Are You Using These 3 Essential Facebook Tools?

Facebook has become more than just a social networking platform: it’s become a useful tool that the world’s largest brands and organizations use to market their products and services. Small and medium-sized enterprises use Facebook in order to increase their visibility and to improve their sales and conversion rates as well. But Facebook only works as a marketing tool if used correctly. Luckily, there are several tools to help you get the most out of your Facebook marketing campaigns. Let’s take a look a three of the most essential Facebook tools to have in your social media tool belt.

1. A Content Calendar

This first tool is by far the most important. A social media content calendar helps you organize your thoughts, campaigns, topics and goals into a clear strategy, all the while keeping you accountable for posting regularly. It’s a good idea to have a content calendar extensive enough to span every social media network and blog you post on so you can see the big picture of how your campaigns are playing out across the Web, but also one that’s able to be drilled down to individual networks. Content calendars take many shapes and sizes, so before you do anything else, find one that works for you and start plugging in your posts!

2. Facebook Ads Manager

The Ads Manager tool offered by Facebook is a user-oriented application that has a comprehensive and easy-to-use interface. If you’ve posted an ad on Facebook or are thinking about doing so, then the Ads Manager will become your new best friend.

Ads Manager has three different levels of organization: ads, ad sets and campaigns. Not only does Ads Manager help you organize your campaigns around your company’s main objective in order to get the best optimization possible, but it also helps you manage multiple ad sets within a campaign and set an individual schedule and budget for each one of them. You can create targeted ad sets depending on your audience/target market, and you can also measure their feedback in real-time. And, the tool offers special ad control features for targeting your market and designing creative and appealing content.

So, Ads Manager helps you keep an eye on all your existing ads and marketing campaigns, stop or restart your ads at any given time and it also helps you generate, access and export reports regarding the performance of your Facebook ads. You have full access to the status of the ad, the results, the costs, the reach, frequency, number of clicks, the click-through rate and the average price.

3. Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is an indispensable tool, as it offers invaluable information about your content and audience through detailed metrics. This tool gives you an in-depth understanding of trends and demographics, helps you determine your target market and also helps you adjust your content so that it best matches your market’s needs.

Facebook Insights has three main types of key metrics: Domain Insights, App Insights and Page Insights. Domain Insights gives you information about different websites, even for those that are not directly linked to or affiliated with Facebook. App Insights is specifically designed for Facebook marketers who use applications and who want to efficiently monitor their performance. This may include referral traffic that goes to your application, feedback provided by those who have read or commented on your stream stories, demographics and more. And, App Insights allows you to quickly identify and address any API errors or glitches. Lastly, Page Insights shows metrics for referral traffic, detailed data about engagement rates of fans and more.

These three Facebook tools are great resources to help you plan and strategize your content and campaigns and then check in on them as they’re progressing to monitor how effective and engaging they are. Not only will you be able to course correct if something’s not performing as you’d like, but you’ll also be able to show ROI in terms of engagement, traffic and reach.