How to Promote Your Small Business on Facebook

If you own a small business, we can’t overstate how important it is for you to create a Facebook page for it. This isn’t your own personal profile, of course, but a page that’s open to the public and gives valuable insight regarding how your company works. There are a variety of reasons that your business should have a page which includes, but is not limited to, the following:

• It builds brand awareness
• It allows you to engage your customers
• It can help to generate leads
• It makes a business owner seem relatable
• It gives important information about your business
• Your competition likely has one, and you’ll need to compete with them

Whether you already have a page or are preparing to create one, there are likely a number of best practices that you can still educate yourself on. In this article, we’re going to share some information on creating and optimizing your small business’s Facebook page. We’ll cover important topics such as content, budget, and analytics. Our goal is to give you a strong foundation to build off of as you use social media to make the success of your business soar.

How to Create a Business Page

If you’ve yet to build your page, this is the place to start. Since the creation of a business profile is far different than your personal one—you’ll have to understand the correct steps. Though you aren’t required to complete every task in this exact order, these steps are essential for creating a well-rounded Facebook page:

• Go to Facebook’s “Create a Page” section: Here, you’ll find six different category options. You’ll want to select “Local Business or Place.” You’ll then see a short popup that you’ll fill out, which will ask for your business name, category, address, and phone number. Once you do this, you can click the get started button and dive into the good stuff.
• Preferred audience: This is absolutely one of the most important things that you’ll do when creating your page. Facebook has a “Preferred Page Audience” tab that allows you to input information about your ideal audience. This will allow Facebook to ensure that the right people see your page, which will ultimately allow you to accrue positive interactions.
• Call to action button: Facebook gives businesses the option to display a call to action button, and we highly encourage you to take advantage of this feature. Button options include a Contact Us button, a Learn More button, and a Shop Now option—among others. You can edit this button by hovering over it when logged into your page and then inputting the link to your preferred landing page.
• Photos: You’ll want to add both a profile and cover photo to your page. It’s best if your profile picture is your logo so that you can grow brand recognition. Your cover photo should simply be something relevant to your business. Some businesses may choose to add their contact info to their cover photo, though this is a personal choice.
• Page description: Your page description should be brief—ideally, no more than two lines, or 250 characters. Concisely write out what your business is and allow users just enough information to follow you.

Different Types of Content

The entire point of a Facebook page is to increase brand recognition and business, and you can’t do this without content. You want varied, entertaining, and user-friendly content—give them a compelling reason to follow you. In this section, we’ll outline how to create content that will encourage engagement.

Videos, Pictures, and Text

It’s important that you include a variety of content on your page, and you naturally want everything you post to be high-quality. Visual content is one of the most appealing options, and you’ll really want to focus on this. You want to post photos that will grab someone’s attention while they quickly scroll through their feed. Videos are also good options, as long as they are well-produced—they also are one of Facebook’s top contenders when it comes to user engagement. What you don’t want to do is make posts that are too text-heavy. Say what you need to in as few words as possible, and test out ways to make the visuals do most of the work. It’s even better if you can find a way to include any text on the picture itself.

Organic or Paid Posts?

The question that oftentimes comes up is whether businesses should use organic or paid posts. Though you’re likely to come across a mixed bag of answers, many people recommend paid posts. For those who may not know, organic results are ones that a business makes without the need for making a monetary investment. While these don’t reach nearly as much as paid posts do, they do still have the potential to have a positive effect. We’ll discuss the budget more in detail later in this post, but some rebuff paid posts because they may not have a lot of available funds. The positive thing about Facebook ads is that you choose your budget, and the amount of impressions you make depends on what you spend. Ultimately, we recommend that you use a mix of both options. You don’t have to invest in every post, as long as they’re all quality posts. If you’re building brand recognition, however, you’ll still want to set aside a budget for ads.

Should You Boost Posts?

On Facebook’s platform, boosted posts and traditional ads aren’t the same things, and we’re of the opinion that one of these options far outperforms the other. Facebook may frequently display that little button that urges you to boost your posts, and it may be a tempting thought. However, boosted posts won’t ultimately do very much for your business. One of the reasons for this is that it doesn’t have nearly as many options for customizing your audience as you would in a traditional Facebook ad campaign. Ultimately, it doesn’t really do much for your business in the long run. You may feel as though you see results when you get a few likes and a share or two. However, it also doesn’t always do much in the way of helping you achieve your actual business goals. If you’re looking to financially invest in your business page, we suggest that you’ll ultimately get the best conversions from ads.

