There was a time when you could post an update on Facebook which every of your fans could instantly connect with your message. Imagine if you were able to build your fans to be among the top fan pages in Nigeria like these businesses and celebrities, you would always have your updates grow viral.
But those days are gone. According to Facebook, only 1% of your fans can be reached organically when you post an update on your fan page.
That means that for brands like Kaymu who now have over 6.2M fans, their posts can only be seen organically by less than 63,000 of their fans at any given time. That is the new reality on Facebook. You can either adjust to that reality or you now have to pay to reach your audience on Facebook every time that you post an update.
However, there are two shortcuts to improving your Facebook audience engagement that I will like to share with you.
Find out what works for top performing pages
If you are the manager of a Facebook page, you definitely have access to the “insight” section of the page. This will show you how your posts performed for the week. Facebook also allows you to add “Pages To Watch” for competition analysis.
I recently discovered a tool called SumoRank that you can use to evaluate your own fan page and others. This will give you an insight of the best time to post and what type of content your audience engages with. You should test this with your own Facebook page as well as competitors' pages. When you know what works well for you, you can repeat it for better results.
Utilize Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads are now your option to reach your fans. That is why it is important to learn how to use Facebook Ads effectively. Over 3 million SMEs advertisers are using Facebook ad to reach their audience.
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The simple rule for effective Facebook ads is to properly target your audience using the Facebook Ad platform. Recently, I ran a Facebook Ad experiment on a budget of $100 (99.25 actually). The campaign was successful and details of the experiment are well-documented.
Running an effective Facebook ad can be daunting, but you can use these principles to guide you.
Narrow your target audience
In the process of creating your ad, when you get to the “audience and budget section” of your ad creation process, Facebook will show you the potential number you can reach based on your country of choice. In Nigeria at the time of writing this article, the potential reach is 14 million.
However, you need to narrow down your audience size in order to create effective targeting. The narrower your target, the more effective your ads. For each individual campaign, our audience size for the experiment was less than 200,000. We used the targeting options that Facebook provided to achieve this and it was so effective that we paid as low as $0.01 on Facebook.
Track everything. Test everything
This is because you will get better return on your advertising if you test small before you commit more resources. In this campaign, I tested each ad with $5/per day in order to reduce the risk. After evaluating the performance of the winning ad, you can scale your marketing budget on the winning ad.
Keep engaging all through the period of the campaign
Publishing your ad is not the end of your campaign, you need to keep engaging. You do this by answering comments and making clarifications where necessary.
Want to know the full details of my Facebook Ad experiment? Read about it here
Photo Credit: France in New England via Compfight cc
