Social media has become part of daily life, especially Facebook. Even if you aren’t on social media, that doesn’t mean that people aren’t talking about or looking for your business online! Having a Facebook business page is a great idea for any business and here are some tips to maximise your account.
- Planning and preparation is key to building engagement
Social media is all about engagement and building rapport with your customers. Creating guidelines and a plan will help you to keep producing quality content for your Facebook account. Guidelines can outline your standards relating to spelling, grammar, content you will use, subjects you will/will not talk about, your tone and how you’ll respond to complaints. Writing social media guidelines can help keep you and other contributors on track to represent your brand consistently. An annual social media calendar should include important events and dates for your company, community and country, as well as post ideas for those occasions. The best social media accounts have a lot of planning involved, it is actually quite challenging to be spontaneous and planning removes the pressure.
- Show off your latest work and products in different ways
Facebook has the benefit of allowing video, images and content, allowing you to promote your products how ever you like which prevents the content getting stale. For example you can write a blog post, create a competition, showcase a testimonial, show a video, write an FAQ about a product, talk about something topical within your community or upload a brochure and hopefully get your customers interacting with your posts. Always remember that Facebook is about having an ongoing conversation with your clients rather than the hard sell; keep talking to them and stay in their mind. Have fun with the different options available to you.
- Use targeted area advertising to get more customers
If you are happy to pay for Facebook advertising, there are some great benefits including targeted marketing. Facebook takes note of user locations, what pages they like and where they check into. This record of locations and interests is useful when advertising, as you can create an advert and specify criteria for people who should see the advert. This is especially powerful if you have a local business. For example, if you have a bobcat business that only provides services in Mid Canterbury; it doesn’t make much sense to pay to advertise to someone in London. You can also target people manually based on age, interests and behaviours. This means you only spend money advertising to relevant potential clients.
- Create generic replies for frequently asked questions
Facebook is making it easier for business pages with regular updates and improvements. One such improvement is the ability to set up automatic acknowledgement responses to messages, helping business owners to quickly respond even if they are busy at the time. People using social media expect a quick response and this helps you to meet their expectations. To set this up, go to your business page, click on settings, select messaging, under response assistant click “Yes” next to “send instant replies to anyone who messages your Page”. To change your instant reply message, click Change, update the message and click save. To turn the message off, simply change the “Yes” back to “No”.
- Always separate your personal and professional life
Always remember that social media used for business purposes should be kept professional and polite at all times. You should make sure any personal Facebook accounts are kept private, so you can relax about any photos or posts on your personal page. Facebook has made it easier to access your privacy shortcuts. Look in the top right hand corner of the screen, click on the padlock button, expand the options and make sure “Friends” is ticked for the option “Who can see my stuff” rather than “Public”. There are other security options you can take, accessible in the expanding menus.
Remember, social media is about building engagement and strong relationships, which results in sales over time. Give these Facebook business page options a go and tell us how you went. If you need any help putting any of your social media goals into practice or would like to learn more about social media, give us a call at JFM Marketing and Design.
