My Facebook Post Isn’t Working! Strategies for Social Media Success

Look, we all know—business owners, marketers and sales professionals alike—that social media is important to our customers. And we also know it plays a large and time-consuming part in their lives, which is why  thoughtful approaches, objectives and meaningful social media KPIs can positively impact of your efforts—so you’re spending less time throwing spaghetti at the social media wall and more time adjusting and adapting to your engaged audience.

Enter our FREE social media tracking tool, which can help you track and organize your data in order to assess the success of your social media efforts.

The State of Facebook for Businesses:  

• There are more than 65 million Facebook Business Pages
• More than 1 billion people visit Facebook pages monthly
• Brands on Facebook post a daily average of 1.48 times
• Organic reach for a Facebook post is two percent!
• Average total reach of a Facebook page post is 10.71 percent
• 75 percent of brands promote their Facebook posts

These stats tell us a couple important things:

1. Businesses that have a Facebook page have an uphill battle when it comes to garnering the attention of their target audiences.
2. Businesses can expect a low return on engagement and reach for organic posts.
3. Since 75 percent of brands are promoting their posts, your posts could be downplayed in user’s newsfeed, if you don’t jump on the bandwagon.

Based on this data, let’s chat about how to get the most out of your Facebook posts so you can gather social media KPIs and maximize brand awareness.

Today’s Facebook Reality

It’s no secret that today’s Facebook is drastically different than it was 10+ years ago (heck, even two years ago!) Before, businesses that set up a business page could write a post and garner engagement in a snap—this was called “earned engagement.” Since Facebook went public, much has changed.

We are now in a “pay to play” environment where the more businesses invest in Facebook’s advertising platform, the better engagement they will see.

Put money behind your best content and you’ll be able to reach your fans and people interested in your business product/service. It really is that simple of a concept. However, it’s a tough pill to swallow for many business owners and social media managers who still adhere to the “earned engagement” philosophy, but it’s a necessary reality that needs to be understood.

The benefits of Facebook Advertising:

1. Set any budget you are comfortable with to promote posts and Business pages.
2. Target specific groups of people on Facebook—we’re talking down to age range, geographic level, subject matter interest, and even income level.
3. Estimate your ad reach based on what you want to spend.
4. Set specific goals tied to each ad campaign (e.g. drive traffic to website, increase newsletter sign ups, increase page likes, encourage conversation, etc.)
5. Measure results of your spend—Setting up your business.facebook.com account allows Facebook to track the specifics of your ad campaigns so you see for yourself, where every dollar and cent was spent and what level of engagement and reach you got for it.

The best part? You don’t need to put money behind every post or business page. In fact, you probably shouldn’t, otherwise, any organic post you share will take less priority in people’s feeds over paid posts.

We recommend developing a strategic ad plan that promotes only the best content you have to offer so both organic and paid posts end up working together in your benefit.

Now that we’ve talked about the reality of Facebook and the benefits of advertising, let’s dive into how to get the most out of your Facebook posts to start your journey toward social media success.

Five Facebook Strategies to Maximize Performance

• Set objectives with each post—Identify specifically what you want fans (and friends of fans) to do when they see your post. Do you want them to register for an event? Share the post to their networks? Sign up for a newsletter? Simply, “like” your page? Your post should be written so that it is clear from the beginning what direction you want people to take.
• Only share original content—The best content you can put money behind is content that provides value to your fans. For example, if you blog once a month and that blog is informative and gives readers an instant “takeaway” or action, try advertising the new blog post on Facebook. Another example, we had a client host an event so we put money behind the event post to encourage event attendance. We recommend a minimum $150 per paid post to start.
• Adhere to Facebook graphic requirements—Your Facebook ad may be rejected if you don’t adhere to their photo requirements. Here’s a general guide for creating images for your ads: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/980593475366490.
• Don’t be afraid to experiment—Try experimenting with different calls to action and speaking to different pain points of your customers to best gauge what kind of post captures their attention best. Maybe customers respond better to posts with photos of food in them versus people. Maybe they click on your ads that have direct calls to action instead of more broad-based messages. Don’t adopt a “one and done” mentality with your ad campaigns. Try multiple options to see what works best so your can squeeze the most out of your budget.
• Tag other businesses/people when appropriate—If you have a partnership organization that you want to include in your post copy, make sure you tag their business page too for further exposure of the ad. Not only will the ad be delivered to your fans and friends of fans, but possibly tagged businesses fans too. I don’t know if this is accurate.

There are other nuances to nail Facebook advertising that we didn’t cover. For more, view their handy Facebook ad guide here.

Social Media KPI Examples

The above strategies are also only as effective as the key performance indicators you set to demonstrate success. As we mentioned before, Facebook is one of the best platforms to start measuring social media success against because of its incredible tracking abilities called “Insights.” Ad campaigns will be measured against various KPIs including:

 

You can view your business Insights and see specifically how your ad performed against each of these metrics to understand how your dollars were spent and what you got for your investment. Additional KPIs can be found here.

Evaluating and measuring social media success doesn’t have to be time consuming. You can start by using our intuitive dashboard to track your social media campaigns for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.