by Paul Slack
In this multi-part series on Facebook marketing for small businesses, we will be walking you through tips, advice, and best practices for getting the most out of Facebook for your business. In part 1 & part 2,we explained why Facebook is an important platform that every small business should add to their marketing arsenal. In part 3 & part 4, we reviewed the first two steps of the tactical wheel (listening and building community). In this post, we will discuss effective ways to talk to your audience through broadcasting on Facebook.
The broadcasting stage of your social media marketing campaign is all about posting value-added information to your target audience. Simply engaging with your community on Facebook is also broadcasting. Every business should post a minimum of 2-3 times per day. When broadcasting remember these best practices:
- Types of broadcasting:
- 20-30% of your posts should be designed for creating engagement. Getting users to comment and share your post.
- 20-30% of your posts should be content that you curated from other sources (YouTub, blog, Pinterest, other Facebook pages, etc.).
- 20-30% of your posts should be focused on drive traffic back to your website or blog.
- 10-20% of your broadcasting should be on other company’s Facebook pages.
- 10-20% of your posts should include a special offer or promotion.
- Use “@” tag to promote and give visibility to others: If you’re talking about another company that has a Facebook page, you can use the “@”sign in front of their Facebook profile name and it will add a direct link to that company’s page as well as show up on their wall. Tagging other pages is a great way to generate conversations with key influencers on Facebook.
- Step 1: Be sure you have liked the page first
- Step 2: Begin a post and when you are ready to @ mention the other page, type the “@” sign and then start typing the name of the page you want to mention.
- Step 3: Select the page from the drop down list.
- Step 4: Hit the post button.
- Ask Open-Ended Questions: Get people dialoguing and talking about or responding to your posts. This is really important because it will help your content go viral. When someone comments on your page their activity will show up on their News Feed which is seen by all of their friends on Facebook which, in turn, gives you more visibility to potential customers.
- Use photos: When adding external links in your Facebook status update make sure you select the either best thumbnail photo from the linked page or upload a photo of your own. Pixabay https://pixabay.com/ is a great source of free images.
- Be the Last to Comment: When your comment is the last one in a comment thread of your own wall, the people who shared comments will get a notification that you responded. This is important because it demonstrates you’re listening and engaged.
Now that you know how to effectively communicate with your target audience, in Part 6 of our series on Facebook marketing for small businesses, we will move on to the content step of the tactical wheel.
