Facebook is often one of the first social platforms a business sets up – and with good reason. Facebook has over 1.59 billion monthly active users as of January 2016, marking a 14 percent increase year on year. Each day, over a billion people log into this channel to review their news feed and messages.

Brands are fully aware of the potential of this platform. In the US specifically, 80 percent of companies have a Facebook page.

What is worth considering is how your Facebook page can be optimized, and whether your business is utilizing all the tricks available. Below are some ideas to make your content work harder for you.

1. Add value: The trick to creating great content is producing images, text or videos that your audience values – rather than what you want to ‘sell’. If you sell ice cream for example, have fun with it and create ice cream based recipes, run contests for the quirkiest ice cream flavour or incorporate posts on keeping cool during the summer months. Whatever you post, add value every time to your audience.

2. Community-focused: People ‘like’ Facebook pages to feel part of a community – whether that’s supporting a specific cause, interest or business. While you may have other business related objectives for setting up your page (such as increasing web traffic or sales), keep the idea of ‘fostering a community’ in mind. You can enhance the sense of inclusion by facilitating group discussions and responding to comments in an authentic and helpful way.

3. Consistency: Posting content sporadically or leaving a Facebook account dormant is a big ‘no no’. People will ‘unlike’ your page when they see it’s not adding value. Create a content calendar and post ideally once a day, minimum, to justify being a worthwhile page to follow.

4. Facebook Insights: Facebook has a great tool called ‘Insights’ that provides an overview of how much engagement your posts are generating. As well as tracking the number of followers to your page, take time to look at the insights – paying particular attention to the levels of engagement generated by each of your posts. Facebook Insights also tracks clicks, reactions, comments and shares. Use this to learn what your audience likes and responds well to – and provide more of it.

5. Pin that ‘wow’ content: If you have important content that you want to promote over a longer period of time (say a week, rather than a day) or a post that’s receiving an impressive amount of traction, you can ‘pin’ it to the top of the page. This means even when you post your daily content, your ‘pinned’ post will remain in prime position. It’s a neat trick to make important content go further – without creating a new post.

Most of these are content-focused suggestions. What other ways do you recommend for optimizing your business Facebook page?

Tags: content creation, facebook, social media

Social media is central to many of our campaigns at Peak. We consume news about the impact these channels have and apply our learnings to client projects.

If you’re still struggling to get buy-in on social media, this list of 30 facts provides useful need-to-knows on why engagement is important.

Did You Know?

1. Over 75 percent of all internet users use social media (source: Makeuseof)
2. 71 per cent of women use social media compared to 62 percent of men (source: SearchEngineJournal)
3. 91 percent of brand mentions on social media come from people with fewer than 500 followers and 94 percent of those mentions are positive (source: Business2Community)
4. 21 percent of consumers will unfollow brands that post repetitive or boring content (source: Social Times)
5. 89 percent of 18-29 year age group use social media (source: smallbusinesscan) and 84 percent of C-level/VP execs use social media to support purchase decisions (source: smallbusinesscan)

Facebook:

6. Facebook accounts for 21 percent of all social media referral traffic globally (source: TechCrunch)
7. Facebook drives 23 percent of all traffic across the internet! (source: Shareaholic)
8. 189 million of Facebook’s users are ‘smartphone only’ (source: wersm)
9. 23 percent of users check their accounts at least five times a day (source: SearchEngineJournal)

Pinterest:

10. 80% of pins are actually re-pins (source: Mashable)
11. Shoppers referred to a site from Pinterest are 10 percent more likely to buy (source: Socialmediatoday)
12. Pinterest referrals spend 70 percent more money than visitors referred from non-social channels (source: Socialmediatoday)
13. Pins with a call to action increase engagement by 80 percent (source: Socialmediatoday)
14. 80 percent of Pinterest users are women; 50% of all users have children (source: Socialmediatoday)

Twitter:

15. The fastest growing group of new users on Twitter are aged between 55 and 64 years (source: wersm)
16. 65 percent of users expect a response on Twitter in less than two hours (source: SearchEngineJournal)
17. 88 percent of Twitter users are on mobile and 500 million tweets are posted each day (source: Jeff Bullas)

LinkedIn:

18. LinkedIn has nearly a quarter of a billion users (source: smallbusinesscan)
19. Only 20 percent of LinkedIn users are under the age of 30 (source: SearchEngineJournal)
20. 40 percent of B2B buyers say LinkedIn is important when researching technology and services to purchase and 65 percent of B2B companies have acquired a customer through this channel (source: business2community)

Instagram:

21. More than 70 million photos and videos are sent daily (source: Hootsuite)
22. 53 percent of internet users aged 18-29 use Instagram (source: Jeff Bullas)
23. Instagram is considered the most important social network by 32 percent of American teens (source: Hootsuite)
24. Among top brands Instagram has been adopted by 85 percent (source: Hootsuite)
25. Brands on Instagram are seeing a per follower engagement rate of 4.21 percent – that’s statistically 58 times higher than Facebook and 120 times higher than Twitter (source: Hootsuite)
26. Still photos are more popular on Instagram than videos – generating 36 percent more likes (source: Hootsuite)
27. Posts with at least one hashtag average 12.6 percent more engagement and posts tagged with a location receive 79 percent higher engagement (source: Hootsuite)

Google+:

28. 18 percent of marketers plan to increase efforts on Google+ this year (source: SearchEngineJournal)
29. The +1 button is hit 5 billion times per day (source: Jeff Bullas)
30. Google+ has more than 2.5 billion users but only 10 percent are active (source: smallbusinesscan)

Tags: facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, social media, Twitter