These days, it seems like social media platforms are multiplying like Tribbles.
Clubhouse. Whisper. Caffeine. Yammer. Chirp. No, I’m not just picking random words out of a hat here; I’m naming a handful of social media upstarts that could soon become the next big thing. Suffice it to say, it’s pretty hard to keep up with the constantly shifting social media landscape.
There’s one platform, however, that towers above all others: Facebook. It seems invincible, and maybe it is. After all, you don’t see acclaimed director David Fincher directing an Oscar-winning motion picture about TikTok, do you?
Facebook has weathered many ups and downs over the years. It’s so ubiquitous that many of us take it for granted. Some may think it’s outdated or uncool, but the numbers don’t lie. More people use Facebook than any other social media platform in the world.
In other words, if you’re a business or marketing professional operating online in 2022, Facebook is still, after all these years, arguably the most powerful tool for advertising on the entire Internet. But just like the social media landscape, Facebook’s own internal workings are always changing and evolving. If you want to make the most of its limitless marketing potential, it pays to keep up to date with the latest Facebook tricks, tips, traps, and tactics.
Marketing on Facebook: Why it Matters in 2022
Pop quiz: how many people do you know that use Facebook? Your friends? Your family? Your co-workers? You? For many of us, it’s probably a lot easier to come up with a list of people we know that don’t use Facebook, because it’s usually a pretty short list.
To wit, according to Statista, as of 2022 Facebook has almost 3 billion users worldwide. Yes, that’s a billion with a b. By contrast, the entire combined population of the United States, Mexico, and Canada is a mere 504 million. With an m.
Here are a few more important Facebook statistics for marketers:
7 Important Facebook Tricks Every Marketer Should Know
Now that you know why having a good Facebook marketing strategy is such a big deal, let’s talk about how to get the most of it when pursuing your own marketing efforts. Below, I’ve outlined seven Facebook tricks that are more important in 2022 than ever before.
1. Engage With Your Audience Directly via Live Streaming
They say that a picture’s worth a thousand words. Facebook Live video streams run at 30 frames per second. If every frame is a picture, and every second is a frame, then Facebook Live is worth millions of words. Maybe even more than that.
Live streaming is becoming increasingly popular on social media platforms, proving especially useful for ecommerce digital marketing campaigns. Videos appeal to users in a way that text and even still images do not. That goes double for live videos, where users know they’re not just watching a prerecorded event, but are actually participating in something as it happens.
Facebook Live videos garner larger user engagement numbers than virtually any other kind of content. Regular news updates, product reveals, Q&A sessions, and tutorials are just a few of the ways you can leverage this fact to your brand’s advantage.
2. User Experience Optimization Isn’t Just for Your Main Site
The importance of user experience optimization cannot be overstated. If a user visits a page, site, or profile associated with your brand and can’t easily find the information they’re looking for, they’re not going to wrestle with poor navigation. They’re just going to go somewhere else.
This is as true on Facebook as it is on any other corner of the Internet. Yet, for some reason, many businesses don’t bother customizing their Facebook page navigation layout. They simply accept the default format, either unaware or uninterested in how it might affect user experience.
While all Facebook pages are uniform to a certain degree, you might be surprised at just how much you can modify. The tabs at the top of the page can be rearranged or deleted, and you can even choose the exact hierarchy of tabs in your drop-down menu. Take advantage of these capabilities to ensure that the information your audience is looking for is always prominent and easily accessible.
3. Open Graph Helps Facebook to Understand You Better
Another Facebook feature that too few companies make use of is Open Graph. Meta, the aptly named company behind Facebook, introduced Open Graph meta tags way back in 2010. Why, then, do I still see so many businesses failing to use Open Graph to its full potential?
Open Graph not only helps streamline any website content that you share on Facebook, it also enables brands to create their own third-party apps and then directly connect to the platform. These apps can then be used to monitor conversions of all kinds, notifying you whenever users perform a specific desired action.