Not All of Your Posts Should be Promotional

When you get your page up and running, it’s natural to assume that you’d want to immediately get started showing the world what it is you have to offer. The thing to remember, however, is that the majority of individuals don’t want constant sales pitches. When they follow your page, the hope is that they’ll like your product or service, but they also want you to entertain them. Sales pitch after sales pitch may become irritating, eventually causing them to unfollow you. If you want to keep your followers—and attract even more—you have to keep them engaged. Give users a reason to interact with your content and to look forward to seeing more. A respected rule of thumb is that no more than 30% of your posts should be promotional—meaning that 70% should be a variety of other posts. Examples of things you can post include the following:

• Pictures
• Videos
• Memes
• Polls
• Giveaways

It’s important to note that quality will always supersede quantity. Don’t clutter your page with posts that you aren’t likely to get a positive reaction from. It’s important that you put the correct amount of thought into what you choose to display on your page—remember, whether promotional or not, every post you make is a reflection of your business.

How to Create a Compelling Call to Action

A call to action is the phrase we use for the part of a piece of media that urges initiative. That button that says buy now or learn more? There’s your call to action. However, a simple two words alone aren’t enough to prompt action—you can’t just tell them to, visitors have to want to. Below are a few simple tips for creating a call to action that creates results:

• Ask a question and provide an answer
• Use visuals to your advantage
• Don’t use too many words
• Don’t focus just on what you’re selling—say what it can do for a buyer
• Give a sense of urgency, such as “last chance to buy!” or “today only”
• Have a clear focus paired with a clear message
• Send a positive message

Creating Your Budget

One of the biggest thoughts in the mind of any marketer is how to handle their budget. There’s a lot to unpack when it comes to a budget, and it greatly varies from business to business. One positive aspect of running ads through your Facebook campaign is that how much you spend daily is completely up to you. In the same vein, however, you’ll get far different results if you spend $300 a day as opposed to $5. As a small business, you’ll need to consider factors, such as location, that larger businesses may not. One thing to consider is how many people you’re hoping to reach. A smaller business may not hope to be bringing in thousands of customers at one time, so you may not need to advertise as heavily as other companies. As such, it isn’t a bad thing to start small, analyze your results, and work up from there. While it may not allow you to reach very many people, Facebook allows you to pay as little as $1 a day. Spending a mere few dollars a day for a few weeks can help you get a feel for your impressions, as well as how people choose to respond to your work. The only way to effectively set your budget is to use a set goal. This gives you the ability to accurately weigh your results and visualize how you can improve and alter your campaign. Lack of a goal may cause you to get lost along the way, and potentially even cause you to spend more money than you need to.

A/B Testing

Some companies utilize A/B testing. This is the practice of setting up two ads that are only slightly different than each other and analyzing which of the two—or more—performs better. Generally, it’s subtle differences, such as different subject lines or graphics. Businesses use A/B testing in a variety of advertising platforms, such as pay-per-click and email marketing. The question is, how effective is it when it comes to Facebook? You can, in theory, use A/B testing when advertising on Facebook, but we don’t necessarily recommend it for small businesses. The reason for this is that you have to invest a fair amount of money into the test to be able to accurately analyze your results. In fact, it isn’t uncommon for this to cost a couple of hundred dollars per day. For businesses with smaller budgets, you can perform unofficial tests. This can be difficult, but some professional marketing companies can help small businesses with this task.

Is Your Strategy Working?

So, you started with a goal, set up your page, and began to post content. A few months have gone by, giving you enough time to settle in and see things stabilize. Ideally, you’ll begin to see the results you’d like to early on. If you aren’t, however, don’t spend too much time worrying. It’s incredibly common for a company to have to spend a decent amount of time testing the waters and switching up strategies before they land on the one that works. The best way to move forward with your strategy is to consistently monitor your results by keeping a close eye on your analytics. Here, we’ll dive a bit more into this practice.

KPI

KPI—or key performance indicators—is essentially a system that can track the performance of specific campaigns. This is what allows you to measure your results against your goals, therefore having something to go off when it comes to perfectly matching these two items. It’s essential to have this information when running your page. The following are a few things you can track with KPI:

• Cost per conversion
• Ad impressions
• Post engagement rate
• Follower demographics
• Number of fans
• Actions on page
• Page reach
• Web traffic from Facebook page

Conclusion

As we said at the beginning of this article, social media profiles are one of the strongest ways for you to support your business. You can use everything we covered here to create a successful page and push further brand awareness. While you can do much to help yourself on your own, the help of a professional can truly maximize your profits. Each section here has thousands of words worth of potential information, and any business can benefit from working with an individual that’s an expert in the field. At Logical Position, we’re consistently educating our clients on the many ways they can adjust their strategies. We can monitor your account and equip you with the tools you need to take your business to the next level. If you wish to collaborate with a social media advertising company that truly cares for guiding their clients towards success, feel free to learn more about our services today.