Facebook is getting greedy. There, I said it. I’m not saying anything revolutionary, or all that shocking. It’s just the absolute truth. Back in the day, people would put up Facebook pages, and they would make bank off of it. How come? Facebook simply didn’t know that they were sitting on a gold mine.
There are all these people using Facebook and seeing ads on the side or on their timelines, and for the most part, this was basically dead inventory. Facebook didn’t know what to do with these spots, and they weren’t really actively selling ads for them.
Forward to today, Facebook is making billions of dollars every single year. They finally got a clue. Unfortunately, for the typical Facebook page, Facebook has been cracking down on the appearance of their posts. Now, if you join 10 Facebook pages, chances are you would only see updates for two of them from time to time. It’s as if you never joined the other Facebook pages.
That’s how tight the organic space inventory for Facebook pages, groups, and other free traffic areas on Facebook. Please understand, I’m not saying that you should stop using Facebook page to organically reach out to your followers. What I am saying is that you should supplement your local businesses’ organic page traffic through Facebook Ads.
You can promote your page to local buyers, and once they like your page, you can then advertise to them via ads. Usually, you would buy boosts for your posts so a lot of your content is more visible to the people who have already liked your Facebook page.
I know this is offensive to a lot of people. I mean, it does sound ludicrous. Think about it, people have already liked your page. They’ve already shown their interest in what you’re doing, and you are paying Facebook just to show them the stuff that they should be seeing in the first place.
After all, they sought you out, and they signed up to your page. Well, it is what it is, and like I said, Facebook has gotten greedy. Another way to read this is that Facebook has essentially gotten a clue as to the commercial power of their inventory.
So however you want to read it, the key is to benefit from it. And the best way to do this is to follow this stripped-down plan.
Step #1
Promote your Facebook page to your existing local customers
I don’t care how you do it. Put the URL of your Facebook page in every point of contact you have with your existing customer base. When people call you on your phone, make the answering machine talk about your Facebook page.
When people find you on social media outside of Facebook, talk about your Facebook page. When people get a receipt from your business, make sure it contains the URL to your Facebook page. The more you promote your Facebook page, the more local buyers will get a chance to like it.
Once they like it, you can then Facebook Ads in the form of boosts so you are constantly top of mind. This is how you leverage the value of your local customer base.
Step #2
Post content on your Facebook and boost them
Step #3
Figure out which content gets the most engagement and make more of them. By repeating all these steps, you get to become more visible with your target customers, and the more visible you become, the more they trust you and the more they will remember you. This can have a snowball effect on the amount of flesh and blood human beings walking through the physical doors of your brick-and-mortar local business.
