Are you trying to boost your reach to your Facebook posts, but all you see is less and less engagement on your page(s)?

Facebook is not free. Stop whining. Start investing.

One thing you must understand about Facebook: we all need to bury the idea that Facebook = free marketing. Long gone are the days when you could create a Page on Facebook and have your posts seen by 50-60-70% of your followers. *sigh*

A second thing you must understand… back in the “ol’ good days” there were only a handful of business pages on Facebook. Now? Everyone is on Facebook! (by the way, if “everyone is on Facebook” and you aren’t, then you might have a marketing problem).

But how about we ditch the negativity for a moment? There (still) are multiple strategies on how to use Facebook to market your business in a smart way.

In today’s article I introduce 6 different ways of creating more efficient Facebook posts that will eventually improve your business!

1. Understand your readers. We’re all skimmers in here!

Most people spend a lot of their time scrolling on Facebook, so getting their attention can be quite tricky.

Did you know…? A study run by the National Center for Biotechnology Information revealed that people have an attention span of 8 seconds. That’s 1 second less than a goldfish!!

This is why the first 3 to 4 words of your update post on Facebook are very important, if you want your audience to get engaged with it.

Bonus Tip: Try using CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer, which allows you to add your post text and show you how to improve it.

2. Have a roadmap of your posts

Who thought that even when you post on Facebook you need a plan? By having a roadmap, you can organize things better to the advantage of your business. Just imagine that by having having your content creation covered and knowing when you should publish it, you have a clean and clear path of how to manage everything.

What you write is as important as the time you choose to have your content published. Let’s say that your business is from the beauty industry. You have a salon where you provide all kind of services to your clients. Your posts could be about beauty tips (from hair, nails, make-up, massages, etc.), news from the fashion world, blog marketing, and so on.

The more topics you can approach in your online Facebook marketing, the more engaged your audience will be.

All you need to do next is have a calendar with the exact time when your posts are going to be published. It gives you time to design your social media images and keep everything organised and accessible.

Don’t have time for all this planning? This might help you get clarity on your content marketing.

3. #Hashtags get your word across and improve Facebook posts

There is a whole debate around hashtags. The truth is, you either hate them or you love them. But from a marketing perspective, you have to admit they do have a magic potential of getting the message across to lots of users.

Did you know..? A study from Buffer showed that posts with hashtags have a better reach than posts without hashtags.

Give hashtags a try and see how it works for your business. They can help you for your brand positioning, meaning that you have a catchy hashtag it is easier to get and “stay” in the consumers’ mind. Plus if you are posting something that most people talk about, hashtags can be quite efficient.

4. Time matters when publishing posts

Do you know when is the best time to publish posts on Facebook? There are multiple studies that show when people are more likely to read your posts, but it also depends on your type of business and audience.

The best thing you can do is dig into your analytics to find out when it would be the best time for you (and not some other business) to post anything new on Facebook. You can use Bitly (if you post links) and Facebook Insights which are affordable tools for such activities.

But if you want to dig deeper and get more information you can use more detailed paid tools, like Fanpage Karma. It will show you your data for each type of content: image, text, audio, video etc.

5. Personalize your Facebook posts descriptions

Did you know that you can edit the metadata description when you are republishing a post on Facebook? Indeed you can. The Metadata description is the short chunk of text that appears right underneath your post’s title when you share a link.

Plus, because Facebook posts are now searchable, you can add your keywords and win an increased post reach.

6. Evaluate & improve your visual and written content

Socialbakers ran a study that analyzed 4,445 business pages from October 2014 until February 2015, which revealed that videos are the type of posts which brings the most engagement to a page on Facebook.

After videos you have text updates, links, and photos. (Notice how photos come only after TEXT updates? Whoa.)

Before making any decision on what content is best for your business, you should consider analyzing your business and audience. It is highly important to know what will suit best for your particular type of business.

Let’s say that your essential goal is brand awareness; in this case videos and images are the type of posts that you should consider having more of. But if you want to get more traffic to your blog then you should think about sharing posts in link format.

Nowadays Facebook enjoys 1.44 billion monthly users. So you can definitely draw more attention to your business, but you need to have the right strategy if you are looking for a complete success.

 

Now is your turn…

 

• What strategy are you using to get more reach to your Facebook posts?

• Which element do you consider to be the most important one?

• Have you used any of the above-mentioned tactics? What were your results?