- +1 512-591-8295
- [email protected]
- Mon - Fri: 9:00 - 16:00
Facebook for Business Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
68% of Americans use Facebook and that is second only to YouTube among all of the social media platforms.
I know that you’ve heard Facebook use is decreasing among younger generations, but the statistics don’t always bear that out. Yes there are other platforms that they’re using, but for the most part Facebook is still number one. And the best thing you can do on Facebook and any social platform is be consistent.
That can sound overwhelming when you’re thinking that you need to be putting a lot of work into your business’ presence on Facebook every day or multiple times a day, and that’s not always the case. The one thing you do need to be doing on a regular daily basis is engaging with people who are commenting, liking, joining your page. That engagement is important can be done in as little as 10 or 15 minutes a day. Just schedule a short appointment with yourself to take that time and manually engage with people on your page.
There’s a couple of other tricks that we use to boost that consistency.
One of the things I want to tell you about really quickly though is we recommend using the 80/20 rule whenever you’re posting on Facebook or really any social media platform. That rule says you want at least 80% of your content to be something of value to the people on your page, and no more than 20% should be sales.
On your sales posts, you do need to always include a direct call to action. The most common issue we see with businesses is too many salesy posts and they’re drastically violating that 80/20 rule. The second most common problem we see is when businesses are doing great and providing more than 80% of valuable content, sometimes they actually miss asking people to engage.
On that 20% of posts where you are directly promoting business, it can be something simple, such as visit my website or download this ebook. You do want to be wrapping your arms around those people and bring them further into your business. The best way to do that is a combination of engaging in a natural, social way and actually asking them to join you.
A really quick way you can check your content ratio is visiting your page’s Insights tab, or even just scroll down through your most recent posts, and look at the first ten. Note whether the post is social and offering value to the reader, or if it’s selling the business. Count how many of each. If at least 8 of those 10 are valuable, informational, newsworthy, interesting and no more than two are a direct sales message, you’re good on the 80/20 rule.
Another way you can be consistent on social media without having to write yet another post every day is that you can curate good content from around the web. Sometimes even if it’s a competitor – although not a direct competitor. Find interesting information about your industry and share that on your page.
When we do this, for ourselves or our clients, we notice a couple of things.
First, it’s a great way to make that consistency happen without you having to manually write a post from scratch. It’s easy in that 15 minutes per day that I recommend for engagement to quickly grab a link to something newsworthy and share it on your page.
Another place this helps is that the post being seen – which also means your business name/logo etc is being seen in your fans’ timelines – boosts drastically when it’s a post from a well-known, authoritative and popular source. We all know Facebook page engagement is dropping because Facebook shows your business page post to a smaller % of your fans … so this is a great way to counter that algorithm a bit. Your name being in front of your fans is what helps keep your business top of mind.
Another strategy that helps with this consistency is planning. When I do my annual planning for my business – which I hope all of you are doing regularly – I sit down and try to plan out at least some general topics or themes that I want to touch upon over the next year.
Then, once a month I may pre-write those posts and schedule them for the correct dates later that month. I don’t have to struggle to think about what to write if I have a plan, and that saves on brainpower.
You can check out the marketing planning calendar that I’ve developed and use regularly with clients. I share both the template and a video walk-through showing you how to use it.
Making sure that our posts are being shared at the best possible times will help boost your Facebook strategy, and make it simpler to know when to pre-schedule those posts that you’ve drafted.
You can grab my free Best Times to Post eBook which shares the optimal posting schedules for multiple different platforms, based upon industry research.
For Facebook, the recommended frequency is one post per day. Don’t let that overwhelm you since you can implement some of the strategies noted above. While the best times can vary slightly depending upon your industry, it’s not by much.
So if you only have one post a week or one post a day, you want to tune in on those times if you want the most engagement. Facebook used actually spikes by 10 percent on Friday; keep in mind that means you’re also gonna have probably a lot more competition from other pages that are posting. Also avoid and any day 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. – that overnight traffic won’t get you very great results.
As Seen In
Get solid marketing strategies, designed for entrepreneurs on the track to 7-figures and beyond, right in your inbox.
