How to use Facebook for your Business
Using a Facebook Fan Page is a great tool to market your business online and establish a real connection with your customers. One word of caution, do not use your personal Facebook page for this simple reason: personal facebook content does not show up in Google search results. So, anything you post on your personal page will not help anyone outside of your friends, because Google won’t post it in search engine results. You want the information you post to be found outside of Facebook, in search engine results, because that’s where people go to find information. Make sense? Now, just to quickly clarify, you need to have a personal page to create a business page on Facebook. Secondly, act like a person when having conversations, because nobody really wants to do business with a machine, they want to do business with people.
The following info will help you understand the basic principles, and if you want to dig in and learn more about a specific area I have included some terrific links that will help explain things even further. Let’s get started.
What can a Facebook Fan Page do for my business?
- A business page allows you to have conversations with people about your product, service or interests. These conversations (posts) should generate leads back to your business website or an online offer, or bring a customer into your store where you can convert them to a sale.
- A business page allows you to serve your fan base (followers, customers, etc.) with meaningful content that gets Likes, Comments and Shares.
This page can increase your brand awareness, increase your sales, increase your customer base, and provide you with a database of customer information that you can use outside of Facebook. If Facebook becomes a thing of the past, you want to make sure you have gathered information such as email addresses so that you can reach out to customers on your own, outside of Facebook.
Why should you use Facebook?
Facebook is a means to gather leads, through meaningful content posts. If you are not getting the interaction you wish through your posts, change what you are doing. It’s not working if you are not getting likes, comments, or shares. Period. Change your post content. Change. Got it?
In terms of a business expense, Facebook is typically less expensive in terms of advertising dollars spent on getting new customers and marketing to existing customers. Compared to traditional media outlets such as newspaper, magazines, print ads, or TV commercials, and it is much more targeted. This is the key to advertising, you need to target your customer, not cast out the widest net and see what happens.
It is free to setup the page, and free to deliver content to your fans. However, if you want to really engage with your fans, you will need to pay to play. Such as Facebook Ads, Promote Page, or even pay someone to do all these things for your business.
Something to consider, just because there are over a billion users on Facebook does not mean your content will be seen by all them. You do not want that either. You want your content to be seen by people who will be likely to take advantage or share your content. It’s back to qualified leads, not quantity of leads. The only way you will grow your fan base of followers is by providing meaningful content.
An active page will get much more response than a non-active page. In the world of online, setting it and forgetting about it, is not the plan, so be active and keep at it, to capture customer loyalty. We all know by now that getting a new customer is more expensive than keeping an existing one, and the existing ones, tend to share more content as well! Learn how to Promote Your Facebook Page.
How to use Facebook for my business?
- Create meaningful and relevant posts. Posts can be contests, giveaways, newsletter sign-ups, photos links, text only posts, just make sure that they are what your customers want to read about, and that they are quality, shareable content entries. Facebook will also allow you to schedule your posts so that you don’t have to manually post your posts! How to create a schedule.
- It is good to post about 1 to 2 times per week. Facebook will even remind you if you become lazy and haven’t posted in a while. Pay close attention to your Facebook Insights so that you can see what posts are working, and what time is best to post. No sense posting when your customers are busy driving to work, or eating supper at home. Facebook posts do well between 1 – 4 PM and Wednesday is a really good day. No kidding. Hump day. Secondly, use the leads you are getting from Facebook either through contents, or by directing them to your website and gathering their email address through a newsletter sign-up, and use these leads to market to them in additional ways.
- Use Facebook Ads to create meaningful content and target it towards specific people that are interested in what your offerings. You can target your ads to specific demographics, age, sex, interests, etc.
- Use Facebook to literally spy on your competitors, using SEO tools. See what is working for them, and copy that in your own unique way.
Here is an example: If you had an HVAC company and post about how it is going to be a cold night tonight and use a picture of a shivering snowman to encourage your audience to stay warm! Sound like something you would share, or possibly give a like? Instead, try this. Your audience knows it is going to be cold out. The picture might get a chuckle or a like if you really found a crazy funny picture, but there is not much use in sharing this post. This would be an example of being an entertainer on Facebook, not a marketer. Instead, create a post that offers them tips or helpful ways to save energy and lower their monthly heating costs. Or offer them a special on a new Wifi Thermostat to help control their home heat from anywhere. Remember…when you know what your customer wants to read about, they will likely be more engaged, and engagement is important to driving things like customer loyalty, selling products, or offering services. Learn how to engage your customer through Facebook Insights.
