5 Facebook Essentials to Grow Your Business

“Facebook is all about information and helping people share it.” – Mark Zuckerberg

So having a Facebook presence for your business is imperative if you want to drive traffic to your website or offers and grow your business.

5 Facebook Essentials to Grow Your Business

1. Facebook Profile

If you haven’t already got a Facebook account set up, then you need to do that. Create a profile page where you can share photos or post things you like or are interested in. Your newsfeed will display your posts and anything you’ve liked, and info other people are posting. Your personal profile can be an incredible resource for marketing and networking.

2. Facebook Business Page

Once you’ve got your own profile page you can create a business page (you must already have your own Facebook account in order to do this). This is where you build your brand, your list and your business. Your aim should be to get lots of engagement on your page and ultimately get your content to go viral. Facebook has shifted its focus to engagement therefore it’s crucial that you engage your followers and get them interacting with your posts.

Business pages have lost some of their appeal over the last few years mainly because some businesses have used them to aggressively push their products and services. So instead of educating and providing their followers with helpful, valuable information they have turned them off by being too salesy. You should find areas of interest that your followers are interested in and share them. Don’t focus on just pushing promotions at them because that will inevitably damage your brand and people will not like it!

Connect with your followers

Post regularly, making sure to add a call-to-action link every so often (1 in 3 posts), so that more people will have a chance of seeing your content. The average life of a post is only a few hours, unless it receives a lot of interaction, so always provide valuable content that people will be interested in.

Having a pinned post at the top of your page is advantageous because visitors to your page will see the post pinned to the top of your page. An out-of-date pinned post can affect your credibility so always remove them. To save time you can schedule your posts to go out automatically.

Facebook Live is a great way of broadcasting a live video to your followers. You can utilise this feature for announcements, discussions, demonstrations, interviews with experts and so on.

In addition, you can run competitions to increase engagement. It’s important to check Facebook‘s guidelines on this before launching a competition because they’re updated regularly.

3. Facebook Group

Facebook groups (either private or public) are the perfect place to establish a presence and build a close-knit community. These groups can be an excellent way for you to interact with your audience and encourage them to interact with each other. Groups allow people to come together around a common cause, issue or activity to organise, express objectives, discuss issues, post photos and share related content.

If you set up your own group, you’ll be in total control. You can close the group at any time and pause it so that others can’t contribute, only you. You can message people directly when they’re part of your group. Build on that connection.

4. Driving Traffic

You should be aiming to get your business page in a strong position on the Google listings. If you name your page something more generic, then you can be picking up traffic to your page directly from Google as a result of what people are searching for.

It’ll be difficult to rank highly on Google for keywords that are very competitive. It’s more beneficial to choose a keyword that you know should be relatively straightforward to rank for.

Ways to help get your page appearing within the Google search listings:

• Have a link to your business page from your website. Backlinks generate attention and result in Google pushing you further up the rankings.

• Include main keywords in your page name and about/info section.

• Use keywords in your posts. This enables Google to register that your page is very relevant to that particular keyword.

• Set the vanity URL to your keyword.

• Encourage ‘Likes’ by regularly posting and use ads.

You can look on the front page of Google for the top listings of your keywords by using the keyword analysis tool, SEMrush, and this will give you an idea of what your competition looks like and how they’re ranking. You can try this tool for free.

5. Facebook Ads

All the major online entrepreneurs and digital marketers use Facebook ads. They’re the main way to drive traffic and generate more ‘Likes’ for your page, in addition to sending traffic to wherever you want them to go.

Sponsored ads take traffic directly to a business and allow you to reach a targeted audience relatively easily. This is PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising and is inexpensive to implement. You can set your budget daily and the more money you’re willing to pay the more clicks you’ll get. Facebook will show your ad to people who’ve expressed an interest in the topic.

It’s important to test sending traffic to your website. People are not on Facebook to buy something. Instead they’re there to see what their friends and family are doing, watch funny videos and so on. However, people are much more receptive when they think they’ve just stumbled upon a page rather than always being sold to.

Pixel tracking is great for tracking conversions for you. You can install a code on your website and Facebook will give you an indication on what your actual conversion rate is from people clicking on your link, then landing on your site and then making a purchase.

Facebook owns Instagram, so the same ads can be done on both platforms.

With over 2 billion worldwide users it’s the way forward and a great place to find targeted clients and customers.

To Your Success!