This is the all-important question for any business and social media marketer. Although you may think you have it figured out, there are actually trialled methods that make for better results, in both what to post, and when.
At the end of the day, you want to know how to post on Facebook to:
- Increase your reach and grow your following
- Get lots of likes
- Get people sharing
- Get users commenting and engaging
Before you start posting regularly on Facebook and starting to finesse your overarching message, it is important that you consider Facebook users. Who are you looking for?
Facebook Users
There are currently over 2.3 billion Facebook users logging in each month and using the platform. This is a huge amount of users and potential followers if you have a business. It is safe to say that your ideal target audience is using Facebook. You just need to find them.
You need to form an idea of the type of person you are looking for and then how to approach finding these people of interest. This is the case when it comes to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or any other social platform really. If you understand your proposition fully and the problem you are solving, you have a good idea about what your audience is looking for, your solution in other words. Using the Facebook search functions you can find people who follow businesses and groups of interest to you and then engage with them.
Facebook Groups
As Facebook is a great platform for communicating with users, it is well worth checking out and joining groups of interest out there and even starting your own group to boost interest in your service or product. The benefits of using Facebook groups are great. You can:
- Potentially grow your business followers with genuine people of interest
- Engage on a more personal level with group users
- Build trust
- Add value
- Promote offers
- Share content/insight to some degree
- Drive users to a Call to Action
The stats say it all…
Why not look up some statistics about Facebook users online. There are plenty of staggering stats available that will help you paint a picture of Facebook users in general and might even help you consider your target audience and how to approach them as a business.
Here are a few general stats that may surprise you:
- 88% of all Facebook usage is through a mobile device
- There are roughly 80 million SME business pages on Facebook
- 35% of Facebook ad’s audience are under 25
- Facebook is the top platform for both B2B and B2C businesses
- Almost half of all Facebook users speak English (1.1 Billion users)
What content should you post?
Once you’ve considered your target audience and where to find them on Facebook, you can start to put together a content plan; one that is sure to gauge interest and increase awareness amongst them.
- You want 25% of your posts to be funny or show some real personality.
Perhaps posts can be a little lighter hearted. You could use a suitable or relatable meme for instance
- You want 50% of your posts to add value and inspire people.
These sorts of posts might be ‘How to’ guides or rich blog posts about how you can help your customers in some way. It might be some free way of adding value to them for instance, that relates back to what you offer as a business.
- You want 50% of your posts to add value and inspire people.
These sorts of posts might be ‘How to’ guides or rich blog posts about how you can help your customers in some way. It might be some free way of adding value to them for instance, that relates back to what you offer as a business.
At the end of the day, you want to get the most out of marketing your business on Facebook. This approach to your content output is by no means set in stone, but as a rule-of-thumb, it is known to yield the best results, getting more followers, more engagement and more sales across the board.
Images
Images are clearly very important to get right on Facebook as the platform very much suits rich, visual content, like Instagram. Be relatable and be specific. You want to appeal to your audience on a personal level. Also, don’t just post pictures, find your sweet spot and post stories. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to just add an image to some written content that isn’t particularly well thought out. Remember, you want to have a consistent message with ALL content pushed out on the platform.
There are plenty of free sites out there to help you to edit images and make infographics that work for you, without the need for Photoshop.
Here are a couple of links to free image creation Tools, to get you started:
- Canva – Canva is fantastic in helping you create your own visual content and will help you edit images very simply. We use Canva all the time at The Cake Mix and advise our clients to do the same. It is so easy to use and allows you to produce some great infographics for any purpose. You really don’t need anything else in our opinion. It’s free too!
- Pablo – If you’re looking for content creation tools for social media, then Pablo, by Buffer, is also a good choice.
- There are loads of other image editors out there so depending on your circumstances, do your research and find the best fit for you.
Make sure your images aren’t too busy or that they don’t have too much text as simpler is often better; It will increase the likelihood of them getting shared. Also, if you wish to use particular social images in your Facebook Ads too, Facebook takes a very dim view of images containing too much text and you will struggle to get any text heavy ads running.
Video
Typically, videos do very well on Facebook. Videos tend to get interacted with significantly more than other types of content, as you might imagine. They tend to be more stimulating and interesting to a viewer than other posts.
As mentioned before, make sure you stick to your brand and make sure your videos are of high quality. There are also video guidelines in place to help you with the basics.
