Facebook: Should I use Facebook for my business?

Ok, so Facebook is still away and beyond the most popular social media platform.  It boasts 1.28 billion monthly worldwide users and over 50 million individual Facebook pages.
There is no arguing with those statistics.  Facebook is absolutely huge. When it comes to users it has the most even demographic distribution.  The massive range of users and the potential reach of your content on Facebook makes it a must use social network.
However, Facebook has been going through some changes recently and is moving even further towards targeted brand advertising on this massive social network.  There are good and bad points when it comes to the extensive paid-reach of the new Facebook adverts.

Pro

You are able to accurately and specifically target your audience.  You can now do this based on age, user’s child age, job title, location, gender, whether they’ve just gone on holiday.  To perfectly frank you can pin-point your post and ad’s target audience to an incredibly minute degree it’s almost scary.  And this is great if you have a very niche USP (unique selling point) – targeting ad’s and boosting posts could drive really useful high quality traffic towards your brand.

Con

It costs money to promote and target ad’s in you want to drive traffic to your site.  And because of this the natural, organic reach of anything you post on Facebook is steadily decreasing.   It is also crucial to remember that if your brand is selling to a younger generation then boosting posts on Facebook is probably going to be a waste as the increase in an older demographic is causing younger users to move away from it as the most popular social network for teenagers.

Despite this, Facebook is a social network that every brand and business should have a profile on.  You don’t have to boost posts or target ads but you do have to have a presence on there.  So what should you do with this platform?  Here are some tips and information which you should keep in mind when you think about your Facebook activity;

• Facebook Posts with videos are currently receiving more than double the organic reach of posts with images
• Posts with less than 250 characters have 60% more engagement than ones with over 250 characters
• Posting on Thursdays and Fridays are able to boast 18% better engagement rates than on any other days of the week
• You are twice as likely to establish user engagement if you post question posts
• 75% of user-engagement happens in the first 5 hours following a post
• The most common reason why people un-like a page is due to boring and uninteresting posts

So in order to get the highest level of engagement possible on Facebook your posts need to be accompanied with a picture, have less than 250 characters, be posted on a Thursday or Friday, ask a question and be interesting.  That’s not too much to ask is it?
If you’d like help setting up your Facebook business page then please get in touch.  We’re happy to help in any way with social media management.  From setting pages up to actively managing them we can help.
Statistics taken from here and here.

Look at Also: Social Media Marketing

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