Chris Lake — August 16, 2019 — August 16, 2019
Is your business on Facebook? If not, it should be…
Despite a recent dip in popularity Facebook remains the world’s leading social media platform – it has more than double the user base of Instagram and over 6x the number of registered users that Reddit and Twitter enjoy.
When utilised properly, Facebook can be a very valuable and effective tool to grow your brand and gain customer attention.
Sadly, many businesses don’t see a good return on investment and this is largely due to the way they are currently using it!
Facebook has an organic reach problem
Dwindling organic reach means that fewer people are seeing business page posts in their news feeds. The latest studies suggest that average organic reach on Facebook is just 6.4%. This means that for every 1000 likes your page has, just 64 people from your follower base will see each post.
To combat this, some publishers schedule more frequent posts – after all, if 1 post per day will reach 64 people then 3 posts per day will reach 192 people – more posts equals more eyes on your business right?
Wrong!
In the rush to create and publish more content it is inevitable that post quality will drop. Facebook algorithms penalise low-quality content, so your efforts are likely to be in vain. Additionally, research by HubSpot analysed over 25000 Facebook business posts and found that once a company published posts more than 5 times per week, their return on investment dropped significantly.
This really shouldn’t be surprising.
A spammy business page is no different than the annoying Facebook friend you want to mute! Indeed, studies have shown that high social media posting frequency is associated with narcissism – not the type of character trait you want linked with your brand!
The best Facebook posting frequency
I find that 3/4 times per week is a good rule of thumb. This is supported by HubSpot analysis which discovered that posting between 2 and 5 times per week produced optimal results.
Not only will this new, more relaxed schedule free up time, it has the potential to lower labour costs. Quality, not quantity should be the aim.
Here’s a few science-backed tips to get more engagement from your Facebook content:
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Posts using words or phrases indicating something new (just arrived, introducing, etc.) tend to generate more shares and comments.
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Using deadlines or finality (‘only available until’, ‘limited stock’, etc.) produces higher shares which will increase reach.
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Stay away from educational business posts. These often decrease engagement levels.
It is also essential to focus more on video and image creation. Facebook video post engagement rates average 6% while photo posts are around 4.8%, both well above the average Facebook post engagement rate of 3.91%.
Making your budget work better with paid posts
Like it or not, Facebook is an advertising platform and still offers exceptional value compared to traditional marketing.
The money and time that you save by concentrating less on post frequency will give you a small budget to spend on Facebook Advertising (a much wiser and effective use of resources). Even meagre amounts of money can significantly increase the reach of your content.
Buffer discovered that spending $ 5 on Facebook ads could generate:
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9 page likes
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1 homepage click
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787 new people reached
While not amazing results, they certainly aren’t a bad return for $ 5. It definitely beats churning out several posts a day for little reward!
Furthermore, by getting increasingly familiar with the advertising process and targeting options, it is usually possible to further enhance your ROI (as you learn which demographics are engaging with your content the most).
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