In this article, we will be discussing why Facebook is the best social media platform for your business, a step-by-step guide to setting up Facebook for your business, 6 easy steps on how to create a Facebook business marketing strategy, and how to measure the success of your strategy through the several analytics provided by Facebook.
There is a common saying among business gurus that goes thus: “There are a lot of people out there looking for what you sell, you just need to put yourself in a place where they will see you.” This saying has been proven true. Businesses that put themselves out in the public end up getting more customers and revenue as the year passes by.
It is not easy to present your business to the public and many businesses shun away from publicity. Surprisingly, it’s very easy and it’s at the tip of your fingers; all you have to do is utilize it.
How the Internet affected people’s lives
Remember, we are in the 21st century and over 95% of the world’s population is on the internet and diverse social media platforms. Everybody wants the best out of every situation they find themselves in. Hence, they consult the nearest and fastest help they can get – the internet.
Social media platforms like Facebook connects friends and families but it is also a great platform to sell and promote businesses. Brands that know and apply this successfully achieve growth every year.
So, if you plan to promote your business and make it popular, a platform like Facebook is the best. All you have to do is to master it so as to make the best use of it. Don’t fidget! Read the entire article to learn how you can create an effective Facebook business marketing plan. Stay glued to this post. There is a lot to unveil.
Why Facebook Is The Best Social Media Platform For Promoting Your Business?
The main reason why you may want to start Facebook business marketing is to increase revenue and get more sales. Of course, you will need more people to patronize your business.
Facebook is a large community that has over 2.8 billion people frequenting the platform each month.
Wait for a second and imagine how your business will upscale if you have approximately 3 billion people seeing what your business is about every single month!
Also, in case you don’t know, a lot of people go to Facebook seeking help on how to get things and make life easy for themselves, so do away with the idea that the platform is majorly for posting pictures and commenting.
Below, we will discuss why you should do Facebook business marketing and why it is the best social media for your business.
It is the world’s largest social media platform.
According to FORBES, Facebook hit 2 billion users in 2017, cementing its status as the world’s largest and most influential social network. Recently, there are over 2.8 billion people making use of this platform every month. What a pool of potential customers for your Facebook business marketing plan! A large number of them spend a lot of time on the networking platform seeking concrete information on the goods and services they wish to get.
With this social media platform, you get to have more customers with a great pitch, they become loyal to you and your business goes BOOM.
The best way to get potential clients’ information.
For businesses to strive, getting likes and comments is not just enough. Although it creates awareness and a constant reminder of your business, you have to build a more personal relationship with your potential customers if they are to trust you. It also goes down to how independent you are of a particular networking medium. If your best-used platform crashes today, how well can you survive and still be at the peak of your success pyramid carrying your potential customers along? It’s fantastic how Facebook enables this – getting clients’ information such as emails for close follow-up on other platforms.
Above everything, this feature is extremely commendable, especially with the recent happenings of certain social media platforms shutting down for hours, leaving any business that doesn’t follow up with their clients through other means stranded.
Low Cost associated with Facebook Business Marketing.
Marketing with Facebook is very simple and involves low cost. In starting a Facebook business page, you don’t need to spend any money. Although you might have to pay a graphics designer some amount of money to help you with your profile picture and cover picture. It’s best to use distinct pictures displaying your business for your Facebook business page. To lower the expense, you can use original photos taken by your company. These pictures work extremely well.
The major thing that demands money is calling on the attention of a larger number of people through ads, sponsored posts, and boosting posts. The cost is comparatively low when you compare it with other platforms like Google and traditional prints, TV, and radio.
Moreover, with Facebook, you can focus your marketing on a specific set of people – your target audience. Thereby, reducing cost.
Although 2.8 billion people use the platform, it doesn’t mean that everyone is interested in your product. That said, when you are planning your Facebook business marketing strategy, it is important to focus on the users who will really check out your page.
It is beneficial to your website.
Facebook is a great way to gain traffic for your own website. Asides from posting about your lifestyle and business on Facebook, you can include links to your website in your content on the platform. You don’t have to be just an entertainer who cares about reactions to posts – likes, comments, and shares.
You can optimally benefit from Facebook by making your followers visit your website (it makes them know more about your business). So, make use of your website link in your daily posts on your page. The amazing thing about link posts is that if your website has a cover image, Facebook will support it by generating a nice huge full-sized image for you. People tend to click this image a lot.
