Planning to Learn Facebook Marketing? You’re at the right place!
Quick Stats: 22% of the world’s total population uses Facebook. (Source: Statista)
Quick Stats: There are now more than 50 million small businesses using Facebook Pages to connect with their customers (Source: Facebook)
Quick Stats: 4 million of active businesses pay for social media advertising on Facebook. (Source: Forbes)
If you’re a marketer, you know the importance of Facebook marketing already. No statistical data is required to convince you. If you’re a business, you might know that Facebook Marketing is important but the seriousness might be a little lost on you and precise marketing statistics might put things in perspective for you.
For the purpose of this article, we’re addressing it to the marketers. With Facebook Marketing almost becoming a de facto skill to have, it’s important to understand the basics to get your game strategy right.
It’s even more important in this case, as Facebook being Facebook, it’s notorious for changing too fast and many times in covert ways. If you know your basics, you would be able to spot, understand and work around the constant changes in Facebook marketing and it will become easier for you to learn Facebook Marketing.
7 Concepts to Help You Learn Facebook Marketing like a Pro
In this article, we’ll take you through the 7 core concepts that you need to understand and master if you want to even come close to becoming a successful Facebook marketer, or if you simply want to learn Facebook Marketing.
1.) Organic versus Paid: Difference between Organic Facebook Marketing and Paid Facebook Advertising
Arguably the most thrown around buzzwords in the world of Digital Marketing are – Organic and Paid/ Inorganic. You would certainly have come across these often during the discussions of marketing, no matter on which side of the table you’re.
It’s not like organic versus paid marketing is a phenomenon unique to Digital Marketing. It has always been equally applicable to conventional or offline marketing, if you like, as well. Digital Marketers certainly have named and highlighted this difference clearly and prominently.
If you were to master only two terms about Digital Marketing, those would be – Organic versus Paid.
As a Digital Marketer, one of the first and foremost important things to discuss while kick-starting any discussion around Digital Marketing campaign would be to clearly define and explain whether the client ( for the sake this article, let this be the person for whom you’re going to plan and run the campaign, even if that’s you) understands the difference between the both.
It’s a simple thing but this is where uninitiated clients might get it wrong. Not clearly demarking the difference between organic versus paid would seem like a small communication gap, but beware it can wreak havoc. Why, you ask?
The campaign objectives, plans, target audience, type of ads, Call-to-Action, duration, resources and overall budgets etc. every parameter gets defined basis this. Now think about the nightmare that both you and the client would go through if the client wanted an organic campaign but you planned for a paid one.
God lies in the detail, but so does devil.
For those who are still wondering, Organic Facebook Marketing refers to any promotional activity undertaken by a business for which they don’t have to pay anything to Facebook e.g. managing a business page on Facebook and engaging with its fans via creative posts.
On the other hand, Paid Facebook Advertising refers to any promotional activity undertaken by a business by paying an advertising fees to Facebook in lieu of increased audience reach e.g. boosted posts, sponsored stories, Facebook Ads in News Feed etc. Thus, to learn Facebook Marketing, you need to have an idea of both the aspects.
2.) Right Facebook Channel to Market Upon: Personal Profile, Facebook Page, Facebook Group
Are you building a personal brand as an influencer?
Or are you promoting a commercial brand using Facebook as a platform?
Are you looking to build an engaged community built around a common interested among large number of audience on Facebook?
Or are you looking to engage with your existing and potential fans and customers?
These are some of the most basic yet pertinent questions that need to be answered precisely before you go about creating a professional Facebook identity. Answer to these questions would help you define your end objective for your professional presence on Facebook. Defining your end objective would in turn help you to take the decisions about doing it the right way.
Let’s take some real-world examples of how different objectives would need to make this decision:
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Scenario: You’re a fashionista and want to build a social media identify about the same around yourself
Choose between your personal profile and running a Facebook Page. Remember, a personal profile is much easier to maintain but doesn’t put you in serious professional light. If this is more of a hobby for you, go for it.
If you’re serious about projecting yourself as an aspiring fashion professional or influencer, go for a Facebook Page. This would need you to put in serious work, create quality posts, invoke interest, inspire engagement, maintain a posting schedule, write creative copy and look into your Page Insights to understand your audience.
You could hire a professional to do it or you could do it yourself depending on your preference. But you would need to appear and be committed professionally to a Facebook page.
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Scenario: You’re a commercial brand and want to reach out to your audience using Facebook
Go for a Facebook Business Page. This one is already explained.
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Scenario: You’re a woman and you love to travel solo. You want to build an engaged community of women like you from around the world.
A dedicated Facebook Group is all you need. Facebook Groups are custom-made to build common interest communities.
3.) Set it Right: Setting up an Optimized Business Page on Facebook
Setting up a business page on Facebook is easy. Setting up an optimized business page on Facebook is not so easy. You need to explore all the available settings and then be little creative and imaginative to reap the maximum benefits of Facebook Marketing.
