Hi I am Shirley living in Los Angeles I have been into social media marketing for 5 years. I love reading about it and try to learn new tricks everyday.
Today’s top influencers aren’t just content creators or media buys – they’re both.
According to Invesp, influencer marketing can drive 11 times the ROI of traditional digital marketing. And with 71 percent of marketers believing ongoing influencer ambassadorships are the most effective form of influencer marketing, finding the right influencer for your brand is an incredibly important part of your digital strategy.
Check out the tips below for how to find influencers that are a fit with your business.
Follow influencers
Seems obvious, right? But marketers often ignore the most important rule of sourcing influencers – to follow them.
With more than 200 million people worldwide blocking ads, following influencers allows you to consume content on the same level as a potential consumer. It also allows marketers to digest the content from potential partners and see if it aligns to the brand. Is the influencer’s tone in line with your brand voice? Does the influencer post frequently and with high-quality content? What is the influencer’s saturation rate of sponsored content to unpaid content?
Another perk of following influencers is that it also allows you to see who your competitors are using. With high-compete categories like beauty, following influencers helps you keep an eye on what influencers to reach out to that aren’t already partnering with your competitors.
Care about more than a following
When the New York Times dropped their fake follower exposé in January 2018, marketers shared a collective head nod of approval. Since revealing how the Devumi platform allowed influencers and “celebrities” to buy millions of fake followers, the service appears to have folded under the guise of “not accepting any new clients.” All Devumi social networks have also been deleted.
But for every failed fake follower factory like Devumi there’s a handful of other services that allow users to easily buy fake followers for pretty cheap. TweetAngels offers 6,000 Instagram followers for $67.96, along with 4,000 likes and the claim of 100 percent active followers. Marketers who are sourcing influencers need to objectively look at their followers and engagement rates. It’s often easy to spot fake accounts (no bio, only a couple updates to the social platform, leaving spam comments), but my number one tell is this: Does the influencer have thousands of followers but very few comments on their posts? Then they probably bought some of their followers.
Check your DMs
With fake followers being so prevalent, I urge marketers not to discount microinfluencers with authentic followers. Many up-and-coming influencers will reach out to brands via direct message to collaborate – don’t ignore this eagerness. While you should still check their accounts for fake followers and quality content, sometimes smaller influencers who reach out via direct message can become the most passionate ambassadors for your brand.
Develop these relationships early. Sometimes working with a hustling microinfluencer in their early days allows smaller fees as their followings grow later on.
Have a budget
According to Mediakix, more than $2.38 billion is projected to be spent on influencers in 2019. The days of comping an influencer with product and expecting they’ll share about it are essentially over. No one expects to get a billboard for free – so why do marketers so often expect influencer marketing for free?
Paying influencers is beneficial to both parties, if done correctly. If you can pay your influencers, you’ll have more of a say on their final content deliverables. And if you pay your influencers well, you’ll encourage long-term partnerships and potential deliverables outside of the contract guidelines.
While there’s no industry standard for what to pay influencers, Influencer Marketing Hub has a great tool that allows you to estimate post costs, engagement rate and ROI. The calculator is a great jumping point for negotiations and pay estimates, but shouldn’t be your “end-all, be-all” of influencer pay. At the end of the day, the best influencer for your brand is one your brand can also afford.
Over to you
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear about your experiences with influencer marketing. What techniques do you use to find the best influencers for your brand?
If you try to do everything with your marketing strategy you end up doing next to nothing. Focus is key when developing new marketing ideas and exploring opportunities.
How and when to challenge your current assumptions and best practices on everything related to marketing.
Nine effective marketing ideas that don’t include blogging such as: podcasting, video series, live events, and tons more!
Join 18,000+ weekly listeners for the Buffer podcast, The Science of Social Media, where we bring you the latest and greatest in social media marketing news, updates, stories, insights, and actionable takeaways.
Hailley: Hi everyone! I’m Hailley Griffis and this is the Science of Social Media, a podcast by Buffer. Your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and learning.
