Facebook has grown from a straightforward social media sharing platform into a powerful marketing tool in most companies' digital marketing toolbelts. And after its recent rebranding into Meta, few can deny it has a lot to offer to most businesses.
But precisely due to the amount of functionality, versatility, and promotion avenues it offers, getting started with your company’s social marketing through Facebook can be a daunting challenge to tackle.
Should you focus on organic community building through posts, or would you benefit more from clipping your product showcase videos into short, in-feed ads? Is it worth investing in outside help to manage regular uploads, or are there tools to handle it yourself?
To help you figure out the best approach for your brand and get the most out of this effective-yet-complex marketing platform, we’ll be talking about the key marketing features Facebook puts at your disposal and how to implement them in your own marketing push!
Cover the Basics with an Awesome Facebook Business Page
A Facebook Business Page is a type of profile on Facebook made specifically for businesses, brands, and organizations. These company profiles work like websites, providing you with a space to offer key information about your brand and products and connect with your audience, but are optimized to work seamlessly as part of the platform's ecosystem.
After all, Facebook's Terms of Service are against people using a personal account to represent something other than a real person (a business, for example), so Facebook's Business Pages cover that need.
Needless to say, if you are planning to use Facebook as a marketing tool, your brand needs an optimized business page. And while this might sound like a bit of extra hassle, the good news is that these profiles are designed to offer marketing-oriented features beyond what a personal profile ever could, such as:
- Clearly listing your store’s basic contact information, like your phone number, email address, URL, open hours, and street address if you have a physical store.
- Organically improve your brand’s reach on the site. When users Like your Business Page, your updates will appear on their News Feed whenever you post, which gives you a new avenue to directly connect with and engage customers.
- Increase traffic to your company’s digital footprint. By sharing your brand’s URLs (website, online store, and other social accounts), people that find you through Facebook will immediately have direct access to the rest of your brand’s online presence.
Moreover, Facebook offers various integration options between your on-platform profile and your company’s website, making it easier to funnel and analyze your customer’s navigation patterns.
- Access to insights and demographic breakdowns about your customers. Facebook provides solid data on the audiences that visit your Business page.
Last but definitively not least, these brand profiles can also lessen marketing costs.
Starting a Facebook Business Page is free, and it gives you access to Meta Business Suite, a free tool that combines Facebook, Instagram, and Messaging in one place, allowing you to optimize actions, save time, and get better results.
Through Business Suite, you can access most of the promotional tools Facebook has to offer, like marketing and analytics features — which we’ll be talking about in a little bit!
Make Things Easier with Creator Studio
Once you have a Facebook Business page, you will have access to Creator Studio, and you should certainly make the most out of it.
Creator Studio is a free social media management tool within Meta that you can use to oversee Facebook Pages and Instagram Accounts. It brings together social media analytics, scheduling, and community management tools that can level up your brand’s social media game with little effort.
This tool allows creators and publisher to manage their posts, track tier performance, and makes it easier for them to connect with their audiences.
All these functions are framed around the four main types of posts you can create to nurture your Facebook social marketing presence. And that gives us a nice opportunity to talk a bit about how each can contribute to your overall Facebook Marketing push.
Text Posts
Text posts are useful to communicate something quickly to your audience or to take actions that boost engagement (like asking them a question or starting a discussion on a relevant topic).
Although Facebook allows up to 33,000 characters for text posts, It’s important to keep them short when it comes to content specifically designed for marketing purposes. Not only because it's most likely to engage them but because brevity saves you time that you can better spend doing something else!
Photo Uploads
This can be any type of image, including a photo, infographic, or other visual pieces of artwork. Photos are good for drawing quick attention and interest from your Facebook subscribers without breaking the bank.
When it comes to marketing content, you need to make sure your images are optimized for Facebook so that they are the right sizes and dimensions and can be viewed properly on most devices. The recommended size for posting images on Facebook is 1200 x 630 pixels.
Video Uploads
Video can often be the best medium to get your message in front of your target audience, thanks to its dynamic, customizable nature and the fact that it is easier to consume than other media. This is why you see brands across all niches — not just video marketing studios — uploading at least some videos here and there as part of their Facebook marketing strategies.
Most importantly, Facebook itself wants more people posting this type of content, so videos are actually encouraged by the site's algorithm and can make it easier for you to expand your reach on the platform and your overall inbound marketing efforts.
Facebook Stories
Just like Instagram Stories, these consist of special sets of images or videos that disappear after 24 hours. We can call it ephemeral marketing content.
When it comes to marketing, Stories are all about showing the day-to-day of your business or portraying your brand and products in real-life, more casual scenarios.
As they are ephemeral content, you shouldn't spend too much time or resources producing this specific type of Facebook upload. Images will show for 5 seconds, and videos can be up to 20 seconds per Story. The recommended size for posting images on Facebook Stories is 1080 x 1920 pixels.
Pinned Posts
A special kind of upload where you can use existing posts on your Business Page to be set as “pinned posts,” which means they will always be on top of your Page. This can be useful when you want to leave a welcome message, place links to important pages or customer support contacts, or highlight anything you are promoting at the moment.
With Creator Studio, you can easily create, schedule, and manage all these types of content, be it on Facebook or Instagram, in an easy and integrated way. If you want to take your Facebook content marketing strategy to the next level, this is a tool you can’t afford to ignore.
