This is an article “Why Publishers Should Focus on FB to Drive Online Revenue” by Marc Primo
Say you’re in the educational technology industry and are planning to publish high-quality content to generate leads and create conversions; have you ever wondered what social media efforts would work best to get real results in the shortest period? As it turns out, social media giant Facebook remains the undisputed platform for high-value publishing for half of the agencies and brands that want a broader reach.
While YouTube is another great publishing platform that gets 33% favor from brands, Facebook still tops the charts for revenue building, while its sister app Instagram is favored as the number one platform among 64% of publishers in terms of brand awareness.
Why should this matter for any serious publisher? For one, choosing the right social media platform for your business dictates how well you’ll convert your audiences and turn in profits via your business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) strategies. Different social channels offer specific opportunities to publishers depending on what ad formats they produce or what type of product they are selling.
Facebook has a network of apps that can be right for your content
To better understand how it all works, you’ll have to appreciate Facebook’s network of apps and platforms including Facebook and Instagram Feeds and Stories, Messenger, and its Audience Network to properly select which channels are best for what you publish online. If you rely on less text and more visuals or video, then you can publish on all four platforms.
However, if you are a developer who plans to increase more app installs, you might want to concentrate on publishing content on the Facebook Audience Network with over a thousand affiliated third-party apps you can post on.
Successfully optimizing your presence on social media also means you have to establish a solid content strategy that can address all of your potential audience’s FAQs and practically no other platform can be versatile enough to let you do all these than Facebook.
One of the most common mistakes publishers make in digital marketing is wasting their resources on flashy social networks that aren’t right for the content they are publishing. These days, it’s not enough anymore to just have an online presence on the various platforms, and producing content in higher quantities won’t matter if you don’t have an efficient publishing strategy in place.
For small to medium enterprises that aim to increase their revenue from content and drive traffic to their sites, mastering how Facebook marketing works can generate more leads and sales for better returns. The first step is knowing what your objectives are and identifying the best channels and audiences to tap for the content you publish.
After you’ve aligned the content with the right Facebook objectives (awareness, consideration, conversion), you can use the Test and Learn tool on Ads Manager to analyze your content’s results and what improvements you can make.
Creating native formats can also be done using Instant Articles which makes it easier to publish relevant content to the right audience without you having to do most of the work. What you only have to do is submit your content assets to Facebook for articles that can load nearly ten times faster than standard mobile web articles across regions and devices. This results in a decrease in your bounce rates and encourages better engagement among your followers.
Depending on your post’s timing, you can reach more audiences
Knowing when to hit that post button can also help you reach more audiences on Facebook organically. While there’s still no actual window to deliver the best results for various and specific content types, experts at Hubspot agree that 9AM is the golden hour for higher engagement. On the other hand, TrackMaven shows that 8PM every Thursday is the best time to post content, while 1PM to 3PM every Thursday and Friday can also increase your chances by 18%.
While all of these studies can be helpful for every publisher on Facebook, the wide range of results from other studies can somehow make it pretty difficult to pinpoint the exact best time to post on the platform. You’ll have to note certain factors such as niche market, audience location, and the time most of your core audiences are online to come up with a more reasonable window time for posting.
More content is being shared to Facebook’s 2.8 billion monthly active users than any other platform. Plus, the social media giant’s News Feed algorithm remains very effective in showing users which content might be appealing or interesting to them. Considering that an average of 1,500 Stories may appear in a single user’s News Feed every login, publishers have a good chance of reaching more audiences and turning them into loyal followers; though you still need to factor in the increasing competition for exposure on the platform.
Each time you publish content on Facebook, there are potentially over 1,500 other posts you’ll have to compete with, which makes proper timing essential. Algorithms also determine which content should appear on users’ News Feeds, so following the 1PM to 3PM rule isn’t exactly always appropriate and you may have to post during off-peak times to lessen the competition.
Data can help you troubleshoot publishing flaws
Performing efficient publishing strategies should always factor in what the data tells you. Fully understanding your audience behaviors on Facebook, reviewing your content performance, and finding out how your competitors perform make for a successful publishing campaign.
Try making your content more unique, comprehensive, and relevant to your core audience and complement your publishing campaign across Facebook’s Automatic Placements and other social media platforms to broaden your reach, awareness, consideration, and conversion.
You can find the most important factors via Facebook Insights which provides data points and metrics on Likes, engagement, reach, and demographics among others to help you grow your published content via analytics. Try testing variations of time windows throughout the day (including during the off-peak) and see which ones work the best for your content.
Once you get your numbers, review the data for each window and focus on the best-performing window on succeeding days by scheduling your posts on your Business Page. Last and most importantly, produce and publish high-quality content that’s interesting and helpful to your core audience - because everything boils down to what you really have to say.