Facebook Posting Quick Guide For Business – Episode #1
You’ve decided to include Facebook posting in the social media marketing strategy for your business. That’s great news!
Facebook (still the most popular social network and one with a broad and well-balanced demographic) is an important place for you to be if you want to connect with your target market, build brand awareness, get engagement and drive targeted traffic.
This Quick Guide will help you to ensure that your Facebook posts are poised to perform well.
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Hilights from this episode
- [02:12] When writing Facebook posts for your business try to accomplish these 6 things…
- [4:11] I see a lot of people missing this one and it seems so basic
- [04:49] What are the 8 Facebook posting best practices?
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Episode Transcript
Hi, welcome to The Social Marketer Podcast. I’m Brent, and today we’re going to be talking about Facebook posting, specifically to help you grow your business through best practices posts on Facebook. So let’s get started.
Common questions that I receive are what are best practices for businesses when it comes to posting on Facebook, and how can I grow my business by posting on Facebook? So pretty straightforward. So let’s try to go through those in detail today and attempt to answer those for you. In today’s quick guide to Facebook posting we’re going to review the top eight best practices for Facebook posting for business. So before we begin there’s three things to remember. Number one: these are general guidelines to follow. Number two: your unique brand, your industry, your content, your unique target audience, they’re all going to play a part in determining what works best for you and social media. And number three: not every one of your posts needs to accomplish all of the things that we’re going to discuss today. To help you get the most out of this episode, I encourage you to pause this episode right now and go to SocialMarketer.com/episode1 where you can download the show notes as well as a more detailed version of this Facebook posting for businesses guide and then you can follow along with that as well as it includes a handy checklist. And be sure to listen to the end of this episode to get a free gift, and that gift is a free month of membership at Social Marketer, which will provide you with free done-for-you pre-written social posts you can use on Facebook or most major social networks. It gives you photos and photo ideas, social media training, and lots of great digital marketing resources you can download
Okay, let’s do this. When writing Facebook posts for your business try to accomplish these six things. Number one: write with your social media goals in mind. Try to be mindful of ‘what am I trying to accomplish with my posts in general?’ Am I trying to build followers? Am I trying to build engagement and likes and shares. Am I trying to just sell stuff to drive people to my sales page. Depending on what that- what your goal is, that will determine to a large part what at least some, or a bulk of your posts need to be mindful of or contain to help you accomplish those goals. So that’s number one.
Two: speak to your target market’s needs, wants and pain points. So pretty self-explanatory: know who your target audience is, know what you offer, and know what you offer that will help. What pain point does your target audience have? What need can you fill essentially with what you’re offering and make sure you speak to that in your social posts.
Number three: maintain brand consistency. If you have a certain color scheme, use that consistently. Work to make sure you use your logo in a consistent manner whether that’s on each post or not on any posts just maintain brand consistency. Just so there’s a similar look and feel and experience from when someone goes from your social accounts, through to your website and back and forth.
And number four: try to engage, motivate and persuade the audience. Try to create content that’s valuable. Don’t just stand on your soapbox and just say ‘buy from me buy from me’. But instead try to be engaging and motivating and encouraging and helpful persuasive. And five: I see a lot of people missing this one and it seems so basic but provide a clear call to action. Might be as simple as providing a link to your website or to a particular blog post. Of course, if you’re posting in Instagram, you will have to say link in bio and then put the link to the piece that you’re discussing to the page or whatever it is you’re talking about so they can go to the bio and then click on the link there. And six: follow Facebook best practices. So what are Facebook posting best practices? First I want to list all eight of them and then I’ll go into each one in more detail.
- Vary your post themes
- Vary your posts types
- Use great photos and videos.
- Vary your post lengths.
- Be a great social citizen
- Use hashtags and @mentions
- Post with the right posting frequency
- Prewrite and schedule your posts.
Best practice number one: present a variety of post themes. What does that mean? The best, most engaging social feeds focus more on providing value. That is education and information and entertainment more than just promoting themselves. Consider following the eighty/twenty rule where eighty percent of your posts provide value and only twenty percent are actually self-promotional. So you might ask what is the difference between value-based posts and promotional posts?
Well, value based posts are- you guessed it, posts that provide value. They might offer behind the scenes information about your business. They might provide curated industry content from your industry related to your business, or local information about your own town that your business exists. It might include inspirational or motivational content, trending topics, or just engaging posts.
Now promotional posts are the ones that promote your business, and that might include business information, business value, reviews or testimonials from your customers, or information about your products and services. Facebook posting best practice number two: publish a variety of post types. So you should be posting regular posts, that is just straight-up posts with text in them. But make sure you use Facebook’s other post type options, including posting to groups, and or to events using Facebook Stories, and certainly use media in your post, that is photos and Experiment with going live during the live video posts on Facebook.
Facebook posting best practice number three: remember media is king or queen. You can post to Facebook without media, just plain old text posts like you’re texting your friends, but don’t. Essentially posts that don’t include photos or video don’t perform that well. Studies show that posts with any kind of photo or video in them are going to outperform plain text posts. So make it a goal. Make it a rule right now that anytime you’re working on content for your social feeds, make a- make an effort to get some kind of graphic or photo to include with each post.
You can consider using a simple photo or video editing tool like Canva or photoshop. Photoshop even offers a low cost version called Photoshop Elements, which I think is about one hundred dollars and Canva has a free version and I think the paid version is very affordable.
