Editor's Note: Josh R Jackson is a contributing editor at BestMarketingDegrees.org. To celebrate the launch of our new Facebook Fundamentals Certification, Josh joins us today to discuss the top Facebook skills for online marketers to learn in 2017.
We're halfway through the year, and 2017 has already given marketers a treasure trove of new toys, many of them courtesy of the world’s largest social media platform: Facebook. Messenger Day, The Social Network’s answer to Snapchat, has already promised to take video and Messenger platforms to whole new levels of engagement, creating a bigger sense of culture, and producing a closer sense of community among Facebook video users.
Updates to Ad Breaks, Reactions to Messenger, and advanced ad measurement access for users of Facebook Business Manager have also expanded opportunities for small businesses to gain actionable insights about their audiences. All of this comes on top of the fact that paid advertising is getting more competitive and complicated than ever before.
When thinking about these new developments to the most popular social media platform in the world, it's crucial for small businesses to hone the skills that these tools demand. That’s why we’ve applied what we know about Facebook’s future to present you with the three most important Facebook skills to hone in 2017. Let's get started!
Creating a Sense of Community
Since Facebook began, the platform has been famous for its ability to bring people together. That it can foster a sense of community between like-minded (and sometimes different-minded) people is largely what makes it such a popular outlet for public expression. Since 2007, businesses have been able to create Business Pages to tap into this feature, and create a sense of community all their own.
The marketing potential of Facebook’s Business Pages has only grown over the years, and with the advent of each new feature - whether it be engagement ads, targeting tools, or ad placement technology - businesses tend to benefit when the social network opens new doors that encourage users to gather around common ideas and businesses to engage with their audiences.
A great example of community-creation in action is the new Reactions feature; those six emojis we use to tell users how their posts make us feel have helped businesses to gauge how different audiences receive their content on an emotional level. New posting options like these, and especially fan pages and video, have created new forums around which to animate discussion, encourage feedback from fans, and interact directly with potential clients and customers.
These new opportunities for social expression have made lead generation much easier, especially for those who can get in on the ground floor and harness the full power of the latest social technologies. Engagement metrics have also made lead generation more measurable, which brings us to #2 of the most important Facebook skills to hone in 2017.
Developing Actionable Insights
Facebook Insights take the pulse of a business’s social influence. They are the barometer of how far we reach outside our usual circle of friends and followers. But best of all, they offer bits of information that can act as advice about the next steps our business should take. For instance, if we post text-heavy, self-promotional content without supplementary videos or images, we might see our reach numbers decline. Why? Because text-heavy posts from businesses tend to get hidden, reported as spam, or unliked, and Facebook’s ever-changing social ranking algorithm can penalize pages that receive a high volume of negative reactions.
On the other hand, that same algorithm tends to reward higher rankings to posts that earn engagement in the form of likes, comments, and shares, a kind of positive reinforcement that suggests we should keep doing what we’re doing.
Additional insights about user demographics are telling us more and more about the kind of person we’re reaching. Our insights about these people - particularly about those who like our pages and engage with our content - help us to build a sense of who our customers and brand fans are. In fact, studies have shown that the act of liking a page tends to be an expression of both personality and identity among Facebook users.
The key this year is to take what we learn from insights like these and develop a marketing strategy that can help our business lead its best life by marketing to users who personally like us so much that they will amplify our story by word of mouth. Once we know who these users are and how to reach them, it helps to know how and when to boost the posts they’re engaging with to reach other like-minded people. This leads us to #3 of the most important Facebook skills to hone in 2017.
Engaging With Paid Advertising
Knowing how and when to pull the trigger on paid advertising is one of the most important Facebook skills an online marketer can acquire. This is because, while cultivating likes, comments, and shares organically is one of the best ways to guarantee leads through web traffic, a paid ad can make the difference between growing awareness about a brand and increasing that brand’s perceived relevance. While organic engagement might increase awareness within your close network, a paid advertisement often increases how relevant and important a brand is perceived to be by a wide variety of people, including the usual fans and followers.
Engaging with Facebook’s paid advertising features can range from an exercise as simple as choosing to boost a post that’s already doing well in your network, to an exercise as complicated as designing and uploading content to Facebook’s wider network of Carousel Ads and Sponsored Posts. Each of these options can lead to greater control over audience reach, more consistent web traffic through better targeted ads. This year, it’s important for small businesses to know when pulling the trigger on such promotions is a good idea, especially if offers and discounts are involved.
Some small businesses need to check to make sure they’re prepared for the level of attention they might receive after paying for a sponsored post, and they’ll want to ensure they have the infrastructure in place to adequately respond to all inquiries and provide great customer service - and that brings us full circle, through the most important aspects of community creation.
Want to know how you can best develop all these skills? Take a class in Facebook Fundamentals today.
Want to master Facebook Marketing? Sign up for our new Facebook certification today!