Brian: Welcome to episode #118, I’m Brian Peters and this week we’ve got a ton of marketing inspiration on tap for you. We’ll be sharing 9 marketing ideas that you can try that don’t include blogging, which we can all use a little break from sometimes.
Hailley: We’ll also be sharing a strategy that you can use to help you identify new and exciting marketing opportunities for your business. Much of this episode was inspired by our good friends Hiten Shah and Susan Su, so a huge shoutout to them for their incredible work in the marketing space.
Brian: A warm welcome to the show everyone. Let’s kick it off!
Part I: How to focus and identify big marketing opportunities
Hailley: Let’s start with how to identify more marketing opportunities for your business. Because as we all know, there are a ton of opportunities out there, you just have to know what you’re looking for.
Brian: Exactly. As you said, Hailley, as marketers we have hundreds of channels to choose from. And within each of those channels there literally thousands of tactics you could apply.
As many of us might have experienced in the past, if you try to do everything with your marketing strategy you sort of end up doing… well… nothing. You tend to lose your purpose and overall goals. By keeping it simple and staying focused, you’ll ultimately drive more results.
Hailley: Keeping it simple can seem a bit, well, simplistic for a lack of better words. But if you think about the purpose of marketing, it is quite straightforward. The whole goal of marketing is to get more people to see your product and hopefully, eventually, they end up buying your product, whether it’s a physical product, digital product or, service, the idea is the same.
Brian: Exactly.
Let’s jump into talking more about those opportunities we mentioned.
A big shout out to Hiten Shah for this section as he has a really great blog post about focusing as a marketer and we’re using some of his examples in here:
And, fun fact, we also had the pleasure of chatting with Hiten on the podcast back in episode number 16 if you’d like to give that a listen. Throw back.
Hailley: Wow, that was over 100 episodes ago!
Brian: Wow, how far we’ve come. I’d love to know how many people were listeners back then that still listen now.
Hailley: That would be awesome. Well, regardless, shoutout to our listeners from the past and present.
Brian: Back to those marketing opportunities. We’re going to talk about web traffic specifically to start. First up, let’s talk about what to do with traffic to your website.
Hailley: Let’s do it.
And this is something we haven’t talked about too much here on the show, but if you’ve been doing everything we talk about each week on social and elsewhere, you should (hopefully) be seeing some traffic come into your website.
But a lot of times, we don’t think about what we’d like those visitors to do. Or what they should be doing on our website. And so the first strategy for identifying new opportunities is to challenge your current assumptions and best practices.
You may be doing things in marketing and have no idea why. Which is alright because we all do that, but the more you can question everything, the more opportunities you’ll uncover.
Brian: As Hiten Shah talks about in his article, at Crazy Egg, they originally used a “minimal homepage” because they figured that less information for visitors to consume meant less friction to sign-up.
By simply running some home page tests, they actually found the opposite to be true—in reality, they’re homepage was leaving visitors confused about the product.
What they found was that a long-form home page (20x the length of the original home page) lifted trial sign-ups by 30%.
Hailley: That’s incredible. And remember as we go through these best-practices, they don’t just have to apply to website traffic. They could apply to all sorts of marketing strategies like social media, emails, podcasts, and more.
For example, if you’re posting only links to your website on Facebook, but finding that you’re not getting the results you’d like, challenge your assumption about what kind of content people want to see. Experiment with videos, and GIFs, and infographics.
Brian: Great point, Hailley. There really is a SCIENCE behind all of this marketing stuff.
Hailley: I see what you did there!
Brian: But when talking about running experiments it’s important to run small, incremental tests, instead of putting all your eggs in one basket. That will de-risk you and help lead to compound growth over time.
For example, Hiten talks about how Kevin Li and Sergei Sorokin of the Yahoo Growth team managed to drive Yahoo’s mail app to the top of the App Store by running 122 tests over ten weeks. These small tests only led to 2-3% gains each, but together they compounded into a 1000%+ increase in the CTR:
Hailley: Such a great example.
It’s similar to investing, right? If you save and invest small amounts of money over time, say $20 per week, that’ll eventually become a large sum of money because of compound interest.
