How to Optimize Your Social Content for the Facebook Mobile App

More and more people each day are using their smart phones as a source of news and entertainment. In fact, over 600 million people use the Facebook mobile app while on the go, according to Facebook's latest data.

So instead of asking you if your company ready to join the mobile revolution, I'l ask you ... is your company ready to join the Facebook mobile revolution?

If you're wondering how Facebook marketing might differ from mobile to desktop, this post -- and this upcoming webinar with mobile experts from Facebook itself -- is for you. Read on to get an idea of how you can better optimize your Facebook marketing for mobile!

How to Optimize Organic Content for the Facebook Mobile App

Unlike on Facebook desktop, the Facebook mobile app only shows users their News Feed. What does this mean for marketers? It means your posts need to be even more eye-catching. Not only is the screen much smaller, making images and text harder to read, but the user is quickly scrolling through their News Feed. If your post doesn’t grab their attention in under a second, you may as well not have posted anything.

To create a post that does catch the user’s attention, ask yourself these questions of your Facebook content:

• Is your content visually appealing?
• Is your visual content simple and straightforward? Does it get your point across in a second or two, or does it require a higher time investment?
• Are there just a few words, or are you being super wordy?
• Are you using image and text that play well together, and clearly convey the message you're trying to get across?
• Is your content colorful, unique, or otherwise original enough to help it stand out from other posts in the feed?

As you may have gathered, I'm really hammering home the power of visual content to help you stand out in a news feed organically. With a powerful image, you increase your chance of someone stopping that rapid scroll and clicking through on your post -- hopefully sending them to a landing page, blog post, or elsewhere on your site. The real estate on the Facebook mobile app is in high demand; if you create compelling visual content, it'll help you stay ahead of the game.

If you need some help in the visual content creation department, don't fear -- we have a free kit chock full of templates to help even the most design-averse marketers successful.

How to Optimize Facebook Ads for Mobile Devices

This past year, Facebook changed the way that mobile ads appear in a user’s News Feed, too. The only ad types that are available for a mobile device are those that show up in the News Feed, as the right side bar does not exist on the Facebook mobile app. Because of this, the ad types that can be posted include Promoted Posts and Sponsored Stories. These ads originally were only shown on each user’s News Feed at a frequency of 0-1 times per day, but this frequency was increased to 6-7 times per day this past year. The result? Marketers' Promoted Posts are being seen more by a relevant audience!

So now that you know why these are beneficial, how do you set them up? Facebook mobile ads are pretty similar to how you set up a Facebook desktop ad. Here are the two ways to promote a post on mobile, specifically:

ads.facebook.com

Through your Facebook ads manager platform, create a promoted post ad as you normally would. To see a detailed, step-by-step breakdown of this process, read “A Simple Breakdown of All Your Facebook Advertising Options.” To make your ad visible on mobile devices, choose “Devices,” and then decide on which mobile devices to place your ads. Selecting all types of devices will, obviously, increase the reach of your Promoted Posts.

Promoting a Post From Your Company Page

If you would like to promote a post directly from your company page, simply choose “Promote” in the bottom left corner. (That was easy, eh?)

Don't Forget About the Post-Click Experience

Now that you've got people clicking away on your Facebook content on mobile, it's important we think about the post-click experience, as well. The ultimate goal of Facebook marketing is to generate leads and customers from social media. To do this, you need to send people to your places on your site where there's an opportunity to convert -- and an experience that makes them want to convert. This is, of course, just as true on mobile devices as it is on desktop. Unfortunately, not all websites are mobile optimized, meaning the website is not responsive to different devices and adjusts size accordingly. As such, try to spend some time optimizing your landing pages and other post-click experiences for mobile devices; it'll help you ensure mobile Facebook users that click on your content find conversion a little bit easier.

To learn more about Facebook mobile advertising and the mobile platform, join experts from Facebook on April 17th to learn in an exclusive webinar. Sign up now to reserve your free seat!