FACEBOOK BUSINESS
Millions of businesses, big and small, use the Facebook Business family of apps and services to connect with real people on any device. Facebook Business Pages help people connect with your business. And Facebook adverts help people discover your business. No two businesses are alike. That’s why the Facebook Business family of apps and services is built to help your business meet its specific goals. Encourage people to visit your website or shop, download your app or purchase products. Our measurement tools can help you see how your campaigns perform against your goals and build better campaigns for the future. Our advert formats are designed to capture attention and prompt action. They offer creative flexibility, work across devices and are built to help you reach your goals.
Marketing on Facebook Business
Whether you sell in person, online or through an app, you know what you’d like to do next as your business grows. More than 1.8 billion people use Facebook every month to connect with friends and family and discover things that matter. Marketing on Facebook helps you find new customers and build lasting relationships with them.
Facebook adverts
The people you want to reach are here. More than 1.2 billion people use Facebook every day.
Facebook Pages
Your Page establishes your business’ presence on Facebook, so people can find out about you and connect with you.
Messenger
Automate responses and create Messenger bots to connect with and serve your customers.
Tell your business’ story at the centre of visual discovery to inspire action.
Audience Network
Extend the reach of your Facebook and Instagram adverts into other mobile apps and websites.
Atlas
See how your adverts performed – and which types of people you reached – across devices, browsers, publishers and channels.
Online Sales vs. Attracting Likes
When creating a Facebook business strategy, it’s important to think through what you want to achieve. Is your goal to make ads and drive traffic to your website – perhaps a web shop where visitors can make a purchase – or do you want to drive traffic to a Facebook fan page where visitors can “like” what you do?
Many businesses benefit from both, so perhaps a combination is the best choice. Just make sure your primary reasons for being on Facebook is clear before you start working.
This is a straightforward way to advertise your business on Facebook. You make traditional external-website ads and when someone clicks through, he or she is directed to your web page where a purchase or sign-up can be made.
This way of using Facebook for business advertising has proven to be very successful for countless of companies. And when you do it, you’ll get the results right away. Just compare how much you spend on Facebook ads to the revenue and you’ll know whether or not you need to tweak your campaign in any way.
However, when doing external-website ads you may miss out on the social aspects Facebook is made up of.
Don’t forget that “liking things” is the backbone of this entire network.
Attracting Likes
Businesses may see better results – even when advertising a product or service – by first sending visitors to a fan page where they have to like the page to see the offer. After that, they can click out to the web page to make a purchase.
By doing your advertising in these three steps, you can combine brand making with sales.
However, a lot of businesses’ main reason for being of Facebook is just to get a fan base and not to make online sales. It might be a physical shop, say, a restaurant, a clothing store or any company that’s on Facebook primarily to raise brand awareness.
In that case, ads directly to the website might not be the best choice. Instead you want people to like your Facebook fan page where you can talk to them, run contests, arrange polls or other activities your customers want to engage in.
The goal is to have active fans that spread the word about you to their friends, which in the end can be profitable for any business.
Facebook Marketing for Small Businesses
On the contrary to what many believe, online-business marketing on Facebook benefits small, traditional retailers the most.
Small businesses offer unique products or services to a smaller range of customers and Facebook provides an excellent opportunity to reach the exact target audience with a personal approach.
To succeed in small-business marketing on Facebook you don’t need to run a modern IT company. One benefit with Internet marketing for small business is that it allows you to compete with larger corporations.
If you offer a niche product or service, you might even have a competitive advantage. A large business will not have time to focus in depth on a single niche.
Do’s and Don’ts for Marketing on Facebook Business
Use a Recognizable Profile Picture
Being recognizable on Facebook is important to getting found and Liked. Because your profile picture is at the top of your Page and used as your thumbnail for all of your posts, you need to make sure it’s something that your Fans will actually associate with your brand. Usually, it’s best to just go with your company logo.
Coordinate Your Cover Photo, Pinned Post, and Profile CTA to Promote Marketing Campaigns
These three things are the most immediately visible parts of your Page. If you want to maximize engagement with your marketing campaigns, try matching your copy and creative across all three.
So if you’re promoting an ebook, for example, you could create a cover photo featuring an image of your ebook, publish an organic post to your page that contains a link to your landing page, and make sure the profile CTA has a link to the landing page as well.
Tailor Your Organic Posts
Targeting on Facebook isn’t just for paid content — you can also use them for organic posts too. Instead of blasting out all of your posts to all of your Fans, think about ways you can use Facebook targeting tools to segment your organic posts by age, gender, education, etc. By being more specific with your targeting, you might be able to generate even better engagement.
Use Tracking URLs and Facebook Insights to Analyze Your Page Performance
You can’t improve your Facebook Page if you don’t know how your posts are performing in the first place. Use tracking URLs with UTM codes to identify which posts are driving traffic and conversions to your website. And for Page-specific data such as your engagement rate per post, head over to Facebook Insights.
Once you have insights from these analyses, you can tailor your content strategy to post more of what works — and less of what doesn’t.
Post During Strategic Times of Day
While the best time of day can vary from Page to Page and audience to audience, there has been some data released that shows that posts published between 1 – 4 p.m. have the best clickthrough and share rates. Use this as a jumping-off point to discover which time of day works best for you.
