Facebook ads get 22 billion clicks a year, and those ads reach a total of 1.6 billion active monthly users. It’s clear Facebook is an attractive channel for advertisers. Here are some methods we practice to use Facebook to increase conversion rates.

Targeting

Facebook’s targeting capabilities offer a scary amount of information – which is great for advertisers.

Facebook’s targeting options are immense, allowing you to pinpoint highly specific audiences that are likely to buy into your brand.

To make this happen, you’re going to layer targeting options to reach highly focused audiences and create ads specific to them.

Let’s say you’re a travel brand, for example. Your broad campaigns (like the one I described above) will play on the basic desire everyone has to travel, escape their job and taste luxury. You’ll also be targeting soft conversions with those campaigns – something like signing up for price updates when the hottest deals are available.

By targeting Life Events on Facebook, you can reach people who have a wedding coming up; people in the market for a honeymoon. So, instead of generic holiday ads, you target these people with offers for the ultimate honeymoon. Then, layer some demographic targeting as well to target men who are getting married, and offer them the perfect honeymoon for her.

You can use interest targeting to pinpoint couples who’ve shown an interest in cruises or other holiday types. The list of targeting options goes on and there’s almost no limit to how specific you can be. Find that sweet spot where your ads are seen by enough people to maximize leads, but guarantee they have a high possibility of converting.

Remarketing

Facebook optimizes ads for a wide range of campaign objectives. You’ll be asked what your advertising goal is as soon as you go to create an ad. This includes a Conversions objective which allows you to target new and previous visitors based on actions they take on your site, in a similar way to AdWords remarketing.

The great thing about the Conversion objective is it allows you to track a wide range of actions users take on your site and use this to a place where they are on your sales funnel. With this attribution, you can create ads designed to nudge them along the buying process.

Facebook Pixel

Facebook Pixel is a tracking code (like AdWords cookies) that allows you to track users and target them with remarketing ads. This is how you track user actions through your conversion objectives, which I mentioned earlier. Facebook Pixel essentially means you can do the following:

• Conversion tracking: See how successful your ads are by tracking the actions users take after clicking through to your site.
• Optimize bids for conversions: Automatically adjust your bids so ads show to people who are more likely to convert.
• Remarketing: Target previous visitors who didn’t convert the first time with remarketing ads.
• Reach a wider audience: Use Lookalike Audiences to reach people with similar interests as your existing customers and leads.

Custom Audiences

To create a Custom Audience you upload email lists and Facebook finds the accounts of those people, allowing you to target them with ads on Facebook. You can upload your email marketing lists and target your existing customers, whether they initially came from Facebook or not.

You can then use your Custom Audiences to create more relevant Lookalike Audiences. Don’t upload your entire email list and creating a single Custom Audience. Upload segmented lists based on the actions people took when they first signed up.

Although social media engagement has dropped by 50% over the last three years, 92% of marketers still believe that social media is vital to their business. This is probably because social media marketing doubles the conversion rate compared to traditional outbound marketing methods. 
Why? Because social media engagement strengthens brand loyalty, builds customer-brand relationships, and increases word-of-mouth advocacy, which is a much more effective conversion tool than advertising.

So, what’s caused this massive drop in content engagement? A common business misconception that simply being on social media is enough.

Showing up isn’t enough anymore. Intelligent marketers know that you can’t just throw a bunch of posts out there and hope that something sticks.

Audiences today are so desensitized by the flood of content that brands need to find new ways to proactively reach out, rather than passively waiting for them to engage.

If you’re seeing a decline in your engagement rates, here are five tips to break you out of your slump.

1. Be Active

The number one key to social media engagement success is to build long-term, meaningful relationships with your audience. Viral content isn’t going to cut it anymore. What audiences really want is responsive conversation, interaction that they know will make a difference.

Most brands have adopted social media, but their engagement efforts have generally only been one-way. They’re using social media as a bullhorn, rather than the walkie-talkie it’s designed to be.

If brands don’t respond to comments or messages, it screams, “We don’t really care about you.” Consistently responding to followers can create a domino effect, starting with an increase in your post’s organic reach and visibility on news feeds, leading to even higher engagement rates.

Respond quickly and consistently to as many comments as possible; never use cut-and-paste responses.

Flaunt Your Personality

People will judge your brand based on the way you interact with them on social media, so always be genuine. Understand your social media brand voice!

This is particularly important because 80% of people on social media choose to follow brands based on whether their content feels and sounds genuine.

In fact, people often unfollow brands for not having a personality, or for using slang and jargon that doesn’t match their brand voice.

“Don’t just give your customers something to talk about, give them somebody to talk about.”

Jay Baer

Whether you’re sassy like Wendy’s, or quirky like Starbucks Coffee, know who you are and don’t be afraid to let that personality shine.

P.S – Try replying to comments and messages with GIFs or memes occasionally  Its’s an easy way to inject some fun into your page.

3. Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback

Ask your followers for feedback on your service or product and respond to each of their comments- especially the negative ones.

Start a conversation about a trending topic. Ask what questions they would like to see answered in the next blog or post. Ask them how they tackle certain challenges or what was their best experience with a certain product. The more you know about your audience, the easier it will be to come up with great questions and better content. Increasing social media engagement moves beyond extracting likes to making real connections with consumers.

Alternatively, set up a poll just for fun. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram all have built-in poll functions for you:

4. Set a clear call-to-action

If anything, 2019 is the year of transparency. The cultured audience knows when they’re being tricked into something and 66% of consumers feel deceived when they realize they’ve been baited into reading sponsored content.

The main takeaway is this: be upfront with what you want.

Using words like “follow”, “retweet”, or “follow” can result in 20x the engagement rate compared to posts without clear CTAs.

5. Recognize your fans and post user-generated content

Fans appreciate being recognized by their favorite brands, and reposting UGC is a great way to strengthen your community and potentially increase sales.

Don’t believe me? See how the ‘InstaWhopper’ campaign by Burger King gathered over 34,000 coupons in 3 hours. Or, how this #AIRMAXLINE campaign by Nike resulted in over 15 million impressions and an increase in social media engagement in just two weeks – 100% organically.

Basically…

At the end of the day, social media is all about building relationships. Be a good listener, be authentic, be consistent, but shake things up sometimes. And remember that it’s not just about you and your needs.

In exchange, you’ll get a better understanding of your consumer base, which will help you to build better products or provide better service– both key components in improving your business.

Remember, relationships also take time to build, so don’t be disappointed if your engagement rates don’t immediately increase overnight.

Most importantly, social media is a continually evolving playing field, so be ready to adapt your strategy at any time.