Worldwide, there are over 1.86 billion monthly active Facebook users recorded in January 2017, which is a 17 percent increase year over year. Around 1.2 billion people are online on Facebook right now. Facebook is growing every second and it’ll add 900 new profiles by the time you end up reading this blog.
So how does a marketer leverage such a massive platform?
There are three areas on Facebook where you may reach out to your audience:
- Pages
- Groups
- Ads
Pages:
Facebook pages are medium to list your business on facebook. Create a page for your product, brand or company as a whole. The best practise is to put your logo as the display picture and some attractive picture as cover image. Try to be consistent with your brand messaging and use same font, colors, content as you did on your website, or maybe product packaging.
‘About’ section is very important and should be carefully dealt with. Be crisp and precise, write who are you, what value you provide and how are you different from competitors.
Include all the details about your business, especially the timing if your business works on particular schedule. Give relevant contact details.
Facebook page is a free-of-cost way to reach out and engage with your customers and prospects, but it has its own demerits. It is quite difficult to grow your fan base organically. It takes time and effort. Be active on your page, post interesting stories and interact wisely.
Facebook post at 7pm will result in more clicks on average. (Source: Forbes)
Industry average says that your audience is active on facebook at 7 pm in the evening try out your posts during that time but don’t make it your benchmark. The timings work differently for different business. Set up a series of posts on different days of the week at different time and find out what time works best for you.
On Thursdays and Fridays, engagement is 18% higher. (Source: Bit.ly)
Starting up with a page, you need to be very active on engagements. Reply to the comments, interact with them, talk to them. Your audience seeks a human touch when they interact with a brand. That’s a best practice for all your brand touchpoints – make it as human as possible.
Every 60 seconds on Facebook: 510,000 comments are posted, 293,000 statuses are updated, and 136,000 photos are uploaded. (Source: The Social Skinny)
There’s no limit of the number of fans your page can have, unlike your personal profile’s limit of 5000 friends.
Groups
Groups are a great way to get into a discussion with like-minded people. Create groups with your business-related themes and you’ll get membership requests from your potential customers. Start new topics, break new announcements, put up survey/feedback questions, there’s a pool of knowledge you should explore.
Although groups are a fun way of getting in touch with your audience, it takes a lot of effort in building audience. Start with inviting friends and families and your business colleagues. The word spreads as the membership grows. Also, be relevant in the discussion topics. It helps in facebook search result when someone is searching for your business related keywords.
Facebook Ads
One more (maybe most powerful) area in facebook to reach out to your audience is facebook ads. You can target your customers, grow fast but all comes at a big buck. Ads could be really expensive sometimes. We have kept the ads out of scope of this blog for a simple reason – it is not a hack to grow.
Bottomline is, you can grow your audience base by posting relevant content and interacting with people. Be active or let an application do it for you. Sign-up for a platform like FirstHive to engage with your customers on social media. FirstHive lets you handle multiple profiles, schedule your posts and view your audience activities on one dashboard.
Try to grow organically on Facebook. It’s fun to work on such an interesting channel. Facebook is coming out with new features now and then to make it easy for businesses to engage and grow. Facebook also brings products for businesses like Workplace (which is a Slack spin-off) that you may use. Well no harm in trying something that increases productivity.
