More than 200 million companies are on Facebook today, but the social networking site has expanded beyond the point where businesses need to be convinced about its importance. Everyone knows just how vital Facebook is today, so let’s jump right to the point of this post: Exploring the five marketing tips to get you more Facebook Likes.
1. Be Clear About Your Mission
Before you make or edit your Facebook Profile page, make a clear mission statement for your marketing strategy. Your mission will guide your marketing efforts on Facebook and also explain what your company is all about to your current and prospective community members. In other words, your mission should explain the purpose of your company and why your customers need you.
A clear and well-crafted mission is the root of success for many popular brands today. For example, Steve Jobs created Apple with the mission to support and encourage creativity, and not just sell computers. If you are out of ideas, look at the big names in your own industry and their mission statements.
Simply put, you have to be clear about what type of business you run so that you can share it with others on Facebook. It may not get you more Facebook Likes directly, but it does make for a solid foundation for the marketing strategy you make.
2. Watch, Experiment and Learn
Let’s assume that you have a solid Facebook marketing strategy in place. If you think that the only thing left now is to implement the strategy, think again. The definition of a perfect Facebook strategy is always changing, and you have to constantly experiment, watch, and learn what clicks and what does not.
You have to track the results of your actions on Facebook and use it to assess the best strategy for your business. Thankfully, there are lots of great resources to track your social media success. Facebook Insights is one of the best tracking tools, but feel free to find and use your own preferred tracking tool.
Just make sure that you get as much data as you can on your Facebook activities from the tool you choose. There are many indicators that show the effects of your marketing efforts. Here are some good ones for Facebook:
- Number of Facebook Fans and Followers you gain per day.
- People Talking about This (PTAT).
- The engagement rate on your Facebook page indicated by the number of Likes, comments and shares.
- The engagement rate by day of the week or hour of the day
- Conversion rates, like the number of signups and clicks on your Facebook ads.
Experiment with the content you make and share (photos, videos, links, and/or a combination of them), the frequency of your posts, and the calls to action you use. Take a look at other successful brands on Facebook and learn what you can from them.
Disney, Oreo, Starbucks and Coca Cola are big names on Facebook, and they can teach you a lot on how to engage with your community and increase Facebook Likes. You can learn even more by monitoring the top brands within your industry. Study their taglines, calls to action, and take a page from their marketing strategy if possible.
3. Clarity, Connection, Consistency
When you make content for your Facebook community, you have to ensure that it has all the following:
Clarity– the message should be clear, along with the tagline and call to action; this also extends to your page updates, cover photo, and other elements of your Facebook profile
Connection– the content you share should get people talking on your Facebook Page; use these conversations to listen to your community and build relationships
Consistency– the content has to be consistent with your company’s message and overall culture, as should your Facebook page itself. Consistency with your brand should, in fact, extend beyond the look and feel of your content and also to your social media team.
It is important to remember that Facebook and other social media sites are interactive platforms. Many companies end up using Facebook only to push promotional information instead of actually interacting with their customer base.
Communicate with your fans consistently in order to ensure that your community grows. You do not have to personally respond to each and every comment; a simple like and short replies to interesting comments are good enough.
[Recommended reading: 4 Free Ways To Grow Your Facebook Page]
4. Produce Content That Can Be Shared
As mentioned earlier, you have to experiment with the content that you share. This means that you can use up all allowed characters provided by Facebook to make insightful and interesting mini blog posts. However, the majority of your content has to be shareable. Here are some basic tenets to making shareable content; it should be…
- short, preferably limited to 80 characters
- varied, which means using audio, video, links and photos; or a combination of them on different posts
- trigger a response, so the content that ends with a question mark, or that is funny or interesting is preferred
- deliver what people visiting your Facebook Page actually want
- published at the right time of the day and right day of the week to reach the most Fans
The last one is especially important, because Facebook posts can quickly disappear under Fans’ timelines and News Feeds. Your posts have to catch their attention quickly before this happens.
5. Write About Useful and Timely Topics
Changes happen rapidly on Facebook and other social media websites, which means that there is always something new to write about and share with your community. Depending on the information you want to share, these timely posts can be long or short, and contain links, photos, videos, or even all three. Because of their high value and timeliness, your community and other prospective fans are more likely to read and share the post and get you more Facebook Likes.
If your company is part of the IT industry or some other industry that changes really quickly, you should be ready to cover the latest topics and trends and share them with your community. You can then repurpose or expand the content on your company blog for even more exposure.
Conclusion
At the end of the day your focus should not only be on getting more Facebook Likes, but also become a better company because of them. Defining Facebook as a mere marketing platform is an oversimplification. It is also a great platform to find out more about your customers, reach out to them, and improve the way you do business. You should also remember that it can take time to see results on Facebook, despite its fast-paced nature. Patience and the right actions, as described in this article, will get you positive results in the long run.
NOTE: If you liked what you just read, please click the Facebook Like -button below my author box. Yes, that was a sample of a straight forward Call To Action 🙂
[Recommended reading: 5 Best Ways To Get More Facebook Likes]
[Image credits – Main image: Pixabay; other images are from their respective websites and/or social platforms or articles]
Angeline is a guest blogger and a vivid reader who reads everything about social media. She is also passionate about her dog and likes traveling across the country and fond of taking vacation in country side.