How does Facebook News Feed update affect your B2B Company ?
I love to snack, don’t you?
How about your business, does it enjoy the occasional donut or two?
I happen to think it would, granted it will most likely not be a donut but the kind that brings traffic, leads and sales to its funnel, like Facebook.
Facebook is a platform that allows you to connect with customers and prospects for your business. And with 2 billion active monthly users it is no longer a question of is your business on Facebook, because it should be.
Facebook is crucial in content distribution which could be in the form of a post, event, images, videos that you can put up on your business page. Reaching your audience on Facebook could be organic or paid.
As delicious as Facebook sounds, it is borrowed land for your business because you do not own the platform.
This means you have no control over what happens when Facebook changes its algorithm. Your business could be affected either positively or negatively.
If you are an entrepreneur, small business owner or part of a larger marketing team in corporate, this update may have you worried about reaching your customers on Facebook to the point where you want to give up on Facebook business altogether.
But worry not, I will give you 3 Facebook features that will help your reach and engage with your target audience even when they do not get to see your updates on their timeline.
1. Facebook Groups
Facebook groups are a great way to reach a targeted audience as it is a group of people coming together with common interests or goals. With a click of a button you can share a post of your business or service to people you are sure have a vested interest in what you offer. This is of course assuming you are posting to the relevant groups.
Nothing will be less effective on Facebook than randomly sharing posts in groups that are not in your line of interest. No matter how big the group is in terms of number of members, focus on your target audience. It is not about quantity but quality.
Also, when posting in groups, refrain from always posting about what it is that you are selling. Be a part of discussions that educate and provide value to the members without trying to sell them on your product, you will come out looking like an expert and thought leader.
2. Facebook Messenger
If you haven’t already you better start using Facebook messenger and have an unfair advantage over your competitors. A few facts about messenger, mind boggling facts!
60 million business are on messenger, 2 billion messages are sent monthly between users and businesses on messenger and 64% of Facebook users use messenger monthly
Facebook messenger allows you to interact with your customers quickly and personally all while leveraging on automation and with an open rate of up to 80%!!!
That right there is enough reason to set up a welcome greeting, instant replies and away messages on messenger for your business. You can also run ads on messenger and reap some benefits from that open rate.
Learn how you can get started with Messenger for Business.
3. Facebook Advertising
Advertising on Facebook is not free but it is worth it if you do it right.
This is a strategy that has grown a lot of business throughout the years. If you have a Facebook account you know they ask information of its users such a as gender, relationship status, job title, interests, location, date of birth and a lot more.
While all of it is optional information for the user to give and may not seem that valuable to them, it is gold to marketers like you and me.
This is because as the marketer, if you know your buyer persona’s age, likes, job title, location we can choose to target your ad to be seen only by Facebook users that meet these criteria. And this is the game changer. You are no longer shooting in the dark. You get your ad in front of people you know are interested and have the ability to buy increasing your sales tremendously.
Learn how to create Facebook ads for your business.
Now that you have the 3 tools you can use to reach and engage with your audience on Facebook, here are a few pointers on content creation for your Facebook audience without being a slave to the ever-evolving algorithm.
Know your customer and know your brand. Provide unique value to your audience so that in their opinion you are a reliable point of reference and improve their well-being, it will get them excited and prompt them to share with their friends. This will grow your audience which means more traffic to your page increasing your brand awareness.
Have a content strategy plan to help you create evergreen content that is relevant over a long time and is reusable. For example, when you have a blog post that did very well, you can create a podcast, a webinar or a video around the same content that was featured in the blog which will be good for your SEO.
When running an ad on Facebook be intentional. Have a clear goal, budget, timeline and metrics for success. This will help you know if you met your objective and if not, you can go back and consider what to change in turn improving your strategy for future campaigns.
If you haven’t already, start using video. I know most of us are not comfortable with video, but you get used to it. In the video give value first, get straight to the content and less about yourself, give the audience a reason to stay. You have 8 seconds to make a good impression.
On Facebook, it could be live video or recorded and it does not have to be you on video all the time. You could e.g. have a weekly show, conduct interviews, show behind the scenes of a project, involve the audience with a Q&A, or feature a day in the life of a team member.
Be a great curator. There is a lot of good content out there, but the bad content is more. So, by sharing the absolute top content from the best sites, even from your competitors you stand out as the go-to business page for amazing content and over time that will trickle down to your sales.
Partner with other people. Here the goal is simple, it is all about the OPC i.e. Other Peoples’ Communities or Content. This way you tap into their influence and in an authentic way not by using them but, in a partnership, bring them in to experience your brand or work on project together or even videos such as the ones we mentioned before like interviews all while sharing it on Facebook and will share it too.
Syndicate like a boss. This simply means you are sharing with other already popular platforms. Many people do not know this but you can create a profile/account on sites such as inc.com, cultivate a relationship with the person who owns the site and when you create a new post they automatically see it with the help of RSS feed, which means no need to submit. If they like your content, they can decide to publish it which will be shared back to Facebook and your page continues to grow.
As an alternative which is free unlike opening an account, you can decide to submit to your blog to the popular platforms in your line of work. For example, in marketing there is MarketingProfs, Forbes, Business Insider and the list goes on.
Last but not least, create templates that you can use over and over again. Templates save you time and they give you consistency in your look and feel of a post. You can use stock images for example Pexels is great for free photos. Paid options are deposit photos, Shutterstock gives you a fixed number of photos per month for a reasonable price.
Have a method to the madness e.g. on blog posts, fonts used, heading and subheading, CTA image,all of it. Use a tool like Canva to create banners, social media posts
That is a wrap on this “snack” segment on Facebook for your business, still a lot more to come and be sure to feed that business page with these tips and watch it grow.
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