All businesses need to have a Facebook page, and have employees spending time each day writing posts and monitoring comments – or do they?

It all comes down to your return on investment, a Facebook page is just a communication channel after all. But in order to understand what your return on investment is, you need to look at your whole marketing strategy.

Strategy

What is your objective to each of your market segments? Are you trying to drive engagement with the segment at the top or bottom of the funnel.

If your objective is to attract new customers to use your services, then a Facebook page isn’t going to be your communication channel of choice.  A Facebook page where people opt in to see your posts is different to Facebook advertising where you can pay to increase your brand awareness and reach new customers.

However, if you already have a large customer base and you’re focusing on customer retention then Facebook is a fantastic place to keep customers engaged with your organisation, allowing you to understand them and gather valuable feedback to improve your services.

Once you’ve reviewed your objectives, think about who your stakeholders are, who you want to talk to and if they are regularly on Facebook? If your key stakeholder is another organisation or government agency, is Facebook really the best channel to reach these people? If they are Facebook users, what tone of voice should you adopt to be the most relatable to them?

Monitoring and Measuring

If you don’t have a marketing strategy in place there are some tips in this article.

If you decide Facebook is a good communication channel within your strategy, you need to make sure that you are monitoring and measuring its performance.

It’s essential to have a dedicated staff resource to make sure the page is monitored every few hours and responses are sent to people quickly. This is a great way to increase your relationship with people; and Facebook monitors your response time and publishes it, so if you don’t respond quickly (or at all) every Facebook user who is researching your organisation may assume you have poor customer service.

The Facebook algorithm changes all the time, so it’s important to stay on top of current best practice – subscribing to blogs from social media platforms like Hootsuite, Sprout Social and HubSpot is a great place to start. Currently the goal is to make every post as engaging as possible, maximising the number of people commenting on each post and reacting to each other comments. So posting a closed-ended question isn’t going to generate a conversation and will result in a poor return on investment. Review all of your previous posts, understand which are generating the most engagement and which are reaching the greatest number of people.

Tip: If you have a large number of employees that are active on your page, make sure you exclude them in your analysis.  They may be skewing the data, after all they aren’t your target audience.

Once you’ve found the trend, base your future posts around these insights. Set benchmarks so you know what an acceptable return on investment is. By using the scheduled posts tab within Facebook Publishing Tools, you can write numerous posts at a time. This helps maintain a single-tone of voice, and allows you time to ensure each post is on strategy, rather than writing something because you haven’t posted for two days.

As well as analysing which posts work, look at the time of day and how often you need to post. If your community is really active you may want to post once a day, if not you may get a better overall response by posting once a week. Trial different strategies to find out what your Facebook community wants from you, and make sure you don’t waste unnecessary time and resources creating posts for the sake of it.

At least once a month, review your results and make sure that you are achieving at least as good a result as your benchmark. As the Facebook algorithm changes your results will vary, so what works now might not work as well in a month.  If you can’t organically meet your ROI benchmark then there is the option to boost posts. But before you do this review your marketing strategy and plan; understand the impact to the business of taking money from one activity and moving it to improve your Facebook page’s engagement.