Marketing on Facebook

Facebook isn’t just for sharing holiday snaps or reminding you of a long-lost acquaintance’s birthday – for small business owners, it can be a brilliant and easy way of marketing your business. Chamberlink explores some simple and effective ways to utilise your Facebook page as a branding tool.

Posting with purpose

If you’re utilising Facebook as a business, it’s not enough to post what you like and when you like it – that strategy won’t gain you very much traction. Instead, you should go forth with the idea that every post should have a purpose beyond content for the sake of it. To post with purpose, you need to identity what you want your content will achieve i.e. what action do you want your followers to take? With that in mind, you should then think about what kind of post best serves that purpose; for example, text posts are good for generating conversations and should be used to ask a question/ask for feedback, while photo posts are better at grabbing the attention of the scrolling user.

Unless you are jumping on a timely, viral trend (in which speed is of the essence lest you miss the boat!) you should consider adopting a content calendar. With this, you can pre-plan your posts and use a scheduling tool to autopost your content. This can help free up your time and take the stress out of coming up with new ideas every day.

Groups

Being active in groups relevant to your business/target customers is a great, organic way to market yourself and your business, drive engagement back to your page and generate new leads. The Facebook algorithm recognises high-engagement users and will make their posts more visible, so you can gain increased visibility by regularly posting useful content to groups. They key word here is useful – be careful not to be flagged as spam.

Video content

Photo posts might be more popular than text posts, but in recent years, video content has surpassed photos as the best way of grabbing attention and boosting engagement. And it’s clear to see why – videos can be used to communicate directly to your audience, offering a more casual and personal way for customers to get to know your brand. Videos can also provide a behind-the-scenes look at your business – and, in a world in which customers increasingly value strong business ethics and corporate social responsibility; video content allows you to demonstrate your transparency and values. Best of all, you don’t need to invest in high-tech equipment to create good videos content – short videos can be filmed on your phone and uploaded with ease.

Optimisation

When people are in need of a new product or service, they typically turn to the internet to find what they looking for. Therefore, your Facebook page should contain all of the information a potential customer might need – not only your contact details and opening hours, but also reviews and images or videos of your product/service in use. Your cover photo and profile picture should be inviting and clearly show off your brand, and you should provide clickable links for your website and phone number so you can be reached with ease. If you don’t provide enough information, customers won’t waste their time looking for it and will quickly move on.

Advertising

If your budget allows for it, you will find that it is relatively easy to start an advert campaign on Facebook. Using the Facebook Ads Manager, you can choose your ad objective, set your budget and schedule and identify your target audience, which will help get your ad in front of the right people. You can also set ‘brand safety’ parameters, which will automatically exclude any type of content that you deem inappropriate to appear alongside your advert.

Extra tools

Facebook offers extra tools for business pages that will help you manage your page more effectively. •Facebook Business Manager is described as “a one-stop-shop to manage business tools, business assets and employee access to these assets” – among other benefits, it serves as the central place to track and monitor the effectiveness of your Facebook ads, and allows you to control multiple users’ access to other online resources such as your company

Instagram account. You can grant access to your staff, allowing them to handle your online marketing and effectively freeing up your valuable time. •Facebook Insights measures audience engagements through such metrics as likes, reach and engagement. It can also track how many people unfollow your page – essentially,

Facebook Insights help you determine which kind of posts work for you, and which don’t. •Facebook Chatbots will help you connect quickly and efficiently with potential customers. Using automated AI messaging software, a chatbot will reply instantly to queries or questions, identifying needs and providing customer care.