With heightened competition in business today, it’s critical for business owners to explore all possibilities for marketing and customer engagement. Social media is a leading source for businesses to achieve both in an easily accessible, highly effective fashion.
Platforms such as Facebook even provide organizations the opportunity to create business-specific profiles stocked with special features to best engage fans. What makes Facebook for business even more appealing is its availability to everyone.
Regardless of your budget or team size, there are numerous strategies businesses can use to find success through social media marketing. Here, we share five tips for using Facebook for your local business.
Show yourself
Whether your profile is business only or personal, the underlying base of what makes social media so appealing is imagery. In fact, research shows visuals get 53% more likes, 104% more comments, and 84% more click-throughs than an average post. Aesthetically pleasing photos are what attract users to a profile, so it’s in your best interest to ensure your Facebook page is well organized, well edited, and an accurate portrayal of you and your business.
Your cover photo
Your page’s cover photo is the first thing people see and what will ultimately either attract someone to your page or prompt them to keep scrolling. Ideally, this photo should be recognizable or related to your brand, draw positive attention, or elicit an emotion from viewers.
If you feel a static photo doesn’t represent your business well enough, Facebook now offers the option to use a cover video as well. A video can be 20 to 90 seconds long and offers the opportunity to share more about your story. Whatever you choose, keep the dimensions of your image in mind and how the photo will appear on desktops, tablets, and mobile screens.
Your people
Social media is the best place to humanize your brand and show off the amazing people who make your business what it is. Pictures and videos of your team, office space, and company events are all elements of an engaging Facebook business page. Take note of how bigger brands portray their employees and leaders through Facebook.
For example, Oracle CEO, Mark Hurd’s page or beauty brand Dove’s page, both demonstrate real people within the company sharing relevant and engaging posts. Although these pages have large followings, the idea remains the same, regardless of business size.
Post with intent
There’s so much noise on social media today; it’s not effective to just post whatever idea comes to the top of your head and hope for the best. To truly attract and retain a Facebook following, your postings must be meaningful, timely, and relevant to your customers interests.
Information over promotion
Not only will consumers notice overly-promotional postings, Facebook’s algorithm might too. Stick to brand-relevant, useful information to reach a broad audience and boost engagement. Trial and error will help you determine which sort of positions are best received by your audience. These insights can serve as your guide for the type of content you should continue to publish.
Of course, this is a business profile and you should use it to promote your business in a tasteful way. Fortunately, social media is a mecca of consumer honesty, so you can trust your followers to let you know when something is working and when it’s not. New product announcements, local events, sales, and other timely news are a great way to engage your customers in conversations about your business and learn more about what they want and how you can provide it.
Interact with followers
Remember: the reason for platforms like Facebook is socializing, so don’t be afraid to have fun and be sociable with followers. There are lots of ways to engage customers and other local businesses on Facebook that can provide notable benefits. Here are a few.
Customer service
When companies engage and respond to customer requests over social media, those customers end up spending up to 20 to 40% more. Not only is social media more convenient for customers to interact with brands, but also provides you the opportunity to efficiently answer questions and resolve issues on the channel your customers prefer. Should you discover any positive or negative conversations about your business, you can easily join in.
Customer engagement
Consumers appreciate when brands recognize them on social media. Show your customers how much you value them by commenting on or sharing their posts using your products. Small reminders that you see what your customers are posting and displays of appreciation go a long way.
Facebook also offers a range of additional tools to help you boost interactions with followers, such as Facebook live. Source ideas from your customers on what they’re interested in and live stream a video about that topic.
Add a budget
To really succeed in Facebook marketing, you must build in an adequate budget. Facebook Business provides a number of tools to ensure you’re generating the highest impact through your postings, and a small budget is all you need to utilize them.
Boost posts
Boosting posts is easy and suitable for all budgets. You simply choose to either push your posts to people who like your page and their friends or people you choose through targeting. Depending on the intent of your posts and who you’re targeting, both options provide engagement and traffic benefits.
Local business promotion
Local awareness ads are an incredibly useful tool designed to target people within a flexible radius around local businesses based on population density. Businesses can work to build brand awareness, increase foot-traffic, and boost in-store sales by promoting these localized ads to users living or visiting your business’ locale.
Measure your efforts
There are a number of ways to effectively measure your Facebook metrics; the important thing is just that you do it. Analyzing insights such as audience demographics, frequent interactions, which types of posts are most successful, and other details surrounding your efforts can help you continuously improve.
Key metrics you should always have been tracking
Engagement: Tracking engagement will give you a reliable look into whether or not people like the content you’re sharing.
Reach: If you’re paying for ads or just putting effort into your content in general, knowing the reach of your audience is important for continuous improvement.
Referral traffic: Facebook can only take you so far; eventually, you’re going to want your followers actually patronizing your business. Measuring how many of your customers actually made the conversion from Facebook friend to customer can help determine the full impact of your Facebook efforts.
Facebook can do amazing things for your business, but it’s also important to remember to have fun with it. People appreciate authenticity from brands, and that goes for your social media presence as well. So, do what you can to boost your brand and accept that you may have to roll with a few punches. Good luck!
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