Facebook is the world’s most popular social network with 2.5 billion daily users. Facebook’s algorithm has been making it more difficult for businesses to reach consumers. However, it’s still one of the best digital platforms to promote yourself on and engage with your target audience.
In fact, two thirds of Facebook users visit business pages at least once a week. What’s more, Facebook users cover a wide range of demographics. This includes a diverse mix of ages, locations, and income levels. Users also have a diverse range of interests.
No matter what your industry and niche, you’re likely to find a large audience of target customers on Facebook.
Continue reading for more reasons why you should use Facebook for business plus some tips on making your Facebook promotions a success.
Why You Should Use Facebook for Business
Facebook offers many benefits for businesses. Here are some of the main reasons why you should use Facebook for business.
It’s Necessary and Expected
It’s generally expected by consumers that they will be able to find you on Facebook. Consumers go to brand Facebook pages to find more information, ask questions, and interact with the brand.
If you don’t have a Facebook page, you miss out on engaging with current and prospective customers. Your competitors most likely have a Facebook page and therefore are gaining a competitive advantage.
If a customer is deciding between you and competitors, your competitors having a Facebook page is a big advantage. Being able to get extra information and ask questions and get quick responses could be the thing that encourages a prospect to purchase from a competitor.
Want to learn more about your target consumer? Connect with your existing customers and reach out to new ones through social media. Learn more in our blog article, The Importance of Social Media For Business.
Customer Loyalty
Following a brand on Facebook helps in making customers much more loyal too. Over half of a brand’s social media followers are likely to become loyal and repeat customers.
Without a Facebook account you’re losing customers at the decision phase. It’s then likely that you won’t get them to purchase from you after that as they become loyal to the brand that helped them on Facebook.
It’s a Low Cost Marketing Platform
Marketing activities can be expensive. Social media, however, is relatively low cost. Using Facebook isn’t an exception to this.
It’s free to set up your Facebook business page. You also need minimal to no investment to run the page and create content to post.
The fact that minimal investment is needed to use Facebook makes it a great marketing platform for small to medium businesses.
Without a Facebook account you're losing customers at the decision phase.
Even if you do have a large marketing budget, using Facebook means that you can use this budget elsewhere and diversify your marketing efforts.
If you do decide to run paid campaigns on Facebook, such as ads or paid promotion of posts, Facebook advertising options offer low CPC.
It Helps with Content Promotion
Facebook is a great place to share links from your website. It’s therefore a good place to share new content with an engaged audience.
Some content that you can promote via Facebook includes:
Blog posts
Videos
Podcasts
Infographics
Ebooks
Reports and Whitepapers
By promoting on Facebook, you increase the reach of your content which should hopefully increase conversions.
INCREASE ONLINE REACH AND BOOST SALES WITH A VIDEO CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY FOR SOCIAL MEDIA
It Increases Website Traffic
Facebook is a great place to promote your website and its content to increase your social referral traffic. You can include a link to your website in your “About” section. This makes it easy for followers to find your website for more information or to make a purchase.
You can also promote website links in your Facebook posts. Whether you want to promote a new product, a sale, or a new blog post, sharing the link on Facebook will help to drastically increase your traffic.
This traffic is also very relevant. People have seen your content in your post and chosen to interact. They are motivated to be on your website which makes conversions much more likely.
It Helps with SEO
Having a Facebook page can help your SEO strategy. Social media promotion is a part of off-page SEO. As Facebook is the largest social media platform and has a diverse group of users, it should be included in your off-page efforts.
Facebook helps with SEO as it drastically increases the visibility of your content. This then leads to increased website traffic and hopefully contributes to a low bounce rate.
Increased visibility also means that the chance of your content being linked is a lot higher. This will help you gain backlinks which are highly important to SEO.
Sharing on Facebook also makes it more likely that a company with a high domain authority website will see your content and share it. Getting backlinks from high domain authority websites will have the most effect on your SEO.
It Helps Build Two-Way Relationships
Facebook makes it easy to connect and communicate with your current and prospective customers. You can provide them with extra information and help with problems they may have.
You can also use Facebook to appear more human and build a relationship with your customers.
You can use your post captions and Facebook’s other features such as polls, to engage with your audience. You can ask their opinion and for advice or ask an open ended question to start a discussion.
Facebook is perfect for building two-way relationships with customers.
By posting this type of content and responding to comments, your followers will feel valued. This helps a lot in converting customers and keeping them.
You Can Get Feedback
Facebook allows you to get direct feedback from your target audience. You can directly ask for feedback or take note of what people are saying in comments, reviews, and private messages.
There are not many ways to get this kind of feedback without sending something like a survey. Even via other contact methods like email, you are more likely to receive negative feedback than constructive or positive feedback.
Feedback left on Facebook, especially in comments, is more organic. People’s thoughts can also help with things like product development.
For example, a string of similar comments may highlight the need for a product line extension that may not have been made obvious otherwise.
It Has Advertising Options
Along with being a great platform for organic promotions, Facebook is a great place to advertise. There are a range of ad formats and detailed targeting options.
A benefit of Facebook advertising is that you can promote your in-feed posts to increase their reach. This is useful to grow brand awareness, increase followers, and ultimately get more people interacting with what you shared.
These “dark” or “boosted” posts allow you to reach more of your own followers, reach their friends, or reach a brand new audience that meets a criteria you set.
You can also run more standard display style ads including single image, carousel image, and video ads.
