Expert Insights On Using Facebook to Grow Your Brand and Your Business

Facebook’s appeal as an advertising channel is the product of many different factors. For starters, it owns the largest active user base of any other social network, with nearly three billion users logging in on a monthly basis.

Facebook is also familiar to many business leaders who have set up personal and/or business pages on the platform, where businesses are able to achieve organic reach and engagement without any paid campaigns. When businesses are ready to create a campaign, they can do so for as little as five dollars per day, in many cases.

But if you’ve taken this path and still struggled to deliver results, the time and money spent on poor-performing campaigns can feel like a big problem—especially if other local businesses are setting up campaigns and driving ROI.

To help small businesses upgrade their strategy, we hosted two separate events earlier this month that delivered valuable insights and actionable tips from the best source possible: a current business leader at Meta (formerly Facebook). Read on for highlights from her two webinars—or, if you’d like to hear everything Stephanie Needle has to say about succeeding on Facebook, choose between our twin webinars targeted to beginner-level advertisers or advanced audiences.

Creating Meaningful Interactions on Facebook

When creating content and attempting to engage an audience on Facebook, Needle encourages small businesses to think of these interactions as belonging to four key categories.

• Acts of Care: This can include acts of service, charitable initiatives, and other business activities demonstrating your company’s impact and dedication to your local community.
• Community Leadership: Leadership-based content goes beyond the products and services your brand offers to deliver expert insights and guidance your customers are seeking. For a local financial planner, for example, community leadership may include posts that answer questions to topical questions about inflation, mortgage refinancing, or building up an emergency fund.
• Sparking Inspiration: Your audience—and Facebook users in general—are always eager for content and stories that inspire them to do better in their own lives, whether that means trying new activities and experiences, or making personal changes to help them better achieve their own goals.
• Fostering Connections: Facebook and brand loyalty is ultimately about connections. When you can use your Facebook presence to cultivate a greater sense of community and engagement between other users—through platform-based conversations or public events posted on Facebook, for example—you create value for your Facebook page and brand that extends beyond the products and services you offer.

By understanding these categories, you can take a hard look at your own content and engagement efforts to make sure you’re creating interactions that offer value to your audience. With time, you may also discover that certain types of meaningful interactions are particularly impactful among your audience. Lean harder into these types of interactions and you may achieve a boost in Facebook performance.

Standing Out in the Facebook News Feed

Most of your Facebook content is viewed and engaged not through your Facebook page itself, but through each users’ News Feed. Since you’re competing for attention with many other brands, as well as each user’s personal connections, it’s important to understand how that content succeeds in catching the attention of users.

Needles points out that most users notice content in the following order:

1. The photo or image shared with the post;
2. The copy for that post;
3. Your business brand name;
4. The likes, comments, and shares for each post.

When planning out Facebook posts, it’s worth prioritizing content creation in a similar order. The copy of your post, for example, may be important to the post’s overall success, but the image or video you share will have a far greater impact on the post’s overall success.

You can also use this information to better understand how the story of a post is being told. If most Facebook users are viewing your photo or video and then the copy, you can think about how the copy is complementary to the main photo or image, rather than introducing it.

Embracing Different Video Formats

As Facebook video consumption has increased among users, the platform has also diversified the types of videos your business can create. While these new formats may require some getting used to, they give your business new opportunities to engage your audience and foster impactful connections.

These Facebook video formats include:

• In-feed video
• Facebook Stories
• Facebook Reels
• In-stream mobile video

With time and experience, you can develop certain tricks, habits and markers of style that will elevate the voice and engagement of these videos—and drive more frequent and deeper interactions.

Hungry for more? Check out the full advanced webinar for the finer details that can elevate your Facebook campaigns.

As you plan out your social media advertising strategy, a digital advertising partner can optimize performance by implementing best practices and supplementing strategy with our in-house expertise. Contact us today to learn more.