In a constantly evolving digital landscape, keeping up with social media best practices for your business can be difficult. Luckily, FH is here to let you know everything you need for online success.In this three-part series, we’ll explore social media best practices for business pages on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Each article will explain why your business should be on the platform, detail when you should post and highlight up-to-date best practices.Let's start with Facebook.
Why be on Facebook? If your company wants a social media presence — and in 2018 you probably do — Facebook is often a good bet. With more than 2 billion monthly users, Facebook is the largest social media platform and accounts for one in every five minutes spent online.Facebook is a great way to connect with key audiences while building brand awareness, humanizing your organization and driving traffic to your website. It also has advertising and post-boosting capabilities that let users target content to specific audiences, allowing organizations to reach key demographics with little effort.
When to Post There’s no best time to post on Facebook because it uses complicated algorithms to determine newsfeed organization. According to data from Hootsuite, content posted between 12 p.m. and 3 p.m. Monday through Friday tends to perform slightly better. However, the best way to determine optimum posting time is by using Facebook’s Page Insights to analyze when your audience is actively engaging with your content.
Shoot Video
Because Facebook algorithms favor native videos, original content averages a 10 times higher reach than links populated from external sources. This means shooting original content will improve your posts’ organic visibility and cut through the clutter.
Perfect Your Profile
Your organization’s Facebook page should have its logo as the profile photo and a branded cover photo. The About section should be complete with a descriptive bio and contact information so any visitor can understand who you are and easily contact you. For best results, add a call-to-action button at the top of your page and pin your most important posts.
Post Great Content
FH recommends following our 50/30/20 rule for content development — 50 percent of content should not be about you but other information relevant for readers, 30 percent should be engagement with the audience in the form of replies and polls while the last 20 percent is self-promotion. Including a caption and multimedia element like a photo or video will significantly improve engagement. Forty-character captions receive 86 percent more engagement on average than longer posts, meaning it’s best to keep them short and sweet.
Boost High-Performing Content
Whenever original content performs well organically, boosting posts is a great way to improve reach among your target audience. With a relatively small budget, you can boost content by clicking the blue "boost post" button on the bottom of the post and following Facebook’s instructions. Target audiences can be broken down by age, location, demographics, interests and behaviors to determine what combinations provide the best results.
Utilize Insights
Facebook insights let you know what content your audience likes and when they interact with it. The more you know about your audience through your Insights page, the more you can refine your Facebook strategy and deliver increasingly targeted content to your audience.
Use Audience Optimization
Facebook’s audience optimization feature allows you to target posts to specific audiences based on interests without limiting reach. After enabling audience optimization on your page settings, you can prioritize who sees your posts based on their interests. This will help Facebook’s algorithm determine the right audience for your posts, meaning it probably won’t improve organic reach but can bolster organic engagement.