It’s time to keep yourself updated with the latest Facebook best practices!
For more than 15 years, Facebook has been the king of social media, with more than 2.8 billion active users. Not only that, but Facebook has also been a major factor in building social media marketing.
And even though newer, more “hip” platforms seem to have appeared (platforms like Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn), Facebook remains to be highly influential when it comes to getting business online.
Having said this, if you leave Facebook out of your marketing channels, you’ll only be putting yourself at a disadvantage.
And so, let’s look at the latest Facebook best practices to help you keep your business at the top.
Facebook Best Practices #1: Be Yourself
This first advice may not sound that important, but hear us out. Modern audiences are quick to pick out frauds, so you don’t want your business to be lumped into that list of insincere and contrived marketers.
Showcase the real personality of your business by making use of channels like Facebook Stories and Facebook Live. Create content like touring your audiences around your establishment, featuring interviews with your staff, how your business helps and impacts your community, and many others.
Don’t be too formal either. Make yourself hip by relaxing and just being yourself in the videos you create. Your audiences will love you better if you show them the real you.
Facebook Best Practices #2: Get That Blue Badge!
This is a surefire way to set your Facebook business page apart from other pages and make you credible to your audiences.
Have you ever seen that small blue checkmark right next to a Facebook page’s name? That’s not there just to be cute. It tells your visitor that the page they’re visiting is a real, confirmed business entity, and all the other pages that try to look like yours are just fakes.
Verifying your Facebook page isn’t complicated – you can do it in a few simple steps. You simply need to request this from Facebook via their security center and provide the following documents as proof that your page is the legitimate one:
- Photo ID (Drivers license, passport, national identification card)
- If your page represents an organization, one of the following: Phone/utility bill, certification of formation, articles of incorporation, or tax exemption documents
- Relevant URLs to your businesses’ webpage to illustrate your notability
As soon as you submit these documents, Facebook will get started with the review in order to determine whether your page needs that coveted blue badge or not.
Credibility isn’t the only thing a verified Facebook page gives you. It also gives you access to other cooler things that Facebook has cooking, like:
- Access to new tools before they are made available to other brands
- Boosts in Facebook’s search algorithm
Facebook Best Practices #3: Use Properly-Sized Images
This should be a no-brainer to every business owner that does social media and email marketing. Posting images that don’t have the right size can cause your targeted viewer to ignore your post and just move on.
Additionally, if you use images that are smaller than the recommended size, you’ll send a message to the viewer that your Facebook page isn’t credible and they should just look someplace else for their needs.
Below we’ve listed specific size images that are optimized for the best visibility on Facebook, so you can get your viewer to stay a few more seconds looking at your post instead of scrolling down immediately.
Optimal Facebook Image Sizes:
Profile Picture: 400×400 px
Business Page Cover Photo: 1200×674 px
Event Cover Photo: 1920×1995 px
Group Cover Photo: 1920×1005 px
Photo Post: 1200×630 px
Story Post: 1200×445 px
Carousel Ad: 1080×1080 px
Single Image Ad: 1200×628 px
Catalog Image: 1080×1080 px
People don’t normally tend to click on the image to see the whole picture, so use appropriately-sized images so when they see the post, they’ll see the exact message your photo would want to tell them.
Make sure you keep the list of image sizes above saved somewhere (a notepad, your whiteboard, your phone) so you can refer to it when creating images for your next Facebook post.
Facebook Best Practices #4: Videos Are All The Rage
Using videos for your Facebook posts helps increase your viewership by a mile. Videos are the best form of media, so don’t miss out on developing your own video posting strategy for your business.
Here are a few Facebook best practices to follow when creating your video posting strategy:
- If you’re doing a long video (more than 5 minutes), make sure to create a short intro to let people know what to expect. Viewers today have very short attention spans and if you can’t catch their attention in the first few seconds of your video they’re going to likely move on to the next video to watch it.
- Depending on what video you’re trying to make, it should not be too long to bore your viewer out. If you’re talking about your brand or product, then a three to five-minute video should be sufficient. Be concise when delivering your message in video.
- Like with doing image posts, be aware that Facebook also has its own recommended aspect ratio for its videos. 4:5 aspect ratio is the most recommended when doing video posts on Facebook.
Keep doing fresh content and with these video best practices in mind, you’ll most likely end up with more viewership this year.
Facebook Best Practices #5: Ask Questions
Facebook has a feature where you can post a question to get your viewers involved. This is important because people love to share and know information about the lives of their family, friends and other people.
By utilizing question-based posts in your Facebook page, you invite your audiences to participate, thus fulfilling their need to get involved in your page’s growth and success.
Your questions need not be too long or complicated. Sometimes, even short, general questions do the trick because it doesn’t require the visitor to think too long just to give an answer.
If you’re not sure what kinds of questions you need to ask your audience, here are a few ones you can start with:
- What’s your favorite (season, holiday, vacation spot, movie, etc.)?
- Which product is your favorite? XXX or XXX?
- When you were a child, what was your dream career?
- Which colors do you prefer on XXX products?
- How has XXX product improved your daily life?
Of course, don’t post questions for the sake of posting questions. Make it relevant to what your business is, so when people are giving their answers, you’re not only getting them engaged with your page, but you’re also getting information about their preferences and needs.
Hit two birds with one stone as they say.
