Are You Using Facebook to its Full Potential?

I like cat videos. Most people do, right?

Cats being silly, dogs being silly and people being silly. It’s all chewing gum for the brain.

Problem is it can also get business owners like you thinking it’s not an effective marketing tool for advice firms . Yes, I know. Goes against the grain of thinking; “Branding using Facebook is definitely an effective strategy. But marketing? Really?”

Absolutely!

Assuming your client base isn’t completely out of the ordinary, do you know that statistically, 80% of your clients are using Facebook?

Here’s the kicker.

60% of them likely use it for professional purposes.

Look at those numbers.

And how many advice professionals are still thinking of Facebook as the world’s leading international depository of cat videos, food pictures and status updates.

Does that sound like opportunity or what?

Shocked? Oh but we are just getting started.

We have so many wrong assumptions about Facebook, especially the demographics.

How many users and how much time do we spend on Facebook?

It turns out to be a whole lot.

According to the Global Web Index and the Pew Research Center

16 million Australians are connected on Facebook.

Surveys report that 79% of adults use Facebook and that 74% of that 79% use it for professional purposes.

For every 6 minutes we use the internet, 1 minute of it is us scrolling through our Facebook feed. That is almost 10 minutes for every hour online.

Australians spend 3.6 hours per day online on a PC and a little over an hour for mobile. Put that together and we get a whopping 1 hour and 17 minutes on Facebook per day.

77% of users with annual income of 98K AUD use Facebook. Facebook users are more affluent than you think.

For age brackets, 25-34 dominates at 26% of Facebook users, while 55-64 is at 7%

However, the fastest growing demographic is the 55 and above age bracket, which grew by a whopping 80%. Another interesting fact? The teen demographic is actually declining by 25%!

But wait, sure, those are great numbers. But does it mean that more Facebook likes mean more clients? It’s not about likes. If that’s the focus, it’s the wrong focus.

I’d trade 100 likes for one lead. Just because likes are the easiest to measure, does not mean that is how you should measure your marketing.

Studies show that likes are also not a very good predictor of sales or leads.

SocialSamosa reported that only 1% of those that liked a post will visit that Brand’s Facebook page.

And what do the 1% do on the page? They click around. Some of those who click around think about it.

That’s it.

If likes are not very useful indicators, what is the use of Facebook marketing then? Easy Peasy. The game is getting eyeballs on your great content and converting interest to leads. It’s about showing quality of marketing first, quantity of views second.

Here are a few more wrong assumptions that is stopping you from using Facebook efficiently.

Posting on Sunday. Usually, Sunday posts get a lot of reactions. Not for the people in the financial industry; Friday has an impact score of 1.2 (from maximum of 1.5) while Sunday? .05 only, the lowest.

1-4 p.m. is the best time to post. If you are fishing for likes only, then yes. But for lead conversion, 5-6 p.m. works best.

Asking questions. Asking and then providing a link decreases clicks by as much as 50% and reach to people by 40%. On the other hand, open-ended questions without links slightly increased clicks.

Branding. 40% of people do not like brand pages. What you can do is place “- first name” to not only personalize it, but to increase your reach.

Posting more. Posting 5-6 times actually decreases number of clicks. How about posting once or twice a day? Leads to 73% more comments giving you more chances to convert those to leads.

There are so many wrong assumptions about Facebook.

Hopefully that’s scuppered a few.

Now that you know better, you can start leveraging Facebook and see lead conversion, not just likes, grow.