Small Business Talk
The Podcast to Grow your Business Faster
Is Facebook Still A Good Marketing Tool?
Show Notes
Is Facebook Still A Good Marketing Tool?
By 2020 more people will have mobile phones than running water or electricity in their homes. 11.5 million users in Australia, that’s approximately 40% of the whole Australian population are on Facebook. 244 million users in the USA, United States, 307 million users in Europe, almost 45 million users in the UK, that is a total of 2.5 billion active monthly users on Facebook worldwide.
Is Facebook a good marketing tool? Absolutely.
Why? Because you have access to your audience, the ability to talk to your people, your tribe, your audience and to stay top of mind, especially for things where the buying cycle is quite lengthy.
Facebook Privacy
Now let’s start by talking about the elephant in the room. Privacy.
If you really want to know what Facebook’s privacy is go to facebook.com/legal/terms.
And don’t buy into all the things that you see on Facebook posts. It’s going to happen like this, that’s going to happen and everything else. Read the actual Facebook terms.
But basically it says, “We don’t sell your personal data to advertisers and we don’t share information that directly identifies you, such as your name, email address or other contact information with advertisers, unless you give us specific permission, permission is often via bots and that way your information can be shared.
If It Is Private Keep It Off Facebook
To use Facebook, you have to agree to their terms.
If you don’t want to go down to the local shopping centre, the local mall and scream at the top of your lungs, that everybody can hear it, then don’t put it on Facebook. Facebook is not the place to air your dirty laundry. If it’s private, keep it private and keep it off Facebook.
If you’re using Facebook for business and you’re being professional about it, there’s nothing to worry about. If you’re putting your dirty laundry on there, basically, STOP IT!
Your Copyright and Facebook
Facebook needs certain permissions from you to provide this service. Permission to use content you create and share, some content that you share or upload such as photos and videos, may be protected by the Intellectual Property Law. You own this intellectual property. Things like copyright or trademark, such as the content you create and share on Facebook. However, to provide Facebook services, you need to give them legal permission, a license to use this content.
You don’t give away your copyright, but basically Facebook has the same rights as you do over the copyright. So once you put it on there, they can do basically whatever they want.
Be careful if it’s something private, as we have discussed, don’t put it on there.
Does Facebook Work?
Yes when used correctly.
If you’ve got a page that has say around 2000 likes and you put up something that gets a lot of engagement, then you will get a lot of reach. If you’ve got people looking at it, if you’ve shared it in groups, then you can really spread your message and spread it organically.
Does it always work?
No it doesn’t.
If you’ve put too much text on that content, if you’ve tried to run an ad with too much text on it, Facebook is not going to like it. You can sometimes get away with a small amount of text a strong call to action or text that is already in the photo, like on a cover of a book or a billboard. But generally, Facebook doesn’t like you adding too much text to your images. And definitely not if you’re running ads from that post.
How Much is Too Much Text on Facebook Images?
Facebook says 20%. To work this out, you need to draw a grid across your image, four lines across your image at equal spacing, and then five lines down at equal spacing. That way, you will have 20 boxes four across, five down. Four times five equals 20.
And then in every box that there is text in it, even if it’s only a small amount of text, you need to add a tick, if you have more than five boxes with a tick in them, then you have more than 20% text. You have too much text.
See I have a blog post explaining this concept in more detail – 20% Text Rule – Read more about Facebooks 20% Text Rule. Facebook like images that are clean and clear, you can put text in your post and you can put information there, but you can’t put text on your images. If you’ve got a post that’s not doing very well, have a look and see why. It may have text on the image.
Social Media Needs to be Social
Messenger is another great way to help share your message. If you’re getting private messages on your posts then Facebook says, “Great, that is engagement”.
Think about it, social media is called social media for a reason, because they want you to be social, they want you to chat between your girlfriends, they want you to engage. If you were down the local shops or at a sporting or waiting for the kids from school and you were talking to your girlfriends, you wouldn’t be just standing there looking at them, you’d be actually having a to and fro conversation.
Somebody would say something, “Have a look at my post”, and then somebody else would message back. “Ooh, that looks like a great post of a fluffy cat,” that sort of thing.
Engage Your Audience
When it comes to business, you need to be thinking about the same thing, you need to have engagement. You need to do it in a way that your potential audience and customers find this information interesting.
