By T.E. Cunningham
You started your Facebook business page a year ago and are working on regular posting. That’s a great start – content is absolutely the most essential part of the process. That said, there are some small tweaks you can make to take your Facebook page to the next level. So take an evening, pour yourself a glass of wine and spend some quality time with your page.
Here are some additions to consider:
- Freshen your cover image. Don’t duplicate your logo on the cover image if it’s your profile picture (which is what we recommend). Also, make the picture or art of the cover image is something that is engaging and truly sells the products or services you provide. For instance, if you are a restaurant, feature a mouth-watering photo of one of your specialties versus a photo of the outside of your building with your sign. We recommend rotating your cover image monthly
- In the About section of your page, make sure to take the time to fill out every possible item you can in this area; it is indexed by major search engines, and you may be “dinged” for not having complete info
- For the same reason listed above, also use the Milestones feature on Facebook
- Think about some new series posts you can utilize: employee of the month, product/service special of the week or month – give yourself time to be creative when not in the crunch of your business day. Just remember not to overdo it on the sales messaging.
- Use the sweepstakes feature to garner more engagement. You can offer a gift card or free consultation to winners with your sweepstakes efforts. Remember to have a basic legal terms template for your site that can easily be adapted for different sweepstakes. You can find examples online easily, but if you have an attorney it is certainly worth running the master template by them for a quick tweak
- Use the Polls feature to garner more engagement. Let’s use a hair salon as an example. Run a poll each month: photos of summer hairstyles, prom updos, holiday styles, etc. and increase interaction with your Followers
- Community and charity involvement – take a minute to make sure you are dedicating time and space to the critical efforts you are involved with; this ties you to your Followers and the community
- Use your Instagram tab, so you are pulling into your Instagram feed
- Take a minute to review the calendar of all US nationally celebrated days and pick out a few fun ones that make sense for your business and form a promotional countdown with your product or service around them
- Please say you have them turned on. Please say you have them turned on. Please say you have them turned on. Clear enough? It’s a bad message not to do so. That said, there are always a few sensitive business services, such as the medical field that may be good exceptions to this rule. If you are not responding to all reviews, every single one, quickly and positively – review best practices and make a plan
Boosting. If you are not boosting, you need to do so immediately. Set a weekly or monthly budget for yourself – you can do great things for a small business with just $50 per month. Remember Facebook’s newest algorithms prevent your business posts from being viewed by Followers as frequently as they once were. An estimated 5% of your Followers may see a daily post. Boosting will increase Followers and engagement.