How to Reduce the Gap between Your Brand and Your Target Audience using Facebook

When Facebook was introduced in 2004, the main objective of the team behind this social media site was to attract students into social networking. After gaining popularity surge, it did not take long for businesses to realize its potential as a major marketing and advertising tool that it is today. It was in 2007 that Facebook launched “brand pages” which allowed users to engage and interact with their favorite brands and enabled business owners to effectively promote their products/services to their target audiences. The interesting part is that all of it was free of charge. But since then, it has become increasingly difficult to make sure your followers see your content.

Facebook Becoming a Major Marketing Channel

As more and more businesses started using Facebook as their online marketing platform, the social media site put forward some restrictions on the ‘promotional’ content posted by businesses. According to TechCrunch, Facebook now uses an algorithm which considers several important aspects such as how interested a user on a particular page, how well the post performed in terms of engagement, the type of post, and when it was posted.  Even if you are posting an interesting content your audience engages with on a regular basis, Facebook does not want you promoting your brand for free. For promoting your brand, Facebook has provided with, sponsored posts and paid ads, which is similar to Google Adwords.

On June 2014, Facebook said that they would be limit the organic news feed impressions for brands which industry experts believe as an effort to show users with high-quality content. The social media site also updated their news feed spam algorithm to penalize businesses using manipulative techniques such as spammy links, like-baiting and posting frequently-circulated content. It is important for businesses to build communities online and connect with their target audience via social media, and here are a few strategies that can them in boosting organic reach to target their Facebook audience.

You cannot Gain Benefits without Quality Content

Here also, content plays an important role and when your content is of higher quality, you can get more likes and shares thereby increasing your organic visibility. Just like Google, Facebook also gives more priority on content quality and relevance, and when deciding which posts to include in a user’s Newsfeed, the social media site looks at engagement parameters such as likes, shares and clicks to determine the quality of each post. Furthermore, higher quality content generates higher click-through-rates and produces more likes and shares.

If no one sees your content posted on your Facebook brand page, then you can experiment with some paid promotional campaigns to get expected results. Facebook allows businesses to “boost” posts so that they appear higher in the Newsfeed section of your followers. The engagement you get for promoted posts helps to ascertain your credibility and effectively increases your organic reach. The amount of promotional campaigns required will depend on the value your content provides for your target audience.

Using Facebook Insights

Just like Google Analytics, Facebook has its own proprietary analytics platform known as Facebook Insights which provides a variety of different data sets to help business owners to determine the performance of content posted on their brand page. Currently, Facebook Insights are broken down into 5 separate sections – Likes Visits, Reach, Posts and People. The performance of content should not be based solely on ‘showing-off’ metrics. For example, if your social media presence is down, you cannot expect to see much in terms of engagement.

You might be missing the bigger picture if you are only looking at likes and shares. Facebook Insights provides businesses a 360 degree view of how their Facebook page is performing. Many marketing experts openly say that there are businesses that are still unaware of the benefits of using this analytics platform. According to them, there is a ton of value here and it is easy to use, and best of all it does not charge you anything.

Using Competitor Insights

To gain your competitor insights, there are many reliable tools available and some of them include Quintly, Social Bakers and SimplyMeasured. For instance, another popular insights tool called Buzzumo helps businesses to identify the top performing content for any topic, keyword, or brand name. In that tool, you will notice that for each topic/keyword, you can view the top content, sharers and influnences, based on a variety of measurements, including number of backlinks, social share, social influence and domain authority.

You need to keep in mind that there are no shortcuts or substitutes for attracting considerable Facebook traffic to your brand. You need to take serious efforts for implementing your Facebook marketing strategies and thereby you will get benefits such as high brand visibility, high returns and of course, more conversions.