A Guide to Facebook Marketing in 2024

Businesses of all sizes worldwide use Facebook’s platform to market their products and services to the 2.96 billion prospective customers who use the social media platform each month [1].

Many brands already have a presence on social media to establish credibility. However, as a business decision, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms can be powerful tools for promoting products and penetrating new markets. Once a strategy and plan are implemented, your brand can benefit from consistent messaging through content marketing and Facebook advertising to reach targeted audiences. 

This article will offer an overview of what Facebook marketing is and how it works, content strategies for your brand, and an introduction to Facebook advertising.

What is Facebook marketing?

Facebook marketing promotes a business and sustains the brand on the social media platform Facebook. It comprises organic (content) marketing and paid advertising as a boosted post or Facebook advertisement (ad). 

Facebook is one of the original forms of social media marketing and remains the most popular social media platform, followed by YouTube and WhatsApp [2].

Since 2007, when Facebook launched paid advertising, it has played a key role in how businesses use social media as a marketing tool. With the influx of content in Facebook feeds, organic posts can get lost in the algorithm. Paid ads help businesses target specific demographics to get their message out, especially for news of big launches, updates, and promotions.

Return on investment (ROI)

In 2022, Facebook’s advertising revenue was over $113 billion, down just slightly from $114 billion in 2021, but making great leaps since 2020 when Facebook generated $84 billion in ad revenue [2]. Whilst the pandemic and spending extra time on our phones may have influenced this increase, it demonstrates Facebook marketing’s continued importance and profitability. The platform can deliver high-impact advertising for a lower cost than other types of marketing because the aim of boosted posts and ads is to reach the right potential customer.

Build your brand on Facebook organically.

To build your brand on Facebook, you will need to develop a marketing strategy and plan that delivers high-quality content promoting your brand. This concept is considered 'organic'—just like the concept of organic fruits and vegetables, meaning nothing was added to the post to make it grow. Any traffic generated is organic because the business didn’t pay for advertising or post boosting. Later in the article, we will discuss 'paid' Facebook advertising strategies.

First, you will need a Facebook business page, which can be easily created using a personal account. Facebook has comprehensive step-by-step guides for creating or setting up your page. This video also briefly introduces setting up your social media presence on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Determine your audience

A core component of developing a social media brand presence is understanding who your audience is and what types of content will interest them. Does your audience want to be entertained or educated? Does a 2-for-1 discount on pizza sway them? Do they want to invest in high-quality products that will last a long time?

Determining your audience will help you create the right content and put it on the right platform (Facebook, Instagram, or both). You can then decide whether to rely on organic content or paid ads, boost posts or create ads, and spend money on advertising.

Example 1: Family-friendly British restaurant in London

This restaurant might have a target audience of 25- to 50-year-olds in London and surrounding boroughs. The restaurant owner runs the social media pages, and they might rely on paid ads to rotate weekly promotions to Facebook feeds and Messenger, but not on Instagram.

Example 2: Clothing brand selling plain T-shirts in various colours and shipping nationally

For a new clothing brand whose marketing appeal is that it sources from UK factories, the audience might be 18- to 35-year-old females in urban areas. The social media manager may experiment with A/B testing in York, Bristol, Oxford, and Canterbury before launching in major cities like Nottingham, Manchester, and Liverpool. With a primary focus on organic content, the manager only creates ads for the initial launch, paired with promotion and subsequent launches of new T-shirt colours on Facebook and Instagram.

Types of Facebook content to market your business

Facebook marketing is a form of content marketing. Different types of Facebook posts can be used to share your brand’s messages to the world, each serving its purpose in marketing a particular product or service. 

• Text post: The simplest of posts, text-only content is rare in Facebook marketing. This is because posts with photos, videos, graphics, or links are more likely to grab users’ attention. Text posts are typically used on personal accounts to source information, ask for recommendations, or share big announcements. 

• Photo post: Photographs can elicit strong emotions. Using one (or a few) high-quality photos in a Facebook post can showcase the available colours of a summer dress, spotlight a restaurant’s best appetiser or cocktail, or promote a tropical beach destination.

• Video post: Video accounts for a considerable amount of time spent on Facebook, both with and without sound, which means subtitles are important. Videos in Facebook posts can help a business tell its brand story or a news publication deliver live updates. 

• Linked content post: Posts can include links to your website, blog, or news article. Linked content can consist of a call to action (CTA) that may directly lead to sales, brand awareness, or promotions. 

• Facebook story: Facebook stories are photos or short video content that appear on the top of a news feed and remain for 24 hours. These tend to be casual updates, sometimes cross-posted from Instagram.

For organic content, brands should use high-quality photos and videos whenever possible, take advantage of memorable holidays and months, and craft genuine messages that reflect the brand. Then, consider which posts are worthy of boosting for a target audience.

Preparing media assets like photographs, videos, and graphics requires time, so planning is wise. Businesses typically use a content calendar to execute a social media plan in a timely, organised fashion. 

Cross-posting from Instagram

While many still use Facebook, Instagram (owned by Facebook’s parent company, Meta) has a different audience. For brands that target 18- to 29-year-olds, Instagram may be a more nuanced, visual-forward platform that can easily tag other brands in photos and stories. Brands can even share user-generated content. Compared to 69 percent of adults who say they use Facebook, about 40 percent use Instagram [3]. Of the adult Instagram users, 21 percent say they use it weekly, and 20 percent say they use it daily [3].

