Facebook Business is an excellent platform to raise the profile of your business, build up a customer following, sell your goods and market your brand to your selected audience.
Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world and, it’s about more than sharing pictures of your latest family barbecue. Facebook Business provides you with all the tools you might need to run and market your business online.
For many smaller, micro or freelance business owners, it’s the ideal way to start marketing your company in the online space and reach your target audience.
Key reason to get proactive with Facebook Business
For business owners who are just starting out, a Facebook Business page may be all you need to get your venture off the ground. And for established businesses, Facebook’s huge reach and level of engagement makes it perfect for communicating with your customers and driving prospects to your new content, product pages or news stories.
Setting up a Facebook Business page is free, and will get you set up with the basics. But there are additional features that you’ll need to pay for – so it’s worth factoring these social media costs into your monthly marketing and social media budget.
These are the key ways to get up and running with Facebook:
- Create your Facebook Business page – creating a page for your business gives you a company hub on the Facebook platform. You can describe your business, upload your logo and company branding and include all the relevant address details, contact links and opening times that customers will be interested in. This is also where you post your updates, content, videos and new stories. If you’re looking to get started with online promotion, this could be your first step into marketing your business.
- Post regular fun, interesting and engaging content – posting frequent content is critical for success when using social media. So, try to post something on Facebook at least a couple of times a week, or daily if you have the time available to commit to your social strategy. Post about your latest offers, share videos of your events or case studies, run competitions or include links to your latest blogs and news updates. The key here is to post regular varied content, and to keep your followers engaged and interested. Try to leave the corporate-speak and ‘professional persona’ behind and make your Facebook page a fun place for customers and prospects to visit.
- Boost your posts and extend your reach – once you have a decent following on Facebook, you can reach a large number of people through organic posting and everyday updates. If you want to extend the reach of your marketing, you have the option to ‘Boost a post’ and promote the content to a wider audience. This is a paid service, but it can be a worthwhile way to target your content to both a larger global audience, or to target a very specific niche audience. It can be tempting to boost every post, but be strategic about the messages you want to promote.
- Use Facebooks Ads – Facebook Ads will help you to get truly granular with your advertising. This is a cost to factor into your marketing, but it will help to widen the scope of your Facebook presence. Create custom advert copy, add call-to-action buttons, include images/video and target your ad to a very precise target audience. You can filter by age, location, gender, interests, occupation or even by income bracket, making it very easy to hone in on exactly the demographic who will be most engaged by your products and/or services.
- Set up Facebook Shops – selling online has become the norm in recent times. Facebook Shops allow you to make your own online shop. You can also set up an eCommerce function, through a provider like Shopify, to allow you to take online payments and send out purchased items to customers. With very little set-up time, you can start to generate whole new revenue streams from your online shop, increasing awareness of the brand and boosting your sales and income.
- Go live with Facebook Live – one way to connect with your followers is to run a Facebook Live session, where you stream live video and audio directly from your page. This could be used to run a product demo, to report from your latest event or to give a face-to-face update on your latest plans for the business. Streaming live is an excellent way for your followers to get to know you and your business – and people buy from people, so becoming a more human presence is a brilliant way to humanise your brand.
- Be smart and review your Insight analytics – one of the most important parts of any digital and social media marketing is to understand your return on investment (ROI). Facebook’s Insights section shows you analytics covering most elements of the page and your audience engagement, allowing you to see where content and campaigns are working, or where there’s room for improvement. By tracking these metrics, you can go a long way towards improving and evolving your social media marketing strategy.
Start exploring the benefits of Facebook Business
Getting started with social media marketing may seem daunting. But a Facebook Business page can be a straightforward and simple introduction to the benefits of social media.
Start by creating your business page and then gradually explore the options to post, boost and advertise your marketing content. Over time, you’ll build up a growing following of customers and prospects, giving you an online hub from which to run and grow your business.