13 Fantastic Facebook Marketing Tricks & Tips [2018]

It’s becoming more and more important to take a more personal approach to how you advertise to your target audience in order to stand out from the crowd. Nothing could be more true than navigating Facebook. Facebook currently has over 2 billion users, and as the platform continues to grow, newsfeeds changes are implemented and eCommerce businesses increase, your Facebook competition is getting tighter by the minute.

In this week’s post we look at 13 fantastic Facebook marketing tricks and tips to help you make the most out of your Facebook marketing strategies this year.

1. Quality Over Quantity

Did you know that every 60 seconds there are 317,000 status updates and 54,000 shared links uploaded to Facebook? And that’s just updates and links!

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That’s a bucket-load of content being uploaded every minute. To stand out from content noise, you should be concentrating on quality over quantity. It’s not frequency that’s going to increase your reach; quite the opposite, actually. With new newsfeed updates it’s even more important to create high-value quality content. Content that is segmented to smaller niches improves the likelihood that your ads are relevant to potential shoppers and thus increasing your chances of interactions. The same thing can be said for your organic content; which brings us to tip #2.

2. Quick Facebook Page Promotion Tip

Planning on running an ad to promote your Facebook page? When you create these campaigns, it will automatically set the text and description as per your page settings. Instead, to improve your response for each segmented market, you can customize the heading by clicking Advanced options and using the text block to adjust headings.

3. Integrate Your Facebook Strategies

Whether you’re creating a PPC ad or Facebook page content, your objective should be the same: providing highly relevant content that your potential customers want to engage with. Sure your objective may be different, with PPC ads driving traffic to your store and page posts used to keep followers entertained or informed, but for results for each you want to ensure you’re creating awesome, interesting content.

Which is why it is so important to integrate your organic and paid Facebook strategies, to ensure you’re providing good content that is equally inline with the voice of your brand. There is a big chance your potential shoppers will encounter your brand through organic and paid social posts and therefore any conflict in your messaging can result in mixed messaging, ultimately undermining your marketing efforts and your ROI.

Sprout Social have an awesome webinar on how to integrate organic and paid Facebook strategies to get you started! You can view it here: 5 Best Practices for Integrating Organic and Paid Social Media Strategies.

Pro Tip:

When planning your Facebook page’s ‘organic’ content, remember the 80:20 rule. You want to make sure that only 20% of your content is hard-sell promotional, while the remaining 80% is fun, inspiring, educational, high-value articles, and any other non-sale content. Just because your text isn’t over-sell, doesn’t mean you are not building your loyal customer base. Look at the below example – are they telling you, “BUY NOW”?

4. Go Live

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last two years, you probably already know just how important video content is to Facebook marketing. One of the best video content reach you can get is with Facebook’s live video. According to Livestream stats, 82% of brand audiences prefer live video over any other form of social media posts.

If you’re waiting to be able to shoot ‘good quality video,’ you’re missing out on huge reach potential. Like we have said time and time again, you don’t need video to be professionally shot for it to be effective, even more the case with Facebook Live. Use live video to reveal a new product or promotion, to give tips in your niche or show behind-the-scenes teasers for upcoming lines.

Don’t take our word for it, just as marketing genius Gary V who is constantly crushing – if you’ll excuse the pun – his Facebook live content.

5. Quick Tip to Increase Reach? Get Tagging

Want to maximize your organic reach? Try your hand at tagging your fans when you are sharing UGC or tag partner businesses, publications or Facebook pages you’re working with.

6. Don’t Underestimate Instant Replies

We may not all have big budgets to get in on growing AI and BOT tech, but Facebook’s Instant Replies are the next best thing. So many consumers now opt for communicating with brands directly through Facebook as opposed to emailing customer support.

The upside: being able to create a more personalized shopping experience; the downside: people expect an instantaneous response. Facebook Instant Replies allows you to engage with your customers messages before you’ve even read them. Here’s Facebook’s guide to get instant replies set up:

7. Tell a Story

Yes, even for your paid Facebook campaigns. Telling a story will help you get more interest and build stronger connections with your target audience, both in turn helping you get more ad clicks. You can do this by creating teaser ads before a product or site launch, getting people invested in your launch, or outlining a story that’s important to your brand in long form video or text posts. An awesome example of just how powerful presenting a narrative is, is HONY: Humans of New York.