You benefit from a range of targeting options when using Facebook and can even retarget those who have visited your website or used your app.
This is made possible thanks to the Facebook Pixel. Once placed on your website, it acts like cookies to track those who interact with your website on Facebook where they are served your ads.
Other Facebook ad options include messenger ads and dynamic product ads.
It Generates Leads and Boosts Sales
Facebook has a vast audience of potential customers. Posting on Facebook and running advertisements, if desired, will help you reach this group. You, therefore, have a great lead generation tool if you have a Facebook page and post and interact actively.
Once you have reached these leads, use your content to inform them, entertain them, solve their problems, and build a relationship. This will help in converting these leads into customers.
Once converted, these consumers are likely to stay loyal if you both keep interacting on your Facebook page. Customers that follow you on social media are some of the most loyal and easiest to retain.
5 Tips to Help You Be Successful on Facebook
Now you understand why you should use Facebook, follow these 5 tips to help your Facebook promotions succeed.
1. Have a Facebook Strategy
Once you decide to use Facebook, you need to develop a strategy. This includes:
- Creating goals
- Determining how you will measure these goals
- Planning how to achieve these goals and get your message across most effectively
- Deciding what type of content you will post
- Deciding how often you will post
- Deciding if you will do any paid advertising and setting a budget
- Deciding who will manage the account and who will plan, create, and schedule content
Having a framework outlining what you want to achieve, how you plan to achieve that, and how you will measure success and adjust makes the chance of success on Facebook much higher.
2. Plan Content in Advance
To be successful on Facebook, you need to consistently be posting content. To ensure this is done, you need to plan and schedule your content in advance. Try to plan at least a month in advance.
When planning, these are the main types of posts you can share on Facebook:
Photo Posts: photo with caption (images, infographics, illustrations, animations, etc.)
Video Posts
Linked Content Posts: including a link to content outside of Facebook such as a blog post.
Text-Only Posts
Facebook Polls
Giveaways and Contest Posts: to promote any giveaways and contests you’re running. Facebook does have rules on contests and giveaways and what you can ask followers to do. For example, you cannot ask people to follow you to be entered. If planning to promote a giveaway or contest on Facebook, set it up on a landing page outside of Facebook and promote a link to that.
Facebook Live Posts
Facebook Stories
Sharing of Content: you can also share the Facebook posts of others if relevant to your brand and audience.
The Rule of Thirds
When planning, also remember the rule of thirds. You want to have a split of one-third promotional content, one-third engaging content, and one third shared content, for example, content from industry professionals.
Social Media Content Calendars
Create a content calendar to plan your ideas and store content assets. You can then schedule posts in advance through Facebook’s publishing tools or through a third-party platform.
Content calendars help you get organized, stay organized, be more consistent, and more engaging in your social media. Learn How to Create a Social Media Content Calendar.
3. Interact with Followers
If you plan to use Facebook, make sure you set aside time to interact with followers. If you don’t interact then you won’t be very successful when using Facebook. You need to be creating two-way conversations instead of posting and then going quiet.
Interacting can include responding to comments on your posts and replying quickly to messages. By responding to help solve problems or just create a two-sided conversation, you make followers feel valued and increase the chances of having satisfied customers.
Interacting will help build relationships which helps increase brand loyalty. Having strong relationships with your current customers and prospective customers makes it more likely that they will become repeat customers.
4. Make Use of Facebook Insights
Make sure you’re constantly analyzing your results and adjusting your strategy as needed. Facebook’s Insights is one of the best in-platform analytics tools.
It will show you the demographics of those that interact with you, your best performing posts, changes in followers, and more.
You can also access information relating to each post through publishing tools including:
- Number of likes
- Number of comments
- Number of shares
- Number of link clicks
If you utilize tracking links, you can then track these followers once they leave Facebook to interact with your landing page. This will help with measuring the success of posts intended to get conversions.
5. Don’t Expect Instant Success or Obsess Over Vanity Metrics
As with most marketing activities, you cannot expect a lot of success from simply setting up a Facebook page and starting to post. Even if you post high-quality content consistently, it will take a while to get traction.
Focus on planning and curating content and analyzing every post for overall success and success in relation to the goal of the post.
Analyze what content works best for what goals and understand your audience on Facebook. Your success will then grow over time if you use this information to guide your posts.
Make sure you promote your Facebook page as well to gain awareness. Place a link to the page on your website. You can also promote the new page on other platforms you use such as via email.
Having a contest or giveaway early on can help in gaining followers too. Even if you cannot ask them to follow you to be entered, contests often get a high number of shares and comments, making your page more visible.
Focus on Metrics Relating to Goals
Additionally, don’t focus on vanity metrics that don’t relate to your goals. While a high follower count can be beneficial, don’t obsess over this. If you have a smaller following that engages a lot, this is better than having a lot of followers that don’t interact.
If your goal is to get sales conversions, for example, then this smaller engaged audience will make achieving that goal more likely.
In Conclusion
Almost every business can benefit from using Facebook. Using Facebook for business is a great way to engage with your customers and prospects, drive traffic, and get sales. Plus its low cost!
If you want to get started running a Facebook business account or improve your current efforts, we can help. Brand Hause can assist with planning and executing your Facebook strategy as well as overhauling your presence on other social networks.
Our consultations are free, so get in touch today to find out how we can help you with your Facebook marketing!
Whether you’re prospecting for new clients or marketing to a new audience, the right Facebook marketing strategy can make all the difference.
