Social Media: How To Make The Most Of Your Facebook Business Page
Today, I’m starting a new series on social media! It’s a very practical, hands on look at how - and why - to promote your business on some of the biggest social media platforms in the world. It's going to be awesome - trust me.
And I can think of no better way to kick off the series than with the biggest of the Big Kahunas - Facebook.
If you're not on Facebook, your business at least should be. Whether you love it or hate it, Facebook isn't going anywhere, it's not a faze, it's the leading social media platform and holds a huge chunk of the market.
In fact, Facebook has 1.94 billion monthly users (March 2017). Wow. That's just phenomenal. It's about a quarter of the world's population. 85% of them are outside the US, and more than 65% log in daily. I'm one of them - are you?
So you can see that putting your business on Facebook is a very sensible decision! And it's easy and free.
My Facebook business page is relatively small with about 1,100 likes. I've had my business page for about 2 years and in that time I've experimented a lot with different forms of marketing.
This year, I've invested more in Facebook; a large portion of my audience are regular users. I've been experimenting with Facebook Ads with some success and spending loads of time with podcasts, online classes and news articles about Facebook. It's such a fast-changing platform and I've become completely fascinated by it.
How to set up your Facebook business page
If you don't already have a Facebook business page, you can set one up very easily. You'll need a personal account just to verify your identity (and this connection has other uses... read on).
Choose an appropriate page URL. It can be either your business name, your actual name, or something that's easy to remember and easy for your customers to find you. And if you want to change your URL, that's simply done via your admin settings: Edit Page > Update Info > Basic Information > Change Username.
Next, choose a template - Facebook revamped their pages layout in late 2016 to make it easier to categorise and promote your page.
Here's a great overview of how to set up your page using the new templates.
Template tips!
Rearrange the order of your left sidebar sections. Delete the ones that you don't want; a few that can't be deleted unfortunately so just pop those down at the bottom.
Add other social media accounts like Twitter and Instagram as sections on your page through the Apps option under settings. Simply type in a search, eg "Twitter" and pick the App option, then follow the prompts. I use a free app for this service but there are paid ones too.
Main sections in your Facebook business page
About description
Profile pic
Cover image
Contact info
CTA button
Content
About description
There's a short About spiel that will appear under your banner in the right sidebar. It's only 225 characters so keep this short and keyword-heavy. Then there's space for a longer "Story" accessed in the About section. Take 1-2 paras on a spiel about your business and include your websites and/or social media links.
Profile picture
Post a professional headshot, logo or image that clearly identifies your business or what you are about. Choose dimensions of 160 x 160 pixels. No iPhone selfies or holiday happy snaps!
Cover image
The cover image can be a banner or an image of your product or business. I've long had a branded banner, created with a Canva social media template (Canva is free and super easy to use, so don't feel intimated!).
Facebook's cover dimensions are 851 x 315 pixels, so keep that in mind in terms of positioning your images and text. For eg, don't put any text at the bottom of your image as the Like, Message, More and Sign Up buttons will block it.
You can also post a video as your cover image! Keep in mind that the horizontal dimensions are fairly narrow so you may need to tweak your video to fit. I'm experimenting with this now.
Contact info
You'd be surprised at how many people don't include this info. Don't make your readers search for it!
If you're a product-based business, add every contact detail you have, including social media links. You can even put it in your banner. Service businesses, include your website and a custom email address and/or phone number.
Call To Action Button
The "call to action" button is the large, highly visible blue button at the bottom right of your banner. It leads readers directly to your website, email, video or whichever "action" you'd like them to follow.
You can edit it the button to a number of different options. If you can, draw a bit more attention to via your banner, like I have above.
Content
Last but certainly not least, content! You've got to have regular content on your page.
If you're selling a product, flog your product, along with events, sales, promotions; if you have a service business, you can post helpful content, inspirational quotes, reshares, and promotions for your own blog posts, newsletters, courses, webinars and so on.
High quality images and - increasingly - video is the order of the day.
Try to tag others to reach some of their audiences as well and add 1-2 hashtags on a well known subjects, trends or events. You can also pin important or particularly relevant posts to the top of your page; I do this about once a week with new blog posts.
How to promote your Facebook page
Okay, so you've got your Facebook business page set up, now to promote it. The simplest way to do that is to invite all your Facebook friends to like your page, which you can do on the right hand side of your page.
You can also ask your close friends and family (the ones who'll happily do this for you) to share the page to their friends.
There's also Facebook Ads which are an awesome way to gather likes, especially if you can tie the ad in with a promotion, event or blog post. It only costs a few dollars to post an ad and can result in hundreds of new followers.
For eg, on my Eat Drink Laos page, I try to schedule 1 post a day of an image and descriptive text. On average these posts reach about 200 people a day but when I "boost" a post (create an ad), they reach up to 5,000 people! And add dozens of new subscribers. All for the menial sum of $2-3.
There's loads more to Facebook marketing than paid ads including groups, sharing, links but I'll cover that in another post!
Regularly check your page insights
Keep an eye on the Insights tab, next to the Publishing Tools so you can see which posts are doing well and therefore, what to repeat and what to avoid. It also gives lots of info into the demographics of who's viewing your page and your ad results. Valuable stuff!
And there you have it! Tell me, how has your business fared on Facebook?
About the author: Lilani Goonesena is an Australian freelance writer, SEO copywriter and Squarespace web designer based in Vientiane, Laos. She loves boosting freelancers and small businesses with web design, SEO content and digital marketing strategy. She writes an awesome weekly newsletter on digital marketing, social media, blogging, web design and "all that online stuff". Lilani also blogs at the delectable Eat Drink Laos, just for fun.