Almost every small business has been using social media marketing to elevate their brand and increase customer acquisition. Facebook for small business has become one of the most important channels for promotion which is why so many business owners and entrepreneurs choose to use it for marketing. However, it’s not always easy to know where to start, so here’s the Facebook marketing guide for small businesses.
1. Fill out your profile or page correctly
First and foremost, you need to fill out your profile or page correctly. There is a difference between personal profiles on Facebook and business pages – you, obviously, need to create a business page and fill it with all the necessary information about your small business.
Here are some tips for every bit of info you provide:
- When creating the page, choose the right option (“business or brand”, not “community and public figure”).
- Spell everything correctly, especially your page name aka your company name. Fill in your categories appropriately and provide the most accurate contact information (business address and phone number).
- Don’t leave your profile and cover photos empty. They are meant to make your profile stand out! The dimensions for these are 170x170 pixels for profile and 820x462 pixels for cover photos.
- To make sure that you complete all the available fields, enable Facebook’s Page Tips. These will point out the things you can fill out.
- You can also customize your page by using such options as Offers, Services, Shop, Reviews, Photos, Posts, Videos, Live Videos, Events, About, Notes, Community, Groups, and Info and Ads.
2. Define your social media strategy
The second step is defining your social media marketing strategy. This is pretty much everything you are planning to do with Facebook as well as with other social media platforms. That being said, you can always work only with Facebook if your audience mostly uses this platform.
Your social media strategy will take time to develop, but you need to set some goals for yourself beforehand that will guide you along the way. The following sections will explain how to build your social media strategy.
3. Understand your target audience
Knowing your target audience is a must, so you need to do your research properly and understand your audience. Your Facebook audience will probably correspond to your usual target audience, but there can still be some differences between the two.
Make sure that you know such information about your audience like age, gender, sexuality, location, education, occupation, income, interests, beliefs, family status, fears, hopes, dreams, needs, and more.
4. Plan your posting schedule
Another important element in your social media strategy is your posting schedule. This can be considered a kind of a guide for you that is meant to help you with regularity and consistency in your content.
Along with the days of the week and the hours you will be posting in, you should also decide on your post types. For example, on Mondays, you can post reviews, but on Fridays, you can live stream.
5. Give your posts a purpose
One of the biggest mistakes business owners make with their digital strategy is that they don’t give their content any purpose. Everything you post must have a purpose (e.g. answer a customer question, cover a trending topic)!
If you are not sure about your writing abilities, you can always hire a professional writer from a writing services reviews site like Online Writers Rating. But if you are, you need to make a list of topics to cover and decide why each topic is relevant to your audience.
6. Join groups and create your own
Participation in various Facebook groups can actually help you get more exposure for your business improving your brand awareness. But if you don’t like existing groups, you can always create your own and encourage your audience to join.
That being said, participating in already existing groups can prove to be more effective because you already have people being active within the community. All you need to do is start a conversation or join one that is already happening within that group or community.
7. Engage in and start discussions
Speaking of conversations, engaging in and initiating discussions is also a valuable tactic that you should adopt. These discussions are usually focused on current trends, but they can also go back to the topics that nobody seems to agree on (e.g. Marvel vs DC, human values, dogs vs cats, many cheap clothing items vs a few expensive ones).
The best place to start such discussions is comment sections. If you manage to initiate them in the comments under your own posts, you can expect your content to be shared more often and get more attention.
8. Use Facebook for customer service
Indeed, Facebook is not just a channel for promotion – it is a channel for customer service. Not everyone uses this social media platform to offer customer support, but it can be very useful in this sense both to you and to your audience.
For instance, you can answer customer questions and assist your clients. Do they want to book a room from you? Do they want to check if a certain product is still available? Do they want to make an order? Facebook Messenger is perfect for those, but you can also answer these in the comment sections of your posts.
9. Keep an eye on your metrics
One thing you will definitely need to do is track your campaign performance. By keeping an eye on your metrics, you will be able to understand what works and what doesn’t, and then adjust your strategy accordingly.
For instance, live streams are known to help increase engagement, but if they don’t work for you well, perhaps you will need to stop hosting them too often and instead focus on other types of content.
10. Don't jump over your head
Last but not least, you shouldn’t jump over your head. Always make sure that you stay within your budget by carefully planning as much as you can and having some resources left for your backup strategy. Set achievable goals for yourself and be realistic about your social media strategy on Facebook.
Final thoughts
All in all, to promote small businesses, their owners should simply consider using social media marketing as a part of their digital strategy and, in particular, adjusting their campaign for Facebook.
About the Author
This article was written by Ana Mayer, a project manager with 3+ years of experience. While projects can do without her participation (which means almost never), she likes to read and create expert academic materials for the Best Writers Online review website. Such work gives her the opportunity to write articles on the most relevant topics of today.