And so just because $20 doesn’t feel like a lot now, it adds up in a big way over time.
The same goes for marketing. Small improvements to your product, social media content, email content, landing page, and pretty much everything else, will result in big gains in the long run.
Brian: Love that comparison, Hailley. You’re speaking to my heart here.
I also wanted to quickly chat about another way to identify marketing opportunities for your business before we get into some fun ideas and that’s to optimize strategies you might have forgotten about.
One way to do that is to simply re-publish old content in new channels.
In other words, don’t let great content go to waste. Go back and look at all of the content you’ve published in the past and then republish and reshare it on new channels.
By taking old blog posts and getting them in front of a new audience on Medium, for example, we were able to increase traffic from Medium by more than 1,200%.
We apply this strategy to other channels as well. For example, we’ll pull a list from Google Analytics of posts we’ve written in the past that are still receiving some great traffic and simply update them.
New content, new graphics, a new look and feel completely.
And what we’ve found is that by updating old content we’ve been able to increase traffic to certain blog posts by more than 300% in just a few weeks. Multiply that by 50 or 100 articles and all of the sudden you have a brand new traffic source to your website.
Brian: Just like that!
Last thing is to remember you’re playing the long game.
It takes a long time to build up a social media presence and audience that engages with and shares your content.
Hailley: As Hiten Shah says”
“Content marketing is a long-term investment. When you start out, you’re trying to carve out a foothold by building up little islands of content and an early audience. Over time, as you load up on high-quality content your audience loves and shares, these islands start to group together and form continents on the internet that people land on.”
Part II: Marketing ideas that don’t include blogging
Brian: Next up, let’s talk about some marketing ideas that aren’t blogging.
We, of course, are big believers in blogging at Buffer and it has been a huge part of how people hear about Buffer, but, we also recognize that blogging isn’t everyone’s strength and it’s not what every audience is looking for.
There are tons of other marketing ideas you can run with that don’t involve blogging so let’s look at some of those.
1. Create offline experiences that you organize
Hailley: It’s true that so many marketing ideas revolve around blogging.
The first of nine marketing ideas we have for you is to create offline experiences that you organize, like a conference or event.
If you think of it, a conference is really just like in person content marketing. Except instead of sharing a blog post with your audience, you’re sharing a talk. And the scale of a conference isn’t the only offline experience available. I mean, you can do meetups, or even workshops, which I know you’ve done a lot of, Brian!
Brian: We’ve done several workshops at Buffer, always so much fun and really more of an intimate experience with the audience.
2. Start a podcast
On another note that involves speaking, a popular marketing idea is to start a podcast! Which you might already know because you’re listening to this one right now.
Hailley: This is one of the marketing ideas that has really worked for us and honestly plenty of other people as well.
One of the reasons is that podcasts are reaching people in different contexts than blogging and it is much more personal to hear our voices than read our words.
Plus, it’s so easy to listen to podcasts while doing other things like traveling, driving, walking, cleaning, so I think that’s one of the reasons that podcasts as a medium are a lot more popular.
Brian: Absolutely, and when you think about it, podcasts are kind of the best way to talk to your audience because you are speaking right into their ear, as creepy as that might sound!
The one thing to keep in mind with podcasts is that, like other types of marketing, it won’t perform for you if you don’t have a goal so mane sure to set up some goals and a strategy ahead of time.
3. Create a unique video series
Hailley: Another one of our favorite marketing ideas, and if you’ve listened to this show for awhile it will come as no surprise that we’re recommending this, and that’s to do a video series!
Brian: What a video series looks like is totally up to you. We have one every Thursday on Instagram by our teammate Bonnie who does a sort of trivia show. We’ve also put out an entire series on YouTube about small business marketing and have seen similarly great results from that:
Moving away from multimedia options for a minute, another marketing idea is to write a book.
4. Write a book
Hailley: It sort of seems really daunting but I bet it’s easier to write a book with your team that it is to do it all alone, but I could be wrong.
