Analysis of the Food & Beverage sector by Linchpin SEO shows the following:
Likes make up 79% of all interactions, Comments on posts make up 15% and Sharing a post or link make up 6% of interactions.
Facebook posts made between 8pm and 7am get 14% more interaction than those between 8am and 7pm (which is slightly at odds with the research above by Hubspot). More research can be found here.
1-2 posts per day will result in 19% increase in engagement, however as with Twitter posting too many times can lead to disengagement if you post more than seven times a week of 25%. Even though only 18% of posts to Facebook occur over the weekend these posts are likely to engage 19% more than those during the week.
Facebook have invented a whole new way of advertising with ‘Likes’
The concept is simple. All you need to do is define your audience, design your advert and pay some money to advertise.
Before long, your advert is being shown to your potential customers enabling them to ‘Like’ your page.
Once they ‘Like’ your page, they are now yours. Whenever you want to advertise to them again, you simply post an update on your company page and they all get to see it on their status updates. Well actually no, not all of them… Facebook recently admitted how many people get to see your updates, and it is only 16%.
If this is the case, then how can you get your message to more of your followers?
The answer is that you can pay more money, to promote your post to more of your own followers. But wait a moment, we already paid once to have these ‘Like’ us in the first place. And that’s how Facebook makes more money from you so, remember, the next time you want to communicate with more of them, you have to pay again and so on for ever and ever.
So does that mean that Facebook advertising is like direct mail and email marketing?
In many respects yes, so the question should therefore be, if it works the same way, does direct mail, email and telephone activity work more effectively than social media channels like Facebook for generating leads? Only you can answer that question. If you want to look at this another way, it probably means that there is no point in using Facebook Ads to gain new ‘Likes’ as this is just a way to spend more money getting your message to them in the future. You should always drive the traffic to your own website or pages “organically” and by having quality, interesting content and capture their contact information for future follow up by means of something like a Mail Chimp newsletter.
Top Tip – your staff be made aware of how they should interact with social media sites when referring to your pub and your business, one way to do this is through training. Click here for a cost effective way to train staff on how to use social media.