Facebook Marketing for Small Businesses

Facebook Marketing is a vital asset for any small business and has the potential to:

enhance brands digital presence
build long-lasting relationships with customers
drive traffic and leads to your website.

Despite there being many advantages to using social media, a recent study by the Department of Business Innovation & Skills suggests that more than one in five SMEs struggle with social media marketing.

With Facebook expected to become more e-commerce driven, it is no wonder it’s one of the most visited websites across the globe. Here are our tips on how small businesses can make better use of Facebook Marketing.

Before you delve into Facebook Marketing

Before starting your Facebook Marketing journey, it’s important to research the platform carefully. Consider asking yourself the following questions:

Is my target audience on Facebook?
How are other businesses in my industry performing on Facebook?
What is are my objectives for using Facebook?
Do I have a strategy in place?

It’s common for businesses to begin their social media journey with no action plan which can be detrimental to growth. Having a plan is crucial as it helps to increase opportunities online. If you decide that Facebook isn’t right for you, then look for alternative platforms.

Getting Started: Create a Facebook Business page

If you want a professional presence on Facebook, creating a Facebook Business page is the best route to take. A business page will generate “likes” and “follows” and the actions or lack of action will allow you to gauge what works and doesn’t work.

Hubspot recommends the following steps to create a Facebook Business page:

Create a Page

To begin, head to Facebook. On the left-hand menu, choose Pages > Create New Page. This should launch the Page creator within your Facebook interface.

Enter your Page name and choose up to three categories. Type in a brief description — what your business does, the services you provide, or the purpose of the Page in under 255 characters. You should see this information populate the right side of the Page creator.

Once finished, click Create Page.

Add images

Clicking Create Page shouldn’t move you off the Page creator. You’ll see two more prompts added to the left-hand menu: to add a profile photo (170 x 170 pixels) and cover photo (1640 x 856 pixels).

Add a logo or widely recognised image for your profile photo. If you have other social media accounts for your business, consider using the same profile photo from those to keep your online presence consistent.

For your cover photo, choose an image that represents the purpose or theme of your Page.

You should see these images populate the right side of the Page creator. When finished, click Save.

Choose a username and assign a CTA

After the previous step, Facebook should move you to the Facebook Business Page dashboard where you’ll manage all other aspects of your Page.

This interface can feel overwhelming, so bear with me. First things first, choose a username for your Page. A username helps people find your Page in search and allows them to easily tag your Page when posting about your company. Your username also makes up your Facebook Business Page URL.

Next, click + Add Action Button to add a CTA to your Page. This should be the action you want your visitors to take when they visit your Facebook Business Page.

Facebook offers 10+ different CTA options, from Shop Now to Learn More to Contact Us, and some allow you to input your website to help drive traffic.

Edit your Page info

After setting a username and choosing a CTA, click More > About in the main menu. This will navigate you to your Page info, where visitors will go to learn more about your organisation.

Click Edit Page Info in the top right corner to update this information.

There are many fields to update here. Here’s what to focus on:

Location: If you’re a local business, input your business address so visitors can find you.
Hours: Brick and mortar businesses should input their store hours as some shoppers may reference their Page to see when they can visit.
Price range: You don’t have to fill out this designation, but it may help to specify the price range of your products and services to target the right shoppers.
Additional contact info: Input your website, phone number, and email so visitors can contact you outside Facebook. This information will also help drive Facebook traffic to your website and products.
More info: The description you added in step one should be under “About.” You can add more information under “Additional information,” and you can write in a mission or vision statement under “Impressum.”

Understand your Page settings

In the left-hand navigation, click Settings at the bottom. The left-hand menu will change to more detailed categories, and the right side interface will list (seemingly) countless options.

I encourage you to skim through these settings and get familiar with what each may change or update on your Page. In the meantime, however, I’m going to unpack a few core settings to know.

General > Others Tagging this Page: Make sure this is checked as it will allow others to post about and share your Page.
General > Similar Page Suggestions: Make sure this is checked so Facebook recommends your Page to new followers and fans.
Messaging > Show a greeting: Turn this on so your Facebook Page will automatically send your followers a greeting when opening Messenger.
Templates and Tabs: If you need to rearrange the menu on your Page or the information offered to visitors, you can do this here.
Notifications: This section allows you to customize when and how you’d like to receive Page alerts. Set a frequency that fits your social media marketing schedule.
Page Roles: Whether or not you’ll be the main manager of the Page, there may be others at your organisation who need access to your Facebook Page. Here, you can invite other colleagues to make changes to your Pages. Some common use cases here include:
- A public relations manager who needs to respond to any delicate questions.
- A support representative who can assist those asking technical questions.
- A designer tasked with uploading new photo creative to the Page.

To read Hubspot’s blog post in full, click here

Populate your Facebook Business page with regular quality content

Setting up your Facebook page is the easy part, however, creating quality content that resonates and builds relationships can be tricky.

Having a strategy in place is key as it will keep you focussed and on track with your business objective(s).

Your posts need to be regular and value-driven, instead of posting for the sake of posting. If you’re unsure what to publish, then consider an experimentation phase.

Facebook Insights is integrated into all business pages and free to use. You can use Facebook Insights to:

evaluate posts
discover the reach and engagement
see how much traffic is being driven to your website.

If you’re concerned that Facebook may be time-consuming, then you can use its own in-build social media scheduler to schedule posts in advance. This can help you to stay on track being mindful to check your business page regularly.

Build relationships with your audience

It’s key to regularly interact with your audience whether they comment on a post, send you a direct message, leave you a review and more.

Before you create a post, one of the best questions that you can ask yourself is: “will this post start a dialogue between myself and my audience?” Using this approach will ensure you are using social media effectively, as social is all about being “sociable”.

The key to engagement is authentic content that sounds human. People like to buy from people, so adding in humour and using friendly language is a great foundation to begin building relationships.

Paid-for content

Sometimes it can be challenging to reach your targetted audience organically, therefore targetted paid-for content is a great way to reach your ideal customers.

The beauty of Facebook is that they make it relatively easy to target a particular target audience. You can target people based on their gender, age, interests, location, occupation plus more. This means that you can carefully craft campaigns that are well-targetted.

Once the paid-for campaign comes to an end, you can evaluate your work to understand its strengths, weaknesses and how to improve future sponsored content.

Write compelling content

There are many ways that you can create content that resonates with your audience. Some of our top ideas include:

Posting a variety of content. For example, images, slideshows, videos, blogs, stories, polls and more which is highly likely to maintain the interest of your audience long-term.
Ending every post with a call to action. The easiest way to do this is by asking your audience a question or including a link to your website or email marketing platform to increase leads.
Creating infrequent giveaways. Giveaways are a great way to incentivise your audience to interact with you. However, there are many conditions that you must abide by to ensure that you don’t violate Facebook rules. You can read more about Facebook giveaways here.

Create a targetted Facebook group

Developing a community around a particular product or sharing tips and advice is a great way to connect with audiences one on one. For example, a PR agency may use a group to educate businesses on media relations, whilst a drinks company may use a group for market research purposes.

Finally, take full advantage of the functionality readily available

Facebook has made some huge changes over the last couple of years and it will continue to do so for the year ahead. Facebook Live, Video and Stories are excellent features that have been introduced to encourage more human relatable content. These tools provide great opportunities for those looking to vary their content, build relationships and more importantly, generate leads and sales.

What did you think of our Facebook Marketing for Small Businesses? Did you learn something new or maybe it has given you some inspiration on how to further develop your channels? If you’d like a complimentary 20 minute consultancy to discuss your social media, click here.