This is becoming a more popular form of marketing since it’s easier than ever to publish your own books. You can also go a little smaller than a full book and try creating a short e-book to start.
I’d love to see a Buffer book one day!
Brian: Me too!
A good example of a company that is rocking it at books and e-books is Intercom, so check them out if you need some inspiration.
5. Teach a class
Next up, this is something I’ve done several times at Buffer with wild success, and that’s to teach a class. We went through Skillshare and taught two separate classes on social media marketing, and we also have a class up on creating company values.
We’ve reached so many people through those classes and many of them new to Buffer because they found out about us through the class, which was a great benefit.
6. Host a webinar (or webinar series)
Hailley: Sort of on a smaller scale from teaching a class, but in a similar vein, is to host a webinar. It’s very easy to set up, again this is another great way to be in front of your audience on camera or through voice. Plus I think there’s a little less pressure thank like a YouTube series because you’re there to interact with the audience and not necessarily make it evergreen content to host forever.
Webinars are also a great opportunity to team up with other companies and introduce each other to your respective audiences.
7. Become a pro at Instagram marketing
Brian: Next in line in our top marketing ideas (it’s not blogging), but it’s probably the most content marketing type of social media that you can do, and that’s Instagram.
We’re huge fans of Instagram and we totally believe it can do wonders for your business and community when it’s properly leveraged. Check out episodes 84 and 99 for more on Instagram.
Hailley: Last but not least, let’s talk about what probably isn’t anyone’s first idea but it works, and that’s forums.
8. Share your expertise in popular forums
Places like Quora, or Slack groups (like the Buffer Slack group!), or other more traditional forums are really where content and community come together.
Brian: Forums are unsexy, and yet they still answer a lot of people’s intent-based queries — and, as long as they’re public, they are highly indexable.
Hailley: Don’t give up on forums just yet!
9. Bonus tip: Create shareable infographics
What more can you say about infographics? They capture everything you’re trying to convey in one, beautiful image.
Neil Patel presents a solid summary of the method and components of a great infographic including how to pick a topic based on keyword rank and shareability, how to find the data (since infographics are usually a visual presentation of data), and how to use Dribbble to find a professional designer.
Brian: Thank you so much for tuning in to the Science of Social Media today. The show notes for this episode are now available on the Buffer Blog at blog.buffer.com with a complete transcript.
If you ever want to get in touch with myself or Hailley, we’re always here for your on social media using the hashtag #bufferpodcast. You can also say hi to us anytime and hello@buffer.com
Hailley: Thanks for tuning into our show every single week. You make this fun and are the entire reason we do what we do so thank you! Let us know if you give any of our marketing ideas a try, we’d love to hear from you.
Until next Monday, everyone!
How to say hello to us
We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!
The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 18,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!
Of course, it isn’t only about the size of the social media sites. It’s also whether the social media site is a right fit for your business and you. Does it fit your brand image? Is your target audience using that social media site? How many social media sites can you manage at once?
To make things easier for you, I did some research and compiled information about the 21 top social media sites in 2018. Some will be familiar to you, others might sound foreign to you. It might be worth reading more about the social media sites that might be great for your brand but that you have not explored.
(MAUs stands for Monthly Active Users, and MUVs stands for Monthly Unique Visitors.)
1. Facebook – 2.23 billion MAUs
Facebook is the biggest social media site around, with more than two billion people using it every month. That’s almost a third of the world’s population! There are more than 65 million businesses using Facebook Pages and more than six million advertisers actively promoting their business on Facebook, which makes it a pretty safe bet if you want to have a presence on social media.
Besides being the second biggest social media site, YouTube (owned by Google) is also often known as the second largest search engine after Google. (So if you want your brand to be on YouTube, I would recommend reading up on YouTube SEO.)
Finally, you can also advertise on YouTube to increase your reach on the platform.
3. WhatsApp – 1.5 billion MAUs
WhatsApp is a messaging app used by people in over 180 countries. Initially, WhatsApp was only used by people to communicate with their family and friends. Gradually, people started communicating with businesses via WhatsApp. (When I was in Bangkok to buy a new suit, I communicated with the tailor via WhatsApp.)
