For a number of years now, Facebook has shattered the difficulty all businesses face in branding themselves. Creating an account is incredibly easy, and completing your profile is almost as easy. Not to mention the power of the platform which offers more features each year to boost its Facebook page.
Among these, Facebook ads, the advertising tool of the social network which allows targeting with disconcerting precision its audience. It is clear that we are far from traditional marketing campaigns which remained very broad in terms of targeting, not to mention the return on investment. Indeed, a few tests are enough (image, wording…) to know if the engagement is good.
In this article, I will share with you some concepts that I learned by doing a lot of monitoring on the internet (which I continue today of course) but also from my personal experience. If the principles will seem obvious to you, it is important to apply them on a daily basis in your publications in order to lay the foundations that will allow you to boost your Facebook page. Secondly, I will quickly discuss Facebook ads in order to help you better familiarize yourself with it.
Recipe For A Facebook Page That Works
On the social network like everywhere else, content is king. This is the first ingredient that will need to be mastered to boost your Facebook page and gain subscribers. It is imperative to focus on it before thinking about acquiring and developing your community.
1. Build An Audience Rather Than Business Oriented Page
Many companies make the mistake of only talking about themselves on their Facebook page and inviting each post to participate by asking questions. They are totally business-oriented. The problem is that it is felt very quickly and that subscribers do not engage more than that.
It is very important to understand this notion to produce content that will attract the audience and not make them indifferent. This principle will be all the more important when you decide to use advertising to boost your Facebook page.
Here is a focus of some points to keep in mind for your content:
- Focus first on the interests of the audience you want to attract to your page (relevant to your business if it’s a pro page) and post accordingly.
- Be patient. As the saying goes “Rome was not built in a day”, this is all the more true on social networks.
- Arouse emotion. Practice the art of storytelling by telling stories to better capture the attention of your audience.
- Bring value. Internet users surf the internet a lot in search of information. If you deliver meaningful content to them (around your domain of course), they’ll interact with your posts on their own.
- Build a bond with your audience. Trust and credibility are earned. It’s even longer to do on social media. We come back to patience.
You will understand that before talking about yourself or your activity, you must make your audience listen to you and appreciate your work. Once this bond of trust has been created, it will be possible to talk to them about business since you will have captured their attention. On social media, you have to keep in mind that you are working for your audience above all.
2. Create Native Content To Maximize Time On Facebook
The social network favours native content and penalizes content that includes links to the outside. It’s like that and you have to adapt your strategy accordingly. If you want to make a video, you will have to upload it directly to the platform to boost your Facebook page. Do you often post articles on your blog and want to promote them on your social networks?
Tip 1: Put the title of this one on a background image indicating that the last article is available on your site.
Tip 2: Each content is adaptable to different social networks. For example, you can take a talking clip of your article and tweet it on Twitter or accompany it with a photo on Instagram.
3. Master Content Curation
Creating content takes a lot of time, not to mention the images you have to work on to accompany your texts. Content curation is a good alternative, why? Quite simply, it’s a safe bet. Reusing publications that have worked well will provide results to boost your Facebook page while saving time. What positive then! However, be sure to respect copyright by mentioning the owner of the content.
Here is a method I use daily to find and select content:
- Keeping watch on specialized blogs: This allows you not only to stay abreast of the news in your field but in addition to having valuable content to offer to your audience.
- Have a 360 ° view of information: Do not be satisfied with a source to launch an affirmation. Because, if the latter turns out to be false or inaccurate, your e-reputation can take a hit.
- Observe interactions: the more of them, the more it means that the content has a high perceived value. It should therefore appeal to a similar audience.
- Look next: Competitors are often good sources of information, if their content works, they’ve found the recipe effective.
The objective of this method is to test the publications that work with your audience so that you can then create your own optimized content.
4. Use Facebook Advertising
Facebook’s algorithm reduces the visibility of your organic posts. This means that if you don’t have massive and rapid reactions to your posts, they will have very low reach. Between 5 and 10% maximum. Difficult to boost your Facebook page under these conditions.
Of course, the platform offers a solution: Facebook Ads.
Before fully embarking on the creation of an advertising campaign, it is imperative to:
- Understand the interface and its possibilities,
- Be able to follow the statistics of his page,
- Know your target very precisely (interests, behaviours, etc.).
Targeting
Once these prerequisites have been completed, it is possible to consider boosting your Facebook page and taking it to the next level. The goal is to have a community that engages on your posts on a regular basis. But then how to do? To reach the desired audience, there is a little trick that works well: target the pages of your competitors. Why? Simply because the audience is qualified, or even very specific depending on the popularity of the competitor.
Be careful though, you should not target just anyone. For example: if you are in the rental of accommodation, do not target the Airbnb page which currently has over 15 million likes. First, because the audience is too large and secondly, it is not sufficiently qualified to be profitable.
To find quality competing pages, I’ll give you a little method that I apply when I advertise. I invite you to go to the business manager and then to Facebook audience statistics. Next, type in an interest related to your business and see pages liked by people who like your interest.
If I typed the interest “travel” and then I look at the “likes” of the audience interested in travel in general. I then open each of the pages to see if they are relevant and I see if the community is active on the posts.
Once you have selected several pages, go back to the Facebook advertising tool and see if these are recognized as criteria of interest. If this is the case you have a good targeting otherwise repeat the previous manipulation.
When you choose a page as a criterion of interest, you may notice that other pages are suggested. Do not hesitate to go see them ensure the quality of their audiences. If it’s positive, save them for a future campaign. Don’t group multiple audiences until you’ve tested them separately.
Then add wording and a visual to your campaign from the formats available in the advertising interface. Same, do not hesitate to test several visuals to see which one works best.
I put you a very good tool that will allow you to find inspiration for your future advertisements: You just have to type a word corresponding to your domain (in English) and the site will display a lot of ads on the theme. Not bad for boosting your Facebook page!
Be careful, leave at least 72 hours between each adjustment of your advertising time to have sufficient relevant data.
The Budget
You always finish configuring your advertising with the placement and budget you want to put on the campaign to boost your Facebook page.
Regarding placement, we find all the answers on the internet. From personal experience, I would say Facebook and Instagram feed placements are the most profitable. There will also be Messenger, especially when you want to promote an event or a mobile application for example.
For the budget, I will generally recommend investing a small amount (a few euros) by choosing the option on the duration of the campaign at the beginning. This will allow the ad to run for a few days and have the first statistics that speak for themselves.
In Summary
In this article, we highlighted the importance of writing for your audience before talking about your business. It is necessary to create a bond of trust in order to listen to your community. This will bring better engagement on the content.
In general, you have to stay in native publications to maximize the time spent on the platform. It is better to curate content that works rather than create without being sure of the result.
Finally, we are done with Facebook ads and some tips to easily create an advertisement without taking too much risk. Remember, the key to advertising is to always test other setups to optimize.