Don’t quote me, ten, twenty dollars a month or something like that. Side note, make sure that your photos and videos are formatted properly for the Social Network that you’re using. Each social network requires different sizes of photos. They display the content in different ways, so make sure that you research that and if you’re let’s say, designing your photos or videos in Canva they have awesome preset templates that know the correct sizes so you can just say ‘I want to make an Instagram post’ and it will know the exact dimensions and it’ll just set that up for you. Facebook posting best practice number four: aim for a variety of post lengths. While Facebook will allow you to post posts up to sixty-three thousand two hundred six characters, I’m probably never gonna read that many words in any post that you write and most people won’t either. So you want to keep it short, and studies show that posts that are between forty and eighty characters get the best results. So those characters include spaces and punctuation, so that’s not that long. So make sure you include a strong visual, photo or video, and then forty to eighty characters of text. Obviously some can be shorter, some can be longer, but that’s just a general rule of thumb. If you’re not sure how many characters your posts are, you can just go to Google, punch in ‘character count tool’ and that’ll take you to a free and easy to use online tool. You can just paste your posts in there and it’ll quickly give you word count and character count. However long, every post should be concise and persuasive, motivating people to engage, to follow, to connect, and to convert to whatever your social media goals are. And also monitor your post performance to see what works best with your audience. Don’t just blindly post stuff hoping that it works and only look at how much traffic maybe you’re getting on your website, but instead use a third party analytics tool or use Facebook insights, which is connected to your Facebook business page and see what’s working, see what gets the most engagement. If you have analytics on your website such as Google analytics, you can actually go in there and see how many people have visited from Facebook, or from social networks in general as a way to measure how many people have been coming from your posts. Facebook posting best practice number five: be a good social citizen. Promote other businesses, non competitors probably, but you know if there’s a business that you like, whether it’s in your country or in your local town, give them a shout out. Maybe they’ll do the same back to you. If there’s a great service or experience you’ve had with them, @mention them in your post, oftentimes that will notify them they’ll see that and perhaps they will reciprocate. Facebook posting best practice number six: to hashtag or not to hashtag. While hashtags are a critical part of Twitter or Instagram, experts still can’t agree on whether they really help in Facebook or not. So my recommendation is use hashtags in Facebook thoughtfully, but in a restricted way. Don’t pile on ten hashtags, like you might be tempted to do in Instagram and some even suggest that that’s going to help an Instagram, but in Facebook a couple of hashtags is probably all you’re going to need.
And Facebook posting best practice number seven: post often, but not too often. Aim for somewhere between one to two posts a day at most and perhaps only three times a week. So that’s that’s quite a range, I know, but you don’t want to be posting twenty times a day. So one time, one post a day is ample, or three posts a week even is ample depending on your business and how much content you can muster.
The key is this: post too often and people see you as a nuisance and will likely mute you, or simply unlike or unfollow your account. Oh, and if you post too infrequently the risk is people might just forget you exist, and go to one of your competitors. And as for the best time of day to post, that’s a tough one. It’s a bit of an art. It’s really a try and see what works best for you and look at your analytics. Now, you’ll go online, if you say best time to post for my business and Facebook, if you punch that into Google you’re going to see all sorts of answers. Some will say Tuesday morning. Some will say Wednesday at lunch. Some will say never on weekends. Some will say definitely on weekends. It’s really a trial and error process, so I can’t give you one answer to that question. Definitely do take a look at your Facebook audience insights tool, and that’s going to start to pull the curtains back and let you see what kinds of content is actually getting some traction for you, and perhaps what days of the week or times of the day are resonating best or you’re getting best engagement from your particular audience. And best practice number eight: prewrite and schedule your posts. If you like to save time and to batch process your social media, make your life a little easier by drafting posts in advance, write a bunch of posts all at once and then put those into a social media scheduling tool. Whether that’s a third-party tool like Sprout Social or HootSuite, or even using Facebook’s own scheduling tool. That seems like a lot, right? That’s a lot of things to keep in mind, and you must be thinking ‘do I have to do that for every single post?’ Well, the answer is no. This takes practice and after lots of trial and error and posting a number of posts over time, you’re going to get the hang of it, and try to implement a few of these recommendations with each post and over time it’s just going to become more and more natural to you. So let’s recap your Facebook posting checklist. Number one: the post is written with my social media marketing goals in mind.
Number two: my post speaks to my target markets preferences and pain points. Three: it focuses more on providing value than on promotion. Remember the eighty/twenty rule.
Next, it’s engaging and will motivate and persuade your readers. And next, it includes a great photo or video. Next, branding is consistent in both the photo and video and caption, they all work well together. And next, the caption is concise and provides a clear call to action. Don’t forget to put links to your own site in some of your posts. And next you’ve used hashtags and @mentions appropriately. And that’s it. So besides having the Facebook posting quick guide what should you do next? Like, where do I start? What do I do? If you’re a social Market or member you do you’re already halfway there. If you don’t know about Social Marketer, essentially it’s a service that my business offers where we provide pre-written, pre curated, social posts for your business each month. And all you have to do is go in and fill in the blanks, and you can customize those posts, take the suggested photos that we have given to you, and add those to your posts and you can bulk post and bulk schedule the post you like from the collection that we provided each month into your favorite social accounts. We even offer ideas for photos that you might want to take on your own instead of using the photos that we’ve provided for you. And since you’ve made it to the end of this episode as I promised, in that landing page on social marketer.com/episode1 you’re going to find a link that’s going to give you an opportunity to get a free month of social posts. Thanks so much for joining me today. Please remember to subscribe and I’ll see you in the next episode, same time, same place. Until then, bye for now.
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