One of the best ways to market your business on social media involves creating and maintaining a Facebook Business page. Whether you own a start-up company or a Fortune 500 company, Facebook allows you to target its nearly 2 billion active monthly users. More importantly, creating a Facebook Business page is free. However, Facebook marketing gives businesses access to invest in a plethora of paid advertising formats.
Still, some businesses shy away from this platform, even deeming it a waste of time while citing Facebook as the cause for not yielding results. But what business owners fail to realize is that while Facebook may not directly increase sales, a Facebook business page can profoundly grow your brand and skyrocket engagement. Sadly, facilitating engagement is better said than done. Many brands foolishly believe that they can generate leads by publishing a few photos, videos, or blog posts. If you believe this misconception, you’re in for a big disappointment because your chances of attracting customers are pretty slim.
While Facebook marketing requires a comprehensive strategy, implementing some small changes will bolster your brand’s Facebook presence and take full advantage of everything Facebook Business pages have to offer.
1) Make Sure You Create a BUSINESS Page
Surprisingly, many businesses make the mistake of setting up a personal profile instead of a Facebook business page! If you’re guilty of this mistake, you should stop what you’re doing and immediately create a new business page. Failing to do so puts your brand at a severe disadvantage from competitors because you miss out on all the great features that come with a Facebook business page such as:
- Content Creation Tools
- Analytics and Insights
- Targeting Options
- Paid Promotional Applications
Furthermore, creating a personal profile for your business can be counterproductive to bolstering your digital presence. For instance, when a customer stumbles on a business page, they can quickly like a page and immediately start interacting the page. Meanwhile, a personal profile requires customers to initiate a friend request, which a brand must then accept. This process makes it difficult for customers to learn more about your brand. As a result, many – if not all – of your customers will likely not bother to participate in any further interactions.
After you’ve created a Facebook Business page, the next step involves assigning page roles to a social media management team. To avoid any mishaps, only assign Facebook Business Page roles to employees with training and experience in managing social media accounts. To assign specific roles, go to your business page, click “Settings,” then click “Page Roles.”
2) Adding Picturesque Photos
You never get a second chance to make a first impression. While an attractive profile picture may appear to be for aesthetics at first glance, your profile picture may be one of the most important elements that keep your business page thriving. For instance, think about famous brands like Apple or McDonalds. Each of these brands has a powerful logo that transcends cultural boundaries, allowing people of all backgrounds from around the world to easily recognize.
You want your fans to be able to find your Facebook page without any trouble, which is exactly why your Facebook business page needs a high-quality image that has the potential to become ingrained in peoples’ memories. While you may not be as large McDonalds or Apple, that doesn’t mean that you still can’t have a logo that people will eventually come to recognize. Furthermore, many businesses fail to realize how often a profile picture actually appears. In addition to appearing at the top of a business page, a profile picture appears in followers’ news feeds, posts on a page’s timeline, and even in replies to followers’ comments.
Facebook Photo Dimensions
As you decide on an appropriate profile picture, make sure that it aligns with Facebook’s dimensions. While Facebook frequently changes its ideal dimensions, page profile pictures currently display at 170×170 pixels on desktop screens and 128×128 pixels on smartphones. Once you upload a picture, try not to change it unless you rebrand your logo. If you want people to be able to remember and identify your business, then you will want your branding to remain consistent so that you won’t confuse your followers.
Finally, make sure you don’t ignore your business page’s cover photo. A cover photo takes up a large portion of real estate on your Facebook Page and is usually the first thing that arrests viewers’ eyes. Thus, you will also want to dedicate time to choosing a high-quality photo that attracts and retains visitors. Like profile pictures, the ideal size dimensions for a Facebook Page cover photo dimensions constantly change. Cover photos currently display at 820×312 pixels on desktop screens, and 640×360 pixels on smartphones. Alternatively, you can use a video in place of a photo. With this option, you have the opportunity to share more of your brand’s story, as well as distinguish yourself from other pages that use static cover photos. If you want to use a video for your cover photo, it should be at least 820×312 pixels, and be 20 to 90 seconds long.
3) Verify Your Business
Back in October 2015, Facebook finally took a page from Twitter’s book by introducing a feature that allows business pages to become verified. Companies that complete the quick and simple verification process receive a small “verified” symbol, which appears directly under the page’s profile picture. Although many small businesses have yet to complete the verification process, that small gray badge can result in more credibility, as well as a boost in search results within the social networking site.
To start the verification process, log onto your Facebook business page, and click on the ‘Settings’ tab. Make sure you are on the ‘General’ view and scroll down to ‘Page Verification’. Next, you must provide a correct phone number. After you click on the ‘Call Me Now’ button, you will immediately receive an automated voice message with a verification code, which you then enter into Facebook to complete the process.
Unfortunately, some business pages may have to go through an additional set of steps if Facebook cannot match the number you’ve provided with records it has about the page.
If this phenomenon occurs, return to the pop-up box where you entered your phone number and click on the ‘Verify this Page with Documents Instead’ link located at the bottom left of the box.
