April 14, 2020
Social media marketing is a low cost way to market your business. Most of the marketing requires your time and not an outlay of cash. Facebook is the largest social platform for most retailers. It’s the easiest platform to start marketing and one of the most universal for online sales. Commonly, retailers want to know when and how to best market on Facebook.
Each business has it’s own group of followers. Usually as a page gets started, you reach out to your friends and family and ask them to “Like” your page. Those are your first followers. From this point, you work to grow your followers and fine tune the list to true customers. You want to have a large group of customers who are passionate about the products and services that you offer. It’s very important to always be marketing to your core customer. Your Aunt Lucille and her friends who live 200 miles away that do not shop online, are not your core.
Your Insights section of Facebook will tell you when the people who follow your page are on Facebook. Take a look! It shows which days they spend time on Facebook as well as the time of day. Try to reach them in the most popular times. Place messages in front of them when they are on social media!
Sharing funny posts, or quotes of the day will fill your marketing schedule up but it won’t build a passionate following. When you post something not related to your business you may see an increase in followers that have no interest in shopping with you. Does that help your business? Probably not. If you spend time creating posts, the content should be directly related to your core base. You are looking to add followers that will support your business and look for future posts with interest.
Tip: If you click on the LIKES of the post, it will allow you to invite those people to follow or like your page. Send them in invitation! It’s a free way to increase your followers. This photo shows you where to look, when you hover, it shows the entire list of people who liked that post. When you DOUBLE CLICK, it shows you which of these people already like your page, and which ones you can invite to join your page. This works until you reach 100,000 page likes.
Be consistent with your posting. There are many types of schedulers available that allow you to create posts and place them in a regular and consistent schedule. Posting everyday on your lunch break limits your reach. You will only reach those online within a few hours of that time each day. Your followers might be busy themselves over lunch each day and only log into their social media in the evenings! If you only have 20 minutes of time to schedule posts, be sure you place them to run at different times, and not all at the top of the hour. Pick out 7:42 or 6:33 instead of 7:00 or 6:00 straight up. In this graph, you can see that this particular business has followers who are active on face book each day of the week, and that 6pm-8pm is the most populated time of day.
There are impressions based Facebook campaigns and engagement based campaigns. Impression based marketing is simply posting and putting an image in front of your customers. Your business name makes an impression but does not elicit action. Engagement posts are designed to create action. Try to create a message that gets a response from your followers. Engagement is a reaction to a post. Engagement can be comments, likes, loves, shares or tagging of other people on your post. All help to ensure your post is seen by more people. Deliver your message or ad, but ask them to comment or respond in some way. This post shows 858 had some type of engagement with the post, and that 288 commented or had a visible reaction. It’s normal to find that few people ENGAGE compared to your reach.
Are you still confused on what to post? Follow your competition. Under your insights, you are invited to follow pages similar to yours. Scroll down past your posts, then it says “Pages to Watch.” You can follow another shop in a town similar to yours, maybe your competitor. You can follow a large distributor or a shop in your area that has the same target audience. You might follow a business in a total different industry with the same target audience. For example, you sell home decor and gifts, but you follow a women’s cosmetics company. When you pick out 10 businesses to follow, you can click them weekly and see what their top performing post was during the week. Maybe their success will prompt you to create something similar. It also helps to give you a baseline of how your industry reacts on Facebook.
All of these tips are designed to help you decide when and how to post on Facebook. All of these tools are free to use and just take a bit of time. You can grow your social media marketing by being consistent and fine tuning your true customer base.
Looking for more tutorials on Facebook? Here are some published sources that can help you become a Facebook guru.
Using Facebook Insights (by Facebook)
Five Minute Social Media tutorials
Best wishes on your social media journey!
LeAnn
