The Essential A-Z of Facebook Marketing

26+ features for a successful Facebook social strategy

Facebook dominates social media use with an extensive base of 2 billion users who can be reached by organic or paid advertising tools and targeting options.

But, it's easy to get lost in the various tools which are available and you can be left uncertain where to start. Having a holistic Facebook marketing approach that incorporates many of Facebook's features will help shape a larger and more targeted social strategy or campaign.

Remember, you need to know what your target audience is doing on Facebook to peak their interest in your company/product/service. In Q3 of 2016, Global Web Index found that over a third of 16-64-year-olds answered that they had visited a company's page within the last month. And, over 20% stated that they had shared content (post, article, photo and video) from a company or brand.

It is clear that Facebook users are taking advantage of interacting or researching a company via the social platform, so it is important that you make your self not only visible but stand out from the crowd.

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How many of these key features are you using?

2017 has already seen some big changes to how Facebook can be utilized by businesses to expand their brand awareness, customer service, content marketing and advertising. We have compiled this A-Z list of the key features Facebook has to offer and how these can help your business. Use it as a checklist to review which you use now or could use. We have linked to our analysis of when features linked to give you more information.

Ads Manager Use this to manage your Ad campaigns.
Bots and Business in Messenger - V1.1 of Discover, which enables people to browse and find bots and businesses.
Boost post - Effective, yet inexpensive way to gain more exposure of your posts. by boosting posts you can choose your audience by age, gender and location and by selecting interests (health, beauty, food etc.)
Customer Service - Social is a great way for customers to contact you directly if they have a question - Facebook offers options to show the responsiveness of your business. The higher and faster response rate.
Company Page - This is the starting point for Facebook marketing. Set up a company page so potential customers can find you. Remember to include: company contact details, 'about us' section and to post regular updates to keep your audience engaged with your brand.
Call-to-Action - Add buttons to posts with specific a Call - to - Action (Learn more, Shop now etc.)
CPC Calculation - Facebook no longer counts engagements in CPC, only clicks to site.
Dynamic Ads - Dynamic ads have been successful for retailers using retargeting within Facebook. This new change opens up dynamic ads to other sectors like travel.
Events - Promote events through sponsored ads. this is a great way to raise awareness - the event page shows up on the newsfeed when a 'friend' likes the event.
Edge Rank - This Facebook algorithm decides what stories, or posts, appear in each user's newsfeed. Every action a person takes (a like, a comment, responding to an event etc.) creates an 'edge'. A story about that 'edge' might show up in a user's newsfeed. This algorithm - depending on how interesting the algorithm thinks the post will be to the user - will then show posts related to that edge. Learn more about EdgeRank.
Facebook Exchange (FBX) - Retargets users who have expressed an interest in a related product/service. Learn more about Exchange.
Groups - Creating a company group is a great way to interact with your current customers and make them feel connected and respected by the company. This is different from your company page and should be more interactive. Facebook are looking to launch tools that will help group admins - analytics, membership request filtering, removed member clean-up, scheduled posts, and group-to-group linking.
Insights - Audience Insights allows better targeting, whilst Page Insights helps you understand the impact and interactions with your posts. Both really great tools to utilize for audience impact.
Live - Keep your audience engaged and informed with live videos - this can be Q&A sessions to help your customers or potential customers, how- to videos and lots more. Be creative.
Lead Ads - Perfect for B2B ads on Facebook, lead ads let users input special information to receive calls or quotes. Learn more about Lead Ads.
Messenger Ads - Facebook announced they had run out of space on users' feeds for adverts and will start pushing more adverts in Messenger. Learn more about Messenger Ads.
Messenger Codes - Brands can now display codes which can be scanned by users to start conversations on Facebook Messenger.
Offer Claims - Promote offer content through adverts.
Pop-up chat-bots - The chat box pops up when a user visits a company's page. The purpose of this feature is to prompt visitors to start a conversation with the page via Messenger.
Pinned Posts - Pin your most important/ informative post to the top of your company page. This way, everyone who visits your page will see it, not just those who were online when you posted.
Power Editor - Power editor makes it easy to manage multiple ads at once and import ads via excel. this is great for larger businesses that want to work on multiple ads at once.
Reactions - Facebook counts reactions to posts (love, shocked, angry and laughing) as more important than likes when establishing where posts should appear in users' newsfeeds.
Shopping Sections - Facebook has added a shopping feature in favourites on mobile and released 'canvas' so you can shop from ads on Facebook without being re-directed.
Video Views - promote in-ad video content.
Verification - businesses can claim their Facebook page to prove they own it, and will appear higher in searches.
Watch - This is Facebook's newest feature. It is a new video platform where Facebook have hinted that they will start creating more original content. to increase revenue, users can expect to see targeted advertisizing before and during the shows. this is currently limited to the US (August 2017), but we will update you when it is rolled out in the UK too.

Social platforms are constantly changing; new features are added or existing ones are upgraded and improved. Either way, you need to keep on top of the latest features to make the most of your social marketing.

We update our members monthly on the latest social media options with our Digital Media Cheatsheet including all the major digital platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, PPC, and organic Google search (SEO). Members can also use our Facebook ads guide and Quick Win guide and template on Facebook retargeting.

Contributer : Smart Insights