Looking to connect with your customers, members or a target audience? Look no further than Facebook. According to data from the Pew Research Center, Facebook is the most popular social media site—71% of internet users are on Facebook, and 70% of those users engage with the site daily (45% do so several times a day).
Marketing on Facebook starts with creating a page. A Facebook page gives your organization a voice and presence on the platform specifically designed to help you connect with your audience and meet your goals.
But unfortunately, it’s much more difficult to organically grow your following and reach your audience without spending any money. Most organizations need to invest in Facebook advertising to reach their followers, even the people who are already following your page. Let us show you what we mean.
Take a look at Martin Waymire’s Facebook page. We currently have 1,175 followers, so when we post an update, you would assume all of those followers automatically see our post in their newsfeed, right? Wrong. See the screenshots below comparing a post we shared without any advertising budget and a post we put $10 behind.
The upside to this? You don’t need a huge budget or a ton of time to boost your presence on Facebook. Here are three things to start doing:
1) Promote important posts for at least $5
Have an important update that needs to reach your followers? Create a post and promote it with an ad, targeting your followers. This type of promotion will get more of your followers seeing, liking, commenting on and sharing your post. You can easily create this type of ad by creating and publishing a post, then clicking the “Boost Post” button.
Looking to reach a wider audience than just your followers? You can choose to promote your post to “People who like your Page and their friends.” You can also create a custom audience through specific targeting based on people’s interests. With any of these audience types, you can also narrow down your audience based on location.
2) Consider ongoing ads that promote evergreen content
Have an older blog post that is still really popular, or a landing page you want to drive traffic to? You can set up a “Clicks to Website” ad on Facebook and set it to run for a longer time period.
We’ve had great success with one of our clients, Bridge Magazine, on promoting older stories that aren’t time sensitive and were popular when originally published. The ad below ran through most of last year, promoting a story that was written in early 2015. The ad reached more than 230,000 Facebook users in Michigan and received more than 28,000 website clicks, at a total cost of $0.02 per click.
3) Identify your advocates
As you experiment with promoting content, keep track of which audiences tend to interact with your content more. Maybe targeting your followers is the best option for you, or maybe you get great results by targeting a wider audience based on interest area. Either way, keep trying different options until you find the best fit.
Overwhelmed? We can help.
Even starting off with the basics can be intimidating. Martin Waymire can help your organization get off the ground on Facebook and other social media platforms. Contact us or sign up for a complimentary social media audit below.
