Facebook - worth bothering with other than paid advertising??

_Brian

Following from the other thread about poor content on the forum lets try and kick off a conversation about this...

I'm thinking its not worth bothering just making general posts on a business page, Facebook just don't show them to any decent number of followers unless you pay..

For example, a FB business page I see recently posted that they have 22,000 followers and their posts were only showing to less than 100 people.. My own has a tiny 500 followers and typically I'd see posts shown to maybe 70-80.

Now, if you have a deal or offer paying for boosted posts is probably as profitable as Google PPC, so worth spreading the budget..

I'm not what you'd call a natural at social media and have pretty much arrived at the decision just to use FB when I'm boosting something worth bothering with..

Apparently Google don't use SM activity to rank your core website brand so that's not even a reason to bother..

How about click-bait via FB, is that dangerous territory to get into ??

jimmii

I think it depends massively on the business. For us it really works well. The reach on that page seems strangely low definitely doesn't seem like it is worthwhile for them. We just passed 15k likes our last four posts averaged a reach just under 1600 and through the last 20 or so only one has been under 500 and most are in the 800-1000 range. Our last boosted post was 3 or 4 weeks ago that one reached 7700. It depends on your type of customer if you're target market is guys 30-50 you could have 50k and your engagement is going to be really low that group just doesn't engage online like that much. If your market is 20-40 female then your engagement is going to, more than likely, be pretty good.

Facebook only results in around 15% of our website traffic but the bounce rate is significantly lower than our average and the length of time viewing and page views is significantly higher than from anywhere else so that needs to be taken into account too. I think AdWords is the best first port of call for your money but Social Media shouldn't be overlooked in certain B2C areas.

robinph

Very, very small sample size from what we've done on FB boosted posts. But it seems to be mostly retired women and student aged people from Singapore who click likes on our posts. One set of them just seem to hit like for the fun of it, the others I suspect are bots of some description.

sconhome

_Brian wrote: »

Following from the other thread about poor content on the forum lets try and kick off a conversation about this...

I'm thinking its not worth bothering just making general posts on a business page, Facebook just don't show them to any decent number of followers unless you pay..

For example, a FB business page I see recently posted that they have 22,000 followers and their posts were only showing to less than 100 people.. My own has a tiny 500 followers and typically I'd see posts shown to maybe 70-80.

Now, if you have a deal or offer paying for boosted posts is probably as profitable as Google PPC, so worth spreading the budget..

I'm not what you'd call a natural at social media and have pretty much arrived at the decision just to use FB when I'm boosting something worth bothering with..

Apparently Google don't use SM activity to rank your core website brand so that's not even a reason to bother..

How about click-bait via FB, is that dangerous territory to get into ??

Content is king.

FB are always tweaking their algorithms and the only way to make the most out of it properly is to continually tweak your posting methods.

I'm no expert but it is a large part of my job and I find if you have a particular topic that gets engagement, follow up with a couple of posts while you have that attention.

I generally find that relevant blog posts help (and you can use a tracking script to retarget audiences) depending on what people are doing eg a post I put out around Dublin Marathon got 11.5k organic reach. Then other booseted posts have achieved less engagement - you get the reach but not the reaction you desire.

Re click bait AFAIK Facebook have engineered a way to down rate click bait posts and any 'Like & Share' stuff is frowned upon too. You might slip the odd one of these in now and again but I think best to stay varied and mix up images, text, videos, other content. Let your page have a personality of its own.

_Brian

How about SHOP tabs like Shopify, I've toyed with the idea of utilising this feature. The big drawback is that no shopping tab will work on FB mobile versions. This is a serious drawback, near 80% of FB visits are on mobile and I can only see that increasing..

sconhome

I think this is coming down the line as there are recent reports that a huge percentage of people are only on mobile, that the desktop shopping model is on the move to mobile.

Facebook have been integrating a buy / sell system in groups over the past while (few months) and I would reckon off the back of this they are ironing out bugs so commercial applications can work. Lots of chatter about the ability to cross connect the platforms with I think IKEA being one of the first to use Instagram as an interactive catalog leading to sales.

I'll find the article.

Edit - The bones of the IKEA idea here http://www.fastcocreate.com/3032487/ikeas-newest-catalog-is-a-website-on-instagram At the rate of change this is probably linked to selling directly now.

Shopify also seems to be the only platform that allows integrated selling through Facebook & Twitter. I might have to visit it again for my own purposes.