How-Tu Tuesdays: Using Facebook for your Business

Facebook has become an inevitable marketing tool for businesses across all industries. Facebook’s billion+ users are actively connecting with friends and family. That manifests the power of word-of-mouth and friend referral on the social media platform.

It is important to remember however that using Facebook personally is completely different to using it for your business. The check-list below should help you ensure you have the fundamentals for a successful Facebook business page .

1. Set up a complete page

The journey starts with a business page. Create a page that has information about the business and a link to the website as well as a location map. Make sure your page has a unique web address that is also easy to read and remember to make it easily findable.

Follow Facebook’s step-by-step instructions here to create a page.

As your Facebook represents your business like your website does, it is very important to keep your branding consistent throughout. Use the profile image to upload your company logo (size: 180×180 pixels). Your profile picture should not change unless your branding has. It should appear next to your business name whenever you comment or like other posts representing your business’s visual identity.

Your cover photo on the hand may be changed as often as you (size: 851×315 pixels). This is a great way to entertain the people visiting your page and attracting their attention to a specific message or promotion.

 

2. Identify your audience

In order to achieve a high number of valuable likes, you need to know who your target customer is. By identifying your target audience, you will be able to decide the tone and content you want to share.  It is important to remember that it isn’t about the number of likes but the amount of right likes.

Engage with your audience by sharing what will interest them and interacting with them using the right tone.

 

3. Share the right content

Sharing content on Facebook is easier than other platforms like Twitter (that limits the number of characters of a post) or Pinterest (that is image based). You can post company news and updates, behind the scene photos and product promotions. Remember to post things that your audience will find most interesting and inspiring.

Just like sales in the real world, building a relationship is key rather than going for the ‘hard sales’ approach. It’s important to be honest, consistent and responsive with posts to ensure maximum interactions and likeability.

 

4. Reach a larger audience by advertising

Even though the originality of your content has the potential to make your brand go viral online, it is actually very difficult for the average company to reach a wide audience without advertising. With the competition being very high, Facebook ads help you send the right message to the right people. You can use the ad create tool to target ads to a certain audience with a specific gender, age group and interests.

 

5. Analyse

As with any business and marketing strategy, continuous assessment and analysis is very important. Facebook offers detailed, yet very user-friendly, tools for business page holders to get page-insights. Through the ‘Page Insights‘ tool you can see the best-performing content, the audience your page is reaching and who is engaging with your page the most.

This performance indicator is a great measurement tool for your business. It will help you know more about your customers and market. This constant evaluation should also give you insight into what to do more of and what to do less of on Facebook to maximise its benefits.

 

 

 

 

 

Courtesy of Facebook for Business: https://www.facebook.com/business/overview