You will know more about your competitors.
Facebook is home to everybody. You can’t limit the number of people you want on the platform. I mean, you are not the owner of Facebook, so you will definitely see your competitors. But rather than being scared and spiteful, you can make use of their presence to your benefit.
Facebook allows you to spy on how others in your field are growing. It suggests pages of competitors based on the field you are into. You can click on them and compare your page with theirs. Note what they are doing and you are not doing, and then make good sense of it.
Competitors’ research is very beneficial to your business. It is you go to your competitors for a masterclass without payment. Their activities make your business better if you take note of their distinct techniques.
Several digital experts have highlighted that a business has to be on the internet if it is
Step-by-Step Guide To Setting Up Facebook Business Marketing
Facebook has the most number of users among all social networking platforms. As such, it is a no-brainer to have an account registered. It is the best opportunity for you to reach out to a larger audience and establish your brand across the globe.
Shortly below, a detailed guide will be given on how to set up Facebook for your business.
Register An Account
Before you can optimize Facebook for your business benefit, you must have an account already and if you don’t have one, all you have to do is create one. You will easily locate the ‘Create’ option on the right-hand side at the top of your homepage.
After creating an account, you can go ahead to set up your Facebook business page. To do that, click on ‘Page’ from the drop-down menu on your screen. You have the option of choosing from two-page categories:
- Business or Brand Page – ideal for profit-oriented businesses
- Community or Public Figure Page – best suited for a non-profit organization or public individual
Select the category that best fits your business.
Fill in Your Business Information
After you’ve chosen a category, you’ll be prompted to input your business information in a few fields that will appear almost immediately. Provide your business name and your business category. It is very important that you use the name of your business for your page name so that your audience will be able to find you easily.
Upload A Profile Picture and A Cover Photo to Your Profile
You will be asked to include a profile picture and a cover photo in your profile. You have the liberty of using any image, but it is advisable that you use images that reflect your business and its identity – you can use the logo of your business for this purpose. That is why the need for a little amount of money to give to a graphics designer was formerly mentioned in this write-up.
Like a Facebook personal account, the cover photo serves as the background of your page, so it must be visually attractive and reflective of your business.
Invite Friends
Following the above steps, you will have an option to invite friends from your existing Facebook account to engage (like) your new business page. It is advisable that you click on the invite option, as it will give your new company page a decent starting foundation of followers and engagement.
Fill in Other Business Information
After strictly following the above steps, go to the left-hand side of your Facebook Business Page, and you will see ‘About’. Click it to include other information about your business, such as the location of your business, items, or catalog. Don’t forget to include all pertinent details, such as your website (if you have), your business hours for weekdays and weekends (if you work on Saturdays and Sundays), contact information (like your email, phone number, etc.), and if applicable, your other social media handle links.
An amazing feature about Facebook is that it ranks high on search engines. Its Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the best. Because it ranks higher in searches, it becomes potential customers’ first reference point for your business. So, make sure all the information you input while setting up your Facebook Business Page is correct and up-to-date as it’s what people will see when they want to know more about your business, hence their judgment.
Add A Button
You have the opportunity of adding a button to your account. All Facebook pages have this feature – a strong call-to-action that is free to use. It’s a fantastic way to lure people into taking an action on your page, such as direct messaging you for further inquiries, getting to know more about the services rendered by your business, etc.
After all these steps have been completed, you will have your authentic Facebook Business Page. Viola!
However, creating a business page is merely the beginning of your digital business life. Be active and knowledgeable about the latest trends so you can adapt them accordingly to your business. Customers need a seller that will be able to respond to their needs anytime they need help. They want an immediate reply, and they fail to acknowledge that business owners are humans like them and they can’t be active 24/7.
It is important that you note that the digital space is for everybody, so if you don’t employ the help of Artificial Intelligence, you may be displaced by others who have a lot of employees on shift or who make use of artificial intelligence like ‘Socialays’ to give a rapid and accurate response.
Being online always, sharing new and relevant content on a regular basis, utilizing all the features provided by Facebook, including images and videos to your posts, and joining relevant groups will help you stay relevant to your audience. It will also assist you in reaching and engaging a larger audience, as well as generating revenue for your goods and services.
6 Easy Steps on How To Create A Facebook Marketing Strategy
After you have created your Facebook Business Page, you have to know how to build followership for your business, generate revenue, and grow at the same time. Here are some strategies you can utilize to benefit the most from Facebook for your business.
