Over the years, Facebook has become a social media juggernaut and the premier destination for business promotion and marketing. This fact becomes even more apparent when you delve into the many tools that Facebook offers business owners (both free and paid). For example, Facebook boasts over 2 billion users and over 1 billion users on its subsidiary Instagram. Statistics like these should have any marketing professional and business owner salivating at the mouth. That’s 40% of the entire population of Earth, right at your fingertips.
We’re not aiming to target billions of people with our marketing campaigns. We’ll save that for the tech giants of the world; looking at you, Apple. Instead, we should utilize the sheer number of people on the platform to deliver hyper-targeted messages and advertisements to the customers we’re trying to reach.
Marketing your business on Facebook is not as easy as setting up your profile. Please do not underestimate this process, as it should be strategic and carefully thought out. You should treat this page as an extension of your brand image rather than an afterthought. I recommend hiring and training a professional to manage the page after its creation.
Here are some tips that I have for any business just starting on Facebook. As I’ve mentioned in my previous articles, this is not an exhaustive list, and you should continue to modify it as the social media landscape changes.
Business vs. Personal Accounts
Think about your intentions when creating this page. Do you plan on posting family photos, restaurant reviews, or what Aunt Margarette said at dinner that made things awkward? As a business owner, hopefully not. This same concept applies before you create your business page. Do not create a page intended for business as a personal account. Since Facebook Business Pages’ inception, it’s been a crucial distinction to make and a common blunder among business owners.
So what’s the big deal? Aren’t they the same thing?
Appearances can be deceiving. For example, you’re creating a page for your car dealership. You choose to make your page a personal account instead of a Facebook Business Page. Although it may seem like you’re not missing out on much at first glance, Facebook won’t catch the error nor dissuade you from doing so on the account creation page. By creating the account this way, you’ve permanently barred yourself from all content creation tools, analytics, insights for your posts, and paid promotional options. Yikes. If that wasn’t bad enough, anyone who wants to follow your page has to become friends with the page, rather than clicking the like or follow button.
Creating a personal page and business page interchangeably should be a cardinal sin of marketing a business. So please don’t do it. Instead, we want to make the page as user-friendly as possible for our customers and employees using the page daily.
If you need assistance creating your business page, I recommend checking out Facebook’s official resource: https://www.facebook.com/business/pages/set-up.
Page Roles
On a similar note to separating work from business, let’s talk about page roles. As a public relations professional, I’ve heard my fair share of horror stories about an employee who posted something personal on their company’s Facebook page. It’s a PR and marketing department nightmare while also being super embarrassing for the employee. To avoid such mishaps, we need to take some preventative measures on the backend to minimize this happening.
Ideally, you want to have a select few employees who are spokespeople for the company. However, giving access to too many people leads to the mistakes mentioned above. Instead, these employees should undergo training and adhere to company policies when posting on the Facebook Business page. Page roles make sure these trusted individuals are the only ones posting on the page. Each page role has a specific set of permissions that determines how an employee may use the page.
Multimedia Posts
Visual content is the breadwinner of any company’s social media page. You are 40x more likely to have your audience interact with your post if there’s some visual element attached to it.
Since we are a marketing agency that primarily focuses on car dealerships, I want all the general managers in the back of the classroom to listen carefully. I’ve seen way too many dealerships’ Facebook pages either: (a) don’t have a single picture of a car in their inventory or (b) lack videos that show off the showroom/lot. Every day you don’t post one of these items, you miss out on several leads and opportunities to turn into sales. So if you’re ever concerned about your lead count during closeout, ask yourself this, did I utilize my Facebook page enough to drive leads?
Get creative with it! There are plenty of ways that you can introduce visual elements to your Facebook page. If conventional photos and videos aren’t your speed, try out Facebook Live or upload your Tik Toks to spark engagement with your customers.
Post Frequency and Timing
A balance exists between posting too much and too little. If you post too much, your audience may perceive it as spam and unfollow the page. On the other hand, posting too little creates the perception that you’re an unreliable source of information and may cause irreparable damage to your brand image.
How do I find the right balance? What’s “too much” or “too little”?
Unfortunately, this predicament does not have a one-size-fits-all answer. The solution comes from rigorous testing and weekly monitoring of your analytics. Even well-researched plans for scheduled Facebook posts will have to be adjusted based on seasons, general popularity times, and other factors.
The optimal strategy is to test what time of day/week your posts are most popular and to use Facebook’s tools to schedule these posts ahead of time. Ideally, you should be monitoring your page’s analytics daily, logging important information for future reference.
Conclusion
I hope you learned something from today’s Facebook page crash course. At Market Doctors, our goal is to make sure that car dealers have all the tools necessary to succeed. We have plenty of other resources on this site and products to aid your efforts in becoming the top dealership in your area. If you have any questions or need some guidance, always feel free to reach out to us at any contact information listed on this site.
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