Contrary to popular belief, Facebook marketing for small businesses doesn’t have to cost the Earth. It’s commonly assumed that if looking to conquer the world’s biggest social network, you need to spend big.
But in reality, the vast majority of features on Facebook offers businesses and marketers are free. Either way, it’s worth remembering that almost 70% of all adults have used Facebook at least once. Hence, it can be safely assumed that whatever audience you’re targeting it’s active on Facebook right now.
20 Best Facebook Marketing Tips for Business Page
The key to a successful Facebook campaign for a small or local business lies in first establishing objectives. Facebook can be used to achieve pretty much any business goal without breaking the bank.
You are promoting products or services, diversifying your customer base, building brand recognition, and so on – all possible with a cost-effective Facebook strategy. But what remains constant in all instances is the importance of a robust framework for your campaign.
A foundation that for smaller businesses, it comprises 20 essential elements, and its activities. Briefly summarised, these are the things you need to do to boost your small business Facebook.
Optimize Your Profile Page
First up, you need to make it as easy as possible for people to find your business page in the first place. This is where strategic optimization can pay dividends, with a strong focus on SEO-friendly content.
Find out which search terms are being used by your customers and embed them into your written copy. Your job is to make your profile page stand out and catch the eye of the Facebook algorithm. Otherwise, you risk fading into the background and losing business to your competitors.
Post with Intent
Posting with intent means ensuring everything you post has some kind of relevance and purpose. It means carefully considering the value of everything you post and never posting simply for the sake of it.
Experiment with your creative output by all means, though at all times, prioritize purpose and value.Content on Facebook can entertain, amuse, educate, inform, inspire or amaze. Posts that serve a purpose of some kind always perform better than those of debatable value.
Create a Content Calendar
The single most effective way to boost the efficiency of your Facebook strategy while minimizing the effort required on your part is to create a content calendar. This is where you dedicate a certain amount of time each month to planning and scheduling your posts for the days and weeks to come.
Ideally, with the help of a scheduling system like Buffer or Sprout Social. The more of your publishing activities you plan in advance and automate, the more time you’ll have to focus on analyzing and optimizing your campaign.
Establish a Community Page
An effective way to make customers feel appreciated is to set up a community page on an invitation-only basis. Inviting customers to join a community page personally makes them feel valued, laying the foundation for strong and lasting relationships.
Studies have shown how a good community page will almost always give more organic reach than a comparable commercial business page on Facebook.
Create a Facebook Group
The same can also be said for Facebook Groups, which can be fantastic for boosting engagement and strengthening relationships. For example, if you sell artisan food products, you could create a group dedicated to recipes incorporating the products you sell.
Just be sure to keep promotional messages and calls to action out of your Groups, where it’s better to embrace the ‘social’ side of social media.
Use the Stories Feature
There’s something uniquely engaging and appealing about a good Story on Facebook. Stories tend to have a much more casual and accessible vibe than conventional content, makingthem great for giving your audience a sneak peek behind the scenes.
Stories can also be fantastic for sharing instructional content and tutorials with your customers.If you’re feeling up to it, you can also go live and interact with your fans directly, saving and sharing recordings of your real-time broadcasts.
Use Insights
Instagram Insights is the platform’s suite of in-built analytical tools. Most of which are surprisingly easy to use, providing invaluable information on the performance of your posts.
With Insights, you can see which of your posts are reaching the right people in the right numbers, ultimately creating a blueprint for a successful publishing strategy.
Insights essentially provide you with all the information you need to leverage what’s working with your Facebook campaign and improve or eliminate what’s not working.
Build Your Audience
The size of your Facebook audience speaks volumes for your credibility and appeal. If looking to build authority on Facebook, you need to build your audience as quickly as possible. Finding ways to get more followers on Facebook is to buy Facebook followers and it should therefore be prioritized, as you’re unlikely to be seen as legit with just a handful of followers.
Consider all organic and paid options available for boosting the size of your audience, but don’t make the mistake of buying fake followers from spam accounts.
Assign a Sensible Budget
Paid Facebook Ads should not automatically be written off as overpriced and unnecessary. Facebook offers paid ad services to suit all requirements and budgets, with no binding long-term contracts involved.
Importantly, a Facebook Ads campaign can be used to target any audience in the world with pinpoint precision.From age to location to gender to interests and so much more besides, you can ensure your paid ads only ever appear in front of those with a genuine interest in what you do.
Create Saved Audiences
Creating Saved Audiences can make future paid ad campaigns on Facebook easier and more convenient. This is basically where you configure your audience to ensure relevant ads reach the right people just once before saving this highly-targeted audience to be used for future ad campaigns.
A simple yet effective time-saving feature, making it quick and easy to target similar or identical audiences each time you publish paid ads.
