Using Facebook to generate audience traffic Freelancer work....

 Make Respunding To Comments A Priority...

Using Facebook to generate free traffic is rarely a “set it and forget it” activity. You want users to comment on your posts and when they do you need to respond swiftly to these comments. Someone has taken the time to add a comment so you need to respect this and respond accordingly.

Research has shown that businesses that respond to comments on their posts have a lot more success on Facebook than those that don’t. A lot of the time a comment is actually a question from someone in your target audience. Other people will have the same question in their mind so by answering this you will make a lot of your audience happy.

You need to know this – it is expected that businesses respond quickly to comments on Facebook these days. We understand that people live in different time zones but do everything that you can to respond fast. Research has shown that four hours is a reasonable time for a comment response and will meet the expectations of a Facebook audience.

Replying to the comments that you receive on your posts shows that you care about your audience and you are listening to what they have to say. When you respond properly you will encourage more of your audience to leave comments on future posts. You can set up a chatbot to respond fast for you if you want.

Align your website content to What Work well on Facebook

You want to get as many shares, likes and comments as possible on Facebook. The more shares, likes and comments you have, the more you will know that the content that you are providing is resonating with your audience. You are giving them what they want.

If you know that a certain type of content creates a great deal of engagement why wouldn’t you add this type of content to your website or blog? There is lots of research and statistics to support this.

The most popular type of content on Facebook all of the time is:

• Quizzes
• Heartwarming stories
• “How to” guides
• Bold opinion posts
• Shocking or surprising statistics

To replicate this on your site does not mean that you have to compromise on quality. Use titles for your posts that pique the interest of your site visitors. Most will be Facebook users anyway and they will appreciate it if you take a similar stance with your website.

Use a Compelling Call To Action in your post

We think that this is obvious but you would be surprised how many Facebook marketers drop the ball with this. You have spent a long time creating a perfect Facebook post and then you don’t ask the user to do something – it just doesn’t make any sense.

If you want people to take action on Facebook (or online in general) then you need to tell them what to do. Some people are uncomfortable with this but it is true and you need to do it. You need to include a call to action (CTA) with your posts.

You need to bear in mind that Facebook has been cracking down on “engagement bait” posts for some time now. A few years ago you could say things like “smash a like on the post” and “share this post with your friends”. The Facebook algorithm will restrict your reach if you do this often enough.

But that doesn’t mean that you should shy away from adding a compelling CTA to your posts. You need to tell your audience that you really want to hear from them and that their opinion matters.

One of the best forms of CTA is to ask a question in your post. Plan for a sequence of posts where you will pick the brains of your audience. Don’t outright beg for shares, comments or likes because this could get you into trouble.

Use video

Videos are immensely popular on Facebook. Facebook users consume over 8 billion videos each day. The simple fact is that users would much sooner watch a short video than read a lot of text. You could call this laziness, but often it will be preferable or more convenient for the user to consume your content in this way.

If you are not posting videos to Facebook then you are missing out on an opportunity to drive free traffic. The problem with videos is that they take time and effort (and often money) to make so this puts a lot of marketers off. But the engagement you will get from good videos will certainly be worth it.

A lot of marketers make the mistake of uploading their videos to YouTube and then posting links to these in Facebook. You will get far more views if you upload the video to Facebook itself. This is known as “native video” and Facebook will always prefer this over links to external sites such as YouTube.

Of course you should have a YouTube channel for your marketing, what we are recommending is that you take this video content and repurpose it for Facebook. Making a square video rather than the 16:9 aspect will help. This is because most Facebook users will be on their mobile devices.

There are a number of online services that you can use to create Facebook “square” videos. There are some free options, but if you plan to post a lot of video content (and you should) then you will probably need a paid option. These are not usually very expensive.

Something that will really drive engagement is using Facebook Live. Users really like live content and you can get significantly higher numbers of views, and therefore traffic, if you go down the live video route.