Maybe you use your Facebook Fan Page as a way to promote your affiliate marketing website, or maybe you use it as your sole way of advertising links. Either way, Facebook is a powerful tool you can use to reach your audience. People of all ages have Facebook accounts, so whether you’re niche focuses on college students or senior citizens (or anyone in between), you’ll be able to share links, images, videos, and more on a page dedicated to your business.
But are you doing Facebook right? There are ways to get your content out there and noticed and there are things you might be doing that make people ignore your updates and continue to scroll through their timeline. Avoid the latter by following a few of these tips.
Always Include Visuals
This is a basic piece of Facebook fan page advice, but incredibly important—and if you’re not doing it, you’re absolutely hurting your chances to get content seen, liked, commented on, and shared. Your updates must include an image or—better yet, for your links—a preview complete with the image and starter text.
To include images, make sure they’re sized appropriately: 940 by 788 pixels. This is the ideal size for your photographs or images to show up prominently in the Facebook timeline. For a preview of a link that promotes an affiliate product or sends your audience straight to your affiliate marketing website, copy the URL and paste it into the section to share text. After a few seconds, a preview should appear, and you can then delete the URL from your update and simply share some thoughtful words with the preview. The same can even be done for YouTube videos.
Don’t Invite Everyone You Know To Like The Page
Of course, it’s always nice to see the number of people liking your Facebook page to go up. But would you rather have 1,000 people who like your page and rarely comment or share content or 100 people who are actively looking at and interacting with the things you post? Obviously, you want the latter.
As you start out with a Facebook fan page, it can be tempting to invite everyone you’re friends with to like the page. Instead, give a little thought to which people fall into your ideal client category. If your affiliate marketing business focuses on working women in their 30s, then inviting your nephew and uncle to like the page doesn’t make much sense. Let them know they can support you if they’d like, but instead focus your efforts on getting people to like your page who will actually benefit from your business.
Make It About The Audience, Not About You
Scroll through your Facebook timeline and you’ll see everyone posting updates about current events, products, interesting news, and images—generally with a concern about how it relates to the original poster. But when you’re running a Facebook fan page, you can’t focus your updates on these things and how they relate to you; instead, focus on the audience.
This is where considering your ideal client’s situation is a vital part of your Facebook marketing strategy. Think about their life experiences, their daily struggles, hobbies, financial situation, and interests. Sure, showing a little bit of behind-the-scenes or some personal updates to remind people that you are, in fact, human is a great way to connect with your audience on a deeper level. But your main focus should be posting updates that they’re going to love and want to share. If you’re constantly updating your audience on your pets or leaving personal notes out of context, it’s going to drive down your engagement.
Tag The Sites You Share
If you promote any affiliate links, make sure that you also tag the Facebook page for the website it directs to. This won’t necessarily guarantee more exposure, but it certainly can’t hurt. Even a single “like” of the post from this business could lead to hundreds of more people noticing the update in their feed. This natural and organic interaction on Facebook is what leads to reaching more people.
More than that, though, it will get this company to notice you. If they see that you are an active affiliate marketer and they know your business by name, it can only lead to bigger and better opportunities in the future. It’s an amazing way to network in a way that shows the company what you’re capable of and can pique their interest for projects down the road.
Be Reachable
Take a look at your Facebook page and see if your contact info is there. If not, update this right away! You don’t have to put your address or phone number, especially since you’re probably working from home, but you should have your website and a link to a contact page or an email address for the business. It’s incredibly frustrating to want to reach out to someone and have no way to do it, whatsoever. Additionally, add on any other social media handles that you use regularly, like Twitter or Instagram, so that people who really like your content can follow you on other channels.
Track Links
Set up specific links to use on your Facebook so that you can track their success. This is a basic tip, but surprisingly many affiliate marketers forget to do so. While this will be completely unnoticeable to your audience, it will be a useful tool in reassessing your Facebook marketing strategy, making improvements, and determining what to promote in the future.
