Tag Archives: how to use facebook for business

Smash your Facebook profile in easy steps

Social Media is something that most of us use every day, and if you have a business, you’ll probably have business pages set up.

For the purpose of this article, I’m looking at Facebook in particular. What do your audience see when they land on your business page? Is it clear what you do? Is it engaging? Does it give enough information about you and your business? Is your profile relevant to your business? What do you put in your profile?

This article will give you the answers to these questions and hopefully help you smash your Facebook profile!

Your Facebook profile picture

Several times, I’ve been asked ‘should I have a logo or a personal picture?’

If your account is just a personal account, a headshot is best. For a business account, you can go for a headshot or your logo. If your business is quite a small affair, it’s probably better to go for the headshot, so that people know who you are and can put a face to your business.

Don’t go with pictures of your pets for a business page unless your pet is part of your logo for pet related products or services. Most of us have pets that we love, and there’s nothing wrong with posting photos of your pets on your page, but if I’m buying from a business, first of all I want to see what they do, or what they look like, not what their pet looks like.

Use the same profile picture across all your social media pages to promote consistency.

Make sure that you’re using the right size images for Facebook. Facebook recommends:

Your Page’s profile picture:

  • Displays at 170×170 pixels on your Page on computers, 128×128 pixels on smartphones and 36×36 pixels on most feature phones.

For profile pictures and cover photos with your logo or text, you may get a better result by using a PNG file.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/help/125379114252045

Your cover photo

The one thing to bear in mind when deciding on a cover photo for your business page is that anyone can view cover images – they are public by default. So, best not to upload anything that could be deemed misleading, offensive, deceptive or be subject to copyright.

Make sure the image is clear, high quality and that the size is correct.

Your Page’s cover photo:

  • Displays at 820 pixels wide by 312 pixels tall on your Page on computers and 640 pixels wide by 360 pixels tall on smartphones.
  • Must be at least 400 pixels wide and 150 pixels tall.
  • Loads fastest as an sRGB JPG file that’s 851 pixels wide, 315 pixels tall and less than 100 kilobytes.

For profile pictures and cover photos with your logo or text, you may get a better result by using a PNG file.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/help/125379114252045

Choose your cover image to reflect your brand, your services, or your products. Canva is a great place to create your cover images for a professional look, and there is a free version!

Change your cover image regularly to keep it fresh. You can change it to reflect festivals or special days, such as Valentine’s Day or Easter…but ensure that the image is relevant to your brand.

Your main bio

Your main Facebook profile has two areas where you can write about your business. There’s a short description, which should include a sentence or two about yourself or your business. It’s an opportunity for a short pitch on exactly what you do…and could be your mission statement.

Then you have a longer description where you can include additional information, more about your products or services and the benefits for your customers. You could include a little about your story and don’t forget to include a CTA (call to action).

It’s important to include any keywords in these descriptions to help search engines when people search for what you do.

There is a space to add a website link. This is where I share my Linktree URL. Linktree is a site that allows you to have all the links to things you’d like your customers to see. Mine includes my website, blog site, social media pages and URL for my email subscription…all in one place, with one link. I’d definitely recommend this to anyone who has a business – and the best bit is that there is a free service for this basic information.

You can also add your email address and telephone number, if that is appropriate…and you can add your business’s opening hours.

Interests

There is space for some profiles to add information about your favourite books, TV shows and films. Lots of people skip this, but it can be useful to make connections with like-minded people, or somewhere to put books that you’ve read that may be of interest to others in your niche – such as business-related books.

Privacy Settings  

Once you have finished with your profile and photos, take a look at your privacy settings. This allows you to choose whether your information is public or not. If it’s your business page, you will want almost everything to be public, but if it’s a personal page, you may want to hide some parts of your page.

This is definitely worth a look – sometimes small businesses overlook this bit and then find out that their settings are for friends and family only – so missing potential customers by not having it all public.

Pin a post to the top

The last thing I would say is that there is the facility to pin a post to the top of your profile. A lot of businesses pin an introductory post of themselves and their business. This is the first thing people will see when they come onto your page.

It is a good idea to pin an introduction, but it’s also the perfect opportunity to pin some of your best work as a showcase. Alternatives could be a key message, a new landing page, a special offer or a video. You can change it around every few months to keep it fresh.

How to use Facebook for business

Facebook is a great place to showcase and market your small business. It is totally free to set up a business Facebook account – you just have to have a personal account first, in order to be able to set it up.

I’m not going to go into the setting up of the actual page in this post, but if you need help with this, there is a great, step by step tutorial by Facebook that is really useful.

If you want your business to really blossom on social media, then Facebook is an excellent place to do just that. It’s a great place to market your business and, according to Facebook,”creating a Facebook page allows more than 2 billion people on Facebook to discover your business – think of your page as a digital shopfront.”

What do I post about?

With Facebook, you can create many different types of posts. Each different type of post has its benefits and can engage your audience in different ways. I always suggest that people use the 80/20 rule. That is to say, 80% posts that are engaging, entertaining, educate or inspire your audience, and 20% sales. Your audience don’t want to just be sold to all the time – they want to engage with you and your business and this also helps your brand. Your social media strategy should include all of these types of posts. Let’s look a bit deeper…

Facebook Text Post

A text post is exactly what it says on the tin – just straight forward text only…just words, no photos, no videos, and no links.

Although this type of post is direct, I wouldn’t say this was great for business – especially if your strategy is to drive traffic to your website or directly speak to your audience to get them to buy or engage with you and your brand. But text posts can be good to share opening hours or availability, but be aware that the Facebook algorithm doesn’t really like text only, so your reach may not be good.

