What is Facebook?
Think of Facebook as a perfect place to spread word of mouth. For businesses that have always relied on this method of winning business, having a business page is a fantastic idea.
Most of us understand Facebook from a personal profile point of view. It connects you to all your friends and allows you to share information at will. But a business page often leaves people feeling a bit baffled.
It’s easy to start a business page, simply go to the top of your Facebook homepage and click ‘Create’ and select ‘Page.’
From there you just need to complete as much of the steps as possible. Facebook have intuitively given you tips along the way to help you. Fill out all the contact information and spaces for content about your business. Once it is published, you can start posting!!
Let’s take a look at a Facebook Business Page and go through all the different menus and tabs.
The side menu
- Home – Takes you back to your dashboard
- Posts – This is where you will see a summary of your posts
- Videos – This is where you will see a summary of your videos
- Photos – This is where all your photos will be saved
- Events – Facebook allows you to set up events, so if you have any special open days or if you are attending any trade fairs, set up an event and publicise it to your network
- About – This tells visitors a bit more about you. You can share your contact information and website details here
- Community – This tells you who your followers are, but only those that are your direct connection on your personal facebook account
- Groups – This allows you to set up a private group that may be based around a common interest
- Offers – This allows you to publish special offers and promotions to your followers
- Shop – If you sell products or services that can be bought in a package of some kind, you can set up a shop
- Promote – This button takes you to the Facebook Advertising Centre where you can boost your presence with targeted advertising
The top menu
- Page – This takes you to your main business page
- Inbox – This is where you can see all your messages and comments from your readers
- Manage jobs – If you were recruiting, this is where you would manage job posts
- Notifications – This is where all your likes, comments and shares live. You can see all your business activity here.
More tab.
- Insights – This gives you stats on readership of your content, indications of how well received it is.
- How many new page likes and follows you have and how far your posts have reached.
- Publishing tools – This allows you to create and schedule posts from within Facebook. If you have a shop it also allows you to add products here.
- Ad Center – This is another way of getting to the advertising centre
- Page Quality – This tells you whether your page has any weird restrictions or violations
What should I post on Facebook?
Setting yourself up on social media is one of many things you can do to boost your businesses profile online. It should be in connection with all the other things that you are doing to promote your business. It should also be linked to your business goals. So go to Chapter O and read up on setting objectives.
What are you trying to achieve as a business?
Some objectives that could be integrated into your Facebook strategy are;
1. Develop brand awareness
Your post style should be informative, creating awareness and interest. It would be geared towards telling people stories, building trust in your business and making people feel compelled to find out more about you.
2. Increase Social Engagement
You want people to engage with your social media activity, so make it engaging. Ask questions, tell people about yourself, the people/person behind the brand. Have competitions, raffles, giveaways, things that encourage people to share and interact with your posts
3. Convert to Sales
So you have built a nice little following of people on your business page, the next stage is to get them to do something for you, either place an order or refer you on to someone. Your post content at this stage might be more geared towards special offers and promotions to encourage them along gently.
Your objectives would define the approach you could take to the content of your posts. Refer back to our blog, What is Content Marketing for more supporting information about this.
Facebook Advertising
Once you have got to grips with your content marketing strategy and you’re consistently posting relevant, good quality content to your followers, have a think about upping the ante and trying some Facebook Advertising. Accessible from within your business page, it’s fairly intuitive to set up and Facebook takes you through it step by step.
It starts by asking you what you are trying to achieve?
Do you want to boost a post, promote your business locally, drive traffic to your website, get more leads, or promote your page?
It then allows you to define your audience location, it’s age profile, gender and then start to build the design of your advert with images and text.
You can set it to run for a defined period and set a daily budget, so you have total control over your funds, and it won’t run away with you.
But as with any advertising, what you say in the advert is the key to its success. Facebook will put it in front of your people, but you have to attract their attention.
Using vibrant imagery, an attention-grabbing by-line, straight to the point with what you want them to do and explaining what is in it for them!
Sounds so simple, you’d be daft not to try it!
