5 ways to get more business through Facebook.
Is your business on Facebook? Are you getting the leads you anticipated? While Facebook was primarily established as a personal-social network, it has become increasingly business-focused with businesses advertising and connecting with their clients through their pages and Facebook-specific interventions. If managed properly, Facebook offers another avenue through which to connect with your current and prospective target market.
Having said that, many small business owners report a lack of results (or response) from social media channels such as Facebook, an inability to grow a small Facebook following, or a lack of knowledge about how to make Facebook a part of their inbound marketing strategy.
Make the most of your Facebook page with these tips
1. Make your business known
From your profile pic (choose wisely) to the ‘about’ section, you need to make sure potential followers know who you are and what you do. Your profile should be up to date, relevant, and aligned with your brand and your marketing goals. Leave nothing to speculation – give clear facts and all the relevant contact details.
2. Co-ordinate and direct
Make sure that your profile pic, cover photo, latest posts, and any calls-to-action promote the same marketing campaign(s). This means they need to be up to date and encourage your followers to take action. If you want to maximise engagement with your marketing campaigns, you need to put out a strong, co-ordinated marketing message across the board.
3. Aim and shoot
It’s important to tailor your organic posts to your target market. Facebook has a number of targeting tools that allow you to segment your posts by factors such as age, gender, education, location etc. This will ensure that certain posts reach those followers most likely to engage with your offerings. On this note, be selective about who you allow to post to your page – posts should be relevant to your business and act as a reflection of your brand, and they need to be managed as part of a bigger strategic marketing plan.
4. Schedule and commit
Posting once every six months won’t get your business noticed. At the same time, you don’t want to overwhelm your followers with too many posts in a short period of time, clogging up their feed with info that’s not relevant to their needs. Research shows that companies with less than 1000 followers receive 60% fewer interactions per post when they post over 60 times in a month. And companies that post between 1pm and 4pm have the best click-through and share rates. Think about when and how you’re posting. Keep it clean, regular, and high-quality so that when you do post, your followers sit up and take notice.
5. Think content
Posting to a channel like Facebook isn’t all about advertising (though there is a space for that too). It’s also about knowledge-sharing – about generating useful and relevant content that will have your followers looking to you as a thought leader in your field. Post about your expertise, your ideal customers’ interests, and use market research and buyer personas to find out what your clients need to know. Once you have the content, present it in an interesting way (think visual elements, great design, simple calls-to-action, and even a freebie now and then). Then track your content. Tracing URLs and Facebook tracking tools allow you to see what type of content performs the best. Once you have this knowledge, you can tailor your content to post more of what works to engage your target market and less of what doesn’t.
Using Facebook in a strategic manner can help promote your business and attract new clients. But you need to invest time into breaking through the news feed noise (and there’s lots of it), especially as, even when it comes to general guidelines, what might work brilliantly for someone else’s business might not work for yours. Need help? Talk to us. As digital marketing experts, we understand the importance of online marketing and we can help you find and connect with your target market across numerous channels.