Follow Your Competitors
Getting ahead in business means finding ways to outperform or undercut the competition. In which case, it simply makes sense to keep a close eye on your competitors at all times.Facebook makes monitoring the competition a breeze – simply follow those operating in your niche and keep an eye on their output.
This can be great for identifying their strengths, leveraging their weaknesses, and studying the way they interact with their followers.
Use Your Other Social Accounts to Your Advantage
Chances are, your target audience is not active exclusively on Facebook. There’s every likelihood they’re also highly engaged on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and so on. It’s, therefore, a good idea to work towards building a single unified social presence rather than treating your Facebook campaign as a standalone strategy.
Link to your Facebook pages from your other social accounts, and do the same in reverse. Each time you publish a post, promote it across all of your social accounts and invite your target audience to check out your other profiles.
Use Testimonials
No form of social proof is more powerful or influential than a testimonial. In fact, research has shown that the strategic use of testimonials in a publishing strategy can boost small business revenues by more than 60%. More importantly, over 90% of consumers now check multiple testimonials before purchasing products and services from new businesses.
Best of all, testimonials are 100% free of charge to procure and publish. Most people are more than happy to voice their opinions, so you need only ask – and they’ll most likely comply.
Post Visual Content
Eye-catching visual content is the most engaging type of content on social media in general. This applies to both static images and video content, which are inherently more appealing than textual posts.
On Facebook, studies have shown that a balanced mix of horizontal and vertical visual content generates more engagement than sticking rigidly with one format or the other. Visual content is also exponentially more shareable than other types of content, adding up to the better viral potential for your most prominent posts.
Give a Great Value Proposition Fast
The bio you publish to describe your business needs to clearly communicate your brand’s unique value proposition. More specifically, it needs to get the message across fast – ideally within the first two lines.
Assume that most newcomers visiting your business page for the first time won’t read beyond the first few lines of your bio because they won’t. Research has shown that unless you can hook them practically in an instant, they won’t stick around to see what else you have to say.
Create a Customer Journey
Creating an engaging and enjoyable customer journey means putting yourself in your customers’ shoes. Ask yourself – what would attract you to a brand like yours from their perspective? What would make you choose any given brand over a competitor?
What would motivate you to take action right now and come back for more? Always be mindful of the fact that the customer journey is about more than simply convincing people to buy as much as possible as quickly as possible.
Use Facebook Live
As already touched upon, streaming in real-time can result in a major performance boost for your content and your profile. Facebook Live provides the opportunity to showcase your personality, introduce the people behind your brand and demonstrate your authenticity.
Streaming live on a regular basis also gives new and prospective customers a reason to tune in for more. If the prospect of streaming live seems daunting, consider asking someone else from your business to host your Facebook Live broadcasts.
Always Prioritise Customer Service
Increasingly, consumers of all ages are turning to social media as their preferred customer service channel. From everyday queries to important questions to complaints and criticisms, it’s all voiced publicly on Facebook.
As a trend that’s set to continue gaining momentum indefinitely, you need to embrace it.Invite and encourage your customers to share their thoughts and opinions on Facebook. Each time they do, treat every comment/question as a priority and provide an appropriate response.
Post When Your Customers Are Online
The best time to post is whatever time your target audience is at its most active. Peak hours on Facebook differ significantly from one demographic to the next, calling for careful forethought when scheduling your posts.
You need to think carefully about who you’re targeting and what you’re targeting them with, conducting the research needed to find their most active hours. Again, Facebook Insights provides invaluable data on post reach and engagement, giving you a good idea as to which of your posts are performing best and when.
Measure Your Success
Last up, measuring the success of your Facebook activities means focusing on the most important metrics. The relevance of any given metric will, of course, be determined by the purpose and objectives of the campaign in question.
Though in most instances, success (or otherwise) is measured on the basis of reach, engagement, conversions, and your overall ROI.
Measuring your success on an ongoing basis can reduce the risk of spending a lot to make very little in return. The more often you evaluate the performance of your campaign, the easier it becomes to steer it in a profitable direction.
Conclusion
Viewed from a business perspective, Facebook can be a seriously intimidating platform. With more than 2 billion active users, it’s the world’s most popular and influential social network by a clear mile.
It’s natural for small business owners to assume they’re at a disadvantage on platforms like Facebook. Having a massive marketing budget can be advantageous, providing access to Facebook’s most advanced paid marketing tools.
But what’s important to remember is how successful Facebook campaigns are built not on paid ads but on high-quality output. In fact, research has shown that the appeal and influence of paid social ads have been deteriorating for some time.
In which case, Facebook provides smaller businesses with a surprisingly level playing field. One where even the smallest brands have the opportunity to stand shoulder to shoulder with their biggest rivals.
