The growth of use of Facebook is almost staggering. With over 71% of the U.S. population on Facebook and over 50% of those people logging on every day, Facebook as a tool to get to your target audience cannot be ignored. And if you think that businesses really don’t use Facebook, well that’s not true either. Over 65% of companies report acquiring customers through Facebook.
What are you waiting for?
So, how do you get started? If you contact me, I can provide you a cost effective way to get on to Facebook fast, but let me give you the basics here. Like all social networking, maintaining your presence on Facebook does take time and effort, but that can really pay off whether you do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you.
The basic steps of how to use Facebook for business:
- Decide on the goals and target audience for your Facebook page. Goals could be to increase brand awareness, increase your Google ranking to drive more people to your website or blog, or to reach a new set of prospects for your business. Your audience is who you want to regularly visit your Facebook page.
- Create an editorial calendar using Excel or a similar tool. This should contain the days and content you will be adding to Facebook in the future. You should plan to post several times a day to get the most out of your marketing effort on Facebook.
- Create a compelling profile and ensure your privacy setting are set appropriately. You should use a professional looking picture for your profile. It’s important to understand that you can have a profile page (what most people have on Facebook) and you can have a business fan page which is linked to your profile page. Facebook simply refers to your business fan page as “page”. For your business, you should have both.
- Create your business fan page. For this page, the picture is typically a company logo. Make sure that you select an appropriate part of the logo for the thumbnail which will be used by Facebook next to your posts. To create your page, you need to select what type of business you have. If you have a business with a physical location, then make sure to choose local business because it has some advantages that I will explain. When you first create your “page”, you will want to go into the administration section and select the setting so your page is not visible. This will allow you to get your page set up before the whole world sees it. Once you have your page set up and appropriate photos loaded, you will want to publish the page so everyone can see it.
- Add badges to your website and blog if you have them. Badges are the “Like” and “Follow Us on Facebook” buttons you see on websites like this one.
- Invite people to be fans of your business page. One thing that can be a bit confusing is that your friends of your profile page are NOT automatically friends of your fan page. The best thing to do is to send emails to your friends inviting them to join your fan page. This assumes that the friends of your profile page are your customers. If not, consider who you want as fans of your business and send them invitations to “like” your fan page.
- Add your site as a “place” if it is a local business. As I mentioned, a place is a business with a physical address. There are a couple of advantages of doing this. First, places show up first when people search for things on Facebook, so that of course is good. Second, with places you can create what is called “deals”. Deals are coupons or offers that your customers can take advantage of when they check in to your locations. “Checking in” is a popular concept today which your customers use via an application on their smart phones to let their friends know where they are. If they check in to your location, they are helping to advertise your business to their Facebook friends. Why not reward them with a coupon or discount if that’s appropriate?
- Start writing. Review your goals and make sure you are addressing them. Make sure you are providing compelling and rich content. Your content doesn’t need to be long, but it needs to be of interest to your fans. Think about what is going on in your industry and your business and share that with your fans.
-
Build your fan base. After all, this is why you are on Facebook as a business. There are a couple of different ways you can do this.
- Join Groups. Find active groups that are relevant to your business and join them. First begin by following along with the groups just to understand how the group interacts, but once you know the group better, start by making a comment on a recent post or post a comment that you think the group will find interesting.
- Advertise. Facebook collects a lot of demographics about its users (sex, age, location, interests, etc) and thus you can use this to create very targeted ads for your customers. This is one of most valuable Facebook “how to” for business tips. Advertising is a long subject, so I’ll talk about this in a future blog post.
- Provide interesting, thought provoking content. Ask questions of your fans, get them engaged. Content is the most important thing that will attract and keep fans for your business, so make sure you spend most of your time providing good content because your fans will tell their fans who will tell their fans and so on… You just tapped into the beauty of social networking.
- Offer special deals to your Facebook fans.
- Track your progress using the insights provided by Facebook. Insights will be available on your business fan page on the right hand side once you have launched the page.
This was just a quick summary of how to use Facebook for business. I’ll provide more tips in the future so be sure to subscribe to my blog via email or RSS for the latest information and please contact me if you would like help making Facebook a successful tool for your business.
Have fun with Facebook for business and watch your business grow!