Best Basic Practices For Marketing Your Small Business On Facebook
Is your small business one of the 40 million actively using a Facebook page for marketing purposes? With currently more than 2 billion monthly active users, the social media platform has morphed into a massive advertising media channel. Facebook's ability to highly target audiences, as well as to build a custom audience, are tools built into every business page. The site guides you through a process Facebook refers to as — get started, engage, maintain and measure.
"The majority are non-tech businesses -- the plumbers, the bakers, the local florists who are using technology to reach customers and sell their products and services," said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in 2017. A Facebook page for business is free to create. However, gone are the days when those small businesses could reach all their business page Facebook friends with zero spend. This 6 step process will help your company actively attract and build engagement with customers.
1. Create a Facebook business page
Visit Facebook on mobile or desktop to create a page for your small business, choosing from a category type that describes it best. Facebook will walk you through the steps as you invite others to like your page and begin building a Facebook community. Show off your brand personality, create a cover image, post a video and share links. Choose someone to manage your business page and provide managerial access.
2. Create and promote posts
Keep customers interested, engaged, and stay top-of-mind through activity on your Facebook page. You can grow reach using Facebook tools such as boosted posts, target audiences, custom audiences, and look-alike audiences. For example, you can choose to put budget behind showing a post in the news feed of people who like your page and their friends, or to reach similar users by demographic indicators. There's a button for the option of promoting a post on every post you create. You can stop, pause, set a maximum budget, add to budget, and finally check on the results in order to determine engagement, click throughs, and return on investment.
3. Generate more attention
Extensive amounts of studies and research all over the internet points to the importance of compelling content, images, video, and mobile. Try Facebook Live to engage audiences in an update or event at the moment it's happening. You can also schedule your posts to publish at a time that suits your audience.
4. Get inspiration
If you're stuck or wondering what works best on Facebook, check out the gallery of business ads they love. You can see how they worked and why they were so successful. Then, by visiting Facebook's success stories, you'll find a gallery containing more than 200 examples of dynamic small business ads. Search further to focus on examples by business size, type, service, product, or location.
5. Choose an objective for every ad
When you're ready to boost a post or promote an ad, decide on the objective first. Facebook offers several objectives which include getting website traffic, calling your store, getting more likes, taking a poll, entering a contest, buying something and an RSVP to an event. You can also choose another call to action.
6. Turn on messaging
A good tool for customer service and interface, Facebook Messenger is integrated with business pages. You can use it to communicate privately with customers who contact you or like your page.
Ready for the next steps? Facebook has a free online education program aimed at small businesses that offers more than 80 e-courses in 15-minute chunks of time. Facebook Blueprint is a deeper dive into how to use Facebook marketing tools to build effective campaigns and lead to a Facebook expert certification.
This article was written by Laurie Jo Miller Farr for CBS Small Business Pulse