6 Tips for Facebook Advertising
For many businesses, organic (unpaid) reach on Facebook has really dropped in the last couple of years, as the algorithm often appears to prioritise adverts, updates from friends and posts that have started a discussion. This has left many small businesses wondering if they really need to pay to be seen?
The honest truth is that for most small businesses, if you want to reach a lot of people on Facebook, you probably will need to pay. But this isn’t as bad as it sounds! You can spend as little as £1 per day for however long you like on a Facebook advert, and to be honest that’s pretty hard to beat. Of course, the more you spend the more people you will reach, but even so it can be extremely cost effective.
If you’re a complete beginner to Facebook advertising and not technically minded, you might want to get some help setting up your ad account and running at least your first few adverts. But if you feel confident to do it yourself, here’s a few tips on running effective Facebook ads:
Read the community guidelines very carefully. You don’t want your ad account deactivated for a rule breach before you’ve even started!
Choose a good quality and eye-catching image or series of images.
Make sure there’s no typos in your caption, as you can’t easily edit it once it’s approved!
Ads created from scratch rather than boosted posts often see a better rate of return.
Consider your target audience carefully to make sure you’re marketing to your potential customers.
Keep an eye on how your ads are doing, experiment with different options, and use this information to refine what you create over time.
If you don’t feel ready to run Facebook adverts yet though, that’s okay. There’s a few things you can do to help improve your organic reach when doing an ordinary post. Focus on engaging content that encourages liking, commenting and sharing. Ask questions, request opinions or do something fun.
The other main way to improve your organic reach is to stop posting outbound links. Facebook wants people to stay on its platform, so it will only usually show one or two types of these posts in your feed, and they are more often than not to news articles.
It will take a while for these two changes to your organic posts to make a difference, probable several months, but keep at it and you can improve your organic Facebook reach.
If you would like our help with running Facebook ads, posting organically, or both, please get in touch.