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 freshening up 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 with, let’s understand the platform itself.

First the stats:

• 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 while different sites cite 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, since 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 on 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 high school friends – they all belong on this page. Keep business – business and personal – personal. However, you 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 a following 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 that later in the month).

Business owners can use their Page to connect with followers, share stories, build reputation, reach new customers, get feedback, provide customer service, and give their 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 applies to Facebook as well. Look at the competition, big and small brands, what they are doing well, what they could do better, what elements you can incorporate into your own page. With Facebook, you also want to see which posts are getting likes and the level of engagement.

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

Our last tip for this week (and we’ll talk more about this when we start digging deeper 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 what this looks like, try searching for one of their 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!