Many people I work with start by asking the same question: What good is a Facebook Page?
After all, almost no one sees their Facebook posts, even if you have 50,000 + followers each post individually may only be seen by a few thousand.
And what about the time it takes to maintain? Who wants to invest that into a Facebook page, especially since every change that Facebook makes seems to reduce the number of people who see the page? Worse yet, you or your Facebook team member have to learn how to do everything over and over again.
Yes, all of the above are issues but your Facebook page has value for your business.
How much time you invest in it all depends on the strategy you chose to use on Facebook.
First, you have to have a business Facebook page to run any paid advertising. That’s just a fact and there’s no way around it.
If all you’re going to do is run Facebook ads, you can set up a page, put a few posts on it and then start running ads.
You can run ads, but they won’t work as well as if you actually used your Facebook page or at least posted occasionally.
Facebook wants to create a community and they reward pages that help that happen. When you’re taking action in the way Facebook wants they give you more attention and traffic to your page. When you’re only on Facebook to take what you can, Facebook restricts your traffic and this makes your ad costs higher.
It is possible to get interaction on Facebook organically. It does take more time and work so you have to decide if the effort is worth the results.
I was talking to a friend recently and he does a regular Facebook live on his page. He routinely has 5000 viewers.
This is all organic. He isn’t boosting the posts.
I don’t know about you, but 5000 people watching me for no cost is a good result. Sometimes he has an offer for these people and sometimes not, but he’s growing his audience and reach and he does use it to make sales.
In addition to growing his audience, he’s reducing the cost of his ads.
I’m not sure why but in his case, and many of our clients’ cases, when they have an active Facebook page that has engagement, people liking, sharing, and commenting on the page and posts, their ad costs drop.
Their ads get engagement just like their organic posts and this tells Facebook that they are valuable content so Facebook shows them to more people, at no charge.
How’s that for cool? Your ads are getting organic reach just like your posts.
We’ve seen this play out multiple times over several years.
Once you have a Facebook page that’s getting some engagement you can even use it to test your messaging and your offers.
You can create an organic post and see how much interaction it gets. If it gets less than usual the message then the offer isn’t as attractive to your audience, but if it gets more engagement, then it’s a good message for your audience and it will probably do well in a paid ad.
This lets you test potential ads before you spend any money.
One more idea for your page.
As long as you’ve built your Facebook page audience with messaging that has attracted customers or clients as well as people you would like to be your customers and clients, you can use your Facebook fans and people who engage on your page as an audience to target with paid ads.
These people have taken one small step towards you already and are familiar with you, so targeting them with Facebook ads makes sense.
If you have 1000 people you’re looking at a $1 a day if you have 10,000 people maybe $5 a day and if you have 100,000 people maybe $25 a day will do.
These people will buy from you more often than almost any other audience.
And you can use these people to create what Facebook calls a LookaLike audience. You can collect between 2 and 20 MILLION people in the US using this tool.
It doesn’t get any better than that.
Now you have more people to work with!
All of this comes from being active on Facebook and creating an audience that knows, likes, and trusts you.
It does take some time and effort, but once you get started it often takes less than you think.
Have a great day!
Brian
P.S. If you want to discover what’s in a complete Facebook marketing system, from creating your page to figuring out what to post to selling your products and services sign up for me free masterclass at www.gosocialexperts.com/masterclass.