Instagram posts and stories can be cross-posted onto Facebook. The caveat is that the "@" tags will not transfer over, so Facebook story viewers will see a tag they cannot click. In contrast, tags to other pages in Instagram captions will not automatically translate into Facebook tags. A brand’s social media strategy often involves tweaking similar content slightly to fit each platform.

Build your brand with Facebook paid advertising.

After creating an organic brand presence on social media, you can focus on the two types of paid advertising available on Facebook. The first type is a boosted post. This increases your visibility by boosting specific posts to get the most out of your organic content, especially as Facebook changes its algorithm for showing posts in the news feed. The second is to create paid advertising campaigns using Facebook Ads Manager.

Boosting posts

A boosted post is organic content on your business page’s timeline, so you can add money to increase the likelihood of your target audience seeing it. This is a simple way to advertise on Facebook because it boosts a regular post that otherwise would not have received as much traffic. It helps drive potential customers to your page. 

When a post is boosted, it appears in your audience’s Facebook feed as an ad. You also have the option to select Instagram as an ad placement for a boosted post. In promoting a post, you can decide:

• Your audience: Target audience(s) based on demographics and location

• Your budget: How much you want to spend for the duration of your campaign

• Campaign duration: When you click "boost" and the ad is approved, your target audience will see your ad on their feed for a specified amount of time

Creating Facebook ads

Unlike boosted posts, Facebook ads are created in Ads Manager. With this tool, you can create, manage, and track ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or Audience Network. Ads Manager has many options for customising your ads, which makes this an excellent option for conducting A/B testing to reach your marketing goals.

There are four types of Facebook ads you can choose from:

• Image ads: These ads are static images in JPG or PNG format. Facebook recommends creating ads with 27 characters for the headline and up to 125 characters for the main message since longer character counts are truncated. This precious ad space can be used for calls to action (CTAs).

• Video ads: With video ads, you can tell stories, such as how a product was made or a customer testimonial, in an impactful and engaging way. 

• Carousel ads: Carousel ads enable viewers to click through several images, usually best for e-commerce brands promoting several complementary products or one product from different angles.

• Collection ads: Like static image ads, image collections can showcase several images with a 125-character message.

How to use Ads Manager

A benefit to Facebook Ads Manager is that it is intuitive to use, prompting you with options every step of the way. The first thing you’ll do is choose your ad objective from three categories:

1. Awareness: Brand awareness, reach

2. Consideration: Traffic, engagement, app installs, video views, lead generation, messages

3. Conversion: Conversions, catalogue sales, store traffic

After choosing your ad objective, you’ll use Ads Manager to name your campaign, set a budget and schedule, determine your target audience, select your ad placement, and publish your post.

Best time to post on social media?

Based on posting analysis, the best time to post on Facebook is between 8 a.m. and 12 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, according to Hootsuite [4]. For Instagram, the best time is 11 a.m. on Wednesdays [4]. This might vary depending on your business’s industry, location, and audience.

You can select from Messenger, Facebook, Audience, or Instagram for ad placement. With Ads Manager, you can further customise by choosing options such as Facebook News Feed, Facebook Marketplace, or Instagram Explore.

After publishing your Facebook ad, you can track and monitor it to optimise your ad budget. Some businesses conduct A/B experiments with small sums of money before launching a larger ad campaign.

How to track and monitor your Facebook ad

When evaluating your Facebook ad success, you’ll want to view and analyse data such as ad impressions and frequency, click-through rates, conversion rates, and cost per conversion.

To track and monitor your ads, you can use the three following Facebook tools:

• Ads Manager: Create a report that shows stats on your ads' performance, such as carousel ad views and website conversions.

• Events Manager: Analyse data on visitors’ actions ('events') on your website, such as items added to their cart or completing a purchase.

• Facebook Business Suite: View data about your Facebook and Instagram accounts, such as demographics, content engagement, and paid ad performance.

Additional tools for Facebook marketing

Facebook’s three tools are robust enough to gather all the data you need to gauge your Facebook ad performance. However, you may want to take advantage of other tools that you can use to track analytics, organise your content calendar, and manage your posting schedule. Here are some helpful tools for Facebook marketing:

• Google Analytics: An alternative tool for measuring ad conversions and performance.

• Qwaya: For businesses focusing on Facebook and Instagram, Qwaya is a tool for conducting A/B testing and scheduling ads.

• Hootsuite: This tool is comprehensive for managing your marketing on all social media platforms, including scheduling posts, targeting and bidding algorithms, and more.

• Trello: A project management tool teams can use to manage the Facebook marketing process.

• Google Drive: You can use Google’s many tools to create and manage a content calendar, assign roles, and store assets like photos and videos.

Get started.

Whether you want to become an expert in social media marketing for your business or your career, you can earn a Meta Social Media Marketing Professional Certificate in just seven months. You don't need any degree or experience to start your learning journey today at your own pace.

If you’re more interested in the data side of Meta marketing, consider the Meta Marketing Analytics Professional Certificate to learn how to drive traffic to your Facebook business page.