Starting a Facebook page for your business seems like a simple enough task, but if you want to take social media seriously, you’ll need to realize that it’s an investment. You won’t develop an audience overnight, and you’ll have to put a little cash down to expose your business to users; however, a small amount of your time and money can work wonders for your business in the long run.
Let’s take a look at a few ways you can get your new Facebook page off the ground and in front of the people most important to your business — customers.
Target Local Consumers with Ads
Growing a local page organically is one of the most difficult things to accomplish on Facebook. So in order to get the word out about your business, you’ll need to start using Facebook’s self-serving ad platform to introduce your business to the people who might be interested in it.
And the great thing about Facebook is you can target users down to the almost-individual level, as long as you have enough details about them and their interests. Hiring a Facebook marketing company to manage your content will allow you to skip this tedious process, but it can be done solo.
For instance, if you sell dirt bikes, you’ll probably want to target a younger — 13 to 25 year old — male audience who publicly show interest in dirt bikes. Maybe they like Kawasaki or Yamaha on Facebook, or even relevant sporting events like the X Games. The idea is to use as many of the options available as possible to make sure you’re targeting the types of people who would frequent your business.
Share Content from Your Website
Even if you’re running a simple website with only a few pages, you want to bring users there to learn more about your business, as well as the products and services you provide. One day, instead of posting a product image or other piece of content, you could post an interesting fact about your business and link to your website’s homepage or about section.
Ideally, you should have some way to post content to your website– the most basic way is through a blog — in order to keep people informed on changes to your business or write about relevant news that would appeal to your customers. This content can not only be used for your social media marketing efforts, but will help any search engine optimization you’ve been attempting.
Build Relationships with Other Local Page Owners
Considering the fact that nearly every business has a Facebook page, it shouldn’t be hard to find other business owners near you who may be willing to collaborate.
For instance, if you own a donut shop or café, you could offer to bring donuts or coffee to a nearby auto repair shop if they’d be willing to snap a picture and share it on their Facebook with your page tagged. It’s a simple way to get to know other local business owners and be seen by even more people in your area.
Always Be Personable
One of the biggest mistakes business owners make is treating Facebook as if it were a one-way communication platform. That is, you post your content and move on, without worrying about what users are saying in response to your content.
When posting a photo, link, or status on your page, make sure you have fun with it. You want people to realize that there’s someone behind the curtain.
Start asking questions or post insights about your business’s industry. Challenge people to interact with you and be genuine in your responses. You want them to have a positive experience on your page and associate that with your business.
Understand Your Audience
Once you’ve developed an audience through your page, you should work more and more on sharing content that gets users interacting and sharing themselves. Because you not only want to satisfy your audience, you want them to help you grow it by sharing your posts with their friends who could be interested in what your business has to offer.
So take some time to look over your Facebook Insights and really look at the type of content that performs. You want a good variety of photos and links, but you also want to make each and every post count. Make sure you also take the time of day that your audience is most active into account and start scheduling posts around those times.
Using these simple strategies will give you a good foundation to grow a respected Facebook page for your business. Social media may be a new platform for advertising, but it has become a great tool for reaching out to local consumers in order to get a new business recognized.