It’s hard to imagine a world without Facebook. Once little more than a diversion for college students, Facebook today has integrated itself into nearly every facet of life and is an integral tool for modern marketing.
Your potential audience on Facebook is huge. According to Facebook’s own metrics, 1.79 billion people use the platform every day and 2.7 billion use it every month. There are currently over 9 million individuals or entities marketing themselves on Facebook.
If you’re new to Facebook or have been on it for a while but don’t really use it to promote your business, here’s how you can capitalize on the marketing potential of the popular social media platform.
Facebook Business Basics
Operating on Facebook as a business isn’t quite the same as using it as an individual. As opposed to a personal profile, businesses create Facebook pages, which are free to set up – making Facebook especially attractive if you have a limited marketing budget. This is where you tell your audience who you are and what you do and share content to promote your business.
Your Facebook page is your chance to build and spread your brand. Start by inputting your business information, including links to your website, contact information, operating hours, prices, and more. You should also include a brief description of who you are and what your company does.
Next, choose profile and cover photos that help promote your brand, incorporating logos and anything else that will help viewers recognize you and understand the services you provide. You can also choose a personalized URL for your page to help people find you on Facebook. This should be your brand name, or close to it, and should ideally mirror any handles you have on other social media accounts. You can also add what’s called a Call-to-Action button that can direct users who click a direct means to contact you, visit your website, and more.
Building your audience is also important. Encourage all your clients and colleagues to not only like your page, but also follow it, so they always see your posts first. You should, in turn, be following your colleagues and others in your industry to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on. You can also find additional followers by joining and posting in Facebook Groups that are relevant to your business.
Messaging Strategy
Once you’re set up on Facebook, it might be tempting to just start making random posts. It’s important though, that you treat your Facebook marketing as a legitimate business activity and come up with a strategy for your content and messaging.
Facebook allows you to make a variety of kinds of posts, including basic text status posts, photos, videos, live videos of what you’re doing right now, short Facebook Stories that disappear in 24 hours, polls to engage your audience, and links to websites or other content. If there’s a post you want to have available to visitors at all times, you can pin it to the top of your Facebook page.
Your marketing strategy should include a variety of these types of posts. Simple status posts can inform your followers of things like tax deadlines, while links can direct them to things like your blog or thought leadership pieces you publish. You should plan a schedule for posting and make sure that you’re posting regularly. It’s important to always keep your audience in mind and tailor you content to what it is that will keep them most engaged.
If you have money to spend, you can take your Facebook marketing campaign even further by advertising through Facebook ads, which will appear in a side column when users log in. You can choose your ad budget and target the demographic of users you want to reach. You can also pay to have a regular post be a Promoted Post, which ensures that it will reach a predetermined number of users.
Monitor Your Success
Any social media marketing strategy is only useful if it’s actually accomplishing what you want it to accomplish. You should have an idea in mind when you go in as to what your goals are in terms of engagement levels or how many leads you want to generate.
Facebook offers a feature called Audience Insights that allows you to measure and track the performance of your Facebook activity so you can figure out what’s working, what isn’t, what you should improve, and what you should do more of. Knowing how many people are seeing your posts and how they’re engaging with them empowers you to constantly tweak your Facebook marketing strategy for best results.
With the right approach, Facebook can be a valuable tool in your marketing arsenal. A comprehensive Facebook marketing strategy will put you on a path to improving brand awareness and growing your customer base.
