Facebook Tips and Tricks

Is your business getting the most out of Facebook?

With the sheer amount of content available online it’s certainly true that it has become more difficult to get noticed as a business. It can feel like your content is drowning in a sea of posts, of friends sharing cat videos and, of course, your competition vying for your market’s attention. Happily, you can help yourself by following a few steps that may increase your audience engagement. Here are some Facebook tips and tricks directly from the iBrutes HQ:

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9 Facebook tips and tricks

1. Timing

There are certain peak times when your specific Facebook audience is online. Facebook Manager will show you when your users are most likely to see your posts. You may find that it’s not always quite a good idea to post at 9am. Though you might think it gives potential clients all day to see your post, it really is all about catching them in the moment. By the afternoon or evening when they finally have the time to browse their timeline your post is lost below those cat photos and random comments. (Of course, there are those who are glued to Facebook during work hours, but they’re not really paying attention to anything … unless they, in turn, are promoting their business on the platform, or are a social media management company like iBrutes!)

2. Click-through to website

Building a relationship with visitors to your Facebook page is great, but ultimately you want them to convert to customers. Direct links to your website helps increase conversions, as once they land on your site they are exposed to your ethos and range, and you have a better opportunity to make that sale.

3. Recycling

Recycling is good, right? Well, only when it comes to helping the environment — not when it’s posted content.

Mix it up, we say! Avoid using the same material repeatedly. It can be boring to your visitors and annoying at worst. They won’t appreciate seeing the same old things rolled out again and again, and may block your future posts. An effective Facebook feed should keep everyone interested and display a variety of content, including video, photos, virtual tours, funnies, promotional information, your special offers, and so on.

4. Sharing

Share correctly. Those ubiquitous share buttons are just about everywhere on social media and the web in general. True, sharing other people’s content is not a bad thing once it relates to what you do. It also shows Facebook and its users that you are happy to share quality content related to your industry.

On the flip side, the more people that share your high-quality original posts the more engaging it appears in the eyes of the Sainted Lord Facebook. Write and you shall be rewarded, Sir Post-a-lot!

5. Text vs. Media

Because there are few formatting or styling tools available to you when composing a Facebook post you may find your writing gains little response from the public. Such text-based efforts have a tough time trying to stand out among the sheer mass of bright and shiny multimedia on timelines. The best hope is that an emoji or two might spark the attention of the viewer.

Depending on its quality and content, a photograph included with a post can stand out from the crowd and grab attention. However overwriting the image with text can be a tricky proposition as Facebook penalises shots that have more than 20% text. Too much text and your image might not be shown at all, and if you are spending money on an ad-based promotion it could be wasted.

You certainly get higher engagement with photos and video than with text alone, and infographics — those diagrams with images and brief explanations that first appeared in newspapers — are another great method to engage with your audience.

Video is king. If it moves, the eye is enraptured by it and the viewer is instantly engaged. Text can (and should) be overlaid onto video, as Facebook automatically mutes sound — as does newer web browsers. Videos do not have to be massive studio productions: a little thought and planning can go a long way. When done right it produces up to ten times more engagement than either photos or plain text.

6. Tagging

Tagging, or linking, is a great way to show your content to audiences on other pages. If you tag your post with another page on Facebook the audience of that page will see your update, but keep it relevant!

7. Promotions

Though it was a great way to get likes and shares up to recently, Facebook has turned on the idea of giveaways and promotions. Getting users to enter your competitions can be good in the short term but, eventually, your post ranking gets worse and worse and you connect to fewer people.

8. Relationships

Building a good relationship with a customer means that you enhance the possibility that they will come again. Apu from The Simpsons was a master at building relationships. (He also had a shotgun when those relationships turned sour, but we do not condone violence at iBrutes.)

Build a network through events, community posting, tagging, posts, advert campaigns, page promotions, business promotions and a raft of other means, but stay in contact with your Facebook page and your website, make your posts relevant, engaging and entertaining — and send them regularly.

9. Boosts

See that boost button on your Facebook page? Use it. You could reach up to 3,000 people for just €10, depending on location and demographics. It is one of the cheapest forms of advertising, especially when you consider traditional methods, such as newspaper or radio ads, TV adverts, or even using AdWords and other online promoters.