Your step-by-step guide to setting up Facebook for business
- Head to facebook.com/pages/create (Note: you’ll need to be logged in to your personal account to get started, but don’t worry: your personal info won’t appear on your new Business Page.)
- Choose your page type: Business/brand or Community/public figure
- Enter your business details.
- Upload your profile and cover photos. Make sure to use the optimum image sizes for Facebook so they look their best.
- Click Edit Page Info: here, you can fill in your description, contact information and any other relevant details like operating hours.
- Click Create Page @Username to make your vanity URL. This can be up to 50 characters long and helps people find you easily on Facebook.
- Click Add a Button under your cover photo to set up a call to action like “Shop” or “Contact Us.”
- Pat yourself on the back: You just launched a Facebook Business Page into the world! And she’s beautiful!
Facebook text post (a.k.a. status post)
They’re direct and to the point, but if your goal is to drive traffic to your website or directly convert a lead to a sale, text posts aren’t a great option. The social network’s algorithm also isn’t too fond of these bare-bones posts, and they usually don’t get much reach in the news feed.
Facebook photo post
Generally speaking, photo posts see much higher engagement than text posts. An eye-catching photo (or illustration or infographic, we’re not picky!) is a great way to catch the attention of a potential customer scrolling through their news feed.
Particularly for product-focused businesses, photos that show the goods in action can be really effective. Carb lovers, for instance, might be stopped in their tracks by these photos of The Soap Dispensary’s bread baskets featuring yummy sourdough loaves. Breathtaking!
And don’t worry if you aren’t a professional photographer — or are selling something difficult to capture in an image: stock photos are here to save the day. (In fact, here are 25 free stock photo sites to check out! Just be sure you fully understand the basics of image copyright before you start posting.)
Facebook video post
Vox posts its explainer videos right into its feed so users can soak up all the intel right there on Facebook, and easily comment, react or repost to their feeds. This primer on vaccines, for instance, has 1,400 shares.
Facebook Live video post
Linked content post (aka link posts)
A link post is a post that shares a URL with your followers. Just paste a link into the composition box, and a preview of the website will automatically preview. (Is it technology or magic? We may never know.)
You could share a link to your website, but you could also share content from other sources — like an interesting think piece about your industry. Whatever the content, make sure to add a few words of your own to the post before you click Publish, to give your readers some context or a takeaway.
Facebook Stories
Pinned post
Once you’ve created the post itself — whether it’s a text post, poll or video post — just click on the three dots on the right-hand corner. You’ll have the option to “pin post.” You can tell when a post is pinned because it’ll say “Pinned post” right above it, like this Domestika example.
Facebook Watch Party
More hot options
You can also use Facebook Pages to post job listings and special offers if you’re looking to recruit or build buzz about a sale. There’s also the option to raise money for a charitable cause with a Facebook post.
How to choose the perfect type of post
You can also engage in social listening to learn about what people love about your company… or what challenges they’d like you to address. Keep an eye on what people are saying about your competition too. Yes, it’s eavesdropping, but it’s for business purposes, so it’s totally fine. Just listen and learn.
A good place to start is simply by posting content that’s performing well on other channels. Have you tweeted content that’s getting a great response? Share it on Facebook, too! Have a page on your blog that’s always getting new comments? That’s another Facebook post contender.
Facebook Links
One of the easiest ways to start populating your Facebook Page with content is to share the blog posts you publish. You shouldn’t share every blog post you create, but instead, pick those you know will resonate with your Facebook audience and hopefully get shared by your followers.
To post a link, begin the same way you would create a text post. Write a sentence or two and paste in your link. As opposed to summarizing the blog post in your copy, come up with a relatable or witty statement (as long as it’s in line with your brand voice) that would intrigue someone to learn more.
Before you publish, go ahead and delete the link to make your post look more clean and professional. By this point, the blog post should auto-populate below the white box with the title, meta description, and image. Hit “Publish.”
Facebook Video
If you’re looking to tell a story on Facebook, video is likely your best option. Recently, video has gained a lot of buzz, especially considering the Facebook algorithm now prioritizes both live video and longer videos with high completion rates in users’ News Feeds. In fact, a Facebook exec predicted the social media platform will be all video by 2021.
To upload a pre-produced video to Facebook, click the “Photo/Video”, click the “Photo/Video” prompt below where it says “Write a post. ” and select “Upload Photos/Video”.Select the file from your computer. We recommend uploading videos as an MP4 or MOV file.
Click along the navigation on the right side to choose your video thumbnail and add subtitles and captions. Considering Facebook auto-plays videos without sound (and almost 90% of videos are watched without sound), SRT files are a smart choice to make sure your video is understood by those scrolling through their News Feed on a mobile device.
Because Facebook auto-plays videos, the first 5-10 seconds are prime real estate. As you brainstorm videos for Facebook, make the beginning as visually compelling as possible to encourage the user to view the full video.
