Everyone always talks about how social media is supposed to be one of the best venues for content marketing. But if you’re not careful, this great tool can quickly become a sink for time and money. And it’s unfortunately true that many businesses don’t set the benchmarks they should to ensure they can properly calculate ROI for their content marketing. How can you avoid all of the common pitfalls and leverage Facebook to grow your business and improve your online reputation?
We’ve consolidated many of the top industry tips!
Building Your Audience
One of the biggest complaints about leveraging any social media for content marketing, much less Facebook in particular, is that it can often be a waste of time: because posts go off into the ether of the internet and are never seen by anyone. This is a real concern… but only if you don’t take the time to build your audience first. If the likes on your page aren’t relevant, they’re essentially worthless.
You need to spend the time and effort to ensure that the likes your page gets are from individuals genuinely interested in your product or business. When those individuals see the content you’re promoting, they’ll be more likely to click through.
Manage Your Online Reputation
Online reputation management is a big deal, and a poor reputation online almost always translates to lost customers and lost sales. And if you’re not already paying for reputation management services, then managing your reputation is on your own shoulders.
Try to respond to comments and ratings about your business in a timely and positive manner. Always respond to bad reviews, and make certain to ask the reviewer what you can do to improve their experience. It’s important to address every bad review so that review readers feel that you care about the quality of your business and product.
Ensure Your Timeline is Media Rich
Did you know that Facebook posts with images get wildly more clicks than posts without them? And watching videos comprise approximately 80% of all the activity on Facebook! Videos and images will ensure that the content you share gets more likes and more reads. Where images are concerned, ensure they’re horizontal images which have text titles on them, which can increase engagement.
Use Facebook Promoted Posts
Using small, short, highly targeted Facebook ads can help you get new viewers for your content pretty easily. Of course, promoted posts are primarily recommended for individuals who have grown their Facebook page likes beyond a threshold of 100, simply because promoted posts are traditionally displayed only to friends and connections of those who have liked a Facebook page. While there is also the opportunity to use Facebook ads, they’re not recommended for Facebook novices; try to see some success with promoted posts, first!
Link to Your Own Website
When sharing content, ensure that content is always on your own website when you share! Promoting links to your own website not only brings new potential clients or visitors to your website, but can provide a small SEO boost. And of course, having all of your website’s schema markups operating correctly can pull sample text and images from your website quickly, rather than requiring you to manually enter them, which can save a few minutes of work.
The Bottom Line
Creatively using Facebook as a channel for your content marketing isn’t rocket science; but in order to get a great ROI, you have to take the time to build your page’s likes and identify your target market. Once you do so, you need to be dedicated to producing high-value content which is media rich, and also be willing to adequately promote your content to new individuals using promoted posts.