Although the social media landscape changes rapidly, Facebook continues to be one of the most well-trafficked and important websites for almost all businesses to consider when thinking about their online marketing strategy. Change will always be a part of Internet marketing. However, there are definitely some tried and true tips that always work with Facebook marketing.

First, eliminate the steps that separate your customer from your conversion action by using a 3rd party service such as ActionSprout or other like products. Experienced marketers understand that a Facebook page for business is actually secondary to the newsfeed. Most people do not actually visit or even visit often Facebook pages, even of the businesses and personalities that they like. They see items in the newsfeed and respond to those.

There is a huge problem with most Facebook applications. They require the user to actually go to a Facebook page to convert them. If you are looking for emails or for people to enter contests, this extra work cuts down on your conversion rate.

However, with programs such as ActionSprout, you can eliminate this step and place the conversion action directly into the newsfeed. This makes it much easier to collect emails or send people to visit an outside website. Also, your potential customer does not need to leave the newsfeed to participate in whatever marketing action you want them to.

If you engage your customers with the conversion action in the newsfeed instead of on a Facebook page, you will see conversion rates of up to 20% higher, according to many online marketing experts. This helps you to understand who actually engages with your page and “dead likes.” You can then focus your efforts on the consumers actually interested in your products or services.

Second, use boosted posts judiciously but carefully and cautiously. Facebook is continuously devaluing the reach of organic content. Ever since it went public, the number of people that an organic Facebook post (not boosted with direct and spends) reaches has been decreasing steadily. Currently, an organic Facebook post reaches anywhere from 10-15% of the likes on a page.

Although difficult to reconcile this in an ethical manner, the fact remains that boosted posts are a necessary evil to use Facebook as the marketing tool that it was meant to be. The secret is to boost posts that bring the most traffic to your website and engage your audience. Most Internet marketing experts agree that new product announcement posts are the most popular to boost.

Many of these same experts agree that boosted posts should not be used to advertise on Facebook. Although the post reaches more people, if those people feel disgruntled at looking at an ad, you have done yourself no favors. You actually negatively affect your brand. Focus on new product announcements to make your ad spend on boosted posts worth it.

Correctly implemented, a boosted post has an organic residual that increases its statistics for the next few days. Make sure to monitor this activity on Facebook so that you can understand what your audience engages with most. This way, you can evolve your future posts around a similar marketing strategy and garner the same or better success.

Third, utilize third-party targeting applications in order to focus your ad spend even more. Like it or not, Facebook is becoming more pay-to-play by the day. In order to maximize your ad spend on Facebook, you must target your audience as precisely as possible.

With a third-party application such as Website Custom Audiences, you can limit and target the audience that you send your Facebook ads to. For instance, with Website Custom Audiences, you can send a Facebook ad only to people who visit a certain page on your website.

This is just one example of a creative way to target your audience. As Facebook closes its doors more to organic posting, marketers need to come up with smart ways to use applications together to reach the audience that it wants to reach.

Fourth, make sure that your public relations efforts are on point. Facebook is most well known as a tool for marketing. However, it is also a place for public relations as well. Facebook itself promotes its platform as an online Rolodex to the journalism industry, touting its “1 billion contacts.”

The journalism industry also uses Facebook in order to source stories. As a matter of fact, the new, very popular trending news feed on the right side of every Facebook page was placed there especially for the industry of journalism. It has been one of the most successful additions to the Facebook platform in many years.

In order to use PR on Facebook more effectively, replace that expensive press release with a targeted Facebook post or story. You need to report on breaking news and give targeted comments that also add to your link-building efforts and your Google PageRank. Facebook posts also go out much more quickly than the traditional public relations press release.

This gives you the edge over your competition as a leader on the industry scene. You can actually target specific members of the media with Facebook as well. Facebook Graph Search is a very powerful tool to find information on virtually anyone in the industry of journalism. You can also follow people based on the articles that they write as well as the media outlets that they work for.

Fifth, use Facebook Audience Insights in order to optimize your content strategy. Audience Insights on Facebook is another way to target your advertising more specifically for a higher return on investment. The application gives you the ability to see firsthand what your audience actually engages with in real-time.

This gives you the ability to profile the audience that you are trying to target in great detail. With this kind of data, you can understand if your photos work or whether you should do more contests. In time, you can fully understand your audience and the types of advertisements that they actually respond to.

Lastly, test all Facebook ads with a split test. Facebook is similar to Google in that keywords are very important in indexing content so that it can be found by people looking for it. You need to find the keywords that work for you in order to maximize your marketing efforts. Split testing (A/B Testing) gives you the ability to test a wide variety of audiences at once.

You do not need to spend your entire marketing budget putting your eggs in one basket. You can compare results with many different ads to see which ad performed with the highest ROI. Then, use only the most successful ad going forward. In order to achieve the best analysis, make sure to only modify one variable at once.

Modifying more than one can confuse results. It can give you analytic data that does not truly help you to focus your marketing efforts. As the structure of Facebook ads continues to change, your business needs to keep up with the curve.

However, these tips continue to create better-structured ads and more engaged audiences for Facebook pages and businesses around the world. Put them all to good use for yourself. You are sure to improve your engagement so that you can use Facebook as it was meant to be used.

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Links Web Design is a Website Design Company in Bangor, Maine.