With over 1.9 billion people using Facebook daily, it is undoubtedly the most popular social network around with immense scope for networking and business promotion. But if you are a social media marketer, more users means more competition for you. Will fretting help? Well, in this competitive scenario, having a mere Facebook presence is not enough, you need to optimize your presence to make most of your Facebook business page.
Here are 12 Best Facebook Marketing Tips for small businesses that will help you pull out all the stops and represent your business in the best possible way.
- Create a Business Page
When representing your brand or business, the first thing you need to do is create a business page, not a personal profile. When you make a page, it gives you access to unique tools for businesses. You can ask your followers to like your page so that they can regularly enjoy updates from you in their News Feeds. Here are some more benefits of creating a Facebook Business Page.
- Majority of users access Facebook via mobile these days and here having a business page gives you advantage. Facebook does the work for you, it optimizes your page for both desktop and mobile devices.
- Again, you can access the insights feature that is missing when you have a personal profile. Through insights, you can keep a track of many things such as any new likes you get, engagement on your page, the reach of your posts, performance of your posts, and much more.
- Another feature that you can enjoy by having a Facebook business page is, you can easily keep an eye on your competitors. An interesting feature on Facebook, that let’s you add 5 competitor pages and by doing this you can keep a track of their likes on the pages and how much that count has increased in the week. Facebook also gives you suggestion regarding the competitor pages to be added based on your niche.
Pic Courtesy: postplanner
Besides above benefits, having a dedicated business page allows you to reach your target audience more effectively and build brand loyalty. It surely does maximizes your business potential. Moreover, it is entirely against Facebook’s terms of service to represent your brand or business through your personal profile.
- Facebook Vanity URL of your page
After creating your business page, you will get a randomly assigned number and URL such as facebook.com/pages/yourbrandname/12345. This is a natural process, however, to create a unique web address for your page, you need to create a vanity URL of your page. Once your page gets more than 25 likes, you are eligible to claim your vanity URL.
With vanity URL, your page becomes more shareable, easier to find and you can easily redirect your followers and fans to this customized URL of yours. So, customizing your profile URL is a good way to make it easier to remember and promote your page on other marketing channels.
- Nail it with your Cover Photo
When people land on your Facebook Page, the first thing they notice is your Cover Photo. To turn your visitors into followers, you need to have a catchy and engaging cover photo that attracts the attention of your potential customers and also conveys at the same time represents your business or brand in the best possible way.
As per a study by Kissmetrics, visuals are more engaging and get 53% more likes, 84% more click-throughs, and 104% more comments.
Design your cover photo in a way that it shows off your brand’s personality. Display your products, services in the most creative way. Essentially, your cover photo needs to ties together to your brand’s story or connect with your unique selling point. You can also come up with a cover photo that defines your business’s value proposition in a simple & succinct way.
So, idea is, you need to use the space effectively to maximize your branding power. To give you some inspiration for your cover photo. Let me give you an example of a brand that is completely rocking their cover image.
That’s what ‘Top Rank Marketing’ did with their cover photo. This b2b company came up with an impactful one-liner that goes with their expertise and defines in a concrete way ‘who they are’ and ‘what they do’.
4 Pick your Profile Picture wisely
You need to pick your profile picture wisely, one that your visitors are easily able to recognize. If your company has a well-known logo then you can use your logo as your profile picture. You can also use your professional headshot as your profile picture but make sure it is not blurred. It is important to have a recognizable image as your profile picture on your Facebook page so that it can be easily found and liked. Moreover, your profile image is pictured at the top of your Facebook page and is also your thumbnail image which gets displayed every time you post something on your Facebook page. So, make sure the picture you select as your profile picture reflects your brand. Moreover, even your social media design plays a huge role in the success of your Facebook page. So, make sure you page design looks catchy and creative.
5 Business Promotion via Facebook Ads
To promote your business Facebook page, you can use Facebook Ads. Facebook’s advertising tools are effective and just by sending few dollars you can reach your target audience. It greatly extends your page’s reach and allows you to easily market your products and services to people who exactly match your customer profile. If you use Facebook ads rightly then it can do wonders for your business.
Here is an example supporting the same. Sparkle in Pink (a brand producing high-fashion outfits for little girls) experienced much success with Facebook ad campaigns. The brand primarily relied upon formats such as carousel and slideshow adverts to reach their potential customers. With these ad campaigns, brand witnessed heavy traffic on their Facebook business page and achieved best conversion rates.
- Adding CTA Button
Facebook gives you an option to place a compelling call-to-action button at the top of your Facebook page. Facebook gives you seven pre-made button options to choose from such as Contact us, shop now, watch video, book now, use app, play game, sign up. Further, through your CTA buttons, you can redirect users to your home page, landing page, or any other relevant web page.
Placing CTA button is important to engage your followers or ultimately push them to achieve your end goal.