Facebook Best Practices #6: Post The Right Amount, At The Right Time
There is an optimal number of posts to help you send your message and get your audience engaged with your business, and you shouldn’t stray away from it.
We already know that if you post rarely on Facebook, that’s not really going to help your social media marketing efforts. But do you know that overposting can be dangerous too?
If you go beyond the recommended amount of posts everyday, you run the risk of putting too much content out there that the more important ones get lost in the noise, and with too many of your posts showing up on your audience’s walls, they might just un-like or unfollow your page entirely due to getting annoyed.
So what is the optimal amount of posts per day?
There is no definite answer to this, because different business lines and audiences have different preferences on how many posts they want to see from the Facebook pages they follow.
When Hubspot conducted research on this subject, they found that while having more followers meant a higher return on investment with more posts, there is still a point of diminishing returns.
Ideally, you would want to have at least one or two posts a day. If your business relies on more social media exposure, you need to be posting more than that. News-based pages, politics-related pages and media-related pages typically make at least four posts in a single day, because there’s always fresh content to draw from.
Deciding how many times to post per day is relative to your return on investment. That’s why it’s crucial to track the clicks, impressions, and shares for your page.
How about the best time to post? Should I also plan for that?
Yes you should. According to a research done by RivalQ.com, the following best practices are recommended when planning your posts:
- Move away from lunchtime: Much like on Instagram, weekday mornings and afternoons see the highest concentration of posting, but don’t have much to show for themselves by way of engagement. Try a few early morning or late night Facebook posts to see if you can catch your followers outside of work.
- Try posting on weekend evenings: Brands are seeing above-average engagement rates on Facebook on the weekends, especially when moving away from posting between 10 am – 4 pm.
Of course, you should keep track of how much engagement your posts are getting so you can generate a trend, which would show you the best time to post for your line of business.
Facebook Best Practices #7: Take advantage of Facebook’s resources
Facebook provides its users with countless how-to guides, case studies, guidelines, and best practices to help you turn your page into a success. It’s a no-brainer to then conclude that the very creators of the platform are the best people to listen to when it comes to how to best succeed in this platform.
Take advantage of all of the resources that Facebook will provide you because it already gives you an advantage to those who don’t even take a peek at the resources.
You’ll eventually develop a strategy for your Facebook page that will cater to your targeted audience, but as a start, you should use their guidelines to give you an edge. Use Facebook’s resources as a stepping stone to growing your business page.
To start, read through Facebook’s “Get Started” resource because it will teach you how to establish your brand as a significant force when it comes to video content creation. If you are not planning to focus on video creation, there are other steps in that guide that will help you discover new ideas for building content and promoting your business.
Facebook Best Practices #8: Hashtags, Hashtags, Hashtags
When hashtags were first introduced to Facebook in 2015, people generally ignored them because most creators didn’t really know how important they were.
Fast forward to 2020, and hashtags began to see a significant amount of use after Facebook began stressing their importance to boost engagement by including post metrics for hashtags, like what Instagram started to do at that time.
According to Social Media Today, when Facebook began showing the top trending hashtags, alert page owners started to make use of those hashtags (if they were relevant to the business) in order to stay on top of search results.
This is important because using hashtags that are trending will help keep your page in the discussion when people search for those hashtags.
Like with everything social media related, using hashtags on Facebook should also be optimized. According to Scott Ayer of the Post Planner, one or two hashtags in a given post is the optimal number because it generated the highest number of engagements from viewers.
So unlike Instagram which seems to cause a page to thrive when more hashtags are used, the optimal amount when it comes to Facebook is one or two per post.
Facebook Best Practices #9: Chat With Your Visitors
Responding to your Facebook page messages is a crucial part of building trust between you and your viewers because it shows them that you’re not just using your page as a giant billboard – you really want to connect with your audience and understand them.
Not just answering messages, but answering in a timely fashion will also help you build more credibility because Facebook will display a badge on your page that you are very responsive with your messages.
You can achieve this badge if you have:
- A response rate of 90% or more
- A response time of less than 15 minutes
Engagement is always two-way when it comes to social media, so the more you respond to the messages from your audience, the more likely they are going to feel connected with your brand.
Facebook Best Practices #10: Boost Your Popular Posts
If you see that your post is doing really well, don’t just let it sit there and get drowned by newer posts. Facebook has a feature where you can boost a post of your choice so that it not only shows up again on your page, but it also reaches more audience than it normally can.
Out of all the best practices that are listed here, this is the only one where you’ll need to put some monetary investment.
Boosting a Facebook post is easy to do:
- Choose the post you want to boost
- Click “boost post”
- Choose which objective you’re looking to accomplish with this post: website visits, engagement, or direct messagaes
- Choose your CTA button
- Select your audience
- Set your budget and duration
When boosting your posts, you set the budget you are comfortable spending with the minimum spend set at $1 per day. The days of massive organic reach on Facebook are over. Everything is pay-to-play, but at least this method is cheap and simple to set up.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to Facebook best practices, things will always change as the platform continues to evolve.
This is why it’s important for business owners like you to make sure you’re always updated whenever the Facebook best practices change.
With your busy schedule, of course, you need help.
HoopJumper helps busy professionals like you manage your social media accounts and execute social advertising campaigns quickly, saving you months of expensive trial and error.
Let us help you take your Facebook page to the next level. Check out our Social Media Packages and see which one fits your business the best.