Facebook 101 – The Break Down
Many of us have a Facebook whether it’s for a business page or it’s a personal profile. If you have a business page, Facebook has the potential to bring in new customers or clients to utilize the services of your business. However, if you don’t use the features Facebook provides for you, other than the occasional status updates, you won’t see much progress in terms of more likes or increased engagement. Here, we touch on the essentials for setting up your page, optimizing it, and sharing ways to potentially see more action on your page.
1. Utilize Space For Branding
Back in the day when Facebook was just launched, there was no freedom to customize your profile to fit your personality; every page looked the same. With Facebook Timeline the option to customize your page has reached new heights. Customize your cover page and your profile image with branding to represent your company properly. You can also create custom tabs in addition to the defaulted Photos, Maps, and Likes tabs. See an example here.
2. Advertise
Facebook Ads is overlooked by most page owners because they simply don’t know how to utilize this particular feature. The latest version of Facebook Ads is not what it used to be when it first came out, however there are helpful articles that explain the ins and outs of Ads, as well as a section on Facebook that breaks it down.
The advantages of using Ads are that it can help you target your page to a specific audience in order to gain more page likes. These page likes can potentially lead to new customers. You can create a customized campaign (not the same as “Promote my page”) in which you can include a custom icon to attract various Facebook users. A new feature Facebook has added is the option to boost specific posts – an article, links, or photos – that are attractive enough to spark engagement. The more engagement you have on a post, the higher the chances of your post appearing on news feeds of people who haven’t liked your page just yet.
3. Post When Fans Are Online
How do you know when your fans are online? With Facebook Insights! The newest version of Insights provides so much information about how your posts are doing, which types of posts spark engagement, and best of all – it shows you when your fans are online. This feature is broken down with general times of when your fans are online and you can also see how each day differs from the next. Utilizing Facebook’s scheduling feature, you can now set your posts to a specific time to reach more fans. This is the best way to increase engagement because it’s almost guaranteed that the majority will at least see the post.
4. Utilize Hashtags
First off, hashtags are a way to make your content searchable. The feature started on Twitter then made its way to other social platforms, reaching Facebook last. The most important thing to remember is -don’t go overboard. It is tempting to create a post and type in #every #relevant #word to make your post #searchable. However, that’s not the proper way to use hashtags. Instead, you should pick one or two words to hashtag, and if it’s incorporated into your sentence, even better because it is less blatant that way. For example, “Check out the latest #blog post about #Facebook!” Now this phrase will be searchable under “blog” and “Facebook” targeting people looking for things related to both topics.
5. Optimize Your Page For Graph Search
The newest change on Facebook is the addition of “Graph Search”, which makes your content on your page searchable by anyone looking for it. Different terms such as “Eye Care near me” or “Friends who like sushi” can be looked up with Graph Search which pulls the information from various Facebook business pages and personal pages. To begin optimizing your business page, fill out EVERYTHING – address, phone, hours, categories, descriptions, etc. We go into depth on properly optimizing your page here.
Now that you know the essentials to setting up your page, optimizing it, and promoting it properly, you should notice more engagement. Keep in mind that results are not instant, and some may need more advertisement than others depending on your industry. Also, remember that having a presence on Facebook is an essential aspect of marketing and advertising in today’s society, and has become expected in most circumstances.
Is your Facebook business ready?
Source: MSM DesignZ, Inc. is a Westchester based NY web design firm specializing in SEO, social media, web and graphic design and much more.