Social media has taken over the web and changed the way many of us think about communication and marketing. But if you’re new to social media marketing, understanding how to implement strategies, gain followers, and help your business is a lot more difficult than simply interacting with friends and family.
The following tips will give you a quick perspective on social media from a marketing standpoint, allowing you to implement ideas that automotive social media marketing companies use to help businesses like yours succeed on Facebook.
Start Using Audience Insights to Understand Your Audience
Facebook gives marketers the most in-depth tools of any social media site, to help you understand your audience in order to create content they want to see. The basics of these tools include location, interests, gender, and age.
You can even take a look at other pages people follow to get a better idea of content they want to see in your niche.
With proper planning and execution, you can automate your initial Facebook efforts by researching your audience and scheduling content so you can focus on increasing engagements.
Create a Content Strategy Around Your Audience
Here’s a cold hard truth: Not many people care about your business enough to put up with endless, shameless self-promotion. Sure, your Facebook page has your business’s name on it, and you can do what you want, but the fact is, people don’t care.
Facebook users want to be entertained! With an understanding of your audience in place, you can entertain them, which adds value to their experience on Facebook. From there, you’ll learn more about them and discover ways that you can promote your business, which will increase sales and customer engagement.
Think about your products or services in a simple way by asking, “How does this affect people’s lives?” and “Are people passionate about the products I sell?”
For car dealers, this is simple because there are millions of people who are extremely passionate about cars. So for automotive social media marketers, tapping into that passion can be as simple as a post with a picture of a muscle car with the word “Power.”
The bottom line is that most people follow businesses on Facebook because they like the content posted, not necessarily because they’re a current or past customer. If you give people what they want, you can open the door to more advanced marketing that your audience will really respond positively to.
Accept the Fact That You Need an Ad Budget
Facebook Ads is the holy grail for marketers. Noticeably cheaper than any other form of PPC advertising, businesses can reach a local or hyper-targeted (very small range) audience quickly and efficiently.
The reason you need a Facebook Ads budget, however, is because the company changed its algorithm to reduce the effect of organic posts. What this means is, Facebook made it more difficult for you to simply post content for free to reach your audience.
They purposefully made Facebook a pay-to-play game for businesses. And while that sounds like a bad thing, there is sound logic behind it, which we’ll discuss in the next section.
Whether your goal is to grow your Facebook audience or get traffic to your website, the key to both is Facebook ads. (Pro-Tip: You should want to do both of these things). The first and most important step in this is to decide on a daily budget for ad spend.
You can achieve small goals for less while starting out, and build your way up once the results start to show.
Experiment with Post Timing and Frequency
When starting a new page or marketing efforts on Facebook, it’s easy to think that you want to post a lot of interesting content in order to appeal to users. But Facebook won’t allow each and every one of your posts to go through to users’ newsfeeds because this would cause an increase in noise.
Facebook wants users to be able to see what’s important in their friends’ and family’s lives more than what the pages they like are posting, as Facebook’s main purpose is helping people connect.
Once you’ve developed an audience, use page insights to find out more about them and decide when you should post for maximum organic affect. As we’ve discussed, organic reach can’t be relied on for businesses to effectively market, but with the right content and timing, you can break through the noise and get organic views.