Messenger used to be a messaging feature within Facebook, and since 2011, Facebook has made Messenger into a standalone app by itself and greatly expanded on its features. Businesses can now advertise, create chatbots, send newsletters, and more on Messenger. These features have given businesses a myriad of new ways to engage and connect with their customers.
WeChat grew from a messaging app, just like WhatsApp and Messenger, into an all-in-one platform. Besides messaging and calling, users can now use WeChat to shop online and make payment offline, transfer money, make reservations, book taxis, and more.
WeChat is most popular in China and some parts of Asia. If you are doing business in those areas (where social media platforms like Facebook are banned), WeChat could be a good alternative.
6. Instagram – 1 billion MAUs
Instagram is a photo and video sharing social media app. It allows you to share a wide range of content such as photos, videos, Stories, and live videos. It has also recently launched IGTV for longer-form videos.
QQ is an instant messaging platform that is extremely popular among young Chinese. (It is used in 80 countries and also available in many other languages.) Besides its instant messaging features, it also enables users to decorate their avatars, watch movies, play online games, shop online, blog, and make payment.
I have to admit I don’t know much about QQ but Carrie Law from ClickZ has written a helpful brief introduction to QQ for marketers. It seems that while QQ, a desktop-native platform, used to be the top social media platform in China, WeChat, a messaging app from the same parent company, has taken over its place.
8. Tumblr – 642 million MUVs
Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking site for sharing text, photos, links, videos, audios, and more. People share a wide range of things on Tumblr from cat photos to art to fashion.
On the surface, a Tumblr blog can look just like any other websites. So many blogs that you come across online might be using Tumblr!
Qzone is another popular social networking platform based in China, where users can upload multimedia, write blogs, play games, and decorate their own virtual spaces.
According to several people on Quora, Qzone seems to be more popular among teenagers (while WeChat is more popular among adults). But the rise of mobile-based platforms like WeChat seemed to have caused a decline in popularity of desktop-based platforms like Qzone.
10. Tik Tok – 500 million MAUs
Tik Tok (also known as Douyin in China) is a rising music video social network. It was the world’s most downloaded app in the first quarter of 2018, beating Facebook, Instagram, and other social media apps.
My initial impression is that it looks like Instagram for short music videos (though I’m sure it’s more than that). Users can record videos up to 60 seconds, edit them, and add music and special effects.
Sina Weibo is often known as Twitter for Chinese users (since Twitter is banned in China). It has features similar to Twitter — 140-character microblogging, uploading of photos and videos, commenting, and verification of accounts.
Twitter is a social media site for news, entertainment, sports, politics, and more. What makes Twitter different from most other social media sites is that it has a strong emphasis on real-time information — things that are happening right now. For example, one of the defining moments in the Twitter history is when Janis Krums tweeted the image of a plane that landed in the Hudson River when he was on the ferry to pick the passengers up.
Another unique characteristic of Twitter is that it only allows 280 characters in a tweet (140 for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese), unlike most social media sites that have a much higher limit.
Twitter is also often used as a customer service channel. According to advertisers on Twitter, more than 80 percent of social customer service requests happen on Twitter. And Salesforce calls Twitter “the New 1-800 Number for Customer Service“. There are many social media customer service tools, such as Buffer Reply, available now to help you manage social customer service conversations.
13. Reddit – 330 million MAUs
Reddit, also known as the front page of the Internet, is a platform where users can submit questions, links, and images, discuss them, and vote them up or down.
There are subreddits (i.e. dedicated forums) for pretty much anything under the sun (and above). Subreddits, however, have different levels of engagement so it’s great to research to see if there are popular subreddits that your brand can be part of. For example, r/socialmedia tends to be pretty quiet so we are rarely on Reddit.
Baidu Tieba is a Chinese online forum created by Baidu, the largest Chinese search engine in the world. My interpretation of Wikipedia’s description is that Baidu Tieba seems to be similar to Reddit, where users can create a forum thread on any topic and interact with one another.
