Get Started with Marketing Your Small Business on Facebook
In this blog post I will explain how start up's and small businesses can get started with marketing Your small business on Facebook. Facebook is one of the best social networks to promote your business and make meaningful connections online. According to a recent annual small business and social media survey taken out by Social Media Examiner: Facebook Dominates Small Business Social Media Marketing with a massive 93% of survey respondents saying they use Facebook for business marketing. There's no denying it Facebook marketing is huge and so are the benefits of Facebook marketing for small businesses. Facebook is an amazing opportunity for small businesses to literally reach out to millions of individuals for free or at a very low investment in advertising.
I personally have launched websites and taken orders within hours of the website and page going live!
Although there are many small businesses already using Facebook for marketing there are also people not doing so or not doing so properly.
It's no good going in all guns blazing without some kind of plan or strategy. This strategy can be basic but should include some basic rules and answer some basic questions:
What - Are you hoping to achieve?
Who - Are you targeting?
Where - Do they hangout?
When - Will you engage with them?
How - Will you measure your activity and progress?
Answering these questions gives you a plan to work with, why are you marketing your small business on Facebook? what do you want to get out of your campaign? will it be a longterm campaign or are you looking to run a campaign and measure it over a short amount of time? These are questions you must ask yourself. Then you should be thinking about where your target audience might be hanging out on Facebook, is it on groups or other pages? How will you reach them and engage with them? What content will you post? Where will you get this content? How will you know if any of the hard work you've been doing has worked? - You'll need to use Facebook insights (Facebook's own analytics) or analyse web traffic through Google Analytics, you may even measure by how may extra calls you've had during the campaign - just remember to ask how the caller found you.
Once you have some kind of strategy in place you simply should do the following:
Setting up a business page
This is very easy, simple and self explanatory. Do not use a personal page for your business. Facebook have taken many profiles down that are using their business name to network instead of a business page.
Choose business type, Add you company name and about information. You can go and enter more details later and when you do ensure you properly describe your page and business. Make sure you include your keywords and phrases. Remember this page will also be indexed in search so it should be as professional looking as your business website since this could be where customers land first before your website. Make sure you include any telephone numbers and location details - this information will be prompted by Facebook but you can always check your settings later to make sure you didn't miss anything.
Be sure to add a great cover image and your logo (cover image can be created to size in Canva - a free image creation tool) - Also it's worth bearing in mind that Facebook adds new features to the business page frequently so try to keep engaged with what's going on in the world of social media.
Like and Share
When you've done this you can then 'like' your own page and share with anyone who may be interested in your business. It's also great to get some support from friends and family by asking them to like and share your new page with other interested people.
You are ready to start posting. We could have covered this in the strategy part of this post but the content you post really requires an entirely different strategy again you'll need to think about the following:
What content should i share?
What problem does this content solve?
What's in it for my potential audience?
Does this content evoke a good feeling or reaction in relation to your brand?
Does this content help people to interact with my brand?
Is this content aspirational or inspirational?
Promoting your own products immediately isn't always a great strategy. To begin with anyway. It's a turn off if you simply show up and start shouting about you and making it all about your brand and not about the customer or the community. You should really concentrate on building your likes and growing your audience or even better... Start building a community of people who love to talk to you and each other and share your messages frequently. Then when they are engaged you can start sharing products or images from your website that solves peoples problems or inspires your community.
To create super slick images for your Facebook page you can use Canva, on Canva make sure you use the correct size for Facebook, this is already the correct size template for you. It really couldn't be easier. The hard part is creating that fantastic content. I love to use Post Planner to help me find great questions, viral and beautiful images to share as well as top news, I also use some of the status updates they recommend as inspiration for my own which makes it seem more authentic.
When will you get started?
Tools I use: