We have all heard how social media can improve our businesses brand and marketing exposure, but how can your brand create content that is relevant and engaging? Over the past five years, we’ve developed several strategies to increase Hatch’s social exposure and recently saw quite the tick in the positive direction. What did we do? We created a solid piece of content and added fuel to the fire, but only after we saw what it would produce organically. In this piece, we will outline the process we used, what content we created and what it produced, specifically using Facebook. 

What do I post on Facebook?

Create solid content. That’s what everyone says, but how do you know what’s actually solid content. For the purpose of this post, you can break down content into ten categories: Positive, Negative, Controversial, Funny, Inspirational, Education/Helpful, Cats/Babies, Congratulatory, Questions or Something Else. As a business, it’s important to publish a plethora of different posts that have some relevance to your company – and I don’t mean only specifically about your company. For Hatch, most of our content falls into either the educational or the inspirational categories. 

If you look online at what types of content receive the most engagement it is material that speaks to specific people who can relate. You can do this by sharing a video, a meme, or even a quote from someone in you respect in your industry.

When do I post to Facebook?

There are plenty of studies and statistics that say you should post on Facebook during specific hours, but those simply don’t work for everyone. Through our insights, we believe you should post after you’ve tested your followers’ habits. Once you actually know when your followers are online, that’s when you should post. 

Now I know what you are thinking, Zack, these are people you are friends with! Yes, they are and you should try to engage with your customers on social as well so that they engage with your business posts. If your clients aren’t on, don’t post!

How to ensure engagement?

Ahh, the 1 Million Dollar question, how do you make sure you get engagement? Great question. Before you post content, share the concept to a select few “super users”. A super user is a fan or customer who typically engages with your content. Before you share with the world, ask them what they think. If they give you a thumbs up, hit send and share it. If not, ask what they think needs to be changed and change it. 

When do I spend money?

Spending money on ads can get very expensive very quickly. Some say to only dark post, which means to publish to a specifically selected audience without posting to your wall. Some people say you should be boosting posts. We say a mixture is best. However, only boost a post once you have already gained traction on it unboosted. How can you track this? By simply looking at your analytics you’ll know if a post is getting a disproportionate amount of likes and shares. Then it’s probably safe to assume that people like the content. We then would take that campaign and boost it to a group of people we believe are our target customers.

Now, as with any type of advertising, be sure to know your desired result and how to track it. Your goal could be sales, an email opt-in, or simply gaining awareness. In the campaign below, we saw 40 shares when the post was unboosted and then decided that we could share this message with a boost and likely get similar results.

To find a target you can have a very specific audience or a more general one. We have targets that focus on anything from wealth and education to location. Depending on what we are trying to accomplish we choose different demographics. We spent $50 for a few days with the goal to provide us with brand awareness through a testimonial.

Since this campaign hits a lot of hot and controversial topics, we thought it would do well. We were right. Desmond has become a solid spokesperson for us through this video even though he only mentions us for a few seconds, people can relate to and appreciate what he is trying to accomplish. Something Hatch can get behind. Our full results we over 300 shares and close to 30,000 views. Well worth the fifty bucks spent. 

What do I do once my campaign ends?

So your campaign has ended and unless you keep running the boosted ad, you won’t get a lot of engagement, but that does not mean you are done. One of our favorite hacks is to now go to who liked the post and invite them to like your page. You can do this by hovering over and clicking those who liked and then a pop-up opens a new field and allows you to invite those who have yet to like your page. By doing this consistently we are able to provide even more value to our boosted post by asking those who engaged to follow us. Which, will allow us to provide more value through our page, without having to buy likes.

Bonus!

Is Facebook Live a good investment?

For a long time, we did not have access to Facebook Live, but since we were given access we learned that it’s an amazing avenue for engagement. Not only can you communicate with followers immediately, you can also download the video and upload smaller portions for engagement plus upload it to YouTube. We learned a lot on what works best on Facebook Live and recorded this video to show you.

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