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Facebook’s business tools have been around for many years. As a marketer, I feel that it is one of the most evolved social media platforms out there for businesses. If your audience is active on Facebook, then it is important to have a presence on Facebook in the form of a business page. In this blog, I’ll talk about the benefits of a Facebook page and some ways to boost your business through it.
This post is part of the series of “Social media marketing strategy for small businesses”.
Why does a business need to be on Facebook?
Aside from being the largest social media platform out there, Facebook has tonnes of tools that make it easy for a business to have a presence on it.
Business page: This is the official page of a business. A business page is different from a Facebook personal profile in the features it offers. The page allows a business to consolidate its business updates in one place and engage with followers through posts, polls, questions, lives and event. Recently, Facebook has also launched a lead management system into the page to keep track of leads for the business.
Paid advertising: Having a business page gives you access to two types of paid advertising on Facebook. The simplest one is a boost post, which shows a particular post to targeted people for the duration of the ad. The more evolved advertising is running Facebook ads. This is a more extensive way to show an ad to people with options of targeting by demographics, location, interests, website activity, page activity etc. You can choose from a bunch of objectives like reach, lead forms, website traffic and conversions.
Scheduling of posts: I talked about this in my last post as being the biggest pain point of entrepreneurs. Facebook has had the scheduling of posts feature built-in for many years now, which makes it easy to post in advance. You can also schedule posts through Facebook Creator Studio or Facebook Business. This feature is truly a time-saver!
Once you have a presence on Facebook, you can use its various features to make the best of it. Let me talk a bit about the things you can do to get your page and posts in front of maximum people.
Page SEO
Did you know that Facebook pages can also be optimised for SEO? When people search on Facebook, the search query is compared to many aspects of a page to find a match. These are the key segments for optimising your page’s SEO.
Page name – always pick a name for the page that belongs to your business. This will determine the page URL as well, which will help in getting the page found in Google.
Description – Use business relevant keywords in your page’s description.
Complete all sections – Facebook will recommend your pages to new people, but only when you have a completed profile. Fill all the sections on the page like about, phone number, website and call-to-action.
Page tabs
A small business sometimes does not have a website or have limited knowledge about making edits to their website. Facebook makes managing your online presence much easier. through the tab feature on the business page.
A list of existing tabs can be found on the left side menu of your page. This list is the default setting. But you can change the default tab structure by changing the template in the setting section as shown. Here you can rearrange the tabs as per your business.
You can also add more tabs to highlight your business. Adding the ‘Services’ tab is a good idea for service businesses so that people know what you offer without visiting your website. In the same way, product businesses can add a ‘Shop’ to show their product catalogue. Adding a shop will also help to run a conversion ad later for sale of products.
Facebook Watch
One of the biggest challenges with Facebook pages was that posts are only shown to followers. For a growing business, this can result in frustration at the limited reach of the page. Hence, Facebook launched Facebook Watch in 2017, which is a video-on-demand service. Today it can be compared to Tik Tok and Instagram Reels in terms of how it works.
Facebook determines which videos you may like based on your engagement and serves up those videos for you to watch in a dedicated tab called Facebook Watch. For consumers, it means a never-ending supply of videos like recipes, DIY or dance. For marketers, it means getting your video in front of non-followers. Look at this graph below to see that minutes watched of a page’s video was almost equal for followers and non-followers.
The videos that perform best on Facebook Watch are long ones. The ideal length is 3 mins and the video should have a description, tags and subtitles. This may pose a challenge for small businesses, but make use of Facebook Watch to reach new people.
I hope you’re now feeling ready to take on the challenge to boost your business performance on Facebook. Remember, these features will only work if you have got your content and calendar sorted. To know how to do that, look back at the previous posts in this series.
If you liked this post and would like more tips on other tools, then read more articles like this here or you can listen to the podcast.
Want to learn more about digital marketing? Check out my course on Graphy.