Since starting the page in 2010, HONY creator Brandon has turned storytelling into a page with 18 million followers, and extended his stories into his own Facebook show.

8. Share UGC and Testimonial Posts

When it comes to building a sense of community around your brand, nothing beats genuine UGC (user-generated content) and testimonials. Not only is this a great way to include your fans and shoppers, incorporating UGC into your Facebook marketing content helps to entertain, boost trust and ultimately increase sales. Want further proof? According to Adweek, when deciding on buying a product, up to 93% of people turn to user-generated content. Plus, there are a lot of studies out there showing how UGC increases relevant scores and ROIs.

So how do you integrate UGC into your Facebook marketing strategy? It’s as easy as manually sharing content or using tools such as TINT to automatically integrate it. Whichever way you decide to start using UGC for your Facebook ads, the key is collecting user-generated posts you can use. Check out our 5 Tools to Increase UGC, Pronto post to get you started.

9. Make Your Image Ads More Engaging

As you can see from the previous point, UGC is a good way to stand out from the crowd. This is not just because they make for trustworthy testimonials, but because these images are unique enough to break through the thousands of daily ads. With all image ads, you want to ensure your content stands out. Try using multiple image carousel ads to create an image story, or use single images that pop and stand out from the crowd.

Pro Tip: Keep your ad text short, concise and on point when doing image posts to ensure you don’t lose your potential shoppers’ attention after you’ve hooked them in with an attractive image.

You don’t need to be a designer to create awesome images. Head over to our 23+ Online Design Tools to Create Perfect Visuals Without Design Know-How guide to get started.

10. Make Targeting All About Your Potential Customer

I’ve said it once, and I will say it a million times more: segment, segment, segment! Segment your audiences and then create highly targeted ads aimed specifically at that niche market. It is not the amount of reach you should be concentrating on, but the percentage of that reach that is engaging. Once you have “niched down” your audiences, think about things like what their interests are, where are they specifically located, what they are watching, who are they following and when that specific segment is active – and then create highly specific ads aimed at them. Facebook’s custom audiences is built for this, and that’s what sets this marketing platform apart. Add that to Facebook pixel driven Facebook dynamic product ads, Messenger and retargeting ads, and there is no niche too small to reach.

11. Utilize Your Cover Photo

By updating your cover photo regularly with new product lines, promotions or seasonal content. This will ensure that when potential fans and shoppers come to your page, your latest (most popular) content is front and center, getting their attention straight away. With apps like Canva, this is super easy to maintain.

Pro Tip:

Use your Facebook cover and promotional posts to offer exclusive content/promotions for your Facebook fans. This is a great way to build your followers who will be more inclined to follow if you’re offering ‘VIP’ deals and inside scoops.

12. Optimize Your Campaigns in Real-Time

Like with most PPC campaigns, to get the most out of your budget you will want to monitor your campaigns and make adjustments in real-time to make sure you’re getting the most clicks for your buck. Without creating a new campaign you can adjust your audience, your budgeting, your schedule, your placements, your artwork and even your delivery choices.

It’s important to note here that normally a campaign needs to run a day or two for you to get enough data to judge its performance. For those that aren’t performing there are a number of things you could be doing wrong:

• Your Facebook targeting is all wrong
• People aren’t seeing your Facebook ads
• The campaign objective is incorrect
• Ad placement is off the mark
• Your landing page and Facebook ads aren’t in line
• Your ads are not attracting attention
• You haven’t scaled your Facebook ads correctly

Bonus Tip: How to Scale Up a Performing Facebook Ad

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There you have it, the Facebook marketing tricks and tips to stand out from the crowd this year. Think about who your potential shopper is, drill down your segmented markets and then create content for those segments. As we know, personalization is a key eCommerce trend, and starting with your Facebook strategies is a giant step in the right direction.

Happy selling!