Do you want to bend the most powerful social platform to your will? Do you want to use Facebook to fetch you more and more followers, increase your brand awareness and sales?

That sounds utopist, but it is entirely possible.

All you need to do is to apply six easy steps to your posts:

1. Develop a posting strategy

Most of the marketers that want to establish a strong Facebook strategy simply create an account and start posting without developing a strategy first. And that is a grave - and very common - mistake. If you post everything that comes to mind at the moment you might end up with a page full of content that does not address the needs of the audience you're targeting.

To avoid that situation try to start from thinking your strategy through.

First rule of creating relevant content is tending to your niche. You sell healthcare products? Write about the healthy way of life, fitness and accompanying subjects. Food? You know what to do. Cars? Don't miss that Formula 1 streaming.

Choose several topics you are going to cover on your Facebook page and stick to them.

Next step is scheduling your posts in a right way. Consider creating a calendar for that.

2. Remember about the attention span

Long Facebook posts aren't always a good thing.

According to a study by the National Center for Biotechnology Information attention span of an ordinary reader is 8 seconds. Even a goldfish can focus longer, even if the difference is only 1 second.

That basically means that you need to catch your reader with the first 4 words of your post, and that isn't exactly easy.

Make sure your descriptions look fresh and catchy.

3. Analyze and optimize your content

You can post various types of content on Facebook, among them texts, images, videos and links. And recent data studies show that videos are the ones that get most engagement.

But you cannot simply resort to posting videos only. You need to analyze the needs and tastes of your audience and determine which types of content work best with them.

That also depends on the goals you set for yourself. Links are helpful if you plan on rerouting your traffic to the main website, blog or other social media accounts.

Videos, photos and texts, however, are better for building brand awareness.

Use Facebook Insights and the Post Report option to see what posts work best with your audience and then modify your Facebook strategy accordingly.

4. Promote brand hashtags

Hashtags aren't so common on Facebook as they are on Twitter or Instagram. Moreover, recent studies show that posts without hashtags often get more engagement on Facebook than the ones with hashtags.

However, don't say "no" to hashtags just yet.

There are situations where they can prove useful and get you more engagement than usual.

You can use and promote your unique brand hashtag in order to boost your brand awareness. Once people get used to it, it may come in handy.

Also you can use hashtags while commenting on a hot topic relevant to your niche.

5. Be creative with post descriptions

Every link you post on Facebook automatically drags the needed metadata. However, you can do it by hand to make your Facebook posts more searchable.

In order to do that change the description metadata of the post you're currently publishing so that it will relate to the post description and describe the content it contains.

You can also tweak the metadata and add your own keywords while republishing a post.

Add the keywords anywhere you can - Facebook posts are searchable now, so that can help you a great deal.

6. Choose the right timetable

Another common mistake among the Facebook marketers is posting the content as soon as it'sready, without analyzing which time is the most suitable for posting.

HubSpot proves that the best days for posting are Thursday and Friday, while days from Monday to Wednesday won't bring you too mush engagement.

The choice, of course, is entirely up to you.

Facebook Insights will come to a good use here, too, because they can help you in determining when is your audience more eager to engage with your posts.

Based on that data you can figure out an optimal timetable so no post ever goes in vain.

Facebook has more than 1.44 billion monthly active users, and those can be a great help in promoting your business.

With a right strategy you can get a good chunk of that audience!