Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms out there today. It’s the first position for social media platforms with the most number of accounts worldwide, followed by YouTube and Facebook Messenger. This data is significant because social media marketing has become a major part of digital marketing.

If you have a website, one of the best ways to market it is by improving your social media presence. When you plan to market your website on social media platforms, you can’t avoid Facebook since an estimate of 85% of the world (excluding China) use this platform. This makes it easier for businesses to target a majority of the world’s population and expand the sales horizon.

Moreover, most of your competitors must be marketing on Facebook. The only way to outdo them is to be on Facebook and employ the best marketing practices to attract a larger audience than them. With that said, here are some actionable tips you can follow for Facebook marketing to beat your competitors.

Study your competitors on Facebook

Since your primary goal to market your business on Facebook is to outdo competitors on the platform, it makes sense to analyze how their business page looks like and what activities they carry out. This also helps you to come up with a strategy that outperforms your competitors and keeps you ahead in the marketing game.

You can start by visiting your competitor’s page and observing how the information is displayed. Take note of how much time it takes for the messenger bot to respond. To have a better understanding of their messenger bot, try interacting with it, and figure out the associated strategies.

One of the important marketing aspects is ads. While you would have to utilize Facebook advertising for the best results, it would be best for you to observe the nature of the ads and their placement so that you can integrate advertisements into your strategy in the best way possible. Remember, as you make observations, it should help you in coming up with better ads, and not copying the same.

Also, you can see how often your competitors post, how they respond to and resolve complaints of their clients, and everything else that you would want to notice. Your analysis would provide you with ideas for coming up with a better strategy.

Have a business page on Facebook

Once you study your competitors, it would be easier for you to have your own business page on Facebook. Promoting your products or services on Facebook is not possible if you have a personal profile. The way the audience reacts to a business page is quite different from personal pages, which helps establish yourself as a business easier and also makes it more interactive for the audience.

Once your audience likes or follows your page, they would receive notifications and updates from your page. Moreover, you can also track how your business is doing on Facebook with the help of the advanced analytics tools that Facebook provides for business pages.

When you create a business page, one of the important aspects is making an easy to remember URL. When you change your URL such that it’s easy to memorize, people would be able to reach your page effortlessly. The best structure would be www.facebook.com/your business.

With that done, you can now take additional steps to optimize your business page on Facebook.

Make sure you add all the information about your business and give your contact details as well. Using a bunch of relevant keywords for Facebook would also help make your page more visible.

Make your profile all about your business

Your Facebook page is supposed to talk for your brand. So, make sure all the information that is there on social networking platforms is about your business and nothing personal. Your business should also be portrayed in a way that it has a brand personality. While you do have to assess your competitors, it’s better that you don’t copy or get “too” inspired by them.

Make sure that the unique aspects of your business are communicated in a way that the audience sees clearly how your business is different from your competitors. You can be quite creative by posting pictures, memes, and infographics that establish your brand effectively in the eyes of your audience.

Market the page and use Facebook advertising

Many people hesitate to use the advertising feature on Facebook. However, if you make use of Facebook advertising, you would be able to market your products or services way better than without advertising. Facebook ads have a particular form of reaching the audience, which helps in targeting people very specifically. That way, you reach out to a select number of people who would increase your sales.

Facebook ads work based on the set of keywords you use for the campaign. So, make sure you’re using a useful keyword tool to find relevant keywords. Competitor analysis also helps in coming up with useful keywords that you can incorporate into your content. You can assess the kind of keywords that your competitors use and are effective in targeting the audience. If a certain kind of audience is interested in your competitor’s page, there are better chances of the same audience being interested in your page. So, competitor analysis helps quite a lot in targeting people when it comes to keywords and Facebook ads.

Post regularly

Posting content consistently also helps in keeping the target audience engaged. If you’re not posting from time to time, people would soon forget your business. So, making an “out of the blue” appearance won’t be so useful. Make sure you decide how often you would be posting on your Facebook business page.

While posting regularly is one aspect that’s considered on Facebook, it’s also important that you post content at the best time so that you reach your audience when they’re active. As per a study by Sprout Social, people are more active on Facebook during the weekdays than on weekends. Furthermore, the busiest time on Facebook is between 9 am and 3 pm. Using these insights can help you in posting during the right time of the day so that people come across your content.

Don’t forget native videos

Undoubtedly, video marketing is an effective way of engaging most people irrespective of what medium you use. If your videos are interesting, you would be able to engage your audience for a longer time, and they would keep coming back to your page for more interesting content. However, you must think beyond posting conventional YouTube videos and come up with more ideas. Moreover, Facebook’s algorithm gives preference to native videos over videos that are taken from other platforms.

You can plan Q&As, interviews, how-to videos, tutorials, and much more- anything that goes well with the nature of your business and targets your Facebook audience better as well as impresses Facebook algorithms. However, you don’t have to keep posting videos too often or stick to just native videos. Facebook marketing can be a combination of videos, images, and written content.

Analyze constantly

When you implement a marketing strategy, it is crucial to set goals, have clear expectations, and assess your performance to measure whether your strategy is doing well. The constant assessment also helps in making adjustments and amendments to your marketing strategy so that you can be more accurate in your marketing ways.

You can start with the basic metrics, and as you go on to add more followers to your list, you can make more accurate measurements. Weekly analysis of your audience’s activity on your page should suffice. Analytics gives you a concrete idea as to what kind of content is well received by the audience and what can be skipped.

If you’re following all the above-mentioned tips when marketing on Facebook, you have more chances of outdoing your competitors on this social media platform. When it comes to marketing on various platforms, it is hard to specify when your effort would start to pay off exactly. Patience and consistency can take you a long way. So, make sure you design a workable strategy and track the progress you make, where you lag, and amend your marketing ways from time to time based on performance.

Facebook is going to be more involved in our lives as the years pass by. If you’re willing to outdo your competitors on each level, Facebook can’t be excluded from your plan of marketing. Besides Facebook, if you’re confused as to what other platforms can be useful, you can assess your competitors and see what platforms they’re active on and how they perform. Making this observation would help you attract more audience. However, your selling point would have to be something unique that your competitors don’t offer. This is how the clients of your competitors would want to try your products or give your services a shot.

This article is contributed by Senthil Kumar Hariram –Head of Marketing Team at Neil Patel Digital India.

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