Ultimately, the point of Open Graph meta tags, like all meta tags, is to help web crawlers and social media apps understand your brand better. It tells Facebook’s robot brain what you do, who your audience is, and how you want users to interact with your content. With so much competition on the Internet, clarifying these things shouldn’t be treated as an afterthought. It should be treated as an essential.
4. Make Use of Facebook Creator Studio’s A/B Testing Tools
No, A/B testing is not a way of gauging how well kindergarten students have learned the alphabet. A/B testing is a form of conversion rate optimization that enables online businesses to experiment with new and different marketing strategies.
A/B testing essentially creates two different versions of a website, page, or profile. One version is unchanged. The other version incorporates the aforementioned new strategies. Depending on how successful the new strategies are, this can help a company decide whether they’re worth pursuing on a wider scale.
Facebook’s Creator Studio includes an A/B testing system that allows you to experiment with up to four different post variants at once. Instead of making any of these posts go live on your page, the system circulates them through separate, isolated subsets of your followers to evaluate their performance. The one that does best will then automatically be posted when the test is finished.
5. Study Your Competitors Through Facebook’s Ad Library
If you’ve ever paid for Facebook ads, you might be familiar with the Ad Library. Or maybe not. A repository of every ad that has run on Facebook for the last seven years, it mostly exists as a means of providing transparency in regard to political advertising.
The Ad Library offers a very unique opportunity for digital marketers, however. It provides access to hundreds of thousands of competitor advertising campaigns, if not millions. This instantly puts a massive, easy-to-use, and extremely curatable treasure trove of data at your fingertips.
With the Ad Library, marketers and the companies they work for can see exactly how competitors tell their brand stories, what kind of messages are most effective with users, and how to use customer pain points to make the best possible use of your advertising budget.
6. Pinned Posts Allow You to Boost High-Performing Content
Sometimes, the best Facebook tricks aren’t really tricks at all. Sometimes they’re staring you right in the face so blatantly, you barely even notice them. Facebook’s “pinned posts” feature is a good example. It doesn’t seem like anything special, just a way for you to keep important info visible to people who visit your profile. But look a little deeper, and you’ll see this feature is an underutilized gem.
Most businesses on Facebook view pinned posts as little more than a way of promoting an upcoming event, product, service, or sale, or informing users of temporary changes, such as modified hours of operation. Yawn.
Think about what pinning actually does, though. It guarantees that the first thing someone sees on your page is whatever you want them to see. If you pin your best-performing content there, this can result in an exponential increase in engagement. This makes it possible for online businesses to squeeze every last bit of juice out of their content marketing efforts.
7. Reels Are a Reel-y Promising Peek into Facebook’s Future
Way back at the very start of this blog, I made reference to TikTok, a short-form video-sharing app that has exploded in popularity in the last few years. Though it’s still not as widely used as Facebook, it has quickly become one of the most popular social media platforms for users in the 10-19 and 20-29 age demographics. And Facebook knows that.
Never one to hesitate when it comes to incorporating competitor innovations, Meta rolled out Facebook Reels in 2021, after seeing enormous success with them on its sister app, Instagram. Whether or not you decide to advertise on TikTok, you definitely need to be utilizing Reels on Facebook.
Though still in its infancy, the potential benefits of being an early adopter here are considerable. Keep in mind, Meta wants this system to be competitive with TikTok, so they’re going to continue promoting Reels to the moon and back. Now might be your last chance to get a first-class ticket before the rocket blasts off into the stratosphere. Buckle up!
Need a New Facebook Marketing Strategy? We Can Help!
Keeping up with the latest Facebook tricks and pitfalls isn’t easy, especially if you don’t have a dedicated social media marketing team with the knowledge and resources necessary to help you stay ahead of the curve. Fortunately, the digital marketing professionals at LSEO are ready, willing, and able to put their expertise to work for you.
Here at LSEO, we’ve made it our mission to study the ins and outs of social media. If you need help upping your social media marketing game, you’ve come to the right place. LSEO has the tools and the experience needed to boost your likes, shares, follows, clicks, and conversions.
Don’t wait. contact us today!