The 3 Most Common Facebook Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them

There are 25 million active small business pages on Facebook. That tells us a few things:

1. When it comes to selling and marketing online, Facebook is the juggernaut of social media. And if you have not used Facebook as a marketing platform, you need to start.
2. Just like other forms of marketing, you will run into some competition. You will have to be better than your competition is willing to be. This, for some people, is easier said than done.
3. If there are at least 25 million small business pages, then there is probably enough room for your business to do well on Facebook.

It’s safe to say that a good percentage of these small business pages are not optimized to take full advantage of Facebook. And better yet, many of them will have very poor marketing.

This is because Facebook is such a vast and intimidating platform. And what makes it worse is the multitude of online advice that is dedicated to the subject—and some of the suggestions will be contradictory to each other. But the truth is that Facebook is deceptively simple, and if you follow a few basic fundamentals, you will find success.

To discover that success, you need to uncover some of the most common missteps.

Many business spam their fans

It doesn’t matter if you’re blogging, email marketing, or on social media. At the end of the day, spamming offers the quickest way to lose subscribers, followers, and fans. This is because spam is the polar opposite of value. And value is what will ultimately bring you major success with Facebook.

This means that you need to weigh and analyze every post before it goes on your page. Value is the most necessary ingredient to any post.

That is not to say that all of you Facebook updates should be extremely important.  Seeing that the lifetime of an average Facebook update is about 5 hours, you shouldn’t be afraid to post often. But if you’re obnoxiously blasting promotional blurbs about your company every six hours, you can expect to lose fans.

Many businesses neglect engagement

Businesses will obsess over the amount of fans they have. Many will expend time and resources into acquiring as many fans as possible. But many of them have it backwards. Yes, the amount of fans you have is important. Yes, you should be looking into ways to acquire more fans. What’s more important, however, is the level of interaction that you have with your fans.

Interaction and engagement holds dominion on Facebook. Neglecting this would be a fatal mistake for your Facebook marketing strategy.

Engagement ties into the previous point of this post: providing value. Value is what sparks engagement. Engagement will lead your fans into taking a desired action (buying your product, signing up to your email list, sharing your posts, etc.)

• Provide links to things, articles, websites that your fans will find useful. You can link to your own website, or you can link to other sites on the web.
• Announce new information or details about your company.
• Ask your fans questions. Ask relevant, open-ended questions to your fans to ignite interactions.
• Post pictures along with your updates.
• Show customers that have used your company successfully.
• Provide incentives. Regularly host Facebook contests and coupons to give the incentive for people to post on your page.

The benefits of engagement are multifaceted. Forming a valuable and likeable community on your Facebook page will forge your fans’ loyalty and interest. Beyond that, though, is getting your message seen.

You probably have noticed by now, but some of your posts will never make it onto your fans’ newsfeed. However, if you have “liked” pages on your own personal Facebook account, you will see posts from pages that always seem to be on the top of your newsfeed. This is because Facebook uses Edgerank, which uses an algorithm to pin-point the most relevant social content to put on a newsfeed. User engagement (the frequency someone likes, shares, or comments on your posts) is one of the primary factors in the algorithm. That is the reason why some pages always make it to the top of someone’s newsfeed, and why other seem to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

Many businesses don’t analyze their data

Facebook makes this easy for you. With Page Insights, you can look at what posts sparked the most engagement, how your Facebook ads are performing, and see what you need to improve on in the future.

Marketing without studying your analytics is like shooting a target in the dark.

Put the suggestions of this blog post to the test. Provide value, engage your customers, and look at your results.