With 2.41 billion active monthly users, Facebook continues to be the “hot” social media platform to promote your business. It is the world’s third-most frequently visited website and a place where 90 million small businesses vie for attention among an astonishing sea of content from friends, family, coworkers, colleagues, and countless other businesses all pushing images, videos, and updates into users’ feeds.

Is it any wonder that small businesses are finding it hard to get the interaction they once saw on Facebook from among their users?

Facebook Marketing Dashboard Screen

How Facebook’s Business Pages Work

Like most small business owners, you’ve probably created a Facebook business page. You’ve listed it on your website, invited friends to “Like” it, and you publish updates once every few days. Is that enough?

Not by a long shot. With so many businesses elbowing their way into your news feed through both paid and organic posts, Facebook made the strategic decision to prioritize paid advertising over organic posts.

What does this mean to the average small business? It means that even if you have loyal, raving fans on your page, if they aren’t voluntarily interacting with your content on a regular basis, Facebook isn’t showing them your posts. They may show your page posts to about 1-6% of your followers. That means that if your business has 300 followers, maybe eighteen of your followers max, will be served the post. The rest miss out on your articles, your memes, your updates, sales and specials…unless you pay to play and spend money on Facebook advertising.

High Demand for Limited Space

Facebook has only a limited amount of promotional space available to the 90 million business pages on its platform. While it does show some updates from those pages at no charge to the page followers, it prioritizes what it shows based on paid advertisements first. Therefore, if you really want your posts to be seen, you must “pay to play.”

3 Tips for Smart Facebook Marketing

Before you set up your ad campaign, consider these tips. The most successful Facebook ad campaigns follow these guidelines for success.

  1. Identify the strategy and objectives. What is the purpose of your campaign? You must clearly identify the objective and build your campaign strategy around achieving the objective. Some objectives include: awareness, reach, traffic, engagement, app installs, video views, lead generation, messages, conversions, catalog sales, events, and store traffic.
  2. Invest in tests. Testing advertising is an important component of any digital marketing campaign. What can you test? The offer, timing, audience, and creative are all aspects that can be tested, refined, and improved with each ad campaign to create the most effective ads of all. Dashboard Interactive can create test campaigns and refine the parameters of each campaign to get to the heart of what works for your company and customers.
  3. Use the metrics. Metrics are a vital part of your Facebook ad campaign. It’s not enough to look at how many followers you have on Facebook. What the followers do, whether it’s liking a post, clicking an ad, buying a product, downloading a free offer, or taking other actions is the important step in the Facebook process.

Facebook remains the dominant social media network especially for adults. It’s not enough to rely upon your company’s organic posts, however, to engage with your customers, clients, and followers. As Facebook’s popularity continues to dominate, more brands vie for attention on its crowded platform. To stand out, you’ve got to pay to play.

But do so in an intelligent way with help from the team at Dashboard Interactive. We can help to maximize every dollar spent on Facebook to gain the most leads and sales. We can create an integrated campaign that includes Facebook advertising as part of a holistic digital marketing approach that gets measurable results.