Pestworld Magazine Focusing on the Business of Pest Management
Long gone are the days when Facebook was simply a place to connect with college classmates, and then to socialize and share photos with friends and family. Today, Facebook has morphed into a diverse social media platform where you can consume daily news, watch videos, interact with brands and companies, ask for recommendations, share memories, go live and connect with people from all over the world. Most recently, the platform has become even more business-friendly, with new features consistently being released to support companies in their marketing endeavors.
Living in a digital age, more than two billion people use Facebook on a daily basis, making it a popular platform to consider when looking to engage with current customers, as well as homeowners who may have a need for professional pest control services. In fact, more than 60 million businesses are currently utilizing Facebook in their marketing mix.
Here are a few of the latest features for business pages that are worth considering as part of your pest control company’s social media efforts:
Advertising campaigns: A Facebook advertising campaign is a relatively inexpensive and flexible tactic to spread awareness about your company and pest control expertise with your target audience, and drive qualified traffic back to your website. The first step in kicking off a campaign is to sign up for Facebook Ads Manager, but you can only do this once you already have a company page. The beauty of Facebook advertising? Little design experience is needed and campaigns can be geo-targeted down to the zip codes that are most important to your company. Campaigns can also be executed to work within various budgets, whether big or small. You can track ad performance in real-time within the “Insights” function and determine what ads perform better than others, as far as engagement, reach, impressions—the list goes on. There’s even an option to add a Facebook pixel to the code of your website to track conversions, such as filling out a contact form or clicking a call now button. Consider pushing out a seasonal advertising campaign that provides information about pests to be on the lookout for within those months.
Boosted posts: Not interested in a full advertising suite, but still have the means to put some funding behind Facebook efforts? Think about boosting posts that you’ve published to your page. This tactic increases post engagement and bolsters the overall reach, which is important given the significant decline in Facebook organic reach since 2013. Don’t be fooled into thinking that all of your followers see every post that is published to your newsfeed. The truth is that many of them may never be served your content updates based on Facebook’s algorithms—unless you boost your posts and target them to your followers. Facebook’s VP of Advertising Technology Brian Boland attributes the decline in organic reach to two factors: 1) greater content generation, which leads to more competition in the newsfeed and 2) Facebook’s algorithm of how the newsfeed works as it ranks each possible story (from more to less important) by looking at thousands of factors relative to each person.
By Cindy Mannes
