Social Media Marketing: Facebook for Business Best Practices

NOTE: This is another in a series on social media for business marketing.

If you’re among one of the billions of people who use Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family, keep up with viral YouTube videos, and share your favorite pictures, then you already know the beauty of Facebook.

But if you’re considering implementing Facebook as a social media marketing tool for your company, it becomes a completely different platform and should be treated as such.

4 Facebook business best practices

Different can be scary, but if you follow these simple Facebook business best practices, you’ll be well on your way to increasing brand awareness, engaging with your audience, and becoming a “must-follow” page on Facebook

Keep posts under 250 characters

While Facebook allows you to write longer posts than other social media platforms, short and sweet still spells success. Keeping your post under a 250 characters increases engagement significantly according to a Track Social report that found Facebook posts under that 250-character limit received 60% more engagement than lengthier ones. The research also found that if you can keep posts under 80 characters you will likely experience 66% more engagement.

If you’d like to go more in-depth, don’t forget that you can write longer posts or articles on your blog, and link back from your Facebook page. Doing so, will help you increase your engagement stats and drive traffic back to your website.

Use images

Because keeping text to a minimum is the best way to optimize posts and increase fan engagement, let images speak for you.

A picture is worth a thousand words (or likes) according to 2014 research from eMarketer, which found that 75% of Facebook content is images. The report also found that images have an 87% interaction rate compared to other types of posts that saw no better than 4%.

Images will help you reach your audience faster and increase brand awareness, because they can evoke emotions and imagery that would be hard to create with only 250 characters.

In addition, people like to share images.  Be sure to follow these photo post best practices:

• Include a relevant link back to your website along with the image post when applicable.
• Use only high quality images.
• Post images that are sized for optimal impact. A Facebook Newsfeed shared image should measure 470x352pxls.
• Only use images you have the right to publish (even accidental copyright infringement can be expensive).

Make it fun and personal

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make when they first start out on Facebook for business is talking too much about themselves and not doing enough to engage their audience.

If you take away only one idea from this article it should be this: Facebook is not a billboard, so don’t forget to be social and human.

Does your brand have a voice? A shtick? A style? A sense of humor? Facebook is the platform to showcase it and really connect with your audience on a personal level.

That’s not to say you should never use Facebook to drive sales, just do so sparingly.

A good rule of thumb is to use the 30/70 rule; 30% of your content can be promotional, but keep 70% dedicated to content that is relevant, helpful to your audience, and serves to develop your following and increase brand authority.

Ask questions

Your audience and potential audience do not spend time on Facebook to get marketed to – they’re there to have fun, share opinions, and engage with those brands that are fun to interact with. Another way to become a brand people want to follow is to ask questions and make your page a platform for conversation.

According to Kissmetrics, posts that ask some kind of question get 100% more comments than statement-type posts. Keep your questions easy-to-answer, fun, engaging, but relevant to your business on some level, too.

Bonus tip: Posts beginning with the following words receive the most comments (in descending order from most comments to fewest):

• Should
• Would
• Which
• Who
• When
• What
• Where
• Why
• How

Pulling it together

Kicking off a Facebook page for your business can be scary, but the marketing power is well worth the effort. And the good news is that it’s really not as terrifying as you may think. Simply follow these best practices and we think you and your audience are really going to “like” what you see!

About VONT Performance Digital Marketing

At VONT we believe that change is the only constant in the digital world – and that excites us. When tools and environments are constantly changing, new opportunities to help our clients achieve success are constantly arising. Each new advertising technology, social platform, or design approach allows us to improve on the results we achieve for our clients.

We believe in this idea of continual fine-tuning so much that we named our company VONT, which means to achieve exponential improvement in incremental steps. It is our core belief, and the reason why we are not simply a web design company or simply a digital advertising agency, but rather a long-term, single source partner providing a comprehensive array of web development and digital marketing capabilities.

In short, we’re here so that our clients achieve success in the ever-changing digital world. If you’d like to learn more about VONT and the work we’ve done with our client partners, visit our Work page. Or, if you have a question, contact us. We’ll get right back to you!