- Partner with Influencers
To promote your Facebook business page, you can partner with influencers in your niche and spread the word out about your products/ services. This strategy has been successfully used by many businesses to promote their brand and create awareness about their products. However, depending on the popularity of the influencer you may need to pay them or offer free product samples that you want them to endorse.
For Instance- Daniel Wellington (a Swedish watchmaker) effectively collaborated with a popular influencer on Instagram named Adriana Gastelum to promote their watches and received a tremendous response. These campaigns with influencer blogger helped his startup evolve from a $150,00 startup into a brand worth $220 million that too in a span of less than five years.
- Post Compelling Visual Content
We all know visual content drives better engagement and performs better than only text content. Facebook posts with images generate 2.3x more engagement than standard posts without images. To get better results from your Facebook marketing efforts, you can consistently post visual contents on your Facebook page. The ideal social strategy is to keep a mix of infographics, photos, visuals, screenshots and videos.
However, to get success with your visual content, make sure your content either aims to entertain, educate, share information with the audience.
- Add Facebook social media buttons to your website
To encourage your website visitors to connect and interact with you on the Facebook page, add social media buttons to your site. It helps you in increasing visibility of your Facebook page and encourages your visitors to share your content and expand its reach to a great extent. Further, ‘Facebook follow button’ lets you expand the reach of your Facebook page and makes it simple for your site visitors to like your page in a single one click without leaving your site.
Another benefit of adding this feature is, when visitors will be exploring your site, it will display your page’s no. of likes as well as a thumbnail of faces of people who have already liked your page, display your follower count and feature the most recent posts on your page. This adds the element of social proof and credibility to your site and greatly improves the efficacy of your Facebook marketing efforts.
10.Post at the Best time for your audience
Are you thinking When is the best time to post on your Facebook Page? Well, there is no specific answer for that as different businesses find different days and times that work best for them. If we talk about timing, it depends on who your target audience is and content of your posts such as informative vs entertaining, funny vs serious and so on.
However, irrespective of your business and audience type, there are some optimal times to post on Facebook.
3:00 p.m on Wednesday is regarded as the best time post content on Facebook. On Saturdays and Sundays from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m is also considered as an optimal time to post content on Facebook.
Further, it has been observed engagement rates are relatively 18% higher on Thursdays and Fridays. And now if we talk about the worst time to post on Facebook then early morning on weekends, especially before 8 am, and after 8 :00 p. m is the time when you drive the least engagement on your posted contents.
11.Use Facebook Live to your advantage
Broadcasting earlier was used majorly by large media companies however with the Facebook’s exciting feature of ‘live video’ now anyone can go live and connect with their fans and followers. Many brands are using this feature creatively to launch their products, hold Q& A sessions with their fans, or give their followers a sneak-peek into their company events. Through ‘Facebook Live’ you can let your fans enjoy ‘in the moment’ content.
Here is an example of a brand that perfectly used live streaming to interact with their audience on real-time basis and experienced a great response.
Grazia ( an Italian women magazine) used a feature of live streaming to launch their first ‘community issue’. This gave their fans a chance to watch the event live which they were not otherwise able to attend. This turned out to be a great success and further increased their fan base to a great extent.
- Run a Facebook Contest
Whether your business page has 1000 likes or above 10,000 likes, running a Facebook contest can give you great results and an amazing opportunity to connect with your fans and followers in a fun way. Contests offer you a great tool for extending your fan base and if you come up with a unique Facebook contest then it can go viral as well. Besides, increasing visibility of your brand, these contests engages your audience in the best possible way.
It has been observed UGC (user-generated-content) promotion such as launching a video or photo contest is always a huge hit with the people. Most importantly such contest also gives businesses to gather details about their customers and thus know customers in a better way. It is the most effective way to spread the word out about your business, many brands have used this for promotion and have received a great response.
To inspire you to come out with an interesting Facebook campaign, here is an example of an awesome and one of the most successful Facebook campaign.
TOMS Shoes started a campaign that encouraged people to go barefoot for a day and post a barefoot picture of same on the Facebook. They created a unique hashtag for the campaign #withoutshoes and every time somebody posted a picture, they have to use this hashtag. Now the fun part begins, for every post with the given hashtag, the brand donated one pair of shoes to underprivileged children in need around the world. The campaign turned out to be a huge success and even celebrities like Bella Thorne and Handler contributed in publicizing the campaign. At present brand enjoys over 3.6 million likes on its Facebook Page and has surely done an exemplary job.
So I am wrapping up this blog with the above 12 Facebook marketing tips. When these tips are implemented efficiently, can take your Facebook marketing to another level. Remember to keep your audience in mind when you are implementing any of these tips, after all, you are doing these efforts to captivate your audience. Happy Marketing!
Author Bio:
Campbelljof is a Creative Head for Designhill, as well as a blogger and designer. He writes on topics concerning design, eCommerce, start-ups, digital marketing, and interactive content. His creative work has earned him several laurels over the years.