By pro­mot­ing the most rel­e­vant and engag­ing con­tent with more refined tar­get­ing tech­niques and opti­miz­ing using insights about your audi­ence, you can help ensure you’re reach­ing your tar­get con­sumers at the moments they’re look­ing for you on Face­book.

If search is the king of intent, social rules the realm of inter­ac­tion. In the ini­tial onset, social adver­tis­ing through chan­nels such as Face­book helped fill in the top of the pur­chase fun­nel, dri­ving aware­ness and con­sid­er­a­tion in a social­ly engag­ing envi­ron­ment. As Face­book has evolved, the adver­tis­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty has grown to cap­ture more down­stream activ­i­ty too.

As of the end of June 2014, Face­book boast­ed an impres­sive 1.32 bil­lion active users world­wide. For brands look­ing to con­nect with con­sumers through the fun­nel, the oppor­tu­ni­ty is prime on Face­book.

The con­cern of many brands has been, though, the decline of organ­ic reach on Face­book over the past year – a fact that Face­book acknowl­edged back in Decem­ber. The trend has con­tin­ued, too.

In Feb­ru­ary, Social@Ogilvy ana­lyzed more than 100 brand Face­book pages and found that organ­ic reach clocked in at an aver­age of 6 per­cent, a drop of 49 per­cent from lev­els mea­sured in Octo­ber 2013.

More recent­ly, Face­book wrote on its blog that “on aver­age, there are 1,500 sto­ries that could appear in a person’s News Feed each time they log onto Face­book” and of those, approx­i­mate­ly 300 are dis­played.

The shelf life of social con­tent is short. With a shrink­ing num­ber of slots, there’s grow­ing com­pe­ti­tion to get in front of con­sumers.

Mar­keters look­ing to ensure they reach con­sumers at key aper­tures on the path to pur­chase via Face­book should hone in on three key pil­lars: con­tent, audi­ences, and insights

Pillar 1: Content

Engag­ing and rel­e­vant con­tent is the foun­da­tion for a brand’s strong social pres­ence.

For its part, Face­book has been mak­ing changes to the news­feed and posts in an effort to cre­ate the best expe­ri­ence for its users. Ear­li­er this year, the social net­work announced plans to weed out the spam prac­tice of “like-bait­ing” and just a few weeks ago, took steps to reduce click-bait­ing as well. These mea­sures boil down to Face­book putting the onus on brands to devel­op high­er qual­i­ty con­tent.

As a best prac­tice, test a vari­ety of types of con­tent to see what mes­sages and for­mats res­onate with con­sumers and ensure you are using the appro­pri­ate “sto­ry type” on Face­book when post­ing. This means that links should appear in the link for­mat or else risk being penal­ized, for exam­ple. To elic­it high­er response rates, keep mes­sages and calls-to-action clear and con­cise.

If an audi­ence finds your con­tent relat­able and mem­o­rable, and it’s deliv­ered in an opti­mal fash­ion, then it gets peo­ple lik­ing, shar­ing, and com­ment­ing. This momen­tum has the abil­i­ty to turn your con­tent into con­ver­sa­tion, poten­tial cus­tomers into buy­ers, and fans into loy­al­ists.

Moose­jaw Moun­taineer­ing is one brand that‘s real­ly engaged cus­tomers in the social media expe­ri­ence. One way it has done this is by solic­it­ing the com­mu­ni­ty to send in pho­tos (“Custy Pics”), which they then source for the page’s cov­er pho­tos.

Moose­jaw’s con­tent can be a lit­tle off-the-wall at times (curi­ous about the 10 pit­falls of Glamp­ing, any­one?), but it works with the per­sona they have estab­lished and the fans con­tin­ue to respond pos­i­tive­ly.

But what good is “engag­ing” con­tent when it suf­fers from low vis­i­bil­i­ty?

Pillar 2: Audiences

Good con­tent is table stakes, but you will like­ly find that this alone might not get your brand the reach they’re seek­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly when try­ing to engage prospec­tive cus­tomers. Brands and orga­ni­za­tions have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to pro­mote organ­ic con­tent to high­ly tar­get­ed audi­ences through paid adver­tis­ing, essen­tial­ly ampli­fy­ing high-per­form­ing posts.

While organ­ic reach has been wan­ing, Face­book has been busy intro­duc­ing more advanced tar­get­ing options to help boost paid efforts. By lever­ag­ing Cus­tom Audi­ences in con­junc­tion with Looka­likes, you can eas­i­ly iden­ti­fy offline audi­ences from among Face­book users then extend reach to find new con­sumers who share com­mon char­ac­ter­is­tics with your exist­ing cus­tomers.

This is what eco-friend­ly jew­el­ry retail­er Alex and Ani did to help extend reach and boost sales last hol­i­day sea­son. By con­nect­ing offline lists like CRM data­bas­es, brands can find exist­ing cus­tomers on Face­book and dri­ve exclu­sive incen­tives to these indi­vid­u­als. Then, looka­likes allow for added expan­sion into sim­i­lar audi­ences – such as those who have vis­it­ed your web­site or down­loaded your app.

Cus­tom Audi­ences can be fur­ther refined by con­nect­ing the intent sig­nals from paid search clicks to cor­re­spond­ing con­sumers on Face­book. This inno­va­tion opens up new path­ways to tar­get audi­ences across chan­nels and helps improve ad rel­e­van­cy, which would like­ly lead to a lift in per­for­mance.

Also con­sid­er unpub­lished page post ads as a way to cre­ate more tai­lored mes­sag­ing with­out over­sat­u­rat­ing audi­ences. Through Unpub­lished Page Post ads, you can take vari­a­tions on your best per­form­ing owned media posts and then send those out to spe­cif­ic, gran­u­lar tar­gets, includ­ing the Cus­tom and Looka­like Audi­ences, as men­tioned above. This ad type allows for more dis­creet test­ing of images and copy to find the best-fit com­bi­na­tions for spe­cif­ic audi­ence types.

Pillar 3: Insights

With sol­id con­tent and sophis­ti­cat­ed audi­ence tar­get­ing in place, you can now opti­mize your pro­grams and see how Face­book ampli­fi­ca­tion con­tributes to dri­ving bot­tom-line goals of sales and rev­enue. How­ev­er, in today’s data-dri­ven world, met­rics are only as good as the insights obtained and the actions tak­en as a result of analy­sis.

A cus­tomer-cen­tric approach should car­ry over when lever­ag­ing social data to opti­mize cam­paigns; in this way, you can remain focused on deliv­er­ing high­ly rel­e­vant mes­sages and ads with which audi­ence will more like­ly inter­act and respond.

Ask your­self:

• Have you viewed demo­graph­ic data to improve mes­sag­ing across ages, gen­ders, and geo­gra­phies?
• Is your audi­ence most active dur­ing par­tic­u­lar times of day or days of the week and if so, are you tak­ing advan­tage?
• Are you pro­vid­ing a dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed mobile ad expe­ri­ences to dri­ve cus­tomers to your app, if applic­a­ble?
• Are you exam­in­ing owned and paid strate­gies under the same lens to iden­ti­fy oppor­tu­ni­ties for pro­gram syn­er­gy?
• Are you view­ing social in a silo or are you tak­ing a holis­tic approach to attri­bu­tion and mea­sure­ment across chan­nels?
• Can you learn some­thing about con­ver­sion habits based on where Face­book falls in the path?

How is your brand pro­mot­ing its most rel­e­vant and engag­ing con­tent on Face­book to cre­ate aware­ness and increase your num­bers of loy­al fol­low­ers and brand advo­cates?