5 Things You May Not Know About Marketing on Facebook

Marketing on Facebook is a pretty hot topic these days, and since we’ve launched all 7 books in our Facebook for Business series, I figured that today would be a fine day to cover some random Facebook marketing tidbits that I learned while writing these.  Here we go…

1. Facebook Zero Affects the Ever-Declining Organic Reach

Facebook isn’t giving away real estate for free anymore: that earned media is earned, folks.  We wrote a few months back about Facebook’s organic reach throttle possibly being a good thing for brands, in that it will force us marketers to deliver more high-quality content.  What Facebook Zero means is this: if 0% of your followers engage with your Post within the first hour, your Reach will be nil.  Facebook will surface your content to a small subset of “super followers,” and they’ll be the ones to determine whether or not your content is worth showing to other people.

 2. You Know What Your Followers Like – Really

Facebook Graph Search is extremely powerful and allows you to run hyper-targeted searches to see what’s what.  One quick trick is to us Graph Search in interesting ways to find out more about your community.  You can look at what other Pages your followers Like (“Pages liked by users who like Your Page”), what interests your followers have (“Favorite interests of users who like Your Page” ), where our followers been checking in (“Places visited by users who like Your Page and That live in Your City”), and so on.  This can help you with targeted ad spends and content marketing campaigns.  (For more on this, check out this quick book on Facebook Marketing Strategies with Graph Search.)

3. Forget the Likes: It’s All About Newsfeed

After a user has liked your page (or chosen to follow it), the user will most likely never visit your Page again.  According to multiple studies, 90 – 95% of fans never return to a Page after they have liked it.  This means that the biggest (and perhaps only) opportunity you have to influence and engage with your followers is via their Newsfeed – and the only way to get into their Newsfeed is with posts that spur actual engagement.  (For more on how to spur engagement, check out this book on content marketing on Facebook.)

4. Facebook Contests Are More Powerful than They Used to Be

Facebook changed their Promotion guidelines last year, making it a whole lot easier for companies to post promotions and contests on their Facebook Page.  With those changes, and the Facebook Zero considerations, contests are a great way to improve your Reach on Facebook.  (Hey, did we mention that we make a Facebook contest tool?)
Here’s what changed, and why it helps us: we as businesses are now allowed to collect entries by having users comment or like a post and – more importantly – we can finally use Likes as a voting mechanism.
You could, for example, post something like:
“Win a free dinner for two! Like this post and let us know in the comments below why you should win. The comment with the most Likes wins!  Let your friends know and share this post.”
You can’t force users to share your posts as an entry mechanism any more than you can force a purchase to enter a contest, but the “Like” is powerful on its own: the more users who like and comment on your post, the more users you’ll reach via their activity feeds.

5. Negative Feedback Might Mean You Did Something Right

We should all experiment with our Facebook posts to find out what type of content works best for your Page and followers, but remember that sort of experimentation may give us some negative feedback.   To dig into your negative feedback, go to Engagement to see the total number of users who were annoyed enough to click.  Then, click on each post to see what kind of negative feedback that post has received.