Try Using Paid Budget to Amplify Successful Organic Posts
Get better ROI for your ads by promoting content that you already know works. Putting budget behind organic content that’s performing well can expand your reach and attract more people to your Page.
Leave Your Company’s “About” Section Blank
A preview of your “about” section is shown beneath your profile picture, and it’s one of the first places people will look when they’re scanning your Page. Make sure yours displays relevant information about your company — what you sell, your website, what times you’re open, etc. — to help answer people’s questions right off the bat.
Use a Dummy Account
There’s no way around this one. Dummy accounts violate Facebook’s terms and conditions — so just don’t create them.
If you’d like to avoid post publishing mishaps, set up different publishing settings for different employees on your Page. Check out this help document from Facebook if you’d like to see what roles you can set for different members of your team.
Post Too Often
According to one of our previous studies, companies with fewer than 10,000 Facebook followers receive 60% fewer interactions per post when they post 60+ times per month. So don’t overwhelm your customers by posting more than a few times per day. Instead, spend more time crafting higher-quality Facebook posts, and, you know, getting to the other thousands of things on your to-do list.
Forget About Multimedia Posts
You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again: visual content is essential to succeeding on social media.
And don’t just take my word for it. Research has a shown the use of visual content in Facebook campaigns can generate 65% more engagement after only one month
Be Slow to Respond
Did you know that 42% of consumers who complain on social media expect a 60-minute response time? Whether your audience posts negative or positive comments, ignoring them only creates possible anger or disappointment. So take a few minutes out of your day to monitor your Facebook Page and respond to any issues that crop up
Make Assumptions
The last thing you want is for your posts to blend in with the rest of the clutter on a customer’s News Feed. Just because a strategy works well for one industry doesn’t mean it will work well for yours. Test your assumptions — even the ones we’ve outlined in this post — to see what actually works for you.
BENEFITS OF FACEBOOK BUSINESS
Increased Exposure to Potential Customers
Gather More Leads
Just having people Like your page isn’t enough to provide yourself with a long-term, sustainable business. Sure you can make a good living short-term off just using your Facebook page.
Lower Your Marketing Expenses
Starting a Facebook business page costs you exactly $0.
Sure, you may pay a graphic artist to design a profile picture and cover photo — but that’s not a necessity.
Simply using photographs you take of your business will work — and in some cases that’s better than a creative image from a designer.
My point is that getting rolling with a page costs you nothing until you start paying for ads to get page Likes, boosting posts and running Sponsored Stories — all of which you should be doing with your page.
Facebook ads are relatively inexpensive when compared to traditional print, radio or TV ads — and are 1,000x more targeted.
Just last week I started a page called Fans of Bigfoot — the creature not the monster truck. I started it for fun, but to also test ads and monetization tactics
Reach a Targeted Audience
Just because there are 1.19 billion Facebook users, it doesn’t mean they all want to Like your page.
In fact, I wouldn’t want all of them to Like my page — because only a small percentage of them would actually engage with my posts.
If you’re a local business, direct your ads to target customers within a 10-15 mile radius. The ads might cost you more, but the Likes and potential customers are laser targeted.
If you run an ad on TV, during say an airing of “Seinfeld,” you’d be hard pressed to know with certainty whether your ad targeted the right kinds of people for your business.
Use Facebook Insights
Taking a quick look at the insights;
- How many page Likes I have
- The Reach of my posts & page (take a look at that Reach & tell me Reach is dead!)
- Engagement of the page
- Post Performance… and more
You can dig around and find out how specific posts are performing, the demographics of your fans, etc. Compare this to running an ad in your local paper. Are you given any such stats as to how many people visited your store/website based on the ad?
Build Brand Loyalty
Besides being a place to build a customer base and sell products, a Facebook business page can do wonders for helping you build brand loyalty.
What exactly does that mean?
Well, if you consistently provide valuable and entertaining content, your followers will stay loyal — even when you make mistakes.
These days, people look online to find businesses to buy from — and they predominately search social media.
If your followers see you being active & responsive, they’re much more likely to do business with you than a company with no Facebook presence or a poorly run page.
Increase Your Web Traffic
Smart Facebook page owners use their pages to drive traffic to their websites.
If all you’re doing on Facebook is getting engagement on your posts, then you’re really just an entertainer — not a marketer.
So start using link posts to drive traffic to your site.
The great thing about link posts is Facebook now generates a full-width thumbnail image if your website makes one available.
Because they draw more attention, these wider images are more likely to get clicked.
Boost SEO
The topic of SEO and Facebook gets debated quite a bit.
Some argue that the information in the About section of a business page is scraped and thus searchable by Google.
It’s hard to accurately verify or dispute this claim.
Be Mobile Ready
When people view your Facebook page on a mobile device it shows users:
- Hours of operation
- Address
- Reviews
- Phone number to call directly from the Facebook mobile app
Spy on Your Competition!
An interesting new feature on Facebook pages lets businesses spy on competitors.
Now this doesn’t mean you can look over their shoulders and check out sales or results from their ads — but it’s a great way to see how others in your area and niche are growing on Facebook.