1. Know your targets
The first thing to do is to know who you are on Facebook. You should know your target audience very well.
People have needs, and when they do, they find every possible way to solve them. They fantasize about how sweet their lives would be without those needs. Your job as a business owner is to study them very well and devise a solution. You can start by asking questions like these:
- Who will benefit from the goods and services you are rendering?
- What are their challenges?
- Where do they reside?
- Which age group do they belong to?
- Who influences their world?
- What time of the day do they frequent Facebook?
- How much is the income of an average target?
Knowing the broad profiles of Facebook users is also very crucial. After you’ve gotten the details of the people using the networking platform, you can examine Facebook Audience Insights to see how these details relate to your target clients.
Audience Insights is a tool that is embedded in Facebook. It will enable you to get into the detailed facts of your potential clients.
2. Determine your objectives
You have to set goals. Determine what you want to achieve per season either daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly. You should also have a long-term goal.
Facebook business marketing success is not limited to ‘likes’ and other engagements. The engagements you get must be related to a larger marketing plan. If they are not, they are meaningless and they will only last for a limited time. For an effective and efficient Facebook business marketing plan, you will need a solid goal and objective that is related to that of your business.
Every business has various goals and objectives, but they should be concentrated on factors that affect their end result. The desired end result could be:
- obtaining leads,
- increasing client satisfaction,
- or adding to the number of people that convert to your website.
Once you know your goals, your overall activity on the platform should be streamlined to achieve them.
3. Make a content plan
Now that you’ve known your target and you’ve determined your objectives, you have to structure how you will come up with your content and the time to post them. To make sure that you make the most of your Facebook Business Page, treat it like a conventional personal account. Don’t bore your audience with business content; don’t be official at all times. You can be interactive while still engaging your clients in meaningful conversations.
For content posting, it is best to use the ‘80%-20%’ rule.
The ‘80%-20%’ rule states that 80% (the larger part of your content) should be used to interact with your audience freely. It can be in the form of education, information, opinion seeking, entertainment, etc. Your business vision shouldn’t be the focus of every content you put out. Remember that Facebook is first a social networking platform before anything else. Ensure you deliver value to your audience and create a relationship with them. If you routinely provide people with engaging content, they will be more receptive to listening to what you have to say about your product.
The remaining 20% should be for the promotion of your business. As much as you get mesmerized and engaged with clients during free interactive sessions, don’t forget the primary purpose of why you created a business page. Talk about your business in the other content. Make them aware of the things they stand to gain from doing business with you.
Mind you, Facebook frowns at businesses that push sales vigorously. The platform’s algorithm isn’t fond of self-promotion, so you might get flagged if you do that at all times.
After you’ve come up with the content to post, the next thing to do is to decide when to put it out. Whatever your agenda may be, remember to post on a regular basis. You can have a content calendar to help you manage the kinds of content you post periodically and to keep track of your consistency.
4. Take time to optimize your page
Whatever your business objective is, achieving it will be difficult if nobody is aware of your existence on the platform. This is why it is crucial to click on the ‘invite’ option to get people on your page when creating it and consistently putting out engaging content. Also, you have to make the aesthetics of your cover page great as that is what people will first see when they visit your page.
Furthermore, to make people know about you, you can share your Facebook page link on your blog, email newsletter, website, etc. Also, you have to come up with interactive and engaging content to get a lot of likes, comments, and shares. Make sure your content is relevant, inspiring, educational, and entertaining. This would help it be shared by your followers with their friends.
Get conversational since responsiveness is a highly desired feature of brands. Respond to all messages and comments (Socialays can help with this), provide answers to inquiries, and keep content current. It is advisable that you conduct an audit of your Facebook page from time to time to look for and delete any obsolete content.
Your ‘About Us’ segment should be correct, up-to-date, and compatible with the rest of your landing page.
5. Make the best use of all the Facebook tools
There are several options that you can use to communicate with your followers aside from posted content and comment box. Two of them are explained below:
- Facebook Business Manager: It is a Facebook tool that lets you manage both paid and organic content. It also enables you to collaborate successfully with team members as well as external associates and agencies. Setting up Facebook Business Manager can skyrocket your page to another dimension.