How to Create an Effective Facebook Marketing Strategy
It doesn’t matter which channel you use, you need to develop a strategy. This will help you clearly establish your goals, choose the best techniques to reach them, define your target audience, measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, and improve. Below, we outline a plan that is universal for any business wanting to develop a Facebook marketing strategy.
Step 1. Set your goals
Your goal predetermines the techniques, posts, and ad formats that you will use to achieve it. You can break down your goal into small intermediate objectives. Thus, achieving each of them will make you closer to reaching your big goal. Lastly, create a list of KPIs, that you will use to measure the effectiveness of each technique.
Step 2. Define your target audience
To collect and store all of the data about your target audience, and make the entire process more effective, create a customer profile. It should include their location, age, gender, job position, and income level information. Read our blog post to find out how to create a customer profile.
Another source of information about your audience is Facebook Audience Insights. With this tool, you’ll get information about people connected to your page, people from your custom audience, and people on Facebook. You can get to know what your existing audience likes, where your customers live and the language they speak, monitor their past purchasing activities, devices they use, etc.
Step 3. Choose content formats and schedule posts
Now that you’ve defined your audience and established your goals, it’s time to think over a content strategy that will help you achieve them. A content marketing strategy means that you should create a step-by-step plan which includes types and formats of content that you will produce. Remember that the more content you create, the higher your conversions will be. Using a diversity of formats, consistent publishing, and communicating with customers will skyrocket your user engagement level.
You should also take into account using the correct content mix. Promotional content itself won’t help you build trusting relationships with your audience. Besides, Facebook can penalize overly-pushy marketers for their salesy promotions. So, mix educational, informative, entertaining, and promotional content. If you manage to provide high-quality and relevant content, customers will be happy to learn more about your product.
To produce engaging content, you’ll probably need a content maker. This is a person responsible for creativity. This specialist knows which content formats will help you best achieve your goals. Utilize images, text posts, videos, stories, and links in your strategy. When using images, keep in mind that they should be professional and high resolution. Stay away from using stock images. Videos tend to attract and engage users in the most. Take into account that a majority of users watch videos with the sound turned off, so make sure it conveys your idea even without audio. Using text, stick to 3 sentences. Your task is to use them to your advantage: to attract, provide value, and drive action. When adding a link to your website, pay special attention to the image.
The last important issue is the consistency and frequency of publishing posts. We recommend that you produce 5 posts a week. This way, you don’t bombard customers with your publications and will manage to craft high-quality content without brutal deadlines. For this purpose, use a content calendar. With its help, you’ll have a clear picture of your content marketing strategy. Take care of all the marketing channels that you use, align each goal with a content format, and distribute them across all the channels.
Step 4. Boost your post with Facebook Ads
Facebook is an excellent advertising platform. It allows brands to reach wide audiences, provides a variety of targeting options, tools for successful outreach, and relatively cheap pricing. It is based on a bidding strategy. You choose the timing, ad placement, and target audience.
Step 5. Make use of Facebook tools
Facebook provides much more value than you may expect. There’s plenty of useful tools that can make your work with this channel more effective and lucrative. Check out a list of several of the tools below.
Facebook and Email Marketing
We have a variety of marketing channels to choose from: social media marketing, search engine advertising, messenger, and email marketing, to name a few. It’s great that you can combine these platforms to reach particular marketing goals with the accuracy that had never been available before.
What can Facebook add to email marketing?
With Lead ads, Facebook lets people opt-in to your email newsletters directly in a Facebook post. Aside from Lead ads, you can incorporate positive user feedback collected on Facebook into your email campaigns to empower the feeling of trust with social proof.
How can email marketing combine with Facebook?
Email marketing is a platform where the central communication unit is an email — the message that contains text, offers, and call-to-actions. It aims to drive sales and build long-lasting relationships with the audience. In the footer of each email, you can add social media buttons and suggest subscribers engage with your brand on Facebook. You can also create giveaway emails, providing bonuses for posting about your brand in socials.
How to Track the Success of Your Facebook Marketing Campaign
The Ads Manager “reporting” feature lets you view, at a glance, how your ads are performing. From video ad views to website conversions attributed to a Facebook Ad, you can view all the relevant stats by creating a report.
To create a report, simply open Ads Manager, go to “Analyze and Report,” click “Ads Reporting,” then select the data you want to report on:
With the Events Manager tool, you can set up a pixel to analyze what actions people take on your website.
For example, whenever someone adds an item to their cart or completes a sale, the pixel records this as an action or “event.” You can view this data in a report and then target these users with customized ads in the future.
Access Events Manager here.
Facebook Marketing Conclusion
If your audience is on Facebook, then you should really try out Facebook marketing for your business. Try a variety of Facebook Ads and measure your progress regularly to ensure you’re getting the most from your campaigns.
Share
He is the co-founder of NP Digital. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author and was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.
Resources:
https://blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-marketing-tips/
https://www.hubspot.com/facebook-marketing
https://sendpulse.com/support/glossary/facebook-marketing
https://neilpatel.com/blog/facebook-marketing/
https://www.socialpilot.co/facebook-marketing/facebook-marketing-strategy