By Kelly Woodward, Digital and Social Media Manager for TLC Marketing Consultants
If I told you that your business or brand could potentially be in front of 1.52 billion people per day*, would that perk your ears up? If not, it should. In this age of social media marketing, it can often feel overwhelming to understand how to best utilize a small business’ limited marketing funds.
Facebook provides powerful marketing tools. You can interact with your core audience on a personal level. Here are ten tips to help simplify the complexity often associated with Facebook marketing.
- Create a free Facebook Business Page to promote your business. With over a million and a half daily users, it’s highly likely that your next potential customer is a regular user of Facebook. A business page will help to increase your company’s brand message and build credibility with your target market. As they now say, if it doesn’t show up on Facebook, does it even exist? And what’s better than FREE when talking about a true marketing tool?
- Make sure your Profile and Cover photos represent and reinforce your brand. Your profile picture should be the first image you want to be associated with your business. Your Cover photo should be interesting and memorable, to keep people coming back to your page.
- Define your target market. While it may sound appealing to reach the largest number of people Facebook will serve your content up to, your dollars will better be utilized by making sure your brand is in front of the people you are aiming to do business with; those who are interested in what you have to provide. This increases engagement and provides you with stronger marketing spend than reaching a larger, but undefined audience would.
- Use creative strategies to keep your fans engaged. Nobody likes to be bombarded with nonstop sales pitches in their face. Vary up the content that gets posted to your page so that you’re offering interesting information, not just sales information. Make sure to include topics that drive the most response such as humor and emotion. Asking questions within your posts is another strong strategy for driving engagement. Also, it’s great practice to use different media to keep your posts relevant and fresh, so alternate between photos, videos, and make use of the live feature whenever the opportunity presents itself.
- Don’t forget to use a call to action. What is it that you’d like your target audience to do? Like and Follow your page? Visit your website? Utilize a promotional code? Give your audience a clear message of how you’d like them to respond so that there is trackable action when utilizing Facebook advertising and promotion.
- Don’t be afraid of checking your Analytics. Sometimes it can be hard to make sense of the numbers, but Facebook makes it pretty simple to see what types of ads or promotions have the strongest response from your audience. It’s a great way to see what works and what doesn’t so you know how to steer your campaigns as you move forward.
- You should respond to comments as often as possible. It lets your audience know you’re actively engaged with your page and with your customers, and that you care. It also helps your overall SEO score to have a quick response time.
- Utilize the paid promotion tools for your page. If you see that a particular post is doing well on your page, try boosting the post to increase the audience that could potentially engage with that post. Facebook will also help you develop ads to help you reach your specific business goals.
- Engage with other pages who share your same desired audience. Following and engaging with other community and business pages who share your targeted demographic is a great way to bring those people to your page. By actively following other pages, there is a good chance those pages will follow you back and help to increase your audience organically.
- Remember it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Although there are some steps you can take to see more the immediate benefits of marketing through Facebook, such as utilizing the Page Promotion feature to build your Follower base, successful social media marketing takes time and the dreaded business word; patience! However, once you have your targeted base of followers and regular engagement happening through your posts, the business is sure to follow.
It takes time to develop your follower base and trust within that group, but once you have, your business will reap the rewards of this personalized marketing method.