Here are some Facebook features and how to use them for marketing your business:
Messenger Platform. More than 900 million people around the world communicate via Facebook Messenger. It has opened up messaging to all businesses to enable them to communicate to customers in a new way. Using Messenger “bots,” companies can offer automated subscription content, customized communication as well as live automated messages with clients/customers who opt in. This tool also supports sending and receiving text and images. This is essentially a shift from public to private social media.
Live Video. Facebook has been spending a lot of time enriching the video experience on its site and it has paid off - users are watching more than 100 million hours of video every day on Facebook! Businesses are able to stream Facebook Live broadcasts from a number of devices. Using this tool, your next presentation could go much further than you ever thought possible with Facebook Live.
Video Profiles. You can bring your profile to life on your law firm Facebook page by using Facebook’s Profile Expression Kit. Repurpose the videos you’ve created for your website and YouTube for your Facebook profile to connect more powerfully with potential customers.
Instant Articles. This is a wonderful way to extend the reach of your blog or newsletter content and get more engagement from your audience on Facebook. Instant Articles are better than mobile web articles because they load much faster while accommodating video and image zoom. Facebook has been beta-testing Instant Articles for almost a year and their research says they receive 20% more clicks and shared 30% more than mobile web articles.
How to Grow Your Facebook Audience
BuzzSumo analyzed 500 million Facebook posts to discover what types of posts create the most engagement. Use this data to plot your posting strategy and you will likely see an uptick in the number of likes, comments and shares your posts receive:
1. Schedule evening posts. Posts published between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET receive 88% more interactions than the average post.
2. Use images. Posts that use an image receive 179% more interactions than the average Facebook post.
3. Pose a question. Posts ending with a question receive 162% more interactions than the average post.
4. Use video. Videos are the most shared post type on Facebook, averaging 89.5 shares per video. There are an increasing number of free and low cost tools that make creating short, ad-type videos on Facebook a breeze. I recently started playing around with slide.ly and found it very easy to use.
5. Post on Sundays. Posts published on a Sunday receive 52.9% more interactions than the average post. Fewer companies are posting on the weekends, yet more consumers are reading posts on the weekends.
6. Keep posts brief. Posts with 150-200 characters performed the best, averaging 238.75 shares.
7. Post directly to Facebook. Posting with a third party tool results in 89.5% less engagement than posting directly to Facebook.
8. Link to longer content. Posts that link to long form content (2,000+ words) receive 40% more interactions than linking to shorter content.