What's on your mind? We've probably all seen the prompt on Facebook and have contributed our fair share of thoughts, location check-ins, shared articles, event photos and food pictures over the years. In our last video, we talked about some of the basic elements of a social media post. Now, we're going to look at how to create a social media post on Facebook. Not just as an individual, but as a thoughtful and deliberate social media managers. Let's log on to Facebook and pull up the Home screen for our business page. I'm logging on to the Facebook page of Calla&Ivy. The flower business we've talked about before. If you haven't worked with the business page before, you'll see that there are many more tools for insights, engagement tracking, and resources for your business on your dashboard. If you're an individual user, you can bounce back and forth between your personal profile and the business page on the site menu. Scroll down to the box with a button Create Post. Before we press that, you'll see that there are some shortcuts beneath. Photo or Video will prompt you to upload one of those visuals. Check-in will let you search for a location and Feeling or Activity will bring you to the emoji pictures. You can access these options through the Create Post menus as well. Click on Create Post. Remember, in our last lesson, we looked at the four major components of a social media post. This is where we'll add all that content, which includes text, images or video, hashtags or mentions, and a call to action and a link, and as you can probably already see, Facebook gives us a lot more options to play with as well. Let's write something. But first, let's think back to our prep work. What goals are we trying to achieve with our post? What audience are we trying to engage with? What's our brand voice and what kind of posts do we want to create? We'll create a simple post this time so we can focus on the functionality of posting. Let's share a new article that was just added to the Calla&Ivy website about how to care for fresh cut flowers. First, enter some text. A good piece of advice is to keep it short and punchy, but also keep it consistent with your brand's voice. I'm going to see five tips to keep your fresh flowers blooming. While Facebook's capture limit is a whopping 63,206 characters, it's best to never go that long. You'll find though that some posts warrant more words than others and that's fine. If you want to add an emoji for some fun, you can click on the smiley face to access the collection. Next, we want to mention the author of the article in our post and we can do so by typing @ and then typing their handle. In this case, Anke Audenaert. A list of handle suggestions will pop up and you can pick the person you want to tag. By mentioning someone in your post they'll be notified that you created it and they can share it to their followers as well. What about using a hashtag? Hashtags have traditionally been used much more broadly and widely on other social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram. While you are able to add hashtags on Facebook, hashtags are typically a major feature on Facebook, and if they see them, followers may think you've cross-post at something from another platform to Facebook. So I suggest you use them if you feel they really belong. Because we want our followers to read our new article, we want to include the URL of our article so followers can easily click through to it. Social media users are savvy, so no need to include the phrase click here, just paste URL, and when you do, you'll see Facebook creates a link preview that pulls metadata from your website. Here, we have a big image, the title of the article and the website cleanly and prominently displayed. If we want to attach our own image, we can get rid of the link preview by clicking the X in the upper right corner. Want a tip? If you're URL is long, messy, or you just don't want it on your post. Once the link preview appears, you can delete your URL and the link preview will still remain. What else can we add? Right below the text box, Facebook has a collection of ads to your post options, this can include adding a photo or video, a feeling, a location check-in and other options, such as the option to raise money for a charity, add videos for a watch party, and even add the option for followers to buy gift cards. Ready to post? Before you do, you have the option to boost your post. Boosting a post turns your post into an ad that will get shown to an audience outside of your followers. When you select Boost Post and click Post, you'll have a menu of options to specify, including who you want your audience to be, your budget and duration of your ad. Don't worry if you don't choose to boost your post now, you can always go back and boost it later. You'll learn all about advertising on Facebook in our next courses. So for now, we will keep this as an organic post. Now you're ready to post. Click Post, or you may decide to post later. Facebook also allows for scheduling your posts, which is available under your businesses Publishing Tools section. This allows you to create content well in advance and schedule it to target specific dates like a holiday or the day of an event. Facebook also gives you the option to create other kinds of posts, like items for sales listing, or a fundraiser post, or an event. Facebook also offers you the ability to publish stories to Facebook from your business page. Just know that you can only do this from the Facebook mobile app. Looking for a more personal way to reach your audience? Facebook also allows you to Go Live, where you can broadcast video and interact with your audience in real time. Now that you know the basics of a Facebook post, let's jump to Instagram and create a post there.
