No other social media platform can give you the kind of details Facebook can when it comes to how people feel about your cause.
Millions of people create billions of likes, comments, and shares—every single day.
But how can you use all this information?
Following are three ways to Facebook as a tool to refine your marketing message.
1. Let Your Fans Select Marketing Images
Develop a regular practice of posting images on your Facebook Page that could easily be used for future marketing campaigns.
To make it easier to stay organized, create a Facebook album for each of the major topics you blog about.
Once you’ve narrow down your choices to two or three images, you can use Facebook insights to select the winner. Images with the highest engagement rate wins!
2. Let Your Fans Tell You Their Lateral Interests
When you create content that’s exclusively about your cause, you’ll obviously engage people interested in those topics.
But you’ve got to remember that your fans and followers are people first, with lots of other interests outside your cause.
This is why you want to approach them laterally as well, including other closely related topics.
Below are six Facebook Graph search strings you can use right now (watch this video tutorial on using Graph Search).
- Pages liked by people who like [your page]
- Pages liked by women who like [your page]
- Pages liked by men who like [your page]
- Fans of [your page] and [another page]
- Restaurants in [your city] visited by people who like [your page]
- Pages like by people who live in [your city] and like [your page]
Before diving in whole-hog on these lateral targets, test a few out on your Facebook Page. Post visual content about these lateral topics, and also text updates seeking to understand how these interests relate to your niche.
3. Use Facebook Ads to Learn About Your Donors
The strategies I’ve mentioned up until now primarily rely on engaging your Facebook fans, or using graph search to research what your fans like.
But what if you want to research how your donors might feel about a campaign? For example, during breast cancer awareness month, what will people be most interested in discussing? Breast cancer legislation? New research? How kids help their moms win over breast cancer?
Obviously want to make a little bit more investment then posting one or two Facebook page updates or doing a quick Facebook graph search.
This is where you can use custom audiences to display or hide posts to customers, subscribers, etc.
And if you want to be really strict about your experiment, create an unpublished post and targeted only to those customers. You could compare with another unpublished post that you target to your Facebook fans, but not customers.
Let Engagement Rate be the Judge
Engagement rate is the percent of people that saw an update that liked, commented on, or shared it.
For example, if 1,000 people saw a photo you posted on your Facebook Page, and 100 people liked, commented on, or shared it, the engagement rate would be 10%.
Because engagement rate highlights how people talk about your posts, it’s essentially a measurement of content quality.
The more relevant and interesting your update is to your fans, the higher your engagement rate percent will be for that update.