You need to speak clearly to your target audience in their language when you’re looking at it in a business perspective, the right message to the right audience. Add value, solve their problems, stop trying to sell all the time. Entertain them.
Think clearly about what your brand and story is all about.
- Can you make it engaging?
- Is there something interesting that’s happening about your brand or story and make it emotional whether it’s happy, whether it’s sad, emotional stories sell.
- Think about adding some personality into it.
People like to do business with people they know. They want to know the person behind the business. Unless you’re one of the big ones, you’re not going to just be enough having your brand stand there by itself.
They want to know about you and your story about a cafe, that is sustainable, that is recycling everything, that has zero waste, that is interesting.
Give Your Audience Insider Knowledge
What is interesting about your brand? Think about how you can educate them, what is something that you do in your business, all the time? It might be an industry standard but people don’t know it, it might be a cleaner that always empties the rubbish bins. You think that’s pretty simple but not all cleaners do.
Think about insider knowledge. What kind of things can you tell your audience? For me being a web designer, it might be something about malicious attacks, a virus. There’s lots of them out there. Is it real? If you get a message from your local bank, is it actually your local bank or the ATO, the Australian Tax Office in Australia?
Often these messages are not real. If I’ve got one that I’ve seen recently and I share it out on a post, quite often people will engage in that, because they want to know, they want to make sure that they don’t fall into this trap.
3 Things Every Business Should Do on Facebook
When you’re thinking about Facebook, think about the three things that need to work for your business:
- Consistency
- Engagement
- Conversation
It’s no point putting out 5 posts all on a Monday, and then nothing for the rest of the week or all on a Wednesday or on a Friday. You’re far better off spreading those out, during the week, and spread the different types of content. Don’t have funnies all at the beginning of the week and serious stuff at the end of the week. Then you need to get engagement, you need to get people to like it and comment on it.
Ask questions, get engagement and then you need to have a conversation. It needs to be a back and forth.
Can you get your customers to post something on your behalf?
Can you get them to enquire to answer a question?
What type of coffee do you like?
You might have a debate over whether you’re a tea person, or a coffee person, or if you’re a vet, whether you’re a cat or a dog person, computers, are you a PC, a Windows or a Mac person, that kind of thing?
Think outside the box, think of things that your customers will find interesting and that you can have a conversation about.
Know Like and Trust
People like to deal with people they know, like and trust, which is why video works so well because we can see the person, we can trust the person. If they’re a bit shifty, if they’re shifting around in their seat, we know that there’s something amiss.
The next best thing is audio. You can hear my voice; you can see if you like the how it sounds. It’s not quite as good as video, but it definitely is a good thing and you can’t fake video or audio, people will see right through it. And done is better than perfect, just do it. So put that post out there. It doesn’t have to be absolutely polished. It doesn’t need to be Instagram-worthy as they say. Just put it out there, put something out there and learn as you go and you will get better. I certainly have on this podcast. Talk to your customers, not at them, Julie Broad a local business coach said. And that is so true, we want to be included in the conversation, not talked at.
Things Every Business Should Do on Facebook
There are a few things that you can think about when doing your business post. So make sure that you’re talking to your customers in their language, make sure you’re consistently posting not just here, there and everywhere, and make sure that you have a strategy, think about the way that you can actually interact with your customers.
Who Is My Customer?
Now if you’re having a bit of trouble deciding on one particular customer to talk to, I will include my customer avatar worksheet that you can have a look at.
People often say, “I want to talk to everybody”.
Yes, well that’s great, but then you talk to nobody because you don’t speak their language. The way you talk to a 15-year-old is different to the way you talk to a 20-year-old, there’s a difference to the way you talk to a 60-year-old.
Think about that language, think about the brands that you most engage with, the ones that get you, they’re talking a specific language and you are their avatar, their customer.
Now it doesn’t mean that other people are a little bit further away, so maybe slightly different age or maybe if they’re targeting females it doesn’t mean that males also can’t then engage in their brand, it just means that the way they’re talking is specific and you need to do that too.
Think about your customer avatar and go to the show notes and download customer avatar worksheet and work through it. And think about that when you’re crafting your posts. Especially on Facebook, because customers like people that they know, like and trust and that is built very quickly if you’re all talking the same language
Links
Is Facebook Still A Good Marketing Tool?
Listen to Small Business Talk Episode 58 for the full episode.
On next week’s podcast on Small Business Talk, we will talk to aspecial guests about how to turn your business into a growth engine. See you then.
