With the billions of people who use Facebook all over the world, this platform represents a gold mine when it comes to reaching people and generating traffic for your online business. As an entrepreneur, you always have to be thinking about the most effective ways to raise the profitability of your business and this seems to be one of the obvious choices.

We’re not just talking about free advertising. Using the free method gives you a much smaller scope of reach than paid advertising would with Facebook. You can choose the frequency and the scope of your campaign, and also determine how to position if your business offering fits in with their advertising models.

How To Do It?

You have the option of promoting your business through posts made on your page, directing users to your website, and Facebook page promotion. What will prove most effective for you, is to have users directed to your website, which shifts the focus from your Facebook page and has prospects looking where the real action takes place. This is what will increase your chances of making an actual sale.

Through Facebook’s platform, you’d already have made choices as to the demographic you’re interested in reaching so each visitor is a potential client.  You’re already attracting the kind of traffic you’re looking for.

Develop The Art

You need to bear in mind that Facebook users in most cases are looking to connect with people they know or are seeking out acquaintances. Their primary focus tends not to be on making a purchase. You will find though that pages offering a service tend to do pretty well. You’ll, therefore, need to consider how to create a catchy ad, which will capture your audience’s attention and urge them to consider giving you more than passing glance.

The ideal approach is not to try to fill an already existing need; ads are full of this. You want to create a demand, which is more likely to get you noticed and followed. Of course, the objective is always to move the traffic to your website.

How To Properly Target?

Facebook offers you so many choices in terms of deciding which categories of individuals you want your ads to target. Among the most important categories are location, gender, age, and interests.

You really want to zoom in on the matter of the interest of your audience and we’re not just talking about their general interests only. While this may be somewhat helpful in determining what might be appealing to them, the real winner is the specific interests they’ve listed on their profile.

In looking at their specific interests, you also want to take it a step further by researching just how much those interests mean to them. This will allow you to really fine-tune your target audience so that your likelihood of traffic generation and ultimately conversion, will increase.

Ad Structure

You also want to give attention to the structure of your ads in order to target properly.  You can use original, purchased or (legally) free images to promote your ad. Choose carefully so that your image will speak to or resonate with your targeted audience.

Use clear and concise text with an easy to read and understand the message. This is where you’ll have to find your creative side, or draw on the expertise of someone, paid or otherwise, who can assist you with wording.

If you have a business model that will allow you to make effective use of Facebook’s advertising platform, then learning how to utilize it effectively will help you create targeted ads for the right demographic. Making use of the tips provided and taking the time to get familiar with the ins and outs of the advertising platform, will generate traffic and revenue for your online business.

Hashtags are useful for helping people discover your social media posts. Twitter was one of the first social networking sites to make good use of hashtags. But, they’re now an important part of all social networking sites, including Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram.

While hashtags are useful, they can also have a negative impact on your marketing efforts. You need to be careful with how you use hashtags in your posts. So, with that in mind, you should learn how to properly use hashtags for social media marketing.

The Basics of Hashtags for Social Media

First, let’s make sure you understand what a hashtag is and isn’t. You can think of hashtags as keywords. That’s a hashtag in a nutshell. It’s a keyword or keyword phrase without any spaces and it includes the pound sign at the beginning of the phrase.

The reason that you should use hashtags is that they’re used by social media search engines. When a user performs a search, the site finds relevant posts based on hashtags. And, hashtags are now used by almost every major social media site, including:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Google Plus
• Pinterest
• Tumblr
• Flickr

So, you know the basics. Next, find out how to properly include hashtags in your posts.

The Correct Way to Use Hashtags

If you can remember what hashtags are used for, it should be easy to use them properly. Here’s a quick look at the correct use of hashtags:

• Use up to 3 hashtags per post
• Make sure they’re relevant to your post
• Use local terms to increase local marketing

Generally, you’ll only use 2 or 3 hashtags per post. Adding too many hashtags shows that your posts don’t have a clear focus. Instagram is an exception to this rule. For example, Instagram posts with the highest engagement typically have 4 or 5 hashtags.