From here, you will need to upload documents showing your business’s name and address. Acceptable documents to complete the verification process include:
- Your Business’s utility or phone bill
- Your Business’s license
- Your Business’s tax files
- A Certificate of formation
These documents will help Facebook confirm you are an authorized representative of a legitimate business. While this extra step can become tiresome, taking the steps to verify your page will help strengthen your presence on Facebook.
4) Complete The ‘About’ Section
What kind of business do you own? Are you a restaurant? Do you offer deliverable services? Are you a mom and pop store, or part of a chain of locations? Do you have a physical location with store hours, or are you strictly an e-commerce business? These are the types of questions that an optimized ‘About’ section can address and answer. While visitors no longer see the “About” information when they land on a business page, this section is still important as it provides more vital information about a brand. An incomplete ‘About’ section could result in missed traffic and likes on your page. Meanwhile, updating all the information fields in this section can result in qualified traffic with potential fans that want to connect with your brand.
When filling in your ‘About’ section, there’s no need to extrapolate on irrelevant details. Instead, try to be as clear and concise as possible by including:
- A general description of your products or services
- A mission statement
- Company information such as address, years active, and services
- Your Website URL
- Any important achievements, awards, and milestones
By including relevant information that aligns with your brand’s identity so that your audience can get a sense of what your Page represents before they decide to Like it.
5) Posting Content to Your Timeline
If you want to attract and retain visitors, you must craft and publish useful content on your Facebook business page. This can include new deals or promotions, blog posts, or even important company updates and milestones. But if you want to boost your engagement, you should strive to include interactive media such as images or videos within each of your posts. Numbers don’t lie, and statistics indicate that posts containing visual content receive approximately 40 times more shares on social media than text-based posts.
After you’ve chosen your post type, be sure to leverage Facebook’s targeting tools to attract the ideal types of visitors. Unlike personal profiles, Facebook allows you to target specific audiences with the simple click of the bulls-eye button at the bottom of a post. Doing so allows you to choose how your post will appear to a preferred audience based on factors such as gender, education, age, location, language, and interests or hobbies. Using these targeting options can increase your chances of finding a customer instead of wasting time pursuing bogus leads.
6) Determine Post Frequency
Choosing what to post on your Facebook page is only half the battle; the other half involves determining when to post on your Facebook page, and how often you should post. If your business posts at random times throughout the workday or late at night, you risk the possibility that many fans will not see the posts. If you don’t post frequently enough, may not come appear authentic. Meanwhile, people may opt out of following your page if you post too much. The key to successful Facebook marketing involves finding when and how much to post.
To discover this frequency, you’ll want to check the performance of your updates in your Facebook Insights. This tab offers valuable data such as the day and time your audience most engages with your content, as well as other demographical information such as location, gender, and age. Once you’ve synthesized enough information, you can adjust your content calendar to coincide with when your fans are most active.
7) Pin Your Posts
Depending on your post frequency, your updates may go unnoticed by fans because whenever you post new content to your Facebook Page, older posts get pushed further down your Timeline. If you have a post that you want to promote for a longer period of time, you can pin it the top of your timeline, thereby allowing more people to see your post as you simultaneously post new content to your page.
To pin a post, click on the drop-down arrow in the top-right corner of a post, and click ‘Pin to Top.’ Your post will then appear at the top of your page with a little bookmark. While you can only pin one post at a given time, your post will remain at the top of your timeline until you choose to remove the pin or Pin a different post.
8) Monitor Your Comment Section
As you begin to implement a Facebook content strategy, you will soon notice an increase in post engagement in the form of comments. By monitoring and responding to comments via the ‘Notifications’ tab at the very top of your page, you can build a genuine relationship with your fans by addressing any comments, questions, or concerns that they might have about your business.
Unfortunately, the comment section of a post also opens you up to receiving backlash or negative reviews from disgruntled customers. Every company will receive negative feedback at one point or another. What really matters is how you deal with this backlash, as your actions can either enhance or ruin your brand’s reputation. Your first instinct may be to simply ignore or delete any negative comments; but when you fail to respond to a complaint, it sends the message that you don’t care about a customer’s concerns. Instead of ignoring any criticism, address the problem and use the negative feedback as an opportunity to provide exceptional customer service to find a resolution to the problem, as well as prevent any similar issues from occurring in the future.
While it may not be necessary to respond to every single comment you receive, you should definitely track the conversations occurring. Show your customers that you understand their concerns and encourage them to send you a private message with their contact information so that you can resolve their issue in a timely manner. Things can become very heated online, so remember to remain calm and courteous even when faced with an angry customer.
Bringing It All Together
To be a successful marketer, a Facebook Business page must be part of your digital marketing strategy because it provides your brand with a variety of creative ways to reach and engage with members of a larger, untapped audience. Social networking site – Facebook in particular – will only continue to grow in terms of the role they play for brands. Thus, creating an engaging Facebook business page has a profound effect on how an audience views your brand, as well as their purchasing decisions.
Is your company considering investing in Facebook marketing? For more information on how you can achieve success on Facebook, contact the social media experts at Premiere Creative today or give us a call at (973) 346-8100!