How to setup an optimized Business Page on Facebook would be a discussion for some other day. Let me leave you with enough starters to entice you into learning more about it and be a little playful:
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Profile Pictures
Make use of your Cover Image and Profile Picture in interesting ways. Let the netizens of Facebook know who you are in a memorable way.
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About Section
This is equivalent of your brand pitch. Write a crisp description with enough material to catch the attention of your page visitors, pin your business location correctly, link it back to your official website and leave the active contact details for them to reach out to you. Fill in all the relevant information about your company, product and services and industry type.
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Call-to-Action Button
Add a relevant Call-to-action button on your page.
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Add Milestones
Add important events as milestones on your timeline.
There is much more to setting up an optimized Business Page on Facebook. You can start with these and learn more about what’s relevant to you along the way.
4.) Rules of Engagement: Know your Audience and Engage Them
You didn’t come to Facebook looking for a platform to make it boast about you all the time. Sure, you want to promote something and you would love to keep the conversation around that. But, being a narcissist is the fastest way to make your audience run away from you.
The magic of Facebook, or any Social Media channel for that matter, lies in the engagement. You’re putting in so much effort into reaching out to your audience, then make it count. Make them feel as part of your story. Spark dialogues. Make your Facebook presence interactive. Initiative and inspire conversations. To put it simply, talk to your audience and let them talk to you too.
Some simple tips to go about building an engaging Facebook presence:
- Conceptualize your posts in a conversational and talkative format
- Use simple copy that directly speaks to its audience
- Use relevant popular hashtags to become part of already trending relevant conversations
- Ask your audience a question that they might care about
- Reward them for engagement
- Try Newsjacking
- Provide useful relevant information in return of an engagement action
5.) Content Management: Plan and Manage your Content, Publishing Frequency, Schedule and Response Mechanism
This is one of the most important yet most ignored aspects when it comes to knowing what is Facebook Marketing.
Frequency and timing of content sharing are two of the most impactful parameters for success or failure of your Facebook Marketing strategy.
Facebook Marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. You need to be consistent about what you post, when you post and how do you respond to customer enquiries. Being consistent on a long-term basis might seem simple but it’s a daunting task. Doing a simple activity day-in-day-out demands serious commitment. You can’t just do Facebook Marketing for a week and then go off. It’s almost like fitness, you need to be consistent to see any results. You miss your Facebook workouts and you’ll lose the momentum that you so painstakingly built over a period of time.
A simple process to ensure that your Facebook page is active would look like this:
- Design a simple system around creating quality content on a regular basis
- Plan a publishing calendar in advance
- Make use of scheduling tools to help you automate publishing so that your posts can be published even if you’re away, e.g. Hootsuite and Buffer
- Create some scripts to respond to audience queries in an effective manner. Facebook has recently launched chatbots to help you automate this activity too.
6.) Facebook Post Types: Making Use of Various Post Types to Keep Your Content Interesting
One of the most interesting and effective features of Facebook posts is the variety of posts to choose from. Facebook also keeps on updating the post types from time to time.
Choose the one that is most relevant to your communication. Also, make use of audience analytics to know which post types people are most responsive to.
Different post types serve different purposes so decide on which one is the most relevant to your communication objective. Video is currently the most consumed format of content on Facebook.
You don’t need to burn a hole in your pocket to quickly churn out simple Facebook videos. Shoot an amateur video and share, use Facebook Live, use some creatives and make a video slideshow complete with stock music and all.
Simple, isn’t it? So if you’re not making use of Facebook videos as part of your Facebook Marketing strategy, it’s high time you did.
7.) Page Insights: Digging Deeper into How, When and What Worked and What Didn’t
This one deserves an article to itself. For the scope and purpose of this article, let’s talk about the importance of understanding Facebook Page Insights instead of the mechanics of it that are easily explained by Facebook Help Center.
Facebook provides with an easy-to-use data analytics dashboard on your age Insights. There is a lot of data available to you to analyze how each post has worked, how each audience demographic has responded to your efforts, which time of the day has performed best, which day of the week is the best to publish a post etc.
Dig deeper (our recommendation would to dig as deep as you can) into your Page Insights and it’ll help you grow like nothing else. Study the patterns over a period of time, look for emerging patterns and audience behavior insights and you’ll get conclusive data-backed answers to a lot of questions. You can run small experiments to test your assumptions and make informed choices.
Learning Facebook Page Insights in depth and developing the ability to read through it to spot actionable information, would take you far into your journey to learn Facebook Marketing.
Conclusion
These were the seven core concepts that you must know in order to learn Facebook Marketing, everything else is secondary. My purpose was to introduce these concepts as simply as possible to you and to sensitize you about the respective importance of each of these.
From here, you should learn Facebook Marketing via a professional certification course on Facebook Marketing and later by putting all of this knowledge to use in running some kick-ass successful Facebook Marketing campaign and you would have arrived as a new Facebook Marketing star.
Master the basics!
