Social media for businesses has become one of the most important platforms for both engaging customers and promoting brands. Facebook in particular, with a projected user base of around 665 million, has become one of the more fundamental platforms to have a presence on. However, simply creating a page for your business does not guarantee success, and if not approached correctly can end up being a costly drain on time and resources, especially for smaller businesses who may not have the workforce to waste. In order to maximise the marketing opportunities that a Facebook page can provide, there are some useful guidelines to consider when getting started.
Setting Up
First of all, lets look at how to actually set up your Facebook page. The process is fairly straight forward and shouldn’t take too long. To begin with, you can simply follow this link to head directly to the set up page. Once there, you need to choose which category best describes your business. For a small business or larger company, only three of the options are really applicable - Local business or place, company, organisation or institution and brand or product. You then need to fill out some details, such as business name, and add any additional local information. Be aware that this information cannot be changed later, so make sure to get it right the first time as you will have to start from the beginning otherwise.
Adding your Business Information
You will then need to add a photo to the profile. Generally, you will want to use your company logo or brand name. Make sure that the logo is clear and readable in order to maximise the marketing potential of your page. The ‘about’ section will also need to be filled in. This should be kept fairly short and to the point, again in order to get a direct message across to potential customers and followers about who you are and what you do.
Admin Functions
With the basic functions out of the way, you can add some additional, more in-depth details here. The ‘edit page’ feature will enable you to add more in depth information if followers click on the ‘about’ button when viewing your page, so can be useful to fill out. Additionally, you can set who has access to your page and who can make admin changes here, which will be useful for allowing other members of the team to respond to and post messages etc.
Increasing Followers
Now on to followers. In order to maximise your social media presence, it can be very useful to link your Facebook page with other social media sites, such as twitter for example, and there are a number of ways this can be done. After getting started, your first impulse will likely be to start inviting followers to your page, however, this is not necessarily the best way forward! It can be preferable to start filling your page with good content first, as this will give new followers something to engage with and share. Once you have some good initial content, start inviting close associates to the page first to generate some buzz. This means that when you begin to widen your audience, there will already be a good amount of activity on the page for them to get involved in and share.