5 Facebook Marketing Myths You Should STOP Believing

Day in and day out we’re all inundated with Facebook marketing advice, and we often hear the same advice multiple times from multiple parties.When you hear something enough times you begin to think it must be true! However, often we see businesses blindly following advice without testing whether that piece of information is really relevant to their audience. Every Page will have different strategies and tactics that work for them, and we highly advise that you test any advice you read before assuming it’s a best practice for you. With that said, we’ve done a lot of testing on our Facebook Page. We’ve also done a lot of reading and suggesting of Facebook advice. After looking at some of the most common marketing advice, observing our peers Pages and testing them on our own there are five facebook marketing myths that we want to debunk right now!

Here are 5 pieces of Facebook Marketing advice you should STOP believing!

Myth #1. Your organic reach is down because you post irrelevant information

‍First off, don’t get us wrong, posting relevant information on your Facebook Page is a must. If you’re a restaurant and you’re constantly posting finance tips, you’re not going to get anywhere. The key to engagement has always been, and will remain, providing valuable information to your followers. With that said, there is some room for the occasional “irrelevant” post. The frequency of irrelevant posts will depend on you, your brand and your Page. However, here are some examples of times that irrelevant posts worked pretty well. Keep in mind that ShortStack is a software that businesses and agencies use to build Facebook apps and marketing campaigns. This post about extra Google storage is not completely irrelevant, but it doesn’t have anything to do with building social media campaigns. It's one of our most successful organic posts.

Post Planner is a tool that businesses use to schedule posts for their Facebook Page. They recently posted the below picture, which really has nothing to do with posting to Facebook, but it was funny and relatable and brought some good traffic.

The key is to remember that people on Facebook are human and no one likes to be fed the same information all the time. It’s okay to mix things up and throw in a random quote, or funny photo or video or a simple life hack that your fans will enjoy. A lot of times this will actually increase your organic reach because people will interact with it and hopefully because of that they’ll see more of your future posts.

Myth #2. You’re not posting at the right time

Can I just say, there is no right time to post on Facebook. I cringe every time I see any marketing professional suggesting to brands the times to post on Facebook. It simply just is not a blanket answer.

I’ve been running ShortStack’s Facebook Page for the last three years and I can tell you that our posting schedule changes constantly. Just a few months ago we were seeing great success with posting every two hours. Yep, 12 times a day! However, then that started to slow down, so we had to re-test our theory. For a long time we saw great success with posting in the middle of the night at 2:05am, but that has also changed.

The way to discover the best times to post on your Page is to test and to look at your Facebook insights once a month or so. However, once you determine the best times, we recommend you keep a close watch on your reach and if it starts to drop, start over. Facebook’s algorithm is constantly changing which means our posting strategies need to be changing with them. This article can tell you how to determine the best times to post on your Page.

Myth #3. You’re posting too often or not often enough

This is another objective suggestion.  Just as there is really no right time to post on Facebook, there is also no ideal number of times to post.

Some businesses will see success with posting once a week. Some do well posting once a day, and some can post 10 times a day and still get great engagement on every post.

I’m going to jump back to our friends at Post Planner.

Post Planner posts an average of nine times a day. If you check out their Facebook Page you’ll see that all of their content gets good engagement. They’ve clearly discovered what their fans like to see and they’ve learned that their followers don’t mind quite a few posts a day.

Now let’s talk about our good friend, Jon Loomer, and his Facebook Page. Jon averages about one post per day. Sometimes he won’t post at all and if he has something important to say he’ll post more than once a day. However, Jon averages more than 100 likes on nearly all of his posts.

Both of these Pages are examples of finding what works for an audience.

Myth #4. Brand posts are not showing up in the news feed

If you use Facebook as a personal page then you know that this statement is just false. Since I’m in the business of Facebook for businesses, I really don’t interact much with Pages. I like about 70 Pages on Facebook which, in the big scheme of things, is not a lot! So when I went and looked at the last 50 updates that appeared in my News Feed more than half of them were updates from Pages. That’s right: 27 out of my 50 most recent News Feed stories are from Pages I follow. The craziest part of it all is that I rarely am interacting with these Pages but they keep showing up!

The point is, brands ARE showing up in the News Feed, but they show up if you’re posting content that people care about. Of those 27 brand posts that I saw, they were from the same 5-7 Pages, which are pretty in sync with my interests. If you feel like you’re not getting the reach you deserve try asking your fans what type of content they want and expect from you. It never hurts to go straight to the source to get your fans talking and sharing.

Myth #5. You Should Only Post Images

Back in the day, images got a lot of traffic on Facebook. Recently we learned that native Facebook videos get the most reach, which I have to admit I’ve noticed is true. However, this doesn’t mean you should only post videos.

You should always have a comfortable mix of post types that resonate with your audience. From text updates to photos, videos, galleries and links. If something is valuable to your audience, they aren’t going to care what form it is in.

What other Facebook marketing myths do you keep hearing that you’ve learned aren’t true? Let us know in the comments!