The Scientific Guide to a Profitable Facebook Marketing Strategy
When looking at your Facebook marketing strategy you must take the latest statistics into account.
When you review the data it will help you better understand the Facebook algorithm. This way you will know what your posting frequency should be, what type of content you should create and many more things. They can make your Facebook marketing strategy a lot more successful.
A great report where you can find a lot of useful Facebook marketing statistics is this one from Buffer and Buzzsumo. They analysed more 43 million Facebook posts from the top 20,000 brands.
In this article, I am going to break down this report and the statistics included in it. I will also show you how to make the most of them while creating your Facebook marketing strategy.
Facebook Pages are Publishing More Posts
The study found that Facebook pages are posting more content than they did before. The number of posts published has gone up from 6.5 million posts per quarter to 8.1 million posts. People now post about 90,032 posts a day.
On average the top 20,000 pages are publishing 135 posts per month (four per day).
Publishing four or more posts a day is a good posting frequency. As the study found that when these top pages publish one to four posts per day each post got an average of 2,990 engagements. This comes to 11,960 engagements per day for four posts.
Pages that post less than one post per day got 3,127 engagements per post. This might drive the highest engagement ‘per post’, but the pages overall engagement levels will go down.
And pages that posted nine times per day get 22,194 engagements (2,466 engagements per each post for 5 to 9 posts) per day.
So if you were use the results gathered from the top 20,000 pages, it will be better for your page to post multiple times a day and rack up more engagements than to post less often and get fewer overall engagements.
If Facebook is one of your main marketing channels, I recommend that you post four to five times a day as it takes a Facebook post five hours to get 75% of its engagement.
After that it will only get a fraction of its engagement. It takes even less time for a Facebook post to get 75% of total impressions and reach. Posts on Facebook have a short lifespan.
Therefore, if you schedule a post to go out every five hours you will be publishing four to five posts a day. There will be plenty of time in between for them to reach their maximum potential.
Don’t just schedule your own content for these posts. They should be a combination of your own content and content published by others. What the ratio looks like will depend on how much content you create each week.
Also make sure that the posts that contain your own content go out at your best publishing times.
To find out what posts to share you can use your Facebook insights to see what has performed well recently. Just go to ‘Posts’ under your page’s insights and it will show you your top performing posts.
You can see how much reach and engagement each post received. If you click on each post you can see the metrics in more detail (like above).
Always take the time to analyse your page and find your best posts. You can then find similar content for your future posts. Even republishing your best performing posts can also help as only a fraction of your fans see your posts.
In your post insights there is a section called ‘Top posts from Pages you watch’ where you can add pages of your competitors and see which of their content performs best.
Images Still Drive the Most Engagement
Over the past few years Facebook has been encouraging businesses to create more video content. They claimed that their users liked watching videos more. But we recently learned that Facebook had inflated their video metrics to make it seem like videos drove more engagement.
And this graph from the Buffer’s study proves it as well. As you can see images are still king (even though all media types are getting less engagement than before). Videos might be driving more engagement than links, but images perform the best.
So, publish more images. Again, you can come up with a ratio here. Most of your posts can be images and videos and links can make up a smaller fraction. But make sure you calculate the ROI you get from creating and sharing original videos as they require a significant time investment.
In some of your images and videos you can also include a link to your website. This way you will not only get more engagement, but also more traffic and leads.
To create your images and videos you can use a user friendly design tool like Crello.
It comes equipped with pre-made image and video templates and an editor that makes it easy to create visual content in minutes. There’s also a library full of icons and illustrations that help you improve on the templates.
Remember that Facebook Engagement is Down
As the above two graphs have indicated engagement is down for all media posted. Here’s another graph showing how engagement has been declining since Q1 of 2017.
This is not new information of course as Facebook has been altering its algorithm for years to reduce reach and engagement. The most recent drop in engagement happened in January 2018 when Facebook decided that they wanted more human to human interactions instead of human to page.
Therefore, while creating your Facebook marketing strategy remember that no matter what you do it is highly unlikely that you will get back to the engagement levels you enjoyed years ago. Make sure you set goals that are relevant to the current engagement levels. The only way to reach higher levels of engagement is through Facebook ads.
Another way to drive more interactions is by getting people to directly share your content on Facebook as people now see more posts from their friends than from pages they like. Many companies are doing this by implementing an employee advocacy strategy.
This is when you get your employees to share your content on their social media profiles. It can make a massive difference as The Marketing Advisory Network found that brand messages reach 561% further when shared by employees. They also found that brand messages are reshared 24 times more frequently when employees share content.
To ensure your employees share the right content, you can use a tool like Smarp. This is an employee advocacy tool where you can submit content and employees can directly share it on to networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
It can also help you gamify the sharing process and convince employees to share more. The activity of your employees and the results their sharing generates can be monitored with their analytics.
While implementing these alternate Facebook marketing methods you should also invest more time into building your presence on other marketing channels like email and on other social networks like LinkedIn and Instagram, where engagement rates are higher. As there’s always the possibility that Facebook will reduce reach further. This could make organic Facebook marketing methods redundant.
Consider Your Niche
The study also found that the engagement drop wasn’t the same for all categories.
As you can see in the above graph, the drop in engagement for artists and movie pages was around 70%. While for retail brands and clothing categories the drop was around 50%.
So, take this into consideration while measuring your Facebook engagement. Instead of comparing your performance with every page out there it might be better to just compare with your competitors and niche and set goals accordingly.
Conduct Your Own Analysis for Your Facebook Marketing Strategy
Studies like this one provide a great starting point if your page is new or if you haven’t posted anything in a while. But after you publish more content and gather new fans you should analyse your page separately. This will show you what works best for your page and its unique set of fans.
While doing this also analyse the pages of your closest competitors. As the graphs above have indicated, the drop in engagement varies by category. So, fans within your industry might behave differently.
What do you think about the results of the Facebook marketing study? What steps do you follow while creating your Facebook marketing strategy?
Mitt Ray is the founder of Social Marketing Writing, where you can download 100 free social media background images.
