What is Facebook?

Facebook is the most popular and most successful social networking site in the world, currently boasting over 1.2 billion users. This makes it the perfect site for small businesses to gain more leads, sales and customers. But the site can be a bit overwhelming for businesses that aren’t exactly sure how to get the most out of Facebook marketing. In this report, we will examine the best techniques to benefit from Facebook marketing, how to create a small business Facebook page and how to keep up with Facebook’s ever-changing algorithm.

Create a business page

Creating a business page is a simple step, and doesn’t require a lot of invested time. Simply click on “Create a page,” choose a name for the page, choose the type of business, pick a category, agree to the Facebook ToS, and then click “Get Started.” From here, the business page can be designed with photos, company information, contact information and other content to help keep customers informed in what’s going on with the business, and also to attract new customers to the business.

How to gain more followers

Now that the business has its own page, it’s going to need followers, or all those great posts will not be seen by anyone. There are several ways to attract new followers.

• Create engaging, informative posts. Followers will click “Like” on the post, and the post will then appear in their friends’ newsfeed. Those friends may find value in the post and decide to follow the business page to keep up with deals, products or services offered by the company. Create such compelling content that it will make it beyond Facebook’s newsfeed. Content that has informational value, and is interesting to read will be reposted, reblogged and sent to other social media sites. Stuck on what to write or how to write it? Check out this informative article on how to create the perfect Facebook post.
• Promote posts. You may have the best Facebook marketing post ever written, but if it’s not promoted, it may simply fizzle out with very few viewers. The typical non-promoted Facebook post is only shown to approximately 16% of the followers. To have it seen by up to 100% of all followers, users must pay a fee for Facebook to promote the post. This is Facebook’s way of saying, “Sure, you can use our platform to advertise to thousands of our users, but you’re going to have to pay for it.” It’s up to you to decide if the content you are posting is promote-worthy, or if 16% of the followers is enough. The more viewers that see the post, the better chance the post has of being “Liked” and reposted to users that are not (yet) followers of the business page.
• Use mobile marketing to target mobile users. Millions of Facebook users use mobile devices to access Facebook on a daily basis. See the section “Facebook Mobile” below for more information on mobile marketing.

Effective time management

Facebook offers page insights and analytics which can be useful in determining how often users visit the business page, where they are visiting from and what time they visited. Use this information to determine what type of content is best suited for specific times of the day. By scheduling posts for specific times, this allows more time to concentrate on other business-related matters.

Visit Facebook news-related sites to keep up with the latest news and changes from Facebook. Some sites include SociallyStacked, AllFacebook, and the Facebook newsroom.

First thing in the morning (or whenever you get online), be sure to check the business page first. Checking personal pages can be a distraction and the business page doesn’t need to be neglected. This can actually cost the company leads and sales.

Facebook Marketing

Increase Facebook engagement

By placing ads strategically, businesses can increase their exposure, and with it, their chances of gaining critical leads. Facebook offers ad placement in two areas- the newsfeed, and the column to the right of the newsfeed.

Tip: Ads placed in the center of the newsfeed have a click through rate that is 20 times higher than ads placed in the right-hand column. The ROI (Return On Investment) ratio is 26 times higher for ads placed in the center of the newsfeed. As this can vary by genre, businesses can conduct their own analytics study by purchasing an ad in both areas and checking the results.

SEO for Facebook

Facebook can be effectively used for SEO purposes. As long as the privacy of the posts made by the business page are set to public, Google and other search engines will pick up the content and archive it.

• By using keywords in the title of the post, the link to the post and the description of the post, the business page can expect to see itself rise in the search rankings.
• The name of the business page can incorporate (some) keywords. Facebook maintains a database of banned keywords, and will not allow Facebook page names to contain any of these keywords.
• The Facebook “About” area can be used to add keywords, just don’t spam this area as both Facebook and Google will penalize pages with spammy content.

Call to action

Each post should have an action that the business wants users to perform- either clicking the link, signing up for email or services, visiting a blog or product page, etc. But to get the user to do this, the post should utilize copywriting content which persuades the user to take the requested action.

How to use Facebook for small business

We’ve already covered the first step- create a business Facebook page. From here, the possibilities are endless. The business page can be used to acquire thousands (or more) followers, it can be linked to the company website and blog, and it can be integrated with other social media sites.

Social media Integration

Social media integration can be used to save time and gain exposure simultaneously. By integrating Facebook with other social media sites such as Twitter or LinkedIn, all posts made to Facebook will be automatically posted on the other social media sites as well.

Facebook Mobile

There are currently around 500 million active mobile users on Facebook. To ignore the potential of mobile marketing through Facebook would be very disadvantageous for a small business. Before businesses should start advertising on Facebook’s mobile platform, there is one step that cannot be overlooked- the business website and blog MUST be mobile-friendly. There are two reasons for this:

1. The ad viewers that click on the ad on their mobile device will be taken to a page that is not optimized for mobile and could be slow-loading, laggy, error-filled, and hard to navigate. These potential customers will quickly become lost customers as they will most likely navigate to a competitor’s site that is mobile-friendly.
2. Google has enacted a policy that penalizes sites that are not properly optimized, or that are misconfigured, for mobile device use. Not optimizing a business website to be mobile-friendly can result in the site being demoted in the search rankings.

Keeping up with changes

Facebook is constantly changing up the newsfeed algorithm. This can cause much frustration to business users who must also adapt their strategies each time Facebook changes. There are a few ways to work around the Facebook algorithm changes. First, you must remember what Facebook was designed for — connection-making. No matter what changes are made, the ultimate goal of a small business should be to increase the number of connections.

Inform followers to change newsfeed settings

Facebook has two settings for newsfeed viewing: “Top Stories,” which is set as default, and “Most Recent.” Top Stories are posts made by users that the viewer interacts with the most, as well as posts that the user should find most interesting according to Facebook’s algorithm. So in order to get posts viewed by the most amount of users possible, a business can choose to use Facebook’s “Promote” feature on specific posts, and inform users to change their newsfeed settings to Most Recent. This will keep them up to date on the most recent news, deals, products and services that the company is offering. However, there isn’t currently a way to change the default newsfeed settings to Most Recent without using an extension for Chrome or Firefox. Without using the extension, users will have to reset their newsfeed settings each time they log on.

Ask users to turn on notification settings.

Users can go to the business page, click on the settings icon and click on “Get Notifications.” Then the user will get a notification on Facebook and email each time the business page creates a new post. This is useful for users who don’t want to change their newsfeed settings to Most Recent, or are simply not online when posts are made.