Facebook is a big deal; it has come a long way from its early days when it was just a social networking site for university students. Back then no one would have prophesied how massive it would get, media companies said that social media is not a business. They couldn’t be more wrong, Facebook is currently bigger than all media companies, both in audience and revenue. This a guide to Facebook marketing in South Africa, we will dive into everything you need to know.
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Audience
Let’s put things into perspective by analysing the audience Facebook has, Facebook has over 2 billion users and over 1.5 billion users are active on a daily basis, it is by far the biggest social network in the world. Over 17 million people use Facebook in South Africa, to put things in perspective, Uzalo, the most viewed Soap in South African Tv has just over 10 million viewers.
This means you can reach all your target market through Facebook; it is used by both the young and the old. The other powerful thing about Facebook is that it knows very well what its users are interested in. For example, it knows that Josh from Vanderbijlpark is interested in sport, Rolex watches, TV games and so on.
This is good news is that Facebook allows you to target people based off their interests. You can set an advert to only appear to people who are interested in tv games from Vanderbijlpark. This saves you a lot of money and it means those people will likely take action, unlike TV or Radio that broadcasts your ads to everyone, not necessarily your target market.
Facebook page
Now that we know the power of Facebook, let’s look at how we can access its massive audience. The first step would be to open a Facebook page for your business, it is free and very easy. Your Facebook page should include your logo and everything related to your business.
Promoting the like button
It’s super difficult to develop a strong following on Facebook naturally, it takes a long time to reach at least a thousand likes/followers on Facebook. Fortunately, Facebook is aware of this and it offers businesses an opportunity to promote the like button. This means that you will have to run an advert that promotes your Facebook page, when people click on the like button then they will automatically be your followers.
This is a good way to get a lot of people to follow you, with just R1 000 you can get over 1 000 people to follow your page. What’s good about this is that you don’t need to advertise to those people, they will see your posts. You would have instantly grown your audience and reach.
Now there is something that Facebook does that I and a lot of marketers don’t like, Facebook does not show your posts to 100% of your followers. Instead, it shows it to about 30% of people who follow your page. This is why you sometimes find a Facebook page with over 3 million followers getting only 120 likes on a post.
This is because Facebook did not show it to all the page followers, they want you to continuously pay for advertisements. For this reason, I don’t recommend that you spend a lot of money on promoting your Facebook page, just get at least one thousand followers, for PR purposes.
Boost post - Facebook advertising
Boosting a Facebook post is the most common way to market your business on Facebook. You basically make a post and post it to your Facebook page then pay Facebook to push it to people’s feed. This strategy is usually cost effective, it is used by most businesses as only R50 can get your post seen by more than 1 000 people. You can include the link to your website in the post and this can send a lot of people to your site.
Get More Website Visitors - Facebook advertising
That’s the name for one of the Facebook advertising options, it allows you to promote your website link through a button. This is commonly known as the signup button, it usually displays “learn more” or “sign up” or anything you want. This option is quite expensive compared to the rest but still way cheaper compared to other marketing platforms.
Facebook charges around R1 – R2 per link click on this option, but it’s cheaper than Google ads which can charge up to R20 per link click on ads. This is a great way to get traffic to your website and get more people to know about your site.
Powerful Targeting options
Facebook allows you to target exactly who you want your ad to be shown to. You can set an ad to show up for people who are software engineers and are currently residing in Johannesburg, you can also customize the age and include a list of other interests.
For eCommerce stores, Facebook allows you to target people who have visited your website before, including people who put something in the cart but didn’t finish the purchase.
It’s cheap
Facebook is by far the cheapest advertising platform when compared to TV, Radio, Newspaper, Google, linked in and other platforms. You can get started from as little as R50, it probably won’t take you far but that’s just how affordable it is.
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