The Science of Marketing: When to Tweet, What to Post, How to Blog, and Other Proven Strategies

Chapter 5

Facebook

Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla of the social media space. The network has more than 1 billion active users around the world. Everyone is on Facebook: from the youngest to the oldest and from the geekiest to the most technology unsavvy. If you, as a marketer, had to pick only one social media channel to maintain a presence on, you’d have to go with Facebook.

Old-school marketers just waking up to this reality have been quick to jump on the advertising bandwagon and flood Facebook with mounds of ads with low click-through rates (CTRs). Although the targeting functionality of Facebook’s self-service platform is quite powerful, advertising should be a distant second in the Facebook marketing priority list.

Your brand’s Facebook page is its face (pun intended) to the social world. The content you share and the interactions you entice your fans to engage in define how well you’ll do. This chapter will teach you the kinds of content and sharing behavior you need to understand to succeed.

The fundamental act of Facebook marketing is posting content to your brand’s Facebook page. Hopefully that content then gets likes, shares, and comments, leading to a highly engaged audience, which you can then direct to your website to convert into leads or customers.

I collected a data set of all of the content posted by the 10,000 most liked pages on Facebook and the corresponding like, comment, and share data for each post. I began my analysis of this data by looking at the day ...