Why MSPs Can’t Afford to Ignore Facebook

Facebook is a social media platform that many people love to hate on. However, despite the bad reputation it sometimes gets, it’s - by far - the most important social media platform for B2B marketers. Here’s why:

It’s Where Your Audience Is...All The Time

B2B decision makers are on Facebook a lot more frequently than you think. The average person spends approximately 42 minutes per day on Facebook. And, if you consider the fact that - according to Facebook itself - the median time spent on Facebook per day is 74% higher for business decision makers than it is compared to other users, there is a lot of opportunity to get in front of your target audience.

And, within the IT industry, your chances of reaching decision makers is even higher. Compared to all people on Facebook, these decision makers are:

• 2.2x’s more likely to be a daily active user
• 2.1x’s more likely to be active in the last 7 days
• 2.0x’s more likely to be active in the last 30 days

Other social media platforms, especially LinkedIn, are great to have when you are targeting business decision makers. But you won’t be able to get in front of your target audience as often because not nearly as many people are logging into LinkedIn on a daily basis, and they aren’t spending nearly as much time on it when they do.

It’s Where You’ll (Probably) Get the Most Engagement

If you want your audience to engage with your posts, Facebook is the place to be. Facebook dominates the social sharing arena, receiving over 90% of social shares when compared to Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+ Shares. And, when looking at Engagement Rates as a whole for the IT Industry in the B2B space, Facebook may fall behind Instagram, but the platform performs better than LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest.

While Instagram may be winning out in terms of engagement, it’s important to note that many of those you reach through Instagram may not be a part of your target audience. So, the engagement you get in the form of likes and comments may not lead to conversions as often as they would for Facebook.

It’s Targeting Abilities are Next Level

Facebook’s targeting measures are much more sophisticated than other social media platforms, allowing you better target those in your target audience so your advertising dollars aren’t wasted. You can set metrics than include things like age, gender, location, levels of education, job title, or current workplace. Or, you could use their other features:

• Custom Audiences: With Custom Audiences, you can upload your contact list or email addresses or phone numbers to Facebook, and set up a campaign that targets those on that list. 

• Lookalike Audiences: This tool allows you to target people who are similar to your current clients. 

• Dark Posting: Also known as unpublished posts, this allows you to run News Feed style ads that don’t publish to your Timeline or in your fans’ feeds organically. They allow for hyper-targeting, A/B testing, better guiding of organic traffic, and avoiding ad-only streams. 

• Retargeting: You can set up retargeting advertisements if you add a Facebook ‘pixel’ tracking code onto your website. With those advertisements, you can easily reach those who have visited a specific service page on your website and remind them about that particular service that they looked at.

It’s Paid Features are Affordable and Flexible

Facebook allow multiple paid ways for you to increase your reach: Facebook Advertisements and Boosting.

• Facebook Advertisements: Facebook Ad Manager allows you to run inexpensive campaigns using the targeting abilities mentioned in the previous section. These ads have an average lower cost per click than Google Ads and LinkedIn ads, And, if you diligently test your ads, you can lower your cost per click by 50% or more. 

• Boosting: If you want to promote your everyday posts with little effort, you can Boost them. With boosting, you set a particular budget so that you can make sure the cost stays within reach. While you don’t have all of the capabilities you do through Facebook Ad Manager, it’s still relatively easy to target the people you want, and Boosting takes less time to manage.

It’s Analytics Are Detailed and Easy to Understand

Facebook Page Insights allows you to easily see how your social media channel is performing. From this page, you can look at general statistics of your page and posts over a specific day or range of time, see how your promotions are doing, and more - all in one place that includes easy-to-understand graphs and tables.

It’s Where You Can (1) Educate, and (2) Build Relationships

You can do this with every social media platform - and, you should be trying to - but with Facebook, it’s even easier because of the nature of the platform itself and how frequently people use it.

With social media, you shouldn’t be focused on the hard-sell for the majority of your posts. Utilizing soft-sell methods that are designed to educate or build relationships with the people who view them will perform much better. This includes things like:

• Links to blog articles
• Educational facts and statistics
• Information about your company and the people inside
• Company culture pieces
• Local involvement
• Holiday posts

You can always direct people back to your website for the hard-sell through a soft-sell social media post. Or, if you want to do a hard-sell, make it a Dark-Posted Facebook Ad rather than a post on your page.

Give Facebook A Chance

If you need further convincing on what Facebook can do for your business or would like help getting your page up to snuff, we can help. Reach out to us today.