15. LinkedIn – 294 million MAUs
LinkedIn is now more than just a resume and job search site. It has evolved into a professional social media site where industry experts share content, network with one another, and build their personal brand. It has also become a place for businesses to establish their thought leadership and authority in their industry and attract talent to their company.
LinkedIn also offers advertising opportunities, such as boosting your content, sending personalized ads to LinkedIn inboxes, and displaying ads by the side of the site.
16. Viber – 260 million MAUs
On the surface, Viber is quite similar to major social messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Messenger. It allows users to send messages and multimedia, call, share stickers and GIFs, and more.
However, Viber presents many more opportunities for businesses. As a business, you can buy ads, promote your brand through stickers, engage your community, display your products in the shopping section, and provide customer service.
17. Snapchat – 255 million MAUs
Snapchat is a social media app that focuses on sharing photos and short videos (as known as snaps) between friends. It made the Stories format popular, which eventually proliferated on other social media platforms like Instagram. But the rise of Instagram Stories seemed to have hindered Snapchat’s growth and marketers’ interest in using Snapchat for their brands in general.
Pinterest is a place where people go to discover new things and be inspired, quite unlike most social media sites where engagement is the primary focus. According to Pinterest, 78 percent of users say that content on Pinterest from brands are useful (much higher than that on other sites). This gives your brand an unique opportunity to shape their purchasing decisions.
As Pinterest users want to be inspired to try or buy new things, having a presence on Pinterest could help put your brand on their minds. Here are some tips on using Pinterest for business that the Pinterest team shared with us.
19. Line – 203 million MAUs
Line is a multi-purpose social messaging app that allows users to message, share stickers, play games, make payments, request for taxis, and shop online. It is the most popular messaging app in Japan and is also popular in other areas in Asia.
Brands can create official accounts on Line to share news and promotions, which will appear on their followers’ timeline.
20. Telegram – 200 million MAUs
Telegram is similar to most social messaging apps and is often known for how secure it is as a messaging app.
There are several ways brands can make use of Telegram, besides providing one-on-one customer support. For example, brands can create chatbots for the Telegram platform or make use of Telegram’s channel feature to broadcast messages to an unlimited number of subscribers.
21. Medium – 60 million MAUs
Medium is an online publishing platform with a social network element. It’s free to publish on Medium and free to read most articles. Some articles are reserved for only paying members.
Besides publishing original content on Medium, it’s quite common for brands to republish their blog posts from their company blog onto Medium to extend their reach. (That’s what we’re doing here at Buffer.)
Regardless of the size of the social media sites, it’s most important to consider whether your brand’s target audience is active on those social media sites. That said, larger social media sites, like Facebook, tends to cover a wide range of interests and topics, which makes it suitable for most brands.
Which social media sites are your brand on? Why did your brand choose to be there?
P.s. Buffer Publish lets you schedule social media posts to six of these 21 social media sites — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. If you want to manage more than one social media accounts on any of these six, we would love for you to try it for free for 14 days and experience what it can do for your business.
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Credit: The list of top 22 social media sites is compiled by Statista. The respective monthly active users number was taken from the following websites: Facebook (as of June 30, 2018), YouTube (as of July 20, 2018), WhatsApp (as of January 31, 2018), Messenger (as of February 1, 2018), WeChat (as of August 15, 2018), Instagram (as of June 20, 2018), QQ (as of March 2017), Tumblr (estimated as of July 2018), Qzone (as of March 2017), Tik Tok (as of June 2018), Sina Weibo (as of December 2017), Twitter (as of July 27, 2018), Reddit (as of November 12, 2017), Baidu Tieba (estimated as of July 2018), LinkedIn (as of July 2018), Viber (estimated as of July 2018), Snapchat (estimated as of July 18, 2018), Pinterest (as of September 10, 2018), Line (as of October 26, 2017), Telegram (as of March 2018), and Medium (estimated as of December 14, 2016).
If you want your business to have a presence on social media, Facebook is probably one of the first or the first social media platform you think of.
