5 Facebook Marketing Myths

Is your business using Facebook for marketing? Or have you yet to take up this opportunity to connect with your customers and clients?

As far as social networks go, Facebook remains the strong market leader in terms of numbers. Statista reports that as at August 2015, Facebook had 1.49 billion users, with all most 40% of the global online population using the channel.

Yet despite the staggering figures I find that there are still business owners out there that don’t want to begin any type of Facebook marketing campaign, or they’ve given up on using the channel for marketing having become frustrated by the miscommunication and myths that surround the consistently evolving platform.

So on this week’s blog I’ve made a list of 5 Facebook Marketing Myths, that I’m just about to bust!

1. Facebook is dying, all the kids are leaving – This is a semi myth, yes it’s true that a lot of teenagers and the younger demographic are heading away from the platform… But here’s why, it’s because their parents are using it! So when deciding whether you need to use Facebook for marketing, I ask you to look at who you’re targeting, it could still be a very valid platform for you to use.
2. Facebook are no longer showing organic business page updates in the news feed – Thankfully, not so. I recently reviewed the last 20 updates that appeared in my News Feed half of them were updates from friends. The other half were updates from business pages, only 20 per cent of those were sponsored posts. The other 80 per cent were News Feed stories are from business Pages that I actually like. That tells me that organic reach is still very much alive and well.
3. Facebook takes too much time – Whilst it’s true that social media, and in fact the Internet in general can gobble up time, this only happens if you let it. The key to using Facebook for business, is to put a strategy into place. Facebook marketing then becomes another job that you schedule into your working day. If you’re a business to business service provider, when you compare the time you might spend at face-to-face networking events including travel time, Facebook marketing is actually fairly time efficient.
4. The best time to share status updates is… – I’ve often heard other marketers say, “The best time to post is 9:00 am, 12:00 pm, 5:00 pm…” The list goes on. The fact of the matter is, only you will know the best time to share posts and status updates with your audience, and you will only discover that information through analysing your insights. You will undoubtedly see a trend develop, work out what’s right for you and your audience, and don’t listen to anybody else.
5. The best status updates include images – Photos and images used to be the headline act, but recent research suggests that native Facebook video posts now reach a wider audience. In all honesty, I think the best way to reach your audience is to post a good mix of text updates, photos, videos and links. The most important thing is that whatever you post should have value to your audience, and as long as it does they won’t care what form it takes.

I hope this myth-busting blog post has given you some insights, if you need any help developing a Facebook marketing plan, please give me a call.