5 Reasons Your B2B Facebook Page May be Sputtering

You built your Facebook page for your B2B business but your customers aren’t coming. Your page likes are stagnant, and you aren’t getting the traffic or lead conversions you expected. What are you doing wrong? With over 2 Billion worldwide users representing every demographic under the sun, Facebook is a very valuable and affordable channel for B2B marketing. However, anyone can create a Facebook business page. Your challenge is to make it work for your B2B business.

Before you quit Facebook altogether, examine these five reasons why your Facebook page may be sputtering, and find out how to fix your missteps. With a few changes, you can attract a bigger audience, boost Facebook page engagement, convert visitors to leads, and drive B2B pipeline and revenues.

1. Lack of a Plan

Randomly posting on Facebook is not a strategy and will not accomplish much. A clear, actionable plan will help you set goals and define the steps you need to take to reach those goals. Are you hoping to generate more leads, drive more traffic to your website or blog, improve customer service or create a community? Whatever your goal, you should also establish measures of success to ensure you are meeting your goals. A documented plan will keep you focused on your goals and allow you to adjust your strategy as necessary.

Define your target market, considering key demographics such as gender, age, location and interests. Where do your customers hang out the most and what are they doing on those platforms? Look at how your competitors engage on social media. What channels do they use? How do they engage with their followers? How many likes or shares do their posts receive? You may find you can keep your Facebook page to engage a certain audience segment but you may need to add Twitter, LinkedIn or other platforms to your mix.

2. Posting Too Little (or Too Much)

Consistent and regular posting keeps your content visible to your audience. If you don’t post enough, you will not be at the top of your audience’s mind and they are likely to forget about you in favor of pages posting more often. However, posting too often can fill up your audience’s newsfeed and annoy them. The key is to strike a balance. Most experts suggest posting at least once or twice a day, using content from a variety of sources and alternating between promotional and non-promotional. However, you can always adjust once you see how your audience reacts.

Build a list of topics related to your overall Facebook strategy and create a schedule for your posts.  You can always adjust once you see how your audience reacts.  You might want to consider using a social media automation tool like Buffer or Hootsuite, which enables you to schedule posts in advance.

3. No Variety

Long form content can work on blogs or other mediums, but wordy and long posts on Facebook will most likely not be read. Instead, avoid lengthy content and keep posts short (200 characters). A variety of content is appealing to audiences so ensure your posts represent a mix of text, visual and video content.

• Text content can be short questions, facts, quotes, polls, quizzes and links.
• Visual content including relevant images, infographics and memes, amplifies your content and is more likely to be shared, increasing your content’s reach. People engage more with visuals. Image post should be used frequently because you can use in a variety of ways and can add links in the description. Facebook also tends to give posts with images more weight in their newsfeed algorithms.
• Video content is becoming increasingly popular on Facebook, especially with the emergence of Facebook Live. Facebook research shows video is three times more likely to make users feel connected and two times more likely to give them something to talk about. Live video streaming is also a great way to connect and engage users. Facebook reports live video attracts six times as many views as previously recorded content. Use video less often than other content types, maybe once a week. Live video should be shared for special occasions such as product launches, CEO interviews, user group meetings, etc.

4. Uninteresting Content

Sharing content on Facebook helps you get your message out to your followers but your Facebook page should be about your audience and the problems they are trying to solve, not just about your business. One of the most important factors in building a successful Facebook page and reaching a wider audience is to provide interesting, compelling and engaging content. Your content needs to provide value and give your audience something they can’t get anywhere else. Otherwise, your followers will go to your competitors to find compelling content.

Don’t limit your posts to content about your products or services. Create engaging content your audience will find relevant interesting. Audiences don’t want to be sold to but rather they want to be entertained, make connections and feel part of a community. Consider using:

• User-generated content, which leverages your audience to promote your business by submitting customer testimonials, reviews, photos and blog posts
• Interactive content such as polls and quizzes
• Giveaways and contests
• Video content they can’t get anywhere else including a tutorial, expert advice, interviews with employees or a behind-the-scenes look at your workplace
• Polls and questions

5. Not Using Facebook Ads

Building an audience organically on Facebook can be difficult for B2B companies. Facebook’s advertising system is easy to use an effective method to reach hundreds of Facebook users in your target audience at lower cost than other channels. With Facebook Ads, you can select your audience manually based on characteristics such as age or locations, upload a custom audience of your existing contacts, or use your customer information to identify a “lookalike” audience of similar people. You can also use Audience Insights learn more about your target audience’s attributes such as interests and behaviors.

Facebook offers advertising objectives to help you reach your business goals – awareness, consideration and conversions. You can use a variety of tools to achieve these objectives and grow your Facebook page. You can promote your page, posts, customer actions or your website.

Summary and Next Steps

Facebook has amazing potential to draw in your customers, build a fantastically loyal fan base, and to boost your leads and sales. Not covered in detail in this post however is the importance of testing in your Facebook campaigns. And we don’t mean simple A/B testing of headlines or images – that’s just not enough anymore.

If you’re serious about leveraging Facebook in general – and Facebook ads in particular – for B2B demand generation, contact us today and let us show you a better way to plan, automate, and optimize your Facebook and other social media ad campaigns for B2B sales pipeline and revenues.