- Landscape/Square Video dimensions should be 1280 x 720
- Minimum landscape dimensions: 600 x 315 (16:9)
- Minimum square dimensions: 600 x 600 (1:1)
- Maximum video file size is 4GB and length is 120 minutes
- Video formats should be .MP4 or .MOV
There are plenty of tools out there to help you start to create your own videos so it would be beneficial to check them out. Start to teach yourself how to use them and get those videos out there!
Check out some of these free online video editing tools to get started:
- Clipchamp – Clipchamp has all your video needs in one place. It provides a free video editor along with a compressor, converter and webcam recorder.
- WeVideo – WeVideo is the online video editor that makes it easy to capture, create, view and share your movies at up to 4K resolution
- Wave Online Video Editor – Wave.video from Animatron is a free online video editor with all the features needed to create a stunning video for social media, Youtube, or other projects.
- There are many more… Shop around and find the right one for you.
You can also get free, or at least cheap, video to text tools, which can make life a lot easier. Check these out for instance:
- Happy Scribe: Automatic Transcription Software. Video & Audio to Text in minutes!
- IBM: Easily convert audio and voice into written text for quick understanding of content.
Keep it mobile friendly
When considering what content to post on Facebook and when, remember to think about the fact that a lot of people are going to be interacting with your stuff on mobile as almost everyone has a smartphone nowadays with the apps installed. Therefore, platforms such as Facebook are incredibly popular for people to browse in their spare time. Maybe they are on public transport or just taking a couple of minutes breather in the office between emails. They want to be entertained and video capture is the best way to do this, so use lots of video inside your Facebook posts!
How frequently should you post?
Try and post once or twice a day at the most! This really is the limit for most businesses on Facebook. You might notice some big brands posting more frequently and that is because they have got bigger audiences.
The problem with this, is that every time you look at your news feed on Facebook, Facebook is trying to select from hundreds of different pieces of information that it might want to show you. It tries to make the information as relevant to you as possible by selecting the types of things you normally click on. This means that Facebook has always got hundreds of bits of information to try and pack into a space that is around 25-50 updates long. Those things that it’s trying to choose from are your friends, the pages you are subscribed to and advertisers. It’s constantly trying to make these selections and it can’t and won’t always get it right for you.
Because of this, if a business posts too often, people will stop engaging with the posts as frequently and so Facebook will see these posts as less relevant and so they will not show up as often. I’m sure you can relate to this on some level as at the end of the day, everyone gets irritated seeing similar posts pop up from the same page all the time. Facebook simply wants to make their channel as appealing as possible, to make sure they have lots of people engaging in order to make lots of ad revenue.
Basically, businesses should post less frequently on Facebook than on other channels such as Twitter or Instagram, where you are free to, and encouraged in fact, to post as often as you like. Quality should be of high standard across the board. If a business is posting 2 or 3 times a day and the content is not always great quality, their engagement will start to slide and it will be far harder to reach people. We’ve seen this many times when talking to smaller businesses especially, and it is avoidable if Facebook is done right.
Timing is everything
In terms of managing the timing of posts and finding the best time in any given day to push your content out on Facebook, give it time and you’ll start to learn when your followers are more likely to engage with your content.
Typically, in the US or Western World, it is going to be mornings, lunchtime and evenings, when people are free around their working day. Weekends shouldn’t be written off either as people are typically free to browse social media all day, whether it be whilst chilling in front of Netflix or busing it around town. However, it is worth noting that the average online browser will be less inclined to engage with work related content, for example, on their time off. Maybe weekends are a good time to share the funny, lighter hearted content discussed earlier.
It is worth noting also, that people do engage at different times of the day and different days of the week for different types of product. It is therefore worth researching this, depending on your business and what you are marketing exactly. A lot of working this out for yourself will be trial and error, based on what seems to be working and what doesn’t with your brand and product or service. It will be fairly straight forward analysing the data for Facebook engagement, as there are fewer daily posts to check up on.
When people do in fact start to interact with your posts, make sure you interact back with them. It is really important to have good conversations with people. That doesn’t mean to say that every time someone writes ‘Great post’ you have to write a thank you paragraph back in response, but just try and keep tabs on it and keep it interactive. A simple ‘like’ of a follower’s comment can go a long way.
Be social. It is called social media for a reason!