Many business owners think that just setting up a business page on Facebook and posting a few updates here and there is adequate.
71% of online adults use Facebook. (Pew Research Center) Facebook is an important tool for marketing and advertising. Paid advertising on Facebook generates great results, but daily marketing on the business page can achieve great results too.
Unfortunately, not understanding how the business page works for a business is the problem. Business pages on Facebook do not always generate immediate results. Like any other marketing or advertising campaign results may not be as obvious.
Here are 7 things a business page can accomplish with an active, interesting, engaging and professional daily marketing strategy:
- Increased Exposure
Your Facebook page has a built in audience. This audience likely consists of current customers and potential customers. Engaging with the current customers generates loyalty and encourages them to share your information with their friends, which helps generate new leads. The daily campaign also aims to convert the potential customers into current customers.
- Generate Warm Leads & Referrals
Posting daily updates at least 1 to 3 or more times per day will ensure your business stays in front of the audience. Hopefully, this audience will engage with your update. Those interactions will then be shared with their networks. Your online visibility and branding have now increased and more people are aware of you. Additionally, by staying in front of your current customers and nurturing that brand loyalty they will then refer their friends to your business.
- Collect Lead Information
Facebook provides a great way to gather information about the individuals in your network. Friends of the page are an instant database of potential leads. If your Facebook page disappeared tomorrow would you be able to reach the people who followed your updates? Gathering the emails and information from this network will provide the ability to reach them outside of Facebook through emails or even offline.
- Reach a Specific Audience
Facebook updates provide the ability to target specific individuals who are friends of the business page or potential friends of the page.
For example, if you post an update that would only be relevant to teachers you can target the friends of your page who fit this demographic so that only teachers will see the update. The demographics can be targeted to interests, purchasing history, age, gender, location, and more.
Additionally, you can also expand the reach of the update by paying to boost the post. There are several options for an audience with the boosted post:
- Reach friends of the page.
- Reach friends of the page AND their friends.
- Reach a new audience with specific demographics or by location.
Typically the cost to boost a post is just a few dollars and can be quite effective.
- Boost SEO/Search Rank
Most businesses are concerned with SEO and have paid handsomely to achieve optimized search rank. Many SEO companies focus only on the website, optimizing the site, using keywords, etc. Unfortunately, most ignore Social Media. Social Media activity is important for SEO. Facebook updates, activity, interactions (likes, comments and shares) and business page descriptions and information all contribute to Search Rank.
Posting updates several times a day, including a variety of topics as well as updates about your industry or your business will improve your Search Rank.
- Increase Website Traffic
Most businesses have websites. The website is the place for the business to introduce their services/products and provide enough information to hopefully close the deal and make a sale or grab a hot lead.
Though getting people to the website can be a challenge. Facebook provides a built-in audience to target and get them to click through to your site. This increased traffic will also contribute to your SEO and Search Rank.
- Monitor Your Competitors
Facebook has a feature that allows business pages to watch what their competitors are doing on the site. On the business page there is a feature called “Pages to Watch” that provides businesses in your area that are similar to your industry or niche. Once you select the businesses you want to watch you can then how many likes their page has and how many new friends they got that week. You can also click through to see what their daily campaign looks like.
If a page you are watching suddenly has a high number of new friends for the week you can click over to their page and see what they are doing to generate interest. Your strategy can then potentially be changed to mirror what they are doing for results.
(If you are not active with your business page on Facebook, check out the Pages to Watch and take a look at what your competitors are doing. If they have a strong presence, daily updates, a high friend count they are using Facebook effectively. They are likely also in front of your customers and potential customers either stealing away your current customers or generating leads from your potential customers. If they are there you need to be there too or you could be losing business and not even know it.)
Facebook business pages are an important tool. Each and every update on the page matters. Whether it is a goofy meme that your friends share or an update about a sales special or even an article that you think your audience may find useful these updates actually contribute to your bottom line.
Stop wasting this opportunity and start using your business page as the serious marketing tool it actually is to grow your business and generate some revenue.
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