Best Practices for Facebook Content

 

Target Audience 

You Should Know, Who is Your Target Audience

Users upload a hundred hours of video to YouTube every sixty seconds and share quite 4.75 billion items of content on Facebook every twenty-four hours. Add to that five hundred million new tweets per day and the chances of breaking through the noise seem slim, So the question here is How can you overcome this?

You breakthrough by creating quality content that addresses your customers' needs and their media habits. To understand their needs, consider: what pain points do you know they have, what information needs, what product needs?

To understand their media habits consider: Does your target audience maintain a profile on networking sites? Are they joiners? Do they read blogs or watch videos, or are they spectators? Do they post reviews? Are they critics? Do they create content? Are they creators? Are they on social media at all?

To understand what kind of content will work for your audience, you need to do some research. Find your personas on social media, forums, or review sites and see what kind of content they are sharing. What topics are being discussed? What questions are raised? Once you understand what content will be of interest to your audience, you'll want to consider the format of the content.

There are several content formats: blogs, photos, gifs, graphics, videos, tweets, testimonials, checklists, to name a few. Once you understand the content of interest to your audience and the formats you might use, you'll match both to the social media channels that matter to your audience.

There's a strategy for organizing this process and your content. It's called the Hub and Spokes Model.

Hub and Spokes Model.

What is the Hub and Spokes Model? How can you use it to implement a Content Marketing Strategy?

The Hub and Spokes Content Model is a strategy that allows you to plan content in a variety of formats that are promoted and referred to in other ancillary pieces of content.

You'll start by creating a Hub. A Hub is a content that is unique to your company or organization.

Typically, this content is your company website and or a blog. The Hub content is derived from the pain points of your target audience key topics and target keywords. If this content is good, it can be a powerful way to bring your audience closer to your offering.

Next, you'll participate in the social media platforms you'll use. You'll create company pages, follow other users et cetera. The spokes are often social media channels and they are designed to ultimately drive your audience back to your hub. Conceptually, your research, produce, and publish a main piece of content that becomes the actual hub and then To support, promote, and drive traffic to that important piece of content, You develop multiple spokes that connect back to it.

The hub is published first and the spokes are published continuously for two to three months afterward.

Sometimes longer depending on the focus of the piece in many different formats and many different channels to support the hub. The hub is important because without a hub the spokes would just be miscellaneous pieces and formats of content and not tied to any specific content marketing objectives or strategy. 

The hub and spoke model is intertwined. They must be completed simultaneously because if they are not, because without the spokes content promotion and distribution, the hub wouldn't get enough traffic to be successful.

Finally, it is important to produce valuable content for your audience that's also tailored for each channel. Your content publication mixed with outreach to influencers and your customer relationship-building efforts will accumulate over time. And if done well should result in reaching your marketing objectives. But remember this doesn't happen overnight.

Social Media Categories 

As mentioned, before much of the social media landscape falls into six main categories.

Publishing and sharing, messaging, discussing, collaborating, and networking. These categories describe how the respective social media channels are primarily used and can guide the type of content you publish in these channels but these are not bright lines. In fact, you often take your hub content and then create several different formats of that content and publish it in several different channels, your spokes as covered in the content strategy course. There are lots of ideas out there for how to repurpose your content.

Let's take a look at what content works well on Facebook.

Best Practices For Facebook Content 

The best practices for content on Facebook pages are pretty straightforward.

• Keep it short. People like to scan Facebook
• keep your posts under 120 characters.
• Use big beautiful images, posts with eye-catching photos and videos stand out making it more likely that people like, comment, and share them and Facebook prioritizes visual content.
• Share exclusive content, offer special deals or events to your Facebook page visitors to keep them interested and drive sales.
• Respond to customers. People like it when you listen to them. When you reply to posts and comments quickly, you'll notice customers are more responsive too.
• Tie your content to special events or holidays that are important to your audience and schedule posts around those dates. Like Valentine's Day if you're a florist or Cyber Monday, the big online shopping day
• if you're an e-commerce company. Post for the right audience. Posts is more effective when the people who care see them.
• If you have customers who live in different areas or speak different languages, you can create posts just for them.
• Write a post and choose a location and language you want. When you publish your posts, they'll show up in just the locations or languages you picked.
• Posting on your page is about quality, not quantity.
• Being consistent in the quality and types of posts you create can help people know what kinds of messages to expect from you and how they tie into your business.

Finally, avoid being overly promotional.

Remember, this is a relationship you're building and you wouldn't start any relationship by asking the other person to buy or use your service right away.

Here are some other tips, 

• Change up your cover photos regularly 
• Use call to action.
• Show customers when you're available and how responsive you are.
• Use interesting and creative videos.
• Run contests or learn more about your customers and engage them with quizzes.

In the end, there are some more advanced features you can use to really bring your Facebook page to life.

You can add custom tabs. A travel agency, Intrepid Travel, created a special tab to show trip reviews and another tab to let visitors search and book trips without ever having to leave their Facebook page.

You can also stream live videos with Facebook Live.