When communicating with your target audience, it’s important to understand where most people will see and hear your messages as well as where they want to see and hear them. As part of your targeting tactics, you should look beyond where your audience can hear from you and think more about how they prefer to interact with you. As an example, the majority of your target market may be on Twitter, but they may actually prefer to interact with you through Facebook. And if you know how your audience wants to communicate, you’ll be more successful engaging them in a two-way conversation.

This year Edison Research and Arbitron found that, according to US social network users who follow a company/brand in social media, 80% of respondents preferred to connect with brands through Facebook. This is a powerful statistic to consider when you're creating your social media marketing strategy. Not only does Facebook attract the masses with over 750 million users, it is also how users want to connect with brands. As a marketer, you can be assured that you'll reach a large and receptive audience through Facebook.

To ensure you’re getting the most out of your marketing on Facebook, follow these 3 steps to better leverage Facebook for business.

1. Share Your Content

Be active on Facebook by sharing various types of content to engage your audience in conversation. An easy way to share your content is to connect your blog with your Facebook account so new posts automatically publish to your Facebook page. When you do this, make sure you monitor the interaction with your fans. Don’t leave them hanging, and be sure to keep the conversation going and gather insights to understand what your fans want from you. This will help you decide which types of content your Facebook fans care about, and what to avoid.

2. Figure Out What Content Is Most Engaging

It’s easy to share your content through Facebook, but you should also be aware of what content is most successful for your business. Using Facebook Insights, Facebook's internal analytics tool for pages, get a deeper look into the performance of your content. The Insights tool allows you to see your page interactions and monitors new and lifetime likes over time. It will also enable you to pinpoint which of your updates and posts perform well (and which don't) so you can track trends and get a sense of the types of content you should post more of or avoid sharing in the future.

3. Segment (Then Target) Your Audience

On Facebook, you can now select which of your fans see specific types of content. When you create an update, you now have the ability to choose whether content should be public to all or viewable to only certain custom created groups. This is a great tool for marketers, because you can now create segments for your fans and then target them with relevant and personalized content, which research shows performs significantly better than content that isn't personalized.

Are you effectively leveraging Facebook's marketing potential?