Many of my clients do use Facebook marketing. When asked, they will say for them it is the cheapest and most profitable form of advertising. That is why they use it.
The first question that many who are not using Facebook advertising will ask is, can they get more people onto their Facebook business page without paying? This is tough as you will find that even with those who liked your page, few get your latest updates.
Although Facebook sees itself as an advertising medium, its main hook is for family and friends. These get priority. What is left, hundreds of million organisations worldwide with Facebook pages are all fighting to get noticed. Now a few years ago, Facebook changed their systems so that unpaid got less to try to get people to pay if they wanted to get people to see their latest stuff. This means you are competing with all these people in a smaller space.
So those that use Facebook today, what they see is what Facebook thinks most interests them. If Facebook feels what you posted is of little interest to your public and does not invite meaningful interaction, they will not display it.
Your content has to be good to show up if you do not pay.
It is not so easy if you pay either, but that is a story for another post.
Now if you do want to use Facebook you need to test and continually review what is working. No point in using Facebook measures as really who cares how many likes you get in business if no one comes and importantly buys. So put in Facebook if possible a rarely used phone number and/or email address. Most email systems support disposable addresses without needing to register them first. This is perfect for this task.
Next is what you need to know is who did respond to your Facebook post.
Luckily our point of sale software has a very advanced system for doing this. What you need to do is enter into the POS system a Promotion ID.
Firstly you need a Promotion ID here are some tips:
- Make a unique ID for each different promotion. This will allow you to distinguish each promotion. Don’t reuse or recycle these IDs for different promotions. If you feel you must use the same ID add a date or year after it, eg add say F2Nov2021 (F=Facebook, 2/Nov/2021 if it was first live today).
- Once you make an ID, don't change it.
- Do not use spaces, it can be confusing, e.g. a person was looking at Jan 2019, and it sometimes worked, and sometimes it did not. What we found was the ID was Jan 2019 (One space no, two spaces which he sometimes used)
Now in Detailed Transaction Entry see the red arrow, below for more details.
Now you see the Promotion ID.
Enter the code when putting in the sales.
Now you can watch the transactions based on this code, letting you recognise whether you are receiving value for your efforts.
