As your Facebook Business page grows, you’ll be able to build and develop an understanding of your audience in a variety of ways. With the handy tool that is Facebook Insights, you can get hold of a lot of information that can be extremely beneficial to your business.
You’ll be able to see the most effective time for you to post, the demographics that you’re reaching including gender and age, as well as their locations. Plus, you can suss out what your target audience enjoy reading about by looking at the engagement levels on your posts.
2 – Building relationships
Your Facebook page allows you to become more than a faceless brand, giving you the chance to interact with your target audience. Reply to comments and messages quickly and you’ll boost your brand reputation as a trustworthy and reliable source. Developing that online personality for your business will help you to retain the interest of your current customers, and draw in new prospects too.
3 – Boosting your Google rankings
In terms of SEO, Facebook contributes by increasing your brand’s visibility on the web and building on that brand awareness. By making a public business page, any links that you post can be picked up by search engines so use the platform to link to specific product pages or blog posts. It may not work miracles, but every little helps!
4 – Shaping your brand’s reputation
Having your own Facebook page for your business is another way to promote your brand to your target audience. The social media site provides you with a public page that people can peruse at leisure, giving them a more personal feel for what your business is all about. But this chumminess between your business and your customers isn’t the only way that Facebook can help your reputation.
We love to hear Facebook being used for positive ratings and comments on business, however, that means it can be used to voice negative opinions too. We’ve all seen or heard about companies having some real shockers on social media, where people have complained and it’s gone viral for example. Whilst you can’t stop this from happening, you can make sure you’re monitoring your social media profiles closely. Take control of any complaints quickly and professionally. You want to make sure you are responding to comments and messages regularly, whether they’re good or bad, to maintain your reputation as a business people want to buy from.
5 – Maintaining and increasing engagement
We’ve said already about the benefits of building relationships with your customers, and in order to do this, you want to keep up engagement and communication with them. Understandably, when you’re running a smaller business, it can be difficult to post every day as it’s unlikely you have a department that’s dedicated to just that. However, thanks to Facebook’s handy scheduling tool, you can put together and schedule content and posts for days, weeks and months in advance.
6 – Promoting offers or events
If you, like many other small businesses, find that your events and offers aren’t getting the traction or levels of engagement that you’re looking for, Facebook can help you out here too. It provides you with an easy way to create and promote these events.
You can invite anyone you want to your events, but you can also add data to help Facebook suggest or recommend your event to relevant people that aren’t already following you. The social media site also provides a call-to-action button which can lead people to a particular page on our site – your summer sale offer, perhaps?
7 – Providing social proof
With the number of Facebookers out there, signing up to the site allows you and your business to reach a whole lot of people. As people build their social profiles with personal photos, statuses, likes, work information and the rest, Facebook is gathering up this data and using it to help businesses just like yours. But this profile building doesn’t only work to your business’ advantage through data and campaigns, it also provides the element of social proof.
Social proof is the concept of trusting and adopting others’ opinions or actions. In terms of Facebook, there is a benefit of people being able to ‘like’ your business page as it will appear on their friends’ newsfeeds and induce a curiosity about your page or product.
8 – Enhancing ad efficiency
Facebook’s targeting ability is part of what makes it so effective as an advertising platform, and also why you can’t afford to miss out on it. Once you have a clear idea of your audience, you can use the site’s advertising tools to reach even more people. Their ad set-up allows you to target people based on their interests, age, gender and location, so you can cater your advert’s circulation to people relevant to your line of work. Not only does this maximise your reach, but it also guarantees no wastage in your ad spends.
9 – Getting your business out there
Social media is a huge factor for businesses and their marketing strategies in this modern day. With so many users and devices logged on to sites like Facebook and Twitter, it would be a wasted opportunity if you weren’t getting involved with them. Facebook is a hub of people, and within that hub are potential customers that will love your offering – don’t miss out! Make the most of how easy Facebook makes it for you and your business.