Facebook advertising is one of many options when it comes to digital marketing and like other mediums.
While Facebook may have less users to-date than Instagram, it is still quite popular and buzzing with immense opportunity for businesses in many verticals, including both B2C and B2B.
There are advertising opportunities that leverage powerful data for highly effective targeting; although Facebook Zero was put into play to thwart businesses from filling newsfeed with salesy spam, there still exist opportunities to grow and benefit from organic relationships with prospects and customers.
So what should your game plan be with Facebook? Should you maintain high-posting frequency, an d if so, of what type of content? How much money should you spend on the platform, and where should you spend it? We are going to make it easy to define your foundational plan by simply ensuring your goals are aligned with typical follower thresholds.
When it comes to benefiting from organic posts (posts that are seen without you having to pay any money), you should understand that only 4% of your followers will be organically shown your posts. That being said, your plan should really revolve around the number of followers that you have. Let’s get started!
Threshold: Less than 800 Followers Goal: Get People to Notice
4% of 800 people just SEEING something you post (not engaging with, or turning into a customer) makes it very difficult to justify putting much energy at all into organic posts. That's only 32 of your 800 followers!
While you have less than 800 followers on Facebook, you should be still have some activity to keep the account active and provide some example of what value you can provide a follower. High quality, low frequency posts are the key.
Your main goal should be to increase your total number of followers so that your average conversion rate will support a true ROI (return on investment) on any organic posting efforts you make. You can do that by running paid campaigns to boost your followers, create a social media campaign that entices your followers to share content that will spread on their networks, and/or a campaign outside of social media that promotes your customers to follow you.
Threshold: 801 - 1,500 Followers Goal: Get People to Engage
Once you have more than 800 followers, you know that on average you will have enough people seeing your posts that spending 30 minutes creating content might be worth the time. Whether the content is a post designed to be “highly shareable”, discussion-based to start conversations or better understand your target persona, or promote some type of sale, working on getting those who see your post to engage with it organically should you be your new goal.
We would suggest that you budget post boosts to get your posts out to your existing followers and potential new followers who would enjoy the content. This can lead to to new followers, who may later become customers or clients down the line.
Threshold: More than 1,500 Followers Goal: Get People to Act
Once you exceed 1,500 followers on Facebook, you know that 60 people on average or more will see your posts without you having to pay for them to see it. If you have a 3% conversion rate (of those 60 who see your product-related post and end up making a purchase), you can expect 1-2 people to make an action. This will give you a better idea of how to calculate the amount of time worth putting into crafting a Facebook campaign for a particular product.
At the end of the day, it is important to make sure that you develop a Facebook marketing strategy with direction based on ROI. Set your goals with your long-term objective in mind, while staying realistic.
---Social media can be far more complicated to plan and execute than most business owners anticipate. When deciding what will have the biggest impact, you must define thresholds based on the value and buying process of your buyer persona, as well as cost and closing ratio data for your business. Having a marketing partner that is driven by analytics can help you to make the right choices, and predict industry changes that can completely shift where your impact is.
