Get Facebook working for your business

Most businesses these days agree they have to be on Facebook. The problem is most can’t agree to what level they have to be seen on it. The following are a few tips and points I’ve picked up that will help your Facebook page gain exposure and increase it’s marketing value.

First, this is for Facebook business pages, if you have a page already setup great, if not follow my post here to get started.

Note: a business should be setup as a business page not a profile! If your business has to accept friends then you have the wrong one. Get your profile changed to a business page here – Converting Your Profile Into a Facebook Page

If your page is up and running then you’ll need to build your followers by getting people to like your page. This can be done the traditional way by putting the address to your page on all marketing material or a link can be sent to your email marketing list. If you have a new page a simple way to get likes is to get each employee and friend of your business to like the page and have them invite their friends. These methods will build your followers quickly in the beginning and give you something to work with.

Once you’ve built your following you’ll want to start marketing and selling to them but it doesn’t work as easy as that. If you start blasting out marketing material, special offers and buy now posts you’ll soon find that your posts have no impact and your page isn’t getting the any attention. This is down to Facebook’s algorithm that controls what people see in their News Feed. The algorithm has grown and evolved over the last few years but essentially it still works the same way.

Facebook monitor everything a user does on the site, their likes, their interests, their shares and their friends. Using this information they build up a profile of each user and can group them based on their interests. When you post something on your page Facebook determines which of your followers would like to see the post and will only show it to them. What that means is that if you have 1000 likes on your page your post might only get shown to 50 of them. If those 50 people show no interest in the post, Facebook makes your post disappear from the News Feed. On the flip side if those 50 people like, share and comment on the post then Facebook push it out to more and more people and keeps going as long as the post keeps getting attention.

To get the most from your posts you will need to work with the Facebook algorithm and make it work for you. To start with you need to try to raise the initial number of users that will see your post. These users will be the ones that have shown the most interest in your page previously. You can build this number by posting things purely to attract attention like competitions asking people to like and share or my preferred method is to post things that people will actually care about. If you post things outside of your business scope and that your followers like Facebook will see your page to be diverse and the fact that people interact with it means that maybe more people should see it. From my own use of Facebook I’ve noticed that a post that gets shared carries more weight than one that gets liked. A share post travels through peoples’ News Feeds and gets more attention.

These are the things to post in between your marketing/buy now posts. Go and scroll through your News Feed and see what it looks like. You’ll see what grabs your attention are the photos, you probably didn’t even stop to read the simple text only posts and you definitely didn’t stop to read the posts longer than a few lines. That should show you the type of posts you need to be putting out. In general your post should include one or 2 sentences followed by a link or a photo. If you’re posting a link Facebook will pull in the page details and you’ll get a photo and a description of the page. Make sure the photo is relevant and eye catching, if there are several photos on the page you’ll be able to select which one you want and even if none suit you have the option of uploading your own. If you’re posting a photo make sure the photo is visibly tied to your business so either it’s a photo of your product or building or you’re logo is on the photo. As posts are shared around Facebook the text can get lost so always be able to link the photo to your business.

The contented in your posts will be individual to your business and your followers. Only you really know who your followers are and what they want to see. Tailor each post so that it appeals to the majority of your followers. After a while of posting different types of content you’ll know what works best. There are ways to use Facebook’s advertising platform to “Boost” your post but I’m not covering that here. When you’ve posted and continue to post basic content you should notice a rise in the attention your “big sell” posts get and if you continue this process over the course of the year you’ll see huge benefits from Facebook.