Having more than two billion active users, Facebook makes a perfect platform to promote your business. It might seem a daunting task to use Facebook for business because of frequent changes in its algorithm and rules. However, if utilized in the right way, Facebook is one of the best tools for targeting specific audience according to your brand or business type.
If you are looking to expand your business and enhance your online presence, Facebook has the real potential to reach your target audience.
With tons of tools provided by Facebook such as pages, groups, and Facebook ads, it is much easier to quickly get your business to your audience. To help you break through all your confusions regarding Facebook for business, we have put together a guide below. Check it out.
Key Steps to Getting Started with Facebook for Your Business
1. Put Your Business on Facebook
It is important for your business to have a channel through which you can communicate with the target audience. Facebook offers a number of options to get started including business pages, public figure pages, location pages, and groups. For you to be successful on Facebook, it is important that you know the potential of each option so you can decide which will best suit your business goals.
2. Create A Facebook Business Page
The most important thing for a company on Facebook is its business page. It is a public profile that helps businesses connect with their fans and customers directly without involving any third party involved. To create a page, go to facebook.com/business and press the button that says “Create a Page” (in the top right corner). Now, a lot of options will be shown regarding “business type”, select the type of business you are creating a Facebook page for.
Don’t worry if your business falls into more than just one category – just investigate the one that your customers would likely to think of when they talk about your business and go with it. After creating your business page, there are a lot of sections that you can add to your Facebook page, however, not every section would be suitable for your business. Here is a list of sections that you should consider adding:
- About
This is one of the most important sections of any Facebook business page. It contains information like address, contact details, business details, opening and closing hours, website URL, etc. Most people look for this section to find specific information about a business, so don’t leave it blank!
- Community
This is an excellent place for your audience to interact with and learn more about your business. Posts, photos, and videos uploaded by customers to your page show up here.
- Events
You can create events on your Facebook page and invite people to join you. It is a great way to interact and connect with your target audience. Event pages can also be created in which you can promote your upcoming events, seminars, etc. It is extremely easy! Just create an event page, add information like description, time, day, and date etc. and publish it.
People can also post their comments and queries about the event in the discussion section and you can interact with them there. All this adds in your business promotion and goodwill.
- Home
This is the section that comes up when someone opens your Facebook page. Make sure to keep it updated regularly so your customers don’t miss out on anything from you.
- Offers
It is the best place to promote any deals or discounts you are currently offering. This is also one of the best ways to encourage your audience to come to your Facebook page. You can give an interesting call to action like “like our page to find out more about our exciting offers” to attract more people.
- Photos
All the photos or graphical posts you post on your page shows up under this section.
- Reviews
Before buying anything from you, your prospects would first go to the reviews section of your page to find out what previous customers have to say about your products and services. Ratings show up at the top of the page review section. You can also hide it but we recommend that you show people what others think about your business, it will make you more credible.
If you trust your business and what you are offering, the reviews will be up to the mark – making it easy for other customers to trust and buy from you.
- Shop
If you don’t have a website and neither you are thinking of creating one, Facebook shop is the best option for you. You can add your products on this page and the users can buy them directly from Facebook. All the sales done will be sent to your bank account.
3. Define Your Audience
First, you have to know about your target audience. Here are some questions that you can ask yourself to find your target audience on Facebook:
- Are they more business-to-business purchasers or business-to-consumer?
- Do I want to reach the general public or a specific target audience?
- Should I focus on a specific location or go worldwide?
- What age group should I target?
Facebook offers amazing targeting tools that can help you focus on a specific group of people rather than those who are not even interested in what you are offering. You can select customized demographics, interest groups, and locations. Once you know what your target audience is, you are ready to hit the market.
4. Connect Your Blog and Twitter Account to Feed your Facebook Page
Your Facebook pages and groups need to reflect what you are doing in your broader marketing efforts. You can share blog posts, press releases, video advertisements, radio advertisements, tweets, etc. – all of them should be connected and shared on your Facebook pages and relevant Facebook groups as well. You can participate in community pages to share your content – just don’t be overly aggressive or you will turn off your target audience.
Also, you can mention your Facebook page in your Twitter posts or any printed promotional material, and link it to your website. Having a seamless integration strategy between your multiple social media profiles will help build awareness about your business. Also consider using the best cheap smm panel to assist in your efforts.
5. Create Compelling Content
It is the best practice to plan your content prior to making your Facebook business page. It will help you focus more on your consumers and plan original content that engages your target market. However, if you didn’t plan it in advance, you should do it right after your Facebook page goes live. Just make sure you lay out a three to six-month content according to the major days and holidays in a year. The more compelling content you have, the more audience will be engaged to your page. In short, your content should:
- Be Concise
Facebook pages that go for overly long dense, content and technical jargon are not liked by a majority of people because Facebook is not a medium for it. People like seeing concise information because they are looking for human connection behind your business, not someone who just wants to sell.
Your first priority should be engaging your audience in a conversational tone so they can feel that you are trying to help them.
- Be Original
You should sound original whenever you are talking to your customers. Avoid rewrites of your own content because if your content is repetitive, it will ultimately reflect on your business.
- Be Visually Appealing
Don’t just put textual posts on your Facebook page, use visual content that has the good enough to cut through the clutter of others’ content. Research shows that people engage more with visually striking content rather than pure text content.
