The goal for Facebook was to increase monetization of the site by forcing the hands of business owners into their paid ads and boosted post platforms. This left business owners with little or no budget scrambling for ways to provide content that would reach their fans. Some strategies include posting more often, changing up the type of posts, and spending more time studying the analytical data to give their fans content that would cause increased engagement.
Top reasons to maintain a business page on Facebook:
- Facebook is the largest social site with over 1 billion active users worldwide.
- Facebook provides the largest opportunities for communicating with your consumers. Whether through organic means, targeted ads, boosted posts, or fan sharing.
- Facebook users share 2.5 billion pieces of content each day.
Keys to social media success:
- Provide information that is helpful to your audience and sharable.
- Entertain your audience with off topic posts; something funny, inspirational quotes, business tips, etc.
- Use your platforms to drive traffic to your website or other social sites.
- Grow your email marketing list, so next time the algorithms change you will still have a way to connect with your audience.
- Keep in mind the 80/20 rule. 80% of your posts should be valuable to your audience and only 20% should be all about you, your specials, or product offerings.
While social media platforms are free, social media marketing is not really a free form of advertising. It will take an investment in time and money by you, your employees, or outsourced help to grow your platforms and help improve SEO of your business name and website.