Insight

Running a successful social media account for your brand or business can be tough. Between planning content, posting content, creating attractive visuals, and responding to messages, your workload can add up, and it can be frustrating when your posts on social media go unnoticed!

As a social media agency, we are experienced in helping our clients manage their social media pages through content strategy and planning. Based on that, here are some of our recommended do’s and don’ts to best optimise your brand’s Facebook presence.

1. Know who your audience is.

Your brand’s target audience is arguably the most important point there is. Your messaging needs to be on-brand, but it also needs to be relevant to your audience to be effective. Firstly, you need to identify your target market, then learn more about who your actual audience is via social media analytics and social ad testing.

For example, ookyo, a telco brand with a mainly millennial audience, would require content that’s fun and eye-catching.

View Facebook Post

On the other hand, Sangobion, an iron supplement brand with a target audience of women from the ages of 25 to 45, would require messaging that’s more serious and informational.

View Facebook Post

2. Have a content strategy in place.

Everything begins with content strategy on a good social media page. Having strategy in place gives your brand’s content purpose, creates a strong identity for your brand, and will therefore strengthen the overall quality of the messaging that goes out to your target audience.

Having a dedicated social media strategy team that does in-depth research on your brand and its competitors is one way that could help your brand acquire a structured social media plan to produce relevant content.

Take a look at some of the pages that we manage for our clients with social media strategy in place.

View Work

3. Less is more.

It’s a common phrase for a reason. This applies to both images and your word count on Facebook posts!

Busy and cluttered images can distract your audience from your product(s). According to Facebook’s best practices, photos that have background space and are symmetrical and well-lit tend to gain better audience engagement.

How about words? Well, whether you’re referring to the text within an image or the text accompanying it, keeping it short is key to getting better audience engagement. You’ll need short, snappy, and a relevant message to get your audience to stop scrolling and pay attention.

For example, this Facebook post on the left would work better than the one beside it – it cuts through all the clutter and gets the message across.

4. The ideal video ad length is within 15-30 seconds.

According to Facebook, people often watch mobile videos in short bursts when they’re on-the-go. This means that you’ve got to capture your audience’s attention early, or else they’ll get bored and click away from content that doesn’t engage them. Therefore, it’s best to keep your videos short, preferably within 15 to 30 seconds, and mention your brand – or the point of your video – within the first 3 seconds. In a study done by Facebook, consumers were 23% more likely to remember a brand if it was featured within the first 3 seconds, versus 13% more likely if it was featured within the first 4.

Here’s an example of a video that we did for Haier Malaysia’s Facebook page:

Watch video

5. Use hashtags in your post captions but keep quality in mind over quantity.

Hashtags on social media are used to categorise content, make it easier to discover new content, and gather social insights. Therefore, it’s important to know the most effective way of using them.

While hashtags work better on Instagram than Facebook, using the relevant ones on both platforms and less of them are key to better audience engagement. People tend to scroll past quicker if you #use #too #many #hashtags #that #aren’t #relevant. (See what we mean?)

Here’s how we incorporated a hashtag into the post caption to accompany a video posted on MyTOWN KL’s page.

View Facebook Post

6. Explore different post formats.

You can play around with different post formats as well. JPEG and generic video format posts work well, but it can create more audience engagement if you switch things up once in a while to include formats including but not limited to canvas, “tap to expand” posts, mini albums, 180° or 360° image posts, and polls.

Here’s an example of a 360° image post that we create as part of an engagement contest for EVA Air Malaysia’s Facebook page.

View Facebook Post