Facebook search has location priotized results. This makes it easier for people in your location to find you – meaning more relevant leads too your page.
Users who like or share your content help to promote your information. This effectively turns your audience into salespeople – marketing your information to their friends and family (people are a lot more open to the advice or testimonials of someone they know rather than a hired salesperson from your company.)
You don’t need to invest thousands of dollars a month and hire a company to manage your social media. If you are reasonably confident online. With some basic training and advice you will be able to manage your Facebook page
Be Social, don’t sell.
People use Facebook to catch-up with friends and family, play games, or read entertaining or interesting content. Most users are browsing in the evenings or during breaks. When people are in this social mood they do not respond well to being ‘sold’. Try to avoid direct sales promotions as much as possible – unless that is the #1 reason people follow you (e.g. online shop, daily discounts etc.) Try building a community of people rather than just a one sided conversation.
Build interaction: encourage feedback, questions and discussions from your Facebook community. Create engagement with competitions or games. This can be something simple from “like this photo to win” or “guess how many items in this jar”. It could also be something more complex such as a custom app e.g. “upload a photo of you using our products to win” or “design your own T-shirt to win”. Apps and competitions give people incentives to engage with you, and when they do they help spread the word and promote your page to their friends. This is an effective way of building your audience and extending your reach on Facebook.
Experiment.
Find out what content your audience likes most. Try using different styles of images and see how your audience responds. Do you get more engagement with serious, professional images? Or are humorous and relaxed images getting more attention?
Monitor your activity and audience reactions. Facebook insights are useful for seeing how people engage with your content. It is important to always monitor how effective your posts are and to find out what content people like most. You need to adapt to your audience, and this may mean adjusting your strategy a few times. Trends change and its important to make sure you keep posting what people are interested in. Insights can provide other useful information such as: when your audience is online – telling you the optimum time for new posts.
Scheduling posts makes it easy to write posts in advance and publish them at specific times. This is great if your audience is active late nights and weekends.
Building your audience on Facebook can be hard. It can be helpful to think of the reasons why people like pages or companies on Facebook.
- To gain access to exclusive content, events or sales
- To receive discounts or promotions
- Get updates about your company or products
- Want be associated with the company/page
- Want to receive relevant industry news/current events
- To interact with the company -e.g. support
- To interact with other audience members – community forum, like minded people
These are just a few of the reasons people like pages on Facebook, it can be helpful to think of these and see which of these might be expectations your customers have about your company. It is worth exploring these different content types to see what people engage with most.
Benefits of being active on Facebook
If you invest a bit of time with your company Facebook page, your efforts will be rewarded with an active following of people who are interested in what you do.
Free feedback. Feedback from your customers can be extremely valuable. It gives you an opportunity to hear what people think about your products or services, you can use them as a test audience to see what they think about potential new products
A well managed Facebook presence can be great for your business – and is often something that can be easily maintained in-house with some basic advice and training. Contact our team today to help get the most out of your online presence.
