How to Drive Traffic from Facebook
As we all know Facebook has been growing massively since it's beginning. Facebook sends out a SUPER DUPER tremendous amount of traffic, and as a result, more and more of us in the field of web marketing as a whole, as a correlated factor with things that tend to perform well in Google, are interested in the traffic that Facebook can drive as well as potentially growing it.
1) Know Your Facebook Audience
It's essential to make sure that your Facebook audience usage matches your content goals. If you're saying, “Hey, we're trying to convert people to a Banking software product in an industry that really targets technical folks on the gardening side,” Facebook growth is going to be really, really tough. On the other hand, if you'reselling posters of adorable cats and dogs. that's a Facebook audience right there. You should nail that. So understand that one basic concept and never disassociate those two. If you're working for a injury attorney, trying to get likes and shares is going to be really hard for their content and you'd might be bettert off trying to get some tweets or some shares on LinkedIn. Ya dig?
2) Knowing What Works For Your Topic
It's essential that you understand and know what works for your topic and luckily there's a great tool for this called BuzzSumo. Using BuzzSumo simply enter in your keywords and see the pieces of content that over the past six months or a year have performed the best across social networks. You can easily filter this directly by Facebook to see what's done best in your niche with your topics or around your subjects. It's a great way to know what will most likely work in the future but more importantly what doesn't work well.
3) Setup Analytics For Social Referrals.
Duahh! You'd be surprised how many people DON'T DO THIS, and it's just mind blowing. Setup analytics to be able to track future visits from an initial social referral. There's a great blog post from Chris Mikulin where he explains, in detail, how to setup custom system to track social referrals and then what that traffic does,where it goes and leaves after it's come into your website.
4) Your Headlines Matter!
Not so common would you have guessed that your headlines often matter more than the content you are posting itself? Yeah, no kidding. Think about it, how many links have you clicked from your Facebook timeline and your click was based off the headline alone? Yeah, a lot of links! This is because there's a ton of sharing going on that's merely around the text of that 5 to 15 word headline and these links tend to be extremely important in determining virality and ability to make their way across Facebook.
5) Visuals Stand Amongst The Most Clicked
Another duah, this has been true for many years now across all the social media platforms and should be known by any webmaster / social marketer, visuals tend to outperform non-visual content. When you have great visuals, the spread and share of those tends to be greater.
6) Timing Still Matters, A Little Bit
Timing still matters but interestingly enough, not as much as it used to. This is due to the relativism of Facebook's algorithm is simply much more intelligent than it used to be and as a result we're seeing that posting at a certain time of the day, when more people are on Facebook or less are, isn't quite as powerful as it used to be. That said, if you want to try some timing experiments all you need to do is simply watch your Facebook Insights.
7) Good Content Previals
A huge metric used to determine if your content is worthy is the number of comments, shares, and overall interactions with the post. It's no mystery that Facebook is using a dwell time metric, meaning that if they're looking at that post for a considerable amount of time, even if they're not clicking Like or Share or Comment or clicking, if they're observing it, if that's staying active on their Facebook feed in the visual portion of the panel, that seems to be a metric that Facebook is also using. So as you've probably heard before, content remains king, because this is a big driver for growing your engagement. You want more people to interact more heavily with your content.
8) Brand Page Reach Is Limited
Not surprising either, must of us already know this. As such, there have been many different Facebook algorithmic updates that talk about organic reach if you post this, or that. The flip side is Facebook has reduced some of those types of postings, as to not overfill the content metric of what's posted into the Facebook empire. The good news is that means there is a little bit more room for individual people, individual accounts, like your Facebook account, not your public page, has a little bit more opportunity to get reach versus brands, which for a while were more dominating than they are.
9) Facebook Traffic ROI? Buy More!
If your Facebook traffic has a nice return on investment, then buy more! This is one of those big reasons why you need to be measuring the second order effects and when that traffic comes back and those kinds of things—go ahead and pay to amplify. Just like Google Ads, if you see that a key word is performing well and you can turn on AdWords and you can get more of those visitors and they're going to convert, the same is abosoultely true on Facebook. Since Facebook's traffic is generally much cheaper on a per-click basis than Google's, buy away!!
10) Facebook Is Hard To Game
It never used to be easy to post and get your friends to share, like, interact with which sort of amplified its organic reach, because Facebook cares a ton about those first 5 or 10 minutes and what the engagement is like there. Unfortunately it doesn't work very well anymore. This is because Facebook is very careful to look at: Who did we organically show this to in the news feed? How many of them interacted and engaged with it? What's their history of interacting and engaging with stuff on this particular site? Are they somehow connected? Is there gaming going on here? Have they consistently liked everything that's come from this site in the first five minutes of it being published? All those kinds of things that you would expect them to eventually get to, they've really gotten to, and so gaming it is much more hard.
If you want to find ways to make Facebook work for you, you might want to merge the things that are on brand, on topic, helpful to you, actually will earn you good visits, but do take into account some of that human psychology that exists on Facebook.
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Posted In: Social Media and Digital Marketing, The Vast Universe