As a marketing platform Facebook is an absolute beast!
With an audience of 1.94 billion active users you can be pretty sure your customers are on there, and you should be too. There have been tonnes of discussion over how to get the most out of marketing on Facebook. Most of this advice comes down to creating better content that engages your audience. Sure that’s great, and is absolutely what you need to do from a big picture perspective.
But it’s not very actionable advice.
My work at a top social media marketing company requires that I exploit every bit of traffic and engagement possible. So I’ve learnt a few tricks of the trade along the way. To help out my fellow marketers I’ve compiled a list of hacks that actually work. Most of these are more advanced, so if you’re new to Facebook marketing this may not be for you.
1. Game Facebook’s Algorithm by Posting Pictures as Videos
Facebook love’s video. Over the last couple of years there has been talk in the digital marketing community that Facebook’s algorithm preferences video of any other form of content. Facebook denies this is the case and say their algorithm doesn’t prioritize video over other types of content.
However, the proof is in the pudding and video seems be the way to go if you want to create viral content. To game this system smart publishers have been posting static images as video to grow organic reach.
Advertising Age recently showcased how online publishers Buzzfeed and For Shits and Giggles have been using this tactic to great effect. Employing this tactic is very simple. You simply have to turn your images into video, any basic video editing software can do this.
2. Utilize Text Over Video
According to Digiday 85% of Facebook videos are played in silence. So how do marketers get the message across without sound? Simple utilise text over video. You need to make your videos compelling on Facebook without sound. To do this you need an attention grabbing headline that gets the message across. As an example Tech Insider do a great job at this.
Notice how this video about and electric bike is just as effective without sound.
3. Target Your Competitors Fans
Did you know you can target your competitors on Facebook? That’s right as long as your competitors have a big enough brand on Facebook to be recognised as an audience you can target them directly with ads for your brand.
To do this simply create a Saved Audience in Facebook like your normally would selecting, age, geographic etc. Then, in the interest section search for your competitors; as long as your competitor has a big enough brand they will show up in search results.
Let’s say you’re selling the SEO software Moz. We might want to target the users of SEMrush. Using this strategy we can run ads direct to fans of SEMrush on Facebook.
Simply typing “SEMrush” in Facebook’s interest allows you to target their fans with your ads.
4. Get Facebook Messenger To Pop Automatically Whenever Anyone Visits Your Page
Have you ever been to a Facebook and a message box automatically pops up? This is a very smart tactic for anyone looking to engage with their customers online through messenger. Implementing this is very simple. Just go to your page settings, under Messenger and turn on the Response Assistant.
Our social media marketing team has tested this on a number of Pages and this seems to work fine as long as you have a good response rate on your Facebook Page.
5. Target Those Who Considered Your Offer But Failed To Sign Up
When running a Facebook ad campaign it’s important to squeeze every last sign up on your deal. One of the most effective ways to improve your success rate is to target those who considered an offer but failed to sign up. If you’ve ever ran a Facebook ad campaign where the landing page requires users to fill out a contact form you’ll find a frustratingly large proportion who follow the link fail to actually fill out the form.
Don’t let these customers get away! Re-target to them for the last few days of the campaign with a message along the lines of “don’t miss out offer ends soon”.
Do this you need to make sure you have the Facebook pixel installed on all the pages on your website. Then, ensure when a form is filled out on your landing page a custom “thank you” -page is created. The URL for your custom landing page should be along the lines of: www.mywebsite.com/my-offer/thank-you-submission
Then, using Facebook Custom Audience -tool create an audience that has visited the offer page but not the “thank you” -page. In Facebook your audience will look like this:
You now have an audience who viewed the landing page for your offer but didn’t proceed to filling out the contact form. To create an extra incentive you can add an additional benefit to the offer to get these users over the edge and apply immediately.
6. Sponsor a Facebook Post for Facebook Reviews From Your Best Customers
Having plenty of positive reviews on Facebook is of course good for any business. It provides social proof that your business is trustworthy and does quality work. However what most marketers don’t know is that reviews can also effect Edgerank, the algorithm that decides what is shown in users news feed.
Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t provide a way to reach your customers and fans to ask for reviews. So, you have to be creative! If you have an email list of your best customers you can target them to provide a review on Facebook. Simply create a Click To Website ad on Facebook, or sponsored post with a link to your Facebook page and ask for a review.
7. Go Live With Video To Beat The Pay To Play Algorithm
Unfortunately Facebook is pay to play for marketers nowadays. If you’ve run a Facebook page for the last five years you would have seen a dramatic drop in the organic reach of your posts. To beat this system you need to feed the beast.
Above all Facebook’s algorithm loves video, and the best performing video is live video. So go live with that product launch, run a Q&A with your audience, or go behind the scenes and get more views!
8. Automatically Manage Your Facebook Ad Frequency
One of the biggest problems with Facebook advertising platform is that there is no frequency capping measure when you go through the standard ad creation process. This can be a massive problem but no one ever talks about it! If people have viewed your ad more than 5 times you can be pretty sure that your audience won’t act on this offer.
To create a frequency cap on Facebook you can use the create rule tool. Simply create a rule the campaign turns off once frequency reaches a certain level. This can be done both on the Adset and Campaign level.
Admittedly this solution isn’t perfect and is a workaround. Facebook counts frequency as an average over all users rather than a threshold for each individual user. But until Facebook sets a frequency cap per user this is the best solution.
Once your ad has been automatically switched off create a new ad or use the same ad but target a different audience. With all the massive reach of Facebook and the extensive way to target potential customers there is no reason to keep throwing the same ad at the same audience.
There you go. Hopefully you found these tips unique and useful. Facebook is a massive marketing tool. Arguably it’s becoming exclusively a play to play platform for marketers. Using these tips you can get the most of your Facebook marketing budget plus game the algorithm to get the edge on your competitors.
[Image credits – Facebook -logo owned by Meta; other images, videos, infographics or screen prints are from their respective websites and/or social platforms]
Daniel Deelstra is a digital marketing nerd from Perth agency The Marketing Mix. With qualifications in Marketing and Entrepreneurship Daniel is always looking for innovative ways to communicate with customers and provide value. Whether that be though social media, search marketing, content marketing or paid traffic Daniel knows the important thing is whether the channel is effective at driving sales.
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