A Brief Facebook Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

Facebook Marketing Tips For Small Businesses

As a small business, you don't need to spend loads of money on advertising and employ all marketing channels. Concentrating on a suitable marketing channel and optimizing for it will do fine. 

The biggest opportunity is through social media and, specifically Facebook. Here is the quick guideline on how to get started with Facebook marketing for small businesses.

Things covered:

Benefits of Facebook

Set up a Facebook business page

Content to post

Engagement with the audience

Facebook ads

1. Understand why to use Facebook for your business

The top 10 benefits of using Facebook for small businesses.

• Customer interaction
• Brand awareness
• Exposure to potential customers
• Lower your marketing expenses 
• Identify and target the right audience
• Build brand loyalty and fan base
• Increase the website traffic
• Beat the competitor
• Boost SEO performance
• Page reviews and feedback

If these are the benefits you're seeking through a marketing platform Facebook might be the perfect place for you to get started.

2. How to set up a Facebook business page

Setting up your personal as well as business page on Facebook is easy. Follow these steps to set up the business page:

1. Log into Facebook with a personal profile
2. Create a page 
3. Choose the category of your business (for eg: Health, Software, etc)
4. Add a profile picture and cover image
5. Add all the basic information on the 'About' section
1. Description
2. Username
3. Address
4. Phone number
5. Business hours
6. Email and website address
7. Story and more
6. Add call-to-action button
7. Create your first post
8. Invite your friends to like your page
9. Review your permissions (page roles)

3. Develop a Content Strategy 

Before you start posting on Facebook, you should develop a content calendar and brainstorm the content strategy. The content should revolve around your audience and industry. 

Three things you must confirm:

• What to post
• When to post
• Whom to post

Some of the proven content ideas that will boost your engagement:

• Videos
• Go live
• Run contests
• Photo contents
• Give a caption contest
• Answer a trivia contest 
• Fill in the blanks and so on
• Tell stories and experiences
• Post trending topics in your industry
• Post viral contents
• memes
• quotes
• funny photos
• Product images
• How-Tos and Did You Knows

4. Engagement With the Audience

Engagement in Facebook means the way your audience interacts and takes action on your posts or page. The interaction may be likes and reactions on posts, shares, clicks on media or links, and comments, etc.

So, how to increase engagement with the audience?

When you seek engagement it's what your audience wants and explores:

1. Use the videos
2. Broadcast live 
3. Run contests (see contest ideas above)
4. Respond to their comments
5. Post consistently and at right times
6. Join Facebook groups and interact
7. Add call to action such as contact, book appointment, etc
8. Boost your posts
9. Keep it short and focus on quality, not quantity

5. Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are a great way to promote your business to a large audience and sell your products and services. 

These ads can be targeted to users based on their locations, interests, demographics and profile information. This allows small businesses to spread out to millions of inherent users. 

You need to set up an ad manager and business manager for your page. Then start running ads, choosing the right objectives and designating the proper budget. 

Why you should run Facebook ads:

• Large audience (More than 2.3 billion users worldwide)
• Competitive advantage
• Target the specific group of people
• Powerful re-marketing
• People spend a significant amount of time on Facebook
• Facebook ads are affordable for any size of business
• It increases sales, revenue, and leads
• Boosts website traffic and SEO performance
• It is fast and measurable 
• Generates data about your audience
• Ads help to build engagement and so on

So, if you believe that Facebook marketing is the right platform to transform your small business to a large scale, give it a try. There is no exact way of marketing therefore you should experiment on things that could be the best fit. Facebook is the best platform to start with.