- Facebook Groups: They are online communities where people may share information, knowledge, ideas, and love for your business. You can make use of groups to increase interaction. You can also use the groups to demonstrate your expertise and give more value to your audience by offering supplemental content or incentives to members. It is a fantastic way to foster long-term relationships and loyalty.
6. Facebook ads
A fact about Facebook is that you might have crafted well-composed content, but you will be shocked to see that you don’t get as much reaction as you would have wanted. This is because Facebook prioritizes users’ friends’ and families’ content above other people’s content. So, unless you pay to be seen by people, you might get little to no engagement and that’s primarily because no one knows you.
Most times, what you need to make users know you are a little push that Facebook adverts offer, and the beauty of it is that it is not expensive. It does have a little fee you have to pay.
The Facebook advert is similar to the conventional adverts you do via radio and television. It’s you paying for content that you want to be promoted to a specific target audience. It can be for diverse reasons, either for solid awareness or more engagement. The primary objective is to make people know more about your business.
However, if you don’t have enough money to dive into adverts just yet, you can make use of a Facebook pixel for the time being.
A Facebook pixel is a set of commands (codes) that you may add to your website or page to do the following:
- Measure Facebook conversion rate.
- Remarket your goods and services to those who have formerly visited your page, blog, or website.
- Establish unique audiences for future adverts.
It begins to collect data as soon as it is initiated. That way, once you are ready to promote your business, you’ll have valuable data at your disposal for remarketing ads.
How to Measure the Success of Your Strategy with Facebook Analytics?
With Facebook, you don’t just set a specific strategy and key to it alone. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy. Your strategy requires steady monitoring, removal, and addition. Facebook is a social network with new trends almost every day. Contents that are informational and relevant, as well as timely, ensure that previous readers will go back to your website when they need additional information.
It’s critical to keep track of and measure your strategy that gave good results and those that didn’t in order to figure out what you should stick to and what you should amend. By doing so, you will constantly improve your strategy by learning, tweaking, and trying again.
Facebook Analytics is the cornerstone of how businesses can make the most of Facebook business marketing, allowing consumers to make well-informed decisions.
The data provided by Facebook analytics will reveal what you should keep doing and which strategies you should change. You may also enhance your overall performance by defining your objectives, assessing performance, and changing your plan in a continuous cycle. You need to collect data and insights about your activities on the platform, if not you are not going to maximize the offers the platform provides to the fullest.
Facebook Insights
Analyze audience interaction such as:
- Likes (Positive feedback).
- Set of dislikes (the number of your posted contents that cause people to dislike your Facebook page).
- Reach (the number of users who have seen your posted content).
- Engagement (the number of users who have interacted with your posted content via clicks, likes, comments, and shares).
Furthermore, it will assist you in determining the kind of post content that performs best for your Facebook page, allowing you to assess whether your present content plan is effective.
Facebook Business Suite
It is a store for managing all your Facebook accounts; and not just Facebook, Instagram too. It provides you with data regarding the outcome of all your paid and unpaid posted content on Facebook and Instagram.
You’ll find analytics, trends, and visual statistics to help you learn more about your overall account postings or specific postings. The information it provides includes:
- Likes, comments, and shares.
- Information on your followers’ demographics.
- Your Facebook page’s reach.
Creator Studio
It is a segment on Facebook that is dedicated to content creators, bringing together all of the toolkits for posting, tracking, managing, and monetizing content in one spot. It is also the quickest means to find out what new features or revenue opportunities are available for you.
In addition, it provides you with a variety of indicators that will tell you how well your posted contents, pages, and revenues are performing. You will also have access to information like:
- Recent followers and those who unfollowed.
- The number of people who saw your post and those who engaged in it either through likes, comments, or shares.
- A detailed analysis of your audience.
Conclusion
Facebook is a large market for businesses and brands. There is so much that you can get from promoting your activities on the platform. You can build a community that is all about your business. Also, you can share your products and recent developments with them. People can give product reviews and you act on the reviews. A great and stress-free way of doing business. The use of Socialays, a solid Artificial Intelligence for social media helps a lot as it categorizes your engagements and gives replies rapidly.
Socialays is there to reply to your clients when you are not available.
The step-by-step guide to optimizing your Facebook business marketing strategy to its optimum advantage has been explained in the write-up. Ensure you follow them accordingly to make the best out of the social media platform.
Facebook also has analytics like Audience Insight, Business Suite, and Creator Studio that allow you to integrate all the tools and benefits you derive.
