Do you have the best set up to drive people into your business from your Facebook page?
You’ve definitely got a page…it’s 2016 who doesn’t have a Facebook business page?
In this guide I am going to try and cover all of the best practices and opportunities that having a Facebook Page presents and how to use them to get bums on seats in your business.
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Visuals
In 2016 there is absolutely no excuse for poor quality images appearing on your Facebook page. There are loads of free resources and if you can’t find a half decent photographer to bribe with coffee and food to take some free snaps then you just aren’t looking hard enough.
The first two visual opportunities you have is the profile photo and cover photo. With the profile picture I would keep it simple and use the logo or other significant branded design so that people searching for you can easily find the right place.
With our cover photo you can see that I’ve put in a ‘CTA’ or ‘call to action’. What I am doing here is trying to get people to click the ‘sign up’ button (which I will talk about more shortly). I am using the bigger visual landscape to drive an action rather than it being just about a nice picture of coffee.
I’ve seen that some people drive an action pushing for page likes and you might even consider putting an offer code on the cover photo and asking people to quote the offer when in store. That way you can track the effectiveness of the offer.
The next visual to consider is post visuals. Facebook tells us that posts with pictures on them always do a lot better than simple link posts. All of the visuals have certain sizes that are required of the picture to make it fit properly and you must use these sizes to get the best results.
Having a distorted picture or losing parts of it that are actually important to the post just looks lazy, sloppy and poorly executed. You wouldn’t let it happen with your food so why would you on your marketing?
This is one of ours that we posted recently and this was created in less than 5 minutes and by someone who has no graphic design experience. There is a common misconception that good quality design takes money and or time. It doesn’t anymore. Again…there really is no excuse.
2. Verification
Yes you can see a lovely silver tick next to ‘Stewarts of Trent Bridge’. This is a special business verification and depending on certain criteria you can get your page verified.
All you need to do is head to the ‘settings’ on your page and on the first page just a little way down there is a verification option. If you can get your page verified it’s free and takes 2 minutes following instructions.
This can definitely help your Facebook authority although it doesn’t help get better reach to your audience as far as we can tell. If you have the option though…why wouldn’t get verified as awesome?
3. Tabs
Tabs are super useful depending on what your objectives are on Facebook. You can actually ‘plug in’ third party apps into your Facebook page so that you can get really cool things like email sign up, competitions and as you can see we have our Instagram Feed on our Facebook page.
By clicking on the ‘More’ button you can see the option to ‘Manage Tabs’ and this is a place you can add/remove as well as rearrange your tabs to show what you think is most relevant to your business
4. Messenger & Usernames (New Feature)
Just under your business name now you can see, for example, ‘@StewartsCoffees’ which if you log in to your messenger app and send a message to will come right to us. Give it a test and say hello to us!
This is really Facebook trying to keep up with Snapchat in some respects but it does present itself as a major customer service opportunity if you want it to. It also allows people to search Facebook quickly to find your business so rather than saying you have to go to ‘facebook.com/stewarts-of-trent-bridge’ we can now say “just search @stewartscoffees” on Facebook and any one can find us.
For more info click this link https://www.androidpit.com/facebook-messenger-update and see update on April 7th 2016
5. About Section (and the left hand side)
Obviously really important. I know that if I am looking up a page on Facebook for a restaurants/coffee shop then it’s most likely than I am fact checking. Are they