Facebook Marketing is a great way to reach and engage with your audience, but it can waste a lot of time and money if you don’t know a few tricks.

Trick #1 Have a plan: Know your goals and stick to them. Social media is all about sharing valuable content and doing it consistently. Schedule your posts for the week or month and walk away. If you are sitting down more than once per week to deal with posting, then you are wasting precious time.

Trick #2 Visually Deliver: Mix up post types but NEVER use text-only content. Lead with an image or a video if you want anyone to see your content. People engage more with visual content and Facebook’s algorithms will thusly show your text-only content to fewer people.

Trick #3 Promoted Posts: Do NOT use “Promoted Posts” unless you HAVE to get the word out about an event or a special offer AND you have thousands people who like your page. Facebook makes it easy to throw money at Promoted Posts, but the ROI is just not there.

Trick #4 Use a 3rd party tool: Facebook’s posting tools are great for people to share a selfie or a pic of their hipster meal, but businesses end up drowning in wasted time trying to keep their page updated. I use Social Post Pilot to schedule posting. I spend 30 minutes, once a week to schedule that week’s posts. It has saved me a LOT of hours.

Trick #5 Contests: Create low-cost giveaways to convert your Facebook audience into a solid email list. This way, you know that you will reach them without worrying about Facebook’s secret algorithms. Social Post Pilot has this feature built-in.