More than 1.4 billion people use Facebook every single day, and many multiple times a day. It’s almost certain that your potential customers are on Facebook and using it actively to connect with their family, their friends, and their favorite brands.
Whether you’re running a brick and mortar store, an ecommerce site, an agency, or a software company, you can use Facebook for marketing your business. In this guide, I hope to cover everything you should know to put your business on Facebook, to market your business, and to measure your results.
If there’s anything you wish to know that isn’t covered here, please feel free to tweet me @alfred_lua. I’m keen to keep this guide as comprehensive and helpful as it can be. Thanks!
Facebook Page: How to create a Facebook Page for your business
Having a Page on Facebook is similar to having a website on the Internet. Your Facebook Page is a place where people can find your business online, learn more about your business, and connect with you.
Creating a Facebook Page for your business is quite straightforward. Facebook has streamlined the process to make it super easy for businesses to set up their Facebook Page.
To get started, on any page on Facebook, click on the drop-down icon in the upper-right corner and select “Create Page”.
Here are the things to do to ensure you have a Facebook Page ready to share with your customers:
Fill out basic information about your business
Add a profile photo and cover photo
Add more information (e.g. description, contact info, location, etc.)
If you prefer to follow a step-by-step guide, we have a detailed Facebook Page set up guide for you. The guide covers things such as how to create your cover photo, what key information to add to your Page, how to customize your Page, and more.
Besides using a photo for your cover photo, you can also use a video or a slideshow. Our Facebook cover photo guide has the ideal dimensions for the cover photo and several cool examples from various businesses.
Facebook algorithm: How the Facebook algorithm works
Before we look at what to post, there’s a very important aspect of Facebook that you should know first.
The Facebook algorithm.
Long ago, Facebook used to show posts in the News Feed in a reverse-chronological order. The most recent post will always appear at the top of the News Feed. But as more and more people and businesses join and post on Facebook, there were so many posts on everyone’s News Feed that it became difficult to go through every post on our News Feed.
So Facebook introduced a system to help organize the posts we see on our News Feed. The system is often known as the Facebook algorithm.
The Facebook algorithm uses many different factors to determine how relevant a post might be to each one of us and shows us the most relevant posts at the top of our News Feed. The algorithm is always changing but here’s the core of how it works:
This means that not all the people who Like your Facebook Page will see all of your posts. On average, Facebook Pages are reaching about five percent (or lower) of your fans.
To reach more people with your Facebook Page, you have to post content that they care about and would interact with. We’ll cover that next.
Now that you’ve understood the Facebook algorithm, let’s go through what you can post on your Facebook Page.
Here are the five main post types:
Text
Link
Image
Video
Stories
Text updates are the most basic post type. It’s the easiest to create, though possibly the least visible on the News Feed. Generally, it’s better to attach a multimedia to make the post stand out. (Or you could go wild with emojis! )
Link posts (posts with a link) show a preview of the link attached, usually with an image, a headline, and a description. You can add text to go with the link (as seen in the example above).
Image posts can have one or multiple images. For single-image posts, the image will be resized to 500 pixels wide and the height will be scaled accordingly. (Learn more about the ideal image sizes for Facebook posts here.)
Video posts seem to be the most popular and most engaging format at the moment. Buzzsumo’s study of 880 million Facebook posts found that videos get twice the amount of engagement than other post types. But experiment with the different post types to discover what works best for your brand.
Stories is the latest post format on Facebook, which is also available (and popular) on Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. It is a vertical image or video that makes use of the entire screen of mobile phones, and it disappears after 24 hours. (You can now advertise with Facebook Stories, too.)
Pro-tips:
The best time to post on Facebook is not what you find in “best time to post” studies because your business has its own best time to post. Post when your data tells you and when it’s relevant to your audience. Here’s how.
How often to post on your Page is mostly dependent on the amount of time and resources you have. Our study with Buzzsumo found that five posts a day seem optimal for engagement. But you can definitely post more or less. Start with one per a day, increase the frequency, and monitor how your reach and engagement change.