Photo post

Generally, photo posts see a higher engagement than text posts. You can use photos, illustrations or infographics to catch your customers’ eye, so you need to think about the images you use. There are lots of free image sites out there where you can source photos – PLEASE don’t use google images and just copy and paste. Most of the images on google are not royalty free and you could get into trouble with copyright issues.  I use pixabay.com or unsplash.com – these are free sites and when you pick an image, it tells you that the image is free for commercial use, which means you can use it for social media or on your website. Of course, you can choose to also take your own photos – especially good if you sell products.

Photo posts are great for product-based businesses, as you can really show off your products and you can show behind the scenes shots – anything really that will engage your audience.

Video post

Videos have even higher engagement rates than photo posts. You can do short and sweet video announcements or you can do longer videos to explain something, or to do a ‘how to’ post.

Video automatically plays in your feed, so you’re guaranteed to catch your audience’s attention.   

Facebook Live

Facebook Live video is, as the name suggests, a video that you stream in real-time or ‘live’. This is really popular and a great way to show your authentic self and a fabulous way to connect with your audience. Some ideas you could use would be an introduction video so your audience get to know you better; you could do a Q&A post to let people know more about what you do or your products; you can do behind the scenes video or product demos…in fact anything you can think of.  

Link posts

A link post is exactly that – a post that shares a link (or URL) with your audience. This is great to share your website or blog site. You just copy and paste the URL of your website/blog post and paste it into a Facebook post. The link automatically shows your audience a preview of the site with an image from that site.

You can also share links to other sites – interesting articles or links to events that you might want to share. Just make sure that you add some of your own wording before you click ‘publish’, so it’s personal to you and speaks directly to your target audience.

Stories

If you’re on Instagram, you’ll know that you can publish stories on that platform. But Facebook stories are also a great way to get the attention of your followers. Just like Instagram, Facebook stories are photo based, or short video posts. The photos appear for five seconds and videos can be up to 20 seconds long. Like Instagram, they disappear after 24 hours. It’s a good way to give a quick sneaky peek at something you’re about to launch, or use it for intrigue for a competition or contest.

Pinned post

You can ‘pin’ any regular post – pinning a post means that it will always stay at the top of your page feed, so it will always be the first thing that people see when they visit your page.

Once you have created the post, simply click on the three dots to the right of your post – you’ll see the option to ‘pin post’. Once pinned, the post will say ‘pinned post’ above it. You can change it whenever you like. It’s good for giving important information or instructions to your audience…or as a temporary announcement.

Facebook Watch Party

You can use this feature to screen a public video on Facebook in real time, so you and your followers can experience it together. It’s a great way to create a buzz for a new product launch – and this is often used to launch a music video.

You can promote your watch party by creating an event.

Create event

If you do events, for example if you are a musician and you’re playing in a local bar, you can set up an event to advertise it. Not only a great way to advertise, you can also invite people to your event, you can add photos and information so people know exactly where and when the event is…and what they will get.

Other options

You can also post job listings, special offers and you can even use the option to raise money for a charity.

Marketing your business on Facebook

Now you know how you can post on Facebook and the different ways to post, how do you actually market your business? I talked earlier about the 80/20 rule; 80% engaging, entertaining, educating or inspiring your audience and 20% selling your products.

It’s best to plan your content strategy, so you know what you are going to post and when. There are loads of different types of posts that will do all these things.

Engagement – you can engage with your audience by asking questions, or you could give them information about your products/services without doing the hard sell. Talk about the features or benefits of your products/services – what’s in it for your potential customers? What does your product or service do for them? How can it help solve their problems?

Entertaining – these posts could be something funny or interesting to share.

Education – ‘How to’ posts or teaching your audience something about your business or products/services.

Inspiring – this could be in the form of inspirational quotes, or you could include a link to an inspirational article that you like – or one linked to your particular type of business.

The final type of course, is selling – this would include images of your products, advertising what you sell or what your services are.

In a previous blog, I talk about the different types of posts you could incorporate into your content strategy – click here to find out more.   

How do potential customers find your page?

This is all about you engaging with your target market. You need to know who your ideal client is and what they like. Join groups on Facebook, via your personal page – there are several that are set up for Facebook to specifically help you engage with like-minded businesses and your target audience. For example, Hike Those Likes Market Place is a friendly group where you can meet other small businesses. They have regular, daily engagement sessions that you can join and leave a link to your business. Other people follow you if they like your business. Once they follow you, every time you post, it will appear on their timeline – and so everyone who has liked their page will also see your post.

You can use the search bar to search for your target audience and engage with their pages. Once you have followed them, you will see their posts. Comment on their posts – a pointer here is to be totally genuine – don’t just comment for the sake of it, but only if you are genuinely interested in what they have to say.

Facebook ads

You can also create an advertisement for your business on Facebook. This is all about getting your message in front of your target audience – those that are most likely to want what you sell or provide. There are different types of Facebook ads and targeting options. To find out more about ads, Hootsuite have a great guide.  

And finally, measurement

How do you measure whether or not your posts are successful? You can find this out by using Facebook analytics or Insights.

Facebook Insights will let you know which types of posts work best for your business. It measures things such as:

  • likes/follows
  • reach – how many people saw your post
  • engagement – how many people liked, clicked, shared or commented on your posts

It also tells you which posts result in people who ‘unlike’ your page.

Conclusion

Facebook is a great platform for small businesses and if you put in some time to understand how it works…and more importantly, what works best in terms of post type and frequency etc., you really can take your business to the next level.

If you need help with your Facebook business page, please feel free to contact me.

cindymobey@outlook.com