Using Facebook to enhance marketing efforts

With its fair share of ups and downs - well, mostly downs - in the last year, Facebook is still reeling from its PR and image crisis. Concerns over privacy breaches and controversy over how its leadership handled issues are just a few of the problems the social networking site faces.

Despite these issues, Facebook is still a major tool for marketing and a great way for businesses to reach new and old customers. Home to over two billion active monthly users, it would be irrational to rule out Facebook as a platform for spreading information about your business and brand. Here are some of the ways your company should be using Facebook for marketing:

Find ways to engage in and add to online conversations

Companies usually use Facebook to post material and occasionally respond to questions and direct messages from customers. However, take it a step further by being more proactive with your Facebook engagement. There are many ways to be more engaging, including but not limited to initiating conversations about your product or brand in the comments section of your post or asking your customers their opinions through Facebook surveys.

Make Facebook like another storefront by making it feel like a customer engagement center. Respond to user comments with relevant, friendly, fun, and helpful posts. Engaging with your customers to a higher degree in both quality and quantity will encourage customers to return the favor. Have certain people in your team responsible for monitoring your Facebook account throughout the day to take advantage of opportunities to start conversations.

Use pages, groups, and personalised messages

Businesses usually stick to creating a Facebook page, using that page as their main online hub and mode of connecting with their audience. However, savvy business owners go further than that to create Facebook groups and send personalised messages to customers that go a long way in building a strong community. “Facebook groups are the perfect place to engage with your most loyal customers. It’s easier to start conversations and build a true sense of community in a group, because you can share more personalized content,” said David Scholssm, Founder and CEO of Convert ROI.

Turn your posts into ads   

Facebook Ad Manager allows the option of using an existing post and turning it into an ad. This is a great way to create ads that aren’t overly promotional. People are more attracted to brands through organic advertising and Facebook provides the tool to do just that by creating ads without having to develop a completely new campaign. This is a very useful tactic, especially if your post created a large amount of engagement and you want to share it with a wider audience.

Take advantage of the saved audience feature

Facebook allows for detailed targeting options, which is a great tool when you want to reach an audience more likely to convert to customers. Saved audiences can help you save time on building your target audience and allows for you to focus on creating quality content. With just a single click, you can select your preferences so you can target your content to the right audience.