Scheduling your Facebook posts with social media scheduling tools like Buffer lets you focus on the important aspects of your business — engaging your fans, creating a great product, etc.
Facebook Insights: How to measure your results
To help you understand how your Facebook Page is performing, Facebook provides a helpful, comprehensive analytics dashboard — Facebook Insights.
With Facebook Insights, you can get the following data:
Promotions (your Facebook ads)
Followers
Likes
Reach
Page views
Page previews
Actions on Page
Posts
Branded content
Events
Videos
Stories
People
Messages
In summary, Facebook Insights tells you how your Page is growing and how many people are engaging with your content (posts, videos, or Stories). You can also use it to see when your fans are most active on Facebook and what your top performing posts are.
My favorite is the Overview Report, where you can get a summary of your Facebook Page’s performance, see how your key metrics have changed over time, and find your top posts.
You can learn more about the Overview Report here.
Facebook ads: How to advertise on Facebook
Once you have mastered the basics of managing a Facebook Page (i.e. posting and checking your results), you might want to consider using Facebook ads to reach a wider audience.
With more businesses joining Facebook and sharing their content, it has been becoming harder to reach an audience on Facebook for free (though not impossible). A solution that many businesses have turned to is Facebook ads.
More than six million businesses advertise on Facebook to promote their products and services. Facebook advertising provides the most comprehensive targeting to help you reach the specific audience you have in mind. You can specify your target audience based on their location, their demographics, their interests, their behavior, and more.
That’s not all. Through the Facebook Ad Manager, you can create ads that’ll also show on Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network (Facebook’s network of publisher-owned apps and sites).
Running a Facebook ad is very straightforward. Here are the steps:
Choose an objective
Select the audience you want to reach
Decide where you want to run your ads
Set your budget (daily or lifetime)
Pick a format (Photo, carousel, video, slideshow, or collection)
The first time spending money on advertising can feel daunting. I know I was intimidated. I read countless articles even before I visited the Facebook Ad Manager. I would love to help reduce the anxiety with creating your first Facebook ads. Here are some resources you might find helpful:
The best way to learn Facebook ads is to dive right in and get started. Through experimentation, you can gradually learn what images and copy resonate the most with your audience, how to pick the right audience, how to budget your spending, and more.
Facebook Messenger: How to connect and serve your customers
Social media marketing used to be businesses simply broadcasting their marketing messages at their followers all day. It worked well back in the days when few businesses were on social media and people were still very receptive to marketing messages.
Nowadays, customers message businesses to find out more information, ask questions about their purchases, and request customer support. A study by Facebook found that the majority of messaging app users surveyed had messaged a business in the past three months — Brazil (85 percent), India (74 percent), UK (61 percent), and US (61 percent).
The easiest way to serve your customers through Messenger is to download the Messenger app (iOS and Android) or use http://messenger.com. With the app, you could receive and reply to your customers’ messages, just like you would with your friend’s messages.
If you manage multiple social media accounts besides your Facebook Page, we hope the best tool for you is Buffer Reply, our social media engagement and customer support tool. With a single tool, you respond to messages, mentions, and comments on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Pro-tip:
Besides serving your customers, you can also use Facebook Messenger for marketing. Here are seven ideas for your inspiration.
Facebook Group: How to build a community
The final thing you might want to experiment with is Facebook Group.
It is one of the easiest ways to start an online community for your brand advocates. Most of your customers are likely already on Facebook, and Facebook offers a ton of features for Facebook Groups to help connect people better. It is also great for increasing your organic reach on Facebook.
For example, Ahrefs, one of the best SEO tools, has a Facebook Group for its customers to discuss Ahrefs, SEO, and marketing. It has almost 8,000 members (one has to be a customer to join), and multiple valuable conversations happen in the group every day.
Starting a Facebook Group is as simple as clicking “Create Group” on Facebook and filling out some basic information. The challenge is growing the group while keeping members engaged. Here are four tips for you.
More Facebook marketing resources
I hope you found this Facebook marketing overview useful. If you would like to learn more about using Facebook to market your business, check out the following resources:
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