How To Use Facebook For Business & Marketing
Learning how to use Facebook for marketing is one way to go if social media has found its way into your marketing strategy.
It’s not like small businesses have a choice. The new world order has ensured that to survive in the 21st-century business-sphere, active participation in social media is unavoidable.
We are talking about active participation on the social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
And this does not leave out the newbies like Pinterest and Snapchat. However, this post is about how small businesses can use Facebook to tell their stories, follow leads and win more customers.
Facebook can be used by small businesses to grow their online marketing activities and reach all the people that matter most to their businesses.
Facebook is also pretty easy to setup and use. Moreover, Facebook’s social media advertising is one of the cheapest and most effective social media channels for boosting your reach.
So, if you’ve got your mind made up on using Facebook for your business, let’s see how to go about it:
Table of Contents
How to use Facebook to promote your business
1) Create a Facebook Business Page
Your Facebook business page should (most times) be different from your personal profile page. This type of page gives you permission to talk about your business on a regular basis. But you can always use your personal page to drive traffic to your business page.
Your Facebook Page makes your business:
- Discoverable: When people search for you on Facebook, they’ll be able to find you.
- Connected: Have one-to-one conversations with your customers, who can like your Page, read your posts and share them with friends, and check in when they visit.
- Timely: Your Page can help you to reach large groups of people frequently, with messages tailored to their needs and interests.
- Insightful: Analytics on your Page will give you a deeper understanding of your customers and your marketing activities.
To create your business page, watch this 3 minutes 29 seconds video tutorial on how to create your beautiful business page, then navigate to https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php to get started.
2) Build & Grow Your Audience on Facebook
After creating your Facebook business page, the next step is to grow your followership or fan base. I.e. increase the number of likes. This can be used as a sort of social proof.
One mistake you shouldn’t make is to assume that people will automatically like your Facebook page after creating one.
You need to get the word out before people start to take notice of your business page and make sure you are the first person to like your page. Be a spokesperson for your business.
To build your audience, encourage your current customers and supporters to like your Facebook Page. Your Facebook friends and website or blog visitors can also be a source of initial traction for your Facebook page.
Remember: It isn’t about the number of likes. It’s more important that you genuinely connect with the people who are interested in what you have to offer Facebook. If you do, they’ll help tell your story.
Having a million likes doesn’t necessarily imply that a million people will engage with you. It is much better to have 5000 people who are engaging in your business than 50,000 people that rarely visit your page.
Nonetheless, the number of likes you have on Facebook can be used as a sort of social proof. When people visit a website or Facebook page, they are more likely to trust & interact with a page with 10,000 likes than one with 87 likes.
3) Engage With Your Followers
The secret to engagement on Facebook is posting compelling contents consistently.
You need to have a posting plan for your Facebook page for it to work for your community.
Start by growing a community before you start promoting your business. Initially, post useful, helpful, fun and a variety of content (blog posts, pictures, videos, infographics, useful links, etc.) that have nothing to do with sales.
The reason is simple: You have to build trust within your community, and your community needs to trust that you would continually broadcast useful content that will add value to them.
When your Facebook page is a community hub, you become that trusted source. You should never come straight out of the gate and talk about your business, products, and services. People will only buy from you when they have trusted your business.
4) Use Facebook’s Paid Advertising
With over 1.49 billion members worldwide and a host of advertising tools to reach your target audience, Facebook is providing businesses with the largest advertising opportunity since search.
So yes, your audience is on there somewhere and Facebook can help you reach them.
Seriously, Facebook ads are practically free! Ok, very cheap.
If you can afford $5 per day, then Facebook paid ad is the way to go. You can even set aside $1 to boost a particular post. Very cheap!
If you’re strapped for cash, just ensure that you set reasonable daily Facebook budgets so you don’t exceed what you’re able to spend.
The most astounding component of Facebook’s paid ads is the targeting capabilities. Whether it be by behaviors, interests, demographics, connections, age ranges, languages, or locations, you can dig pretty deep into these targeting capabilities and layer them upon each other to ensure you’re getting to the exact people you want to reach.
5) Run A Facebook Contest
A contest is another great & fun way to grow fans and grow your business on Facebook.
You need to determine what you hope to achieve and tailor the contest accordingly.
Is your goal to increase brand awareness or showcase a new product? Or do you want to increase the number of likes on your Facebook page? Are you hoping to boost user engagement, gather user feedback or develop advocates for your brand?
It is also important that you offer a relevant prize. It doesn’t have to be extravagant. In fact, your contest should showcase your own products and services. Offer your own product or service as the prize. You could add a discount and other freebies but don’t completely shut out your own products. After all, people are coming to your page because they are interested in learning more about what you offer.
6) Sell On Facebook
Many businesses are using Facebook to sell and you can too.
There are many Facebook apps that can enable you can set up a Facebook store to sell your products to your fans on your fan page.
Apps like Shopify, ShopTab, BigCommerce, Wix, etc. make it easy for you to sell directly on your Facebook page without entering a line of code.
Another way to sell on Facebook is to share product links in your Facebook status updates. Use a deep link that takes fans straight to your product, not just your website.
You can also sell your products in Facebook groups or have friends share your product links on their own timelines.
In conclusion…
As the social media community continues to grow & thrive, it is wise to incorporate social media marketing into your overall marketing strategy.
Facebook is a great choice as it offers a lot of useful options and tools to help businesses achieve their marketing goals.
Remember, people will only buy from you when they have trusted your business. So, concentrate your social media efforts on building a community that trusts you.