Facebook for Business: Let’s start with the basics

It’s officially spring, and last month we talked about spring cleaning your business; part of which is refreshing your marketing campaigns. There is no doubt that Facebook continues to dominate digital marketing for both online and physical businesses. But are you using Facebook as strategically as you could?

This month we are going to focus only on Facebook and to start, let’s understand the platform itself.

Statistics first:

  • 5 billion active mobile users
  • 2 billion monthly active Facebook users
  • 4 billion daily active users
  • Link and share buttons are seen on almost 10 million websites daily
  • The average time spent on Facebook is 20-30 minutes.

I was surprised by the numbers, so I checked several sites to verify them, and although different sites quote slightly different statistics, they are very close to each other.

1.4 billion users check Facebook daily

So let’s start using Facebook for YOUR business.

Some of this may seem pretty elementary, as most businesses at one point or another have created a Facebook page. The question tends to be, how active (or consistent) are you in posting content? If you haven’t read our blog on creating a content calendar, or are looking for tips to get started and make this all seem a little less daunting, drop us a note, we’d be happy to help you get started the right way. .

What is the difference between your Facebook profile and your Facebook page?

Simply, your profile is you. Family vacation photos, inside jokes with friends from high school – they all belong on this page. Keep business – business and personal – personal. However, you do need a Facebook profile to set up a Facebook page.

Your Facebook Page is a dedicated web page within Facebook with the goal of building followers and sharing content relevant to your business. You need a Facebook Page to create Facebook Ads (we’re not going to cover ads today, but we’ll come back to this later in the month).

Business owners can use your page to connect with followers, share stories, build reputation, reach new customers, get feedback, provide customer service, and give your business a voice. Since you need a Page to get started with Facebook Ads, let’s focus on how to create a Facebook Page that represents your brand, helps establish your credibility, and gets found on Google.

Some of the same advice we give business owners when they’re building their new website also applies to Facebook. Look at the competition, brands big and small, what they’re doing right, what they could do better, what elements you can incorporate into your own page. With Facebook, you also want to see which posts get likes and the level of engagement.

When launching your page (or revisiting it and refining it further), keep in mind that full pages rank better in search. You may find that some of the tabs do not apply to you and can be removed. You also have the flexibility to rearrange your tabs in a way that makes the most sense for your business. Create your page with text, videos, photos and share (or select) content from others. A handy trick, date some of your posts so they don’t all “appear” on the same day.

Our final tip for this week (and we’ll talk more about this when we start digging into keywords) is to maximize the impact of your Facebook Page short description. The first 156 characters of your short description appear in Google search results as your meta description, this is your chance to include 2-3 highly searched keywords (with your domain name). Funny how this looks, try searching for one of your competitors to see what they’re up to (just add “Facebook” in your search to filter the results).

We have a lot to cover this month, so stay tuned!

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