- Have a Clear Call to Action (CTA)
It isn’t compulsory to have a call to action in every post. But you should at least have a clear CTA in some of your posts to help you achieve your business goals. Even when you are running a Facebook campaign for awareness, constant engagement and interaction with your followers would be a waste of resources without mobilization.
6. Integrate Facebook and Messenger bots
Once your Facebook business page is all set and starts getting a good response from people, it is important that you integrate messenger bots to improve customer care, automate funnels, and collect and score the total number of leads. You can also add ads inside messenger to enhance your online presence. The combination of messenger and bots makes an efficient and effective marketing channel that will always work for you even when you are not available.
7. Build Community with Facebook Groups
An oft overlooked marketing tool on Facebook is the use of groups. They are growing in popularity and are easy to participate. You can create your own group and build an audience focused on your specific products and services. Groups can be powerful and build a more direct communication channel. You can give updates about your products and services in the group so your customers can stay in touch with everything you have to offer.
8. Specific Targeting with Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads are one of the largest online advertising tools available. You can reach as many people as widely as you want for only a little fee. You can also get very specific on the demographics. A very useful tool to quickly and specifically reach your target audience. You can choose a daily budget/full campaign budget for the ad and select the duration you want to run the ad for. For starters, you can run a test ad with customized settings and improve the future campaigns gradually by tracking the response on previous ads you ran.
Facebook can be a powerful tool for marketing your services and products. Developing a well thought out strategy to engage your target audience can pay big dividends. To master Facebook advertising, you can read The Complete Guide to Facebook Advertising by Brian Meert.
Link to Your Business Page from Other Web Sites
Backlinking is an important thing if you want to improve your search engine ranking and build strong credibility. All you have to do is link to your Facebook business page from wherever possible. For example, if you have a blog, you can include a link at the bottom of your website or where appropriate.
Encouraging other influencers like bloggers, YouTubers, and companies to do the same can also have a good impact on your business. It will also help you build a strong online presence.
- Get verified
Once your Facebook business page is verified with a tick badge right next to your name, you’ll become more credible and legit. Customers will feel more confident that they are directly dealing with a legitimate company rather than some imposter or fan page.
Facebook Best Practices
Respond to Messages
The best way to communicate with your customers is through Facebook messenger. Facebook calculates your average response time so people who want to contact you can know how quickly you respond to your customers. Usually, people are more comfortable live chatting than calling which gives an edge to the Facebook messenger. Messenger chatbots are also excellent as they include natural language processing that can help engage with customers.
According to a New York Times article of January 2019, Facebook is planning on merging Facebook messenger, Instagram DM and WhatsApp to create a unified messaging platform so you, as a business, can manage your customers easily.
Use Insights to Track the Success of Your Campaigns
Facebook Insights is a free analytics tool that shows stats like page views, actions taken, reach, engagement, etc. You can use this tool to track and measure the effectiveness of your previous campaigns and improve your next posts according to the analytics.
Use Publishing Tools
If you have planned and made a month’s content in advance, the best practice here would be to schedule those posts through publishing tools so they can go live in the future on a specified time. Third party tools like Hootsuite or Buffer can also you manage your social media profiles in the best way. While posting regularly will take time, you can schedule all the posts in advance and save your time in the long run.
Offer Discounts, Giveaways, And Contests
What’s the best way to bring more people to your store? Discounts and giveaways! The same thing goes for Facebook business pages as well. Driving organic traffic to your page is a difficult task but if you offer giveaways, contests, and discounts regularly, people will engage and interact more with your page. But before offering these, there are certain rules and laws of running contests on Facebook that if not followed, can be a legal problem for your business.
Learn more about these laws and guidelines here.
Stay in Touch with Your Facebook Page
Don’t just publish posts on your Facebook business page and then not check it for a week. Engage your audience by creating interactive posts so people can comment, like and share your posts. You should respond to their comments, questions, and concerns quickly or otherwise, people will think that you don’t care or are not active. Having a good conversation with your audience will also help convert them to customers.
Facebook announced a major change to its newsfeed algorithm in January 2018. Now, Facebook will prioritize those posts that have personal connections and high engagement rate, which means if you don’t generate a conversation, your posts won’t be seen on users’ newsfeed.
Another great way to engage more people on your business page is by creating a poll. It is just like twitter’s poll where you can get to know about your customers’ opinions and have the conversation started. To create a poll, go to your Page Manager and select “Create poll” icon from the menu below the “Write something” box.
Conclusion
With all these latest features and options Facebook is offering, it gets extremely easy to promote your business on Facebook. Starting from merely creating a Facebook page, the whole procedure is quite engaging. Make sure you remember all the key steps and practices that we have mentioned above in the article so you can be the best when it comes to Facebook for business. Also, abide by Facebook’s rules and laws so you can refrain from any kind of legal problem.
If you are a small business, we recommend checking out this book called 101 Facebook Marketing Tips and Strategies for Small Businesses. It will help you discover the biggest marketing trends to grow your business from scratch.
Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising: How to Access 1 Billion Potential Customers in 10 Minutes is another great guide to help you pinpoint your ideal audience and gain a good return on investment through Facebook advertising.