Ignoring Facebook can be the biggest mistake which small and start-up companies make. It is not surprising that most of the consumers are hooked online for searching local business, and Facebook is the common place. It is indeed one of the largest social media platforms in the world and has around billions of active users. Interestingly, this social networking giant is coming up with innovative features for helping users in searching for small business and assists the small businesses in connecting with some of the best and potential customers.
Just imagine how much benefit a good Facebook presence can do. It can simply assist firms to engage with their fans and develop their business. However, there are many methods to promote a business through Facebook and it is difficult to know from where to begin.
The following are some of the basic steps involved in promoting small and starting firms using Facebook –
Creation of Facebook Page
Promoting Small Business Through Facebook
The Facebook page of your firm is the home base for your business on the social media site. It is similar to the normal Facebook profile, but the only difference is here; it would be related to products and services. Through your Facebook account, you can interact with the users and it is very much important that it reflects the given brand which you are representing.
Try to use an attractive business logo and make it as the primary photo of the Facebook Page. Also pick out a cover photo which showcases what kind of services your business does and which is attractive. Adding some snappy and short sentences about your brand can be a good thing and you need to ensure that it is memorable and catchy.
Sharing Contents
Simply having a Facebook page is not going to do any good for you. You need to rack up followers so that you can create something which is interesting and worthwhile for your fans. The contents and the brand details should be so much informative and attractive that it has to be instantly liked by users. Once users like your page, then they would get the instant updates and post which you uploaded in their main Facebook Newsfeed. So, it is important that you constantly update videos, photos, and promotions; in order to create avidity about your brands and services.
Do you know what makes a Facebook post successful? It is the one which drives and makes people to share, comment, and like. Furthermore, it has to be visual and short. You need to check out ways to see whether you can add any amount of visual elements to the various posts, irrespective of it being a photo depicting about the items in your store, a short video, or any newspaper citing about positive feedback about your business.
The Insight tool on Facebook allows one to avoid the guesswork involved in sharing. This particular tool is available in the Admin page menu of Facebook and it provides a great amount of information about the activities of the followers. For example, this tool can easily inform you at what time people are viewing your contents and post, thereby assisting you in planning the promotional activities.
Making Connections
It is futile, if nobody see what interesting contents are posted by you. However, Facebook has got a built-in tool which can easily help in creating online followers. So, first you would need to check out the ‘Build Audience’ tool. This tool is present in the admin menu and using it; you can invite both your Facebook buddies and email contacts to like a given page.
Following traditional marketing and sales techniques can easily assist in developing your audience and expand the existing followers. This involves in advertising the web address of your Facebook page on your business cards, signs of the store, emails, and other marketing materials which you are often using for your business.
User Engagement
An interesting aspect of using Facebook is that you can organically grow and develop your audience by creating various contents which can be shared, liked and commented by your followers. The key aspect there is to post quality and informative contents on regular intervals. So, it means you would have to share the various updates which are important and informative for your audience, which is at least once or twice in a week. To get the best results, you can try to speak in a friendly manner and make the tone conversational.
Also, you need to ensure that the updates are on time and reply to the comments and private messages send by the user directly and immediately. Creating a suitable dialogue among the followers would simply encourage them to check out your post sometime in the future. Do you know that Facebook offers certain direct marketing tools for various business users?
The Facebook Offers is a tool which created coupons. These can be redeemed online or at any store. For a small time fee, you can make Facebook to market these given offers to the news feed of people who are not following your business activities. These come in various packages and as per your budget; you can select how much users can view your offers.
Leveraging
It is common for new customers to try out your products and services if it is recommended by their friends. Facebook allows businesses to use the word-of-mouth marketing technique for promoting the services and products. Just keep in mind that when a fan is interacting with your Facebook page, his or her friends can view the activities in their newsfeed. There are other premium ways of fostering a better interaction like setting up polls, asking questions on the Facebook page, etc. Such things are what fans cannot resist responding to.
Facebook Advertisements
There are various traditional advertisement options provided by Facebook. This allows you to position the ads in the news feed of the user. These ads can be considered as promotional posts and it would be directed to any person who just clicks on the website. As Facebook users collect huge amount of data from users, this can easily help in targeting your ads to users who are going to be interested in your services and products.
Frankly, the above given are the six key methods of promoting your small scale businesses. Of course, initially establishing and creating a great amount of demand for small businesses can be tough. But with the assistance of social networking sites Facebook, they can easily sail through.
Author Bio: Admin Urwin, is a founder of the company Instronaut Media Group Ltd. He is very passionate on writing social media related blogs and from that helps the people to realize how social media is helpful for the businesses.
I found Facebook ads pretty terrible. I didn’t hyper-target mine: I chose a nation, a language, and some general interests, and received a lot of spam likes. It turns out Facebook don’t mind fake accounts these days, as they click through on the ads to convince them that they’re real. This meant I had a huge reach, but a LOT of likes from Facebook accounts that were obviously fake.
I’d advise anyone thinking about Facebook ads to do a lot of targeting, and use several smaller campaigns targeting what could be a few thousand people each rather than larger ones. Otherwise you may as well just throw your money away.
Cool, Thank you!
This is much needed information to me thank you……for more info
You inpired me to Facebook, which am ignoring from several months. Thinking good results from your tips.
Hi Siddharth
You described the promotion of a business through Facebook very well. I am also agree with your point to use ‘Facebook advertisement’. Thanks for this informative post.
Hiii….facebook advertisement is the best way to promote any business… your article is very informative..Thanks for sharing this info..
Promoting business through facebook is a good idea but user has to give his/her full dedication in social activities only then one can able to promote business.