What you need to know about social media and online content for your business. Should you be using paid advertisement? How does Facebook’s algorithm affect your reach? Does your business strategy speak to your content strategy?
How Facebook’s Algorithm Affects Your News Feed
In the past, a person’s news feed would be based on the sequential order of posts from the pages they follow. Basically if you posted something right now and your audience went on their newsfeed 5 minutes later they would see your post at the top of their feed, and if they only went on 20 minutes after you posted, they would need to scroll further down the feed to see your post.
These days, with Facebook being the money-making machine it is, you have to pay to get into your audiences newsfeed. Facebook’s algorithm, an ever-changing beast, will decide who to show your content to and where it is placed. If you post something now, it does not guarantee that your audience will see it.
Due to this algorithm, the newsfeeds of two different devices logging in at the same time will look completely different.
How Facebook’s Algorithm Affects Your Reach
From our research, we have found that Facebook only shows your content to 5% of your followers, organically. Yes, five percent. Now that’s a surprisingly low number, but it may help you understand why some of your content can be getting little to no engagement (likes, shares, comments etc.). It’s the equivalent of standing outside your office with a little signboard after peak hour traffic was over, you’d be wasting your time.
If you’re spending valuable resources on your content & content strategy and you’re not seeing the desired outcome organically, you’re unfortunately wasting your time.
Paid Advertising On Facebook
A question we often get is “should I be boosting all my content?”. The simple answer to that is yes, most of the time.
If you’re investing money into content creation, specifically professional content, we advise that you put some budget behind it. This could be as little as R50 a day for three days.
With our clients we often use this simple boosting strategy to help them understand what content should be boosted. In general, we recommend putting budget behind almost every piece of professional content, especially if it’s a promotional piece of content. In terms of the behind the scenes content, more often than not, you won’t be boosting these (let’s be honest… not everyone needs to know it’s your staff’s birthday).
Your Content Strategy
Every business needs a unique content strategy, it’s not a one size fits all. Just like your business needs a strategy to be successful, your social media efforts need a content strategy.
Align Your Content Strategy With Your Business Strategy
The questions we normally ask our clients:
OR Anybody that’s running social media accounts should be asking their clients.
• What is your business strategy?
• What are your business objectives?
• Where are you trying to go in your business?
• Are you trying to place yourselves as a market leader, are you trying to penetrate the market, or are you trying to retain market share?
• What is your business trying to do?
Your social media content strategy needs to very clearly fit in line with your business strategy. Otherwise, you’re just posting stuff.
You can easily see when people are posting just to hit a number of posts per week, and that’s not okay. “Motivational Mondays” and “it’s the weekend” that’s not a strategy. The only time you should be doing motivational posts is if you’re either a motivational speaker or a business coach, in any other situation, Motivational Monday is a swear word in this office. If it’s not relevant to your business then you shouldn’t be doing it. There’s so much noise online already. Don’t just add to it.
When To Be Social & When To Sell
You need to know when to be social and when to sell on social media. Your content must have a good mix of giving value and selling. You don’t want to saturate your page with buy, buy, buy. You need to add in content that tells your followers who you are and what you do. Give them some value (tips, advice etc.).
We believe in the behind the scenes content, because at the end of the day, social is social. It’s something we always tell our clients. Don’t forget that as much as you are using these digital platforms as a sales tool, they’re still social media platforms. Your followers want to see what you’re up to and in some cases see your company culture. Show them behind the scenes. Make them a part of your journey in terms of what is your business doing, because that’s what social media is about. And then you can throw in some sales stuff. The saying “people buy from people” is important to remember. We often refer to the jab, jab, punch method.
If you look at Innova’s feed, you will very seldom find us trying to tell you what our services are and why you should use us. Instead you’ll see that we are taking you on our journey of what we’re doing, and what it is like to work with us as a company.
How Often Should You Post?
There’s no short answer to this, because it depends on the type of business.
For example, in the events industry. You would start slow and work your way to the event build up. You would then push harder during the build-up phase and during the event you could be posting a couple times a day with event coverage.
However, if you’re a smaller business, you could easily be posting anything between one to three times a week. The key is consistency. If you choose to post twice a week, stick to it and stick to the same general time of day as well.
Definitely don’t try catch up with a bunch of posts all at once because you missed a week or two. The Facebook algorithm is smart and it will penalise you.
Conclusion
If you take anything from this, let it be this. Before you push something out on social media, ask yourself if you would print it and put it in your office? Would you send this email to your clients? Would you say this to a potential client? If not, then you need to reconsider if it should be going out on your business’ social media.
At the end of the day social media can be used as a marketing tool, but it’s also for you to talk to your clients. It defines your business’ image and the perception people have of your business in the market.