaborative content with other industry individuals and brands, with the mutual goal of giving value to, getting engagement from and generating traffic from your collective target audience. It’s a nifty trick.
Why does collaborative content work wonders? Because it’s less work for you (you don’t need to create all the content yourself), it’s more valuable for your audience (as they gain expertise from multiple sources together) and then all the people you’ve collaborated with will then help you promote the content across their Facebook feeds, and other social platforms, too. Which means? You’ll have an army of promoters sharing your content, without having to pay a dime to Facebook.
Here are some tips on how to get influencers on your side.
Tip number two would be:
Use employee advocacy.
This works better, the bigger you are. But with any sized company with more than just a single employee, there’s an opportunity to harness the influence and reach of your staff members.
So, in a nutshell: get your team to share your content! They each have their own audience on various social media channels. If you can reach out to that combined audience, it could be very powerful.
How? By incentivizing them with rewards and/or gamifying the process. E.g. whoever shares your company content the most within a given month, wins some tickets to an awesome event! You can use a platform like Gaggleamp to make this easy, help track it all and get your staff actively and willingly helping your cause.
Anita Campbell
Anita Campbell, CEO of Small Business Trends
Once a month boost one of your Facebook updates to your existing audience and perhaps others similar to your fans, for $30. This increases engagement on your page, and in turn, tends to increase your organic reach. So look on boosting as a step to jump start organic activity. Most small businesses can afford $30 a month.
Do a Facebook Live event now and then. It boosts organic engagement. Sometimes people come up dry trying to think of what kind of Live event to do. My advice is: don’t overthink your Facebook Live event. Start with you in front of the camera delivering a simple message to your clients and fans. Wish them a relaxing and pleasant holiday season. Or thank your clients and fans for their support and tell them how much you appreciate them.
Erin Cell
CEO & Founder, Socially Powered
#1 Go Live – Pick your favorite platform & go live! Be as consistent as possible. Try weekly or every other week to start & increase as it fits into your schedule.
#2 Engage with Your Followers – If you are live ask questions, call out people who are watching live, have them submit questions live & you will answer them. Social media is about connecting with your audience. So make that connection.
The quickest and easiest way to make & build your relationships online is the face-to-face you get from going live. If you can’t be there in-person to shake their hand or give them a hug you can do so virtually via live video.
Keep in mind, LIVE is different than pre-recorded video which can be edited to perfection. You can’t edit live – so it’s the real you & people watch because you just never know what will happen on live video.
Stefan Des
CEO at LeadsBridge
1) My first tip would be to set the correct call to action on the Facebook page. Using the proper call to action on your page will be a great way to drive your audience on the correct step that you want them to make, such as book your service, request more information or show directly your website.
2) My second tip is to Leverage Facebook’s targeting tools.
Knowing your audience is the key to success for every business. With Facebook it is possible to target your audiences by its gender, relationship or educational status, age, location, language, or interests.You can segment individual page posts by following these criteria. This little details can address your message to your audience with the minimum effort.