Facebook is largely responsible for the elevation of social media over the last decade and is a force to be reckoned with in the world of big business. It remains a highly innovative and powerful platform today, with a captive international audience of more than one and one-half billion unique users every day. That’s at least one person out of every two people worldwide using the internet today.
Create a Hub for Your Business: Your Facebook Business Page
Facebook business pages provide their owners with a unique opportunity. They’re a ready-made brand asset, associating web addresses with other contact information in a highly visible setting. You can cross-post blogs to your Facebook business page, resulting in valuable traffic coming across your brand’s content. Right away, this is valuable to you: if you don’t have a Facebook business page, you want to get one started as soon as possible.
One of the benefits of a Facebook business page is the ability, once you have identified your audience, to target that audience specifically. Facebook allows you to be seen by anyone whose interests match up with the niches to which your business caters. A broad array of categories can be chosen from, and multiple choices may be made, in selecting keywords and tags for your Facebook page. Facebook users are regularly shown suggestions for pages to follow, based upon their existing preferences: by defining your target audience, you can generate interested traffic with no more than a few minutes’ effort.
As your Facebook audience grows, you can take look at Facebook’s built-in page analytics, and get a sense for who is visiting your page. Future efforts in advertising can be shifted toward that demographic, or expanded into areas which don’t seem to be getting a lot of attention, despite being highly relevant. You can focus your Facebook ads on individuals by age, location, gender, and a variety of other factors relevant to the target audience you’re trying to reach.
Optimize your Facebook Business Page
Facebook business pages fill the first contact role with many new customers, whose first experience with a brand will be how it is presented on a company’s Facebook page. One of the best ways to optimize a business page for this purpose is to provide valuable and insightful content for your visitors to enjoy. If your company sells shoes, post a video that explains how to accurately measure one’s shoe size at home. If your company sells high-end electronics, use an infographic to explain how to keep your equipment running smoothly.
Don’t be afraid to put a little personality into your content, either. Being affable, approachable, and humorous is all perfectly acceptable. Using your page, “Like” other pages that offer related content. By presenting visitors with access to new sources of information and entertainment, your page will function as a kind of handshake—providing a good first impression, and turning visitors into brand evangelists.
Targeting Visitors with Facebook Ads
Just like your business page itself, the various Facebook ads which are available to you can all be individually focused at your target demographic. You can match your page’s demographic, or you can chose a specific profile for each ad. This allows you to direct ads at specific target audiences, while ultimately drawing them back to your website, where they will be exposed to the full breadth of your content and can be converted into customers.
Becoming an effective brand on Facebook is no easy task. It requires effort and savvy in order to create content that is engaging, and representative of your brand. If you’re interested in learning more about how businesses can engage in social media, read our article on 3 ways to use LinkedIn for business.