Facebook marketing is an important piece of the digital advertising puzzle. But, it can be your downfall if you aren’t doing it right.
Launching a Facebook page for your business is a must these days. It’s an easy way to get in touch with customers, both old and new. There, you can give them the latest news, show them content, and engage with them on a personal and professional level.
However, companies that don’t have an experienced social media marketer at the helm are going to have some missteps. This is what we’re discussing today. These common Facebook marketing mistakes might not seem like a huge deal right now, but they can cost you time and money if you keep letting them happen.
We’ll let you decide if it’s time to fire your social media expert. If they’ve made these mistakes time and time again, you might want to think about it.
Too Many Organic Posts
When you’re trying to get by without paying for your posts, you’re doing it all wrong. If you use organic posts to try to sell products, you’re basically admitting defeat before you even get off the ground. Generally, organic reach is so low that it’s not worth posting anything important that way.
Organic posts are fine for engaging with your followers on a day-to-day basis, but not for anything that you want people to see. For example, you wouldn’t pay to post a photo of what you ate for lunch, but you would pay to post about your newest product or service.
“Boosting” Your Posts
There are two types of paid posts on Facebook: regular old “paid posts” and “boosted posts”. One is much more worthwhile than the other and as you might have guessed, it has nothing to do with boosting.
Paid posts are when you create an advertisement in Facebook Ads Manager with the intention of showing up on people’s feeds that you wouldn’t ordinarily reach. It’s done with advertising in mind, usually whatever product or service you’re offering.
Boosted posts, on the other hand, usually come about when you post organically, only to realize that you should’ve paid in the first place. When you boost, it pushes the organic post to more of your own followers that may not have seen the post.
Facebook will urge you to boost any and every organic post that you make, but it’s not worthwhile at all. You’re much better off paying for posts that will have a much larger reach than posting organically and paying to boost it to your current followers.
Selling Instead of Growing
You have to understand what Facebook is before you start using it as a marketing tool. It’s not a place where you berate your followers into purchasing your products, but it can be a valuable tool for building a brand and growing your audience. If you’re doing it right, you’ll increase your sales in many different ways, both direct and indirect.
Try to think like a customer. Would you want a company you follow to cover your Facebook feed in product advertisements? You’d probably unfollow them in a matter of days.
There’s an old rule in digital marketing which says that you should give your followers valuable content that they can share 80% of the time and reserve the other 20% for selling your products. This is how you can grow your brand the right way and create a loyal customer base that trusts you.
Neglecting Your Community
It’s easy for companies to forget what Facebook is: a social media platform. Although it’s a useful tool for advertising and brand building, you can’t do that very effectively if you’re not engaging with your audience.
When you post something, you can measure its effects directly on Facebook or with your own analytics. That’s just telling you part of the story, though. You have to get in the comments section and see what people are saying because that’s how you build a rapport with your audience.
Specifically, you’ve got to respond to the negative comments and show that you’re listening to criticism. Many small businesses fail to do this and, although it doesn’t seem like a huge deal, deleting or ignoring negativity costs them.
Begging for Engagement
Don’t put so much focus on getting “likes” because they don’t amount to anything. It’s always nice to get that kind of feedback and Facebook will highlight your likes, but it’s engagement that matters. You want people to be commenting and sharing because that’s how things spread and become meaningful.
Also, you should never beg for engagement because it won’t reflect well on your business. Whatever you’re posting should speak for itself and if you’re struggling with engagement numbers, then you need to go back to the drawing board, not coerce your audience into liking, commenting, or sharing.
Inconsistency
Lastly, if you want to succeed with Facebook marketing, you have to be posting consistently. If you’re posting once or twice a week, then you’re not likely to ever see your engagement numbers improve, which makes investing in social media marketing completely pointless.
If you’ve got a good social media manager at your disposal, you can dispatch them with a posting strategy designed to boost engagement and sales. If you don’t, you’ll see your organic reach slowly dissipate because you aren’t giving your Facebook audience a reason to keep following you.
Don’t Make These Facebook Marketing Mistakes: Drive Social Media Now
If you’ve made some or all of these marketing mistakes, it might be time to move in a new direction with your social media management. To make Facebook work for you, you’ve got to give it the attention that it deserves, which is a full-time commitment.
At Drive Social Media, we can help you take your Facebook marketing to a new level that actually builds your brand and helps boost your sales numbers. Contact us today to book a meeting and discuss your Facebook marketing needs with our social media experts.
