The cost of FB assimilation

Brands have and continue to have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. After all it is the largest social medium sporting an impressive base of more than 1 billion users accounting for 13% of the TOTAL use of the entire Internet. That alone makes it hard to ignore.  However, your brand might be finding it increasingly difficult to get traction on the platform. Posts that at one point used to explode into viral gold now seem like a customer funnel that needs a bit of Drano.

So, what’s the answer?  Unfortunately it is simple to start but complicated to finish.

This is a platform that is free and easy to use for the user – not your brand hoping to speak to them. If you are having a problem reaching your customers, you are going to first need to build spend into your existing campaigns for Facebook posts. The good news here is that Facebook ads have some of the best cost per acquisition of any platform and the targeting (that is coming soon to Instagram) is unparalleled.

The second thing for your brand to check is that you actually have a strategy to not only get the content OUT to your customer but a strategy to CREATE that content first. In the marketing world the adage “content is king, context is god” is never more truthful than it is on Facebook. In order to connect you are going to have to create content and value. The age of the curator is alive and well, but if you are a brand that is merely a curator, your customer is going to figure out your source and cut out the middleman, which is you.

Instead, opt for creating things that are of tremendous value to your customer. What can you give to the customer that is both on-brand and of value to them? Once you are of the mindset that creating is a better play that curating it is time to create that strategy.

How many times per day?

There is no doubt that this will be, and likely should be, your first question.  How you answer it depends on your team and trust. Why trust? Because you are going to have to fall on your face and make some mistakes in order to figure out your cadence on Facebook. It will be more than what you need for LinkedIn, but not anything like what you might need to succeed on Twitter.

As a baseline I tend to start with three posts and work from there.  Try once in the morning and then again in the afternoon and finally once in the evening (research shows that 1 and 3pm are empirically good times for posts to get liked or shared). But a word of caution as this is where the failing comes in; you need to figure out when YOUR customer wants content. I typically look to post sometime after 7pm for my final push when people are winding down and looking for, you guessed it, content.

Once you have the times in place run with them for a month and then take a look at what you have and measure it against what you are trying to accomplish on Facebook. Do you want more likes? Clicks to your website? More comments and shares? Adjust your pace and your content to meet the goal you are trying to achieve.

Becoming a practitioner, like anything that is new, can be hard at first but if you have a plan and have the wherewithal to ditch that plan when it isn’t working you have the opportunity to win big on Facebook.  As with everything you have to show up and get your hands dirty first in order to enjoy the fruits of your labor.