If you want your Facebook marketing efforts to be maintainable and grow, you’ll want to start creating a Facebook Marketing system. Building a successful business definitely requires hiring the right people and having a great product. Yet arguably the third most important element is creating processes and systems that produce reliable results. Here are some great ways to start building a Facebook Marketing machine.
Plan Your Posts
The first step is to have a general schedule planned along with a list of topic areas. We provide some great guidance on choosing topics for your Facebook posts in the previous article. This week, simplify your life by deciding which topics you will highlight when. If you only post once a day, a simple list of “Day – Category” will work. For us, this looks something like:
- Monday – Free Website Analysis
- Tuesday – Share blog post
- Wednesday – Share upcoming local event
- Thursday – Varies
- Friday – Showcase recent work
If you need to post multiple times each day then a better process is probably a long list of topics. Some might be on there more than once. Work your way down the list place a checkmark each time you hit a topic. Within a few days you’ll be able to identify a fixed rotation that removes the guesswork and the headache.
Create a Social Calendar
Next, take that list and put it into your calendar. Here at our office we use Google Calendar which allows us to create a color-coded social Media schedule that everyone can access. After you’ve laid that out, take it a step further. Instead of laying out generic categories for each day, begin replacing those with specific topics. In our case this Tuesday no longer says “Blog post”, instead for a couple weeks now it has said “FB Marketing Simplify”.
Don’t forget – you can use on-line tools like Hootsuite to pre-schedule your posts so they go out automatically, no matter how busy you are!
Task & Train
The final piece to systematizing your Facebook marketing is to get your team involved. With an outline and a schedeule, you should be able to assign the follow-thru to your employees. Have a meeting where you discuss the value of social growth to your business. Have them read these articles in our Facebook marketing series, and then follow that up with another discussion. Then, task them accordingly with keeping up with Social Media on a daily or weekly basis. We have one social-centered client who requires that each employee post to the business’ Facebook page at least once per shift! What a great way to keep your team engaged with your clients!
This is Part 4 of 4 in our Facebook Marketing series. Click for part one, two, or three.
Hopefully you’ve learned a lot from this series, or at least picked up some new ideas. Remember that Facebook is not just about marketing, but also about engaging your clients. But any business can benefit from the brand awareness created over time through social media marketing. If this series has raised a few questions or you have suggestions and tips, please leave them using the comments below!