If your business is on Facebook, you're likely looking for ways to ramp up that presence and work on better engaging your audience and turning them into customers. It all starts with your Facebook Page. Ensuring that you've properly set up your page and are managing it in a way that initiates engagement is key.
Here are a few guidelines on how to implement Facebook Page best practices so you can use the tool to the max for your digital marketing strategy.
First things first. You need to make sure you've completed every applicable part of your Facebook Page. You should have a profile photo that represents your business (most likely a high-quality logo) and a cover photo that shows off what your business does.
Furthermore, Facebook added another "Our Story" section to the top right column of a Facebook Page back at the beginning of 2018. This is a great area for you to add yet another photo or graphic highlighting your business as well as some background information about your business and why you do what you do.
When you go to the About section of your Facebook Page, you'll see even more information that you need to provide, including website URL, phone number, business hours, and more.
Make sure to fill out every single field that applies to your business. This helps to give your audience as much information as possible about your business and when/how it operates upfront so that they aren't left with questions.
Facebook allows business owners to customize their Page tab navigation on the left sidebar of their Facebook Page. You absolutely want to take advantage of this.
You're able to create custom Page tabs that link to email newsletter signups, giveaway information, and other social channels. You can also use these tabs to create job listing pages, a shop, events, and more.
Go into your Facebook Page's settings to find the "Templates and Tabs" section. This is where you can edit which tabs you want to appear on your profile, as well as the content of some of them.
A CTA, or call-to-action, button lives directly below the cover photo of every business Facebook Page. This is the perfect opportunity to share a product page, services page, contact form, or another landing page with your Facebook Page followers.
You can change the CTA out as often or as infrequently as you want, and you can even use your cover photo to draw attention to it. Advertise what your CTA leads to with a giant arrow leading directly down to point to the CTA button. This can increase the number of people who are actually clicking on that button to find out more.
Your social analytics is always important to keep track of so that you know how well your posts are performing. Your Facebook Insights can also let you know when your page audience is most active. You want to post right before peak hours to increase the likelihood that the people who like your page will see your content.
You can find this information in your Facebook Insights under Posts. The graph there will show you the volume of your audience's activity so that you can easily pay attention to the highest peaks.
You also want to take a look at your audience reaction to individual posts. Which of your content types tend to getting the most reach and engagement? Those are the types of posts you want to share more often.
If you have a big company announcement, upcoming launch, job opening you're trying to fill, or another important piece of content, you want to pin it to the top of your Facebook Page. This way, it still gets the most attention, regardless of how many other pieces of content you publish.
That post will remain at the top of your page so that every time someone new navigates to view your information, that's the first post they're going to see.
You can also use this for offers, discounts, and sales pages, just to increase the likelihood that page visitors will click to your website and eventually make a purchase. Think of this as your second CTA on your Facebook Page.
As much as we don't want to admit it, Facebook has become a pay-to-play platform. Really, we couldn't expect such a powerful platform to remain free forever. Business just doesn't work that way.
The big thing to remember is that Facebook is still incredibly cheap when it comes to your ad dollars, and when you consider how highly targeted you can make your advertisements, you really can't beat it.
This is why every single business that is trying to use Facebook to its fullest potential absolutely must be investing in Facebook Ads. We don't take making blanket statements lightly, but unless you already have a widely known brand name (and even then, those businesses still run ads), you will not see success on Facebook without advertising.
Facebook doesn't have a lot of organic strategies available for initial outreach. While organic content is still an incredibly important strategy, advertising is a supplemental requirement to help create an audience for your organic content.
You can start with brand awareness ads at the beginning of your ads strategy to increase reach and page likes before moving onto sales specific ad types.
If you're trying to see results on Facebook, get started with these six Facebook Page best practices for your digital marketing strategy. Next steps? Contact us to learn more about implementing a successful Facebook marketing strategy for your business.