When choosing hashtags, make sure that they’re relevant to your post. Don’t include a hashtag simply because you think it’ll attract more users. You can take a look at trending hashtags to find examples, but don’t add them to your post unless they actually make sense in your post.

You can also use local terms to help increase local marketing. For example, when posting about an event, you can include the name of the city where the event will take place. The same applies to posts about local businesses.

The Incorrect Way to Use Hashtags

It’ll also help to learn the incorrect way to use hashtags. These are methods that you should avoid:

• Using too many hashtags
• Including hashtags in your message
• Using the same hashtags every time

Remember, don’t use too many hashtags. Unless you’re using Instagram, you should only use up to 3 hashtags. Otherwise, they’re no longer helpful.

Also, don’t include hashtags in your message. Don’t use them to replace words. This makes it hard to read your message. For example, you wouldn’t say, “check out our latest #SEO #service.” Place them at the end of the message.

The final tip is to avoid using the same hashtags every time. Mix it up. Using the same hashtags will only help you continue to attract the same people. Do you use the same keywords on every single page of your website? No. So, use a variety of relevant hashtags to appeal to more people.

As long as you follow these tips, hashtags should help you gain more followers and improve your social media marketing.

The frequency of your social media posts can directly impact the number of followers that you get and keep.

If you post too infrequently or frequently, you’ll lose followers. You’ll also have trouble getting people to take notice of your social media accounts. For this reason, you need to come up with a schedule.

A social media posting schedule takes into consideration the following factors:

• • The best time of the day to post

• • The best day of the week

• • The topics you should post about

• • The percentage of promotional content

Determine the Best Time of the Day and Best Day of the Week

The best time of the day to post will vary, depending on the social media platform that you use. Also, your target audience may have different internet preferences.

Don’t forget to take the time difference into consideration. 80% of the US population are in the Eastern or Central time zones. If you’re in California and want to target the largest audience, you’ll want to plan your posts based on EST time.

Engagement tends to peak at the following times during the weekdays:

• • 9 AM EST – overall engagement

• • 1 PM EST – most shares

• • 3 PM EST – most clicks

Next, consider the best day of the week to post. Monday through Wednesday, people are less active on social media. The majority of the population is too busy getting into the work week.

By Thursday, people are looking forward to the weekend and are more likely to spend time browsing on social media.

User engagement peaks on the weekends. This goes against previous studies that showed higher engagement during the weekdays. But, trends change over time.

The bottom line is that you should post between Thursday and Sunday to increase engagement. You should also plan at least one post for 9 AM, and subsequent posts around 1 and 3 PM.

Find Topics That Your Target Audience Will Enjoy

Along with considering the time of the day and the days of the week to post, you need to consider the topics of your posts. Find topics that your target audience will enjoy.

The first place to start is with the platform that you’re using. Facebook makes it easy to share just about anything, but Instagram and Pinterest are more image-centric. This means that content with a compelling image included in the post will be more effective on these platforms.

The topics should also be related to your niche and provide real value to your readers. This could include:

• • News

• • Tips and tutorials

• • Advice and suggestions

Essentially, it needs to contain beneficial information.

You can explore the most popular topics by performing searches through each social media platform. Each of these networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, includes a search box.

Type a keyword into the search box and look at the top results. View the profiles of the original posters of the top posts. Look for posters that tend to share content related to your niche and see what topics receive the most likes, shares, and retweets.

Balance Your Promotional Content

Along with your schedule and topics, you need to balance the use of promotional content. It’s a perfectly acceptable business practice to use self-promotional posts on social media. But, if you use too many promotional posts, you’ll lose followers.

20% appears to be the median where engagement increases or decreases based on the frequency of promotional posts. This means you should plan one promotional post out of every five posts.

If you post once per day, this is one promotional post per week. If you post several times per day, you’ll share a promotional post every other day.

Start using a social media posting schedule to increase the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts.
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