Leverage the Power of Facebook Ads and Ad Manager
Appearing just like any other piece of organic content, you can use post Ads on Facebook to seamlessly improve your reach and increase your sales using Facebook’s advertisement ecosystem.
Meta’s Ads Manager allows you to set up and create ads, manage when and where they’ll run, and track how well your campaigns are performing. It’s an all-in-one tool to help you make, edit and analyze paid promotional Facebook campaigns.
Best thing? Just by setting up a Facebook Business account, you also have access to the Ad Manager.
Some of the features Facebook advertising includes are:
- Demographic targeting of users by data on age, location, education, and interests.
- Budget allotment and management to keep your ROI front and centre.
- Ad testing, as multiple ad versions can be run simultaneously in order to compare ad designs and setup and choose the best one.
- Ad performance measurement tools to help you interpret how well things are moving along and adjust your strategy if necessary.
Now, Facebook offers four main types of ads, and the one you should go with depends largely on your campaign goals.
Image Ads
Static image ads are ideal for drawing attention and driving traffic to your website when smaller budgets are in play.
Make sure to use quality, high-resolution images for every ad, and avoid overly busy, cluttered graphics in order to make an attractive and functional image. You should also keep your CTA highly visible and use compelling color palettes likely to grab the attention of someone scrolling through their Facebook timeline.
When in doubt, there are plenty of online resources that can give you a solid starting point for your ads that you can then improve upon.
Video Ads
In this day and age, you don’t need us to tell you that video can be a powerful tool to effectively showcase a product and bring it to life. But that’s precisely what makes them so effective when used as the cornerstone of your Facebook ads strategy.
In comparison to other types of ads, videos can drive more conversions because it allows you to speak to your audiences and demonstrate your expertise in a more direct and personal way while consistently drawing more attention and engagement (shares!) than other formats.
So, whenever your budget allows it, using Facebook's platform to distribute high-quality video ads tends to be a good idea from an ROI standpoint.
Carousel Ads
Facebook Carousel ads allow you to show up to 10 images or short videos within a single ad, each with its own link. They are ideal for advertising physical goods because people can scroll through images to see your product from different angles or engage with several items in a catalogue of stuff you want to promote.
Collection Ads
These ads are ideal for showcasing products from your e-commerce store. They include either a cover image or video, followed by four product images underneath it.
Collection Ads aren’t suited for conveying much information, though, as they allow only a short headline and a 125-character description. So, keeping the focus on a single piece of information or product is often the best alternative to get the most out of this type of ad.
Go Beyond Social with Meta Pixel and Social Media Buttons
Facebook and Meta's greatest strength lies in their ability to provide a broad landscape where you can manage all of your marketing activities. That’s why integration with websites couldn’t be missed.
The Meta Pixel is a piece of code you can install on your site that will allow tracking, testing, targeting, and generating analytics for your Ads Manager. It allows you to follow your client’s behavioral patterns whenever they interact with your online content.
You also have the option to install Facebook Social Media Buttons on your website, which will encourage visitors to connect and interact with you on Facebook and spread your content.
Similarly, the Facebook Like Button allows you to promote your Business Page on your website. By clicking it, people can like your business Page without leaving your site! And remember, when a user likes a piece of content, it may show up in his friends' News Feeds because the algorithm takes it as a signal that their friends might find it relevant as well. Meanwhile, Facebook Share Buttons allow people to share your content on their Timeline and in friends’ News Feeds.
What all this means is that, by using these interconnected Facebook Marketing tools, you can offer an all-around experience to your customers and cross-pollinate every platform your company is on, and expand your reach.
Measure, Test, and Improve with Analytic Tools
As you have seen so far, there’s a tool for every need in Facebook’s marketing solutions repertoire. But in order to obtain good results with any of them, you have to be able to measure your strategy’s performance and tweak it accordingly.
Enter the many analytics tools Meta has to offer!
The Events Manager allows you to analyze what actions people take on your website, thanks to the Meta Pixel we just talked about. For example, whenever someone adds an item to their cart or completes a sale, the pixel will record this as an action or “event.” You can (and should) use this type of information to improve your strategy, like targeting these users with customized ads in the future.
The Event Manager is accessible from Ads Manager or your Business Suite.
The Ads Manager we previously mentioned has a “reporting” feature that lets you see how your ads are performing, and you should always keep an eye on what those numbers are telling you when it comes to performance and response.
Inside the Facebook Ad Manager, you can also find Audience Insights, which will allow you to learn more about who your customers and prospects are and give you relevant information that you can use to further customize your ads, and target potential customers more effectively.
Among the most relevant data points it offers, you have:
- Level of education
- Relationship status
- Location
- Interests and hobbies
- Languages spoken
- Facebook usage statistics
- Past purchase activity
The amount of data Facebook has to offer about your audience is one of its most powerful assets from a digital marketing standpoint. And what makes it even better is how user-oriented and easy-to-use these platforms are! So, make sure to use them to improve your overall Facebook marketing efforts.
Summing Up
Facebook offers a complete landscape for businesses, but the number of tools it offers can make it a bit too complicated if you are just jumping into it.
We hope that we were able to make that transition a little bit easier. Once you start taking advantage of everything Facebook offers and gaining experience, you will quickly boost your marketing strategies and help you archive all kinds of objectives your company is set to.
