How to Create a Facebook Strategy that Kicks Ass

It’s easy to dismiss Facebook as being past its heyday, but it’s still the most widely used social media platform in the world. In fact, with 2.6 billion monthly users, it’s as relevant as ever and marketers can’t afford to overlook it as a powerful tool.

To harness the incredible reach of Facebook, you must have a solid strategy. That means careful planning, execution and monitoring so you can finely tune your content to suit your audience and see the best results.

Planning

Your Facebook strategy should be based on solid foundations, which means considered planning before you’ve even clicked a mouse or created a business page.

Define your audience

Gaining a proper understanding of your audience should be the first task in creating your Facebook strategy, as it’ll keep you focused and influence every decision you make along the way. Demographics including age, location and occupation of your potential customers should be among your initial findings.

Create goals to suit your business needs

Just like you need to know who you’re targeting, you also need to know what you’re aiming for, otherwise it’ll be impossible to get there. To do this effectively, you should avoid the obvious trap of using vanity metrics such as Facebook followers to measure your success.

Instead, look to increase brand awareness, community engagement and lead generation.  You’ll need to set out the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you reach those goals before you can begin.

Execution

All your careful planning should lead to executing a highly-organized and effective Facebook strategy.

Create attention-grabbing content

It’s easy for a user to scroll right past your content, so there’s only a small window in which to grab their attention. Once you have it, there are all sorts of directions you can take, but without that initial interest your opportunity has disappeared. On average, the window lasts for just 1.7 seconds, so make it count.

Post shareable and taggable content

The mix of content you post to Facebook will depend on the research you’ve done into your audience, but it’s vital that it’s both shareable and taggable. This will help your brand increase its reach and attract new customers to your business. As well as plain text status updates, photos and articles, think about branching out into memes and videos.

Maintain a regular posting schedule

It’s vital that you set your audience expectations and then meet them. One of the ways to do that is to establish a regular posting schedule and stick to it. If you start by putting content up on your Facebook page five times a week, you need to be confident you can keep up that pace.

Don’t be afraid of remarketing

Remarketing is one of the most useful techniques to employ on Facebook. That’s because more than 75% of users who add an item to their online shopping cart don’t end up completing the purchase. Showing them an ad for a product they’ve already demonstrated an interest in is among the easiest ways to get a sale.

Split test your ads

Split testing your ads is the best way to optimize, with specific preferences of different groups being targeted each time and leading to more conversions. Adjust a number of different variables and see how they affect the performance of your ads.

Monitoring

Don’t overlook the importance of evaluating your work on Facebook, as this is an integral part of your strategy. Monitoring tools should be set up early to see how far you’ve come.

Analyze your results

The metrics you use to determine the success of your strategy should be linked to your goals. Make sure you’re tracking page impressions, fan growth and engagement to get a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not. This will also help you to understand what your return on investment (ROI) looks like.

Comparing this data with that of competitors gives you a good indication of where you stand within the marketplace. It can also help to highlight areas in need of improvement, as well as identifying which elements have been particularly successful.