Mediaboss Marketing

This is the fourth installment in a five-part series of articles focusing on best practices to up your content marketing game on the big four of social media: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Catch up on the first, secondand third installments, and stay tuned for the final Instagram installment. Share your own favorite tips in the commentswed love to hear from you.

Facebook is the Goliath of social media networks. It has the broadest reach of any social network79 percent of Americans use it, and more than 1 billion usersglobally log in every day.

Here its crucial to cut through the clutter. Thats something you can achieve with consistent messaging and branding, by leveraging Facebooks unique features, and with effective ad targeting.

Images and video are more important on Facebook than status updates, with more than 100 million hoursof video watched every day.

Some products and services lend themselves to visual marketing more than others, but there is always an angle. Even if you arent selling something tangible, show someone using or explaining it.

Many brands are also starting to incorporate Facebook Liveto reach larger audiences in real-time with live question-and-answer sessions, webinars or product demos.

Its easy to feel overwhelmed by the service and tools offered by Facebook, but these are a few unique features that can help marketers make their brand stand out:

There are many metrics that Facebook offers to show you that a post or ad campaign is working. Reach, click-throughs, impressions, comments and likes are all metrics used to evaluate social media success. However, rather than just chasing likes, its important to ensure that your ad objectives are aligned with what your actual business goals are.

As far as targeting goes, Facebooks pixel and custom audiencesallow you to gain rich insights about how people use your website, measure results better and build audiences for targeting. After installing the pixel on your site, Facebook will start building a pool of people who have visited your site. These audiences are created separately from your ads, so you can choose when and who to advertise to.

Facebook also allows you to input a user list or pull data from people who interact with your page and find others who are just like themthis is called a lookalike audience. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of ad targeting, but you should make sure to compare the results from lookalike campaigns with other types of targeting.

Note: be wary of interest targeting, which is essentially the social version of a cold call. Likes and clicks can be made by a user for any reasonit doesnt necessarily mean that they are interested in those particular pages or ads.

Facebook offers a variety of creative ad options you can select. Heres a rundown of which option to select based on your campaign goals and the audience youre trying to reach:

Whoever you are and whatever your brand seeks to sell or do, if it isnt on Facebook, it might as well not exist. When it comes to social, Facebook is king. How will you use it to your advantage?

Next up: Instagram.

Ulrik Bo Larsenis founder and CEO of social media management software-as-a-service platform Falcon.io.

Originally posted here:
A Modern Guide to Social Media Content Marketing, Part 4: Facebook - Adweek