With Facebook deploying constant tweaks to its news feed algorithm, the reach of organic Facebook page posts have dramatically dropped over the last 6-8 months and is going to drop further in 2015, as per Facebook’s announcement on the news feed.
What this means is that business pages will need to constantly innovate to provide interesting and engaging content to their users in order to reach their news feed. To aid in battling this scenario, we have compiled a list of lessons learnt:
Building custom audience
If you haven’t tried custom audience feature of Facebook yet, then 2015 is the year to leverage it. Your company can create a custom audience by uploading your email addresses, phone numbers or Facebook user IDs. This could be a list of your existing customers or prospects you met through your other promotional activities. By uploading this database on Facebook, your page can have unique campaigns targeted towards these audiences. Let’s assume you are running an ecommerce site and you have 1,000 users who bought t-shirts from you in the last 3 months. By uploading this database onto Facebook, you can feature your new t-shirt launches to this audience. Even if your database is small, Facebook allows you to expand it by creating a “Look-alike audience” which creates an audience similar to that of your uploaded database – they take into account demographic data and interests.
Using a landing page to run website conversion ads
If you are going to run an ad campaign on Facebook, make sure that the traffic is driven to a dedicated landing page where your visitors can be converted into potential leads/customers. In our experience over the last one year, running page like ads and boosted posts can have limited impact on the end result of your business (i.e. conversions or leads or online orders). Website conversion ads or website click ads on Facebook can be a far more effective medium to leverage the large audience that Facebook has in India.
A landing page is critical to deriving results because the landing page has a single focus and is able to convert a higher percentage of visitors into leads or customers.
Behaviour
The behaviour section of Facebook ad targeting is one of the most powerful targeting mediums. Using this section, your page can target users who have certain mobile/internet behaviour. An interesting targeting medium under behaviour is called “Online Spenders”. Facebook through its website conversion ads knows which users are spending online. It has an expat category if businesses are interested in targeting NRIs.
