Facebook is one of the largest, most robust social media marketing platforms for businesses. Advertising and building audience engagement can be a cinch for some and a nightmare for others. Fortunately, social media managers tend to make the same mistakes, and there is usually a relatively simple solution. Here are some of the most common Facebook marketing problems and how to fix them.
Never Creating Marketing Goals
Before we dive too deep into Facebook marketing, it’s important to ask yourself what your goals are. You might ask yourself the following questions to start:
- Do I want to get follows and likes for vanity purposes?
- Is building audience engagement my top priority?
- Is social media a listening or customer service tool for my brand?
- Do I expect social media to build awareness about my brand or is it merely a tool to convert sales?
It’s also okay to have no major goals at all. Many businesses simply use Facebook as a placeholder to show that they are modern, and to avoid the potential for social identity theft. After you’ve determined what you want to achieve on Facebook, write your goals down. Get specific. They might look something like:
- By August, I want to have 100 new likes on my Facebook page.
- By the end of the month, I want to increase engagement by 20%.
- I want to make at least three sales from Facebook ads.
Take a look at your goals from time to time. Make sure you’re on the right track and if not, assess what you can change about your social strategy. Also remember that sometimes the strategy is not the issue; sometimes the goal is too lofty. Be realistic as you set your goals and ensure that they are measurable.
Never Creating a Content and Marketing Strategy
It’s all too common for businesses to post what essentially boils down to bland advertisements in a quest to just push something out there. Not only is the lack of strategy obvious to other social media managers, it’s apparent to audiences too. It’s vital that businesses come up with a content and marketing strategy that outlines tone, audience, content, and consistency.
Some quick tips on content:
You Need to Know Your Audience
Your target audience can affect the content you present on your Facebook page. If a company sells life insurance to the elderly, for example, it may not make sense for them to post memes about growing up in the 90’s.
If you want to create advertisements on Facebook, it’s absolutely necessary to know your audience. Details such as age, gender, location, and interests can all contribute to a more targeted marketing campaign and can even save you money by narrowing your audience down to the people who would be most interested in what you have to offer.
Feature Rich Images & Video
If you don’t already have a portfolio of attractive images and/or video, plan to start one. Hire a photographer or videographer if necessary. Use royalty-free images if you’re stuck. Create visuals using applications like Canva. There’s no excuse to post low-quality content in 2019.
Decide on Tone and Purpose
Your Facebook page shouldn’t only include posts about your brand’s awards, news, and events. Give your audience a reason to like the page and return. Most brands accomplish this by posting content that is informative, entertaining, or both.
Besides giving the audience a reason to remember your brand, this also helps to establish a cohesive tone. You may even want to further focus your tone. Is it clean and family-friendly? Is it sassy and fun? Will you create your own content and present yourself as an industry leader, or will you aggregate content in a matter-of-fact way? There are an endless number of directions brands can take and many of them can overlap.
Scope Out the Competition
Check out the competition or even just pages you’d like to mirror. What are they doing that seems to be working? Conversely, is there anything they’re doing that seems to not be working? Perform a little competitive SWOT analysis:
Strengths – What is the competition doing better than you and what strategies are most effective for them?
Weaknesses – What is the competition failing at accomplishing, and why?
Opportunities – Is there something the competition is not doing that they might benefit from?
Threats – Is there something the competition is doing that is harming their brand or Facebook performance?
It’s also a good idea to see if your competition is spending money on ads. Because of Facebook’s recent privacy scandals, every page includes a link to a transparency outline of what ads have been posted to Facebook. If your competition uses ads, their results may not be reproduceable unless you do too. However, you can evaluate the content and design of your competition’s advertisements to help guide you in creating your own.
You’re sure to learn something by spending some time on your competitors’ Facebook pages.
Lack of Resources
The most common resource issues include lack of budget and lack of high-quality content. However, one resource few businesses seem to consider is manpower.
Facebook, like all other social platforms, takes time and practice to understand. That’s why courses like Facebook Blueprint exist. However, if a business doesn’t have someone on staff who has the time to learn about Facebook marketing, create a marketing strategy, source content, design a page, respond to comments and messages, post consistently, and keep an eye on ads, it’s time to hire someone. If you own a small business and can’t justify hiring someone full-time for social media management, consider hiring an agency or freelancer.
Not A/B Testing
Odds are, if you’ve invested in ads for your business, you want to make sure you get the most bang for your buck. That’s why it’s so surprising that so few social media ad managers engage in split testing.
It’s risky to go all-in on an ad right out the gate without even knowing that it will get results. By split testing, you can create variations of an ad, slightly changing the text, image/video, or target audience. Then, using a small budget, keep an eye out on which ad yields the best results. You might find that the difference between a successful ad and an unsuccessful one is so incredibly simple that you would have never thought of it. Going forward, you can use the best ad with some peace of mind knowing that it’s been results-tested.
Split testing takes some of the guesswork out of advertising and can save advertisers a lot of money and frustration in the long run.
Impatience
The fix to this Facebook marketing issue is simple: Just give it more time! It’s next to impossible to build up an audience overnight. If your goals are realistic, you have a sound marketing strategy and content plan, and you’ve invested in ads, it’s only a matter of time before things begin to pick up.
If conversions are your goal, realize that it can take minutes or months for your efforts to yield results, and it’s not always obvious that social media was the reason a conversion took place. Like most forms of marketing, social media marketing tends to be a long-term game.
Never Checking Facebook Insights
Facebook Insights offers an incredible wealth of data about your customers and page. Insights provides information about things like:
- Engagement over time
- The best days and times to post
- Reach
- Your page’s responsiveness to messages
Using this information, you can make educated calls about what changes to make to your page and social strategy.
You Don’t Squeeze the Value Out of Posts and Ad Spend
Facebook engagement is about more than how many comments or likes your posts get. For example, did you know that you can invite the people who react to your posts to like your page? Since people who like your page are more likely to see your posts and engage with them, which can potentially make your page pop up on their friends’ feeds, this can lead to a slow-motion snowball effect.
You can also:
- Collect email addresses on a landing page
- Engage directly with visitors in comments and messages
- Use Google Analytics and HotJar to figure out if the issue is your advertising or your website
Engagement is High, But Conversions Are Low
If engagement on your Facebook page or ad is high, that’s good! It means that the content has resonated with people. However, if your conversion rate is low, there are a few things that could be going on:
You’ve Targeted the Wrong Audience
Perhaps you’ve gotten only part of your audience targeting correct. There’s a good chance that you’ve targeted a group of people who is interested in your content but doesn’t have the money or enough interest to buy the product or service you offer. Making adjustments to age, location, and interests on Facebook ads, for example, could help.
You Don’t Post Enough About You
If you never let people know what you offer (or neglect to give them the occasional reminder), you won’t see many sales or conversions.
Your Website Needs Adjustments
If those who click on your ads seem to not make it past a certain point in your conversion funnel, you need to determine why. It could be something about your website that doesn’t work for the visitor. It could even be something about your pricing, product, or service.
Your Posts Get Little to No Engagement
On the other hand, if your Facebook page gets very little engagement, any number of things could be going on.
You’re Posting at the Wrong Times
Check Facebook Insights to resolve this. If your audience is typically online at 6:00 PM and you post at 7:00 AM, for example, they might not even see your posts!
You’ve Targeted the Wrong Audience
You might need to go back to your audience research for clues. If you run a blog for moms, for example, but include men in your Facebook ad targeting, you may not be reaching the right people.
Your Content is Dull
No one likes to hear that their content is unengaging, but there are some things social media managers can do:
- When possible, make sure every post contains an attractive image or video.
- Encourage your audience to leave a comment by asking a question. Posting polls can be another effective way to get users to interact with your page.
- Tag relevant businesses or individuals your business may have a connection with.
- Post share-worthy content. Shares can dramatically increase your reach, and therefore engagement.
- Adjust your ratio of useful/entertaining content to posts mentioning your services. You might be coming off as sales-y without even realizing it.
You Post Too Often or Too Little
The brute force approach to social media very rarely works. In fact, this might lead to unfollows and negative feedback from users who get annoyed by it. In an effort to maintain a constant stream of content, quality may even decrease.
On the other hand, if you rarely post, it’s important to know that Facebook’s algorithms play a huge role in your page’s engagement. Facebook is most likely to show your posts to users if your page has an overall high engagement rate. However, if you don’t post often enough, it’s difficult to build forward momentum. This can put you in a position where you must buy Facebook ads in order to be seen.
The solution is to find a rhythm somewhere in the middle. If you struggle to post often enough, remember that Facebook has a native scheduler, so you never have to worry about dropping what you’re doing to post.
Common Problems, Easy Solutions
It takes time to build a successful Facebook page. Even the best marketers run into issues along the way. Try some of these solutions for the most common Facebook marketing problems and let us know what you think! If you still struggle to determine what’s going wrong with your Facebook strategy, speak to a professional digital agency that can help. Most agencies are happy to help with your Facebook marketing needs and save valuable time and stay within your marketing budget.
