3 Strategies that Leverage Facebook Engagement to Improve Your Marketing

Facebook needs no introduction. While it may no longer be the fastest-growing social media platform, it still has the largest subscriber base in the world and is the most widely used. All that being said, it would be wise for you to continue prioritizing Facebook in your social media marketing strategy.

The digital advertising landscape has continued to change over the last few years, specifically regarding client security and third-party tracking. And once you also factor in the most recent iOS updates, it’s become more and more challenging to track user behavior and Facebook Ads campaign performance.

One method for countering these limitations is to use the sheer force of Facebook itself. Here are three ways you can leverage Facebook engagement to improve your marketing:

1: Focused Campaign Objectives

One of the best things about Facebook is that you can choose a campaign objective to help you optimize for your specific goals. Whenever creating a new campaign, it’s important to tell Facebook exactly what you’re hoping to achieve, so the campaign can be steered towards helping you to achieve it.

• Engagement Campaign

With an engagement-focused campaign, you can choose whether to optimize for page likes, post engagements, or event responses.

The goal here is to get users to take specific actions within the platform itself and be able to lean into Facebook’s interaction metrics including shares, likes, reactions, and comments. Users who take any of these actions are actually engaging with your content, and are likely to become more interested in following your brand.

• Video views campaigns

With Video views campaigns, you can optimize for either ThruPlay or 2-second continuous views of your video ads.

As you can see above, Facebook recommends choosing the ThruPlay option. If your video is 15 seconds in length or shorter, Facebook will optimize for full video viewing. If your video is longer than 15 secs, the campaign will be optimized for the 15 seconds you most want your users to see.

15 seconds might not sound like a long time, but consider your own watching habits when it comes to viewing promotional video content on Facebook or Instagram. You likely don’t tend to stay with a video ad longer than 15 seconds yourself.

Because social media users’ attention spans are so short, you need to strategize for this with your target audience. The best way to get the greatest value for your ad spend is to frontload your video with the most important information. That way, even if viewers don’t watch your video all the way through to the end, you’ll still be able to make an impact.

• Messages campaigns

You can utilize Facebook message campaigns to start or reignite discussions with users on the platform. These can open direct lines of conversation between users and your organization, without asking users to click off the platform.

You can also choose which channel you want to take in having these conversations: Messenger, WhatsApp, or Instagram Direct.

• Lead generation campaigns

Another method for getting users to take another step with you is the lead generation campaign. Lead generation forms can be utilized to gather user information directly on Facebook, again without asking users to click off of Facebook or to click over to your site. These Facebook lead ads include the following benefits:

• Users can submit forms without leaving Facebook.
• The lead data generated can be integrated right into your CRM.
• Form questions are customizable, so you can prompt for whatever types of information you’d like to get from your target audience.

2: Retargeting Page Engagers

Retargeting isn’t just something you can do with your website visitors. You can also retarget people who have engaged with your Facebook page or Instagram account. By definition, anyone who has chosen to engage with your page or account is a warmer contact than someone who hasn’t. Those should be the folks you want to work harder to build a connection with.

For website visitors, we create audiences by targeting people who have been tracked by the Facebook pixel. With engagement audiences, we can retarget people according to how they’ve specifically engaged with your brand on Facebook or Instagram.

The above graphic depicts all the different types of custom audiences you can create on Facebook. The first set comes from your list of sources, and the second set comes from what are known as meta sources, generated by specific engagements with your social media account.

Treat these audiences in much the same way as you would website visitors. If they’ve visited your page but have yet to purchase something from your shop, use a catalog campaign to inspire them to do so. If they’ve interacted with your posts or watched your videos, you could try sending them a lead gen form to get them to sign up for your newsletter. In short, your Facebook audience can be just as valuable as your website audience.

3: Expand your audience with lookalikes

By lookalikes, we don’t mean body doubles or clones. A lookalike audience is a new segment of users who share the same interests as users in your current retargeting list.

If you’ve had success in connecting with people who have visited your website, you can also grow your audience by creating a lookalike of your visitors and targeting them with some focused ad sets or campaigns. Lookalike campaigns are a great way to introduce more people to your brand and help to foster more interest in what you have to offer.

We certainly hope you’ll find these Facebook engagement, targeting, and retargeting tips to be helpful! Got questions? Not sure about what your best next step is in terms of maximizing your SMM effectiveness? Just get in touch with one of our friendly experts at Cibirix today. We’re in the business of helping your business to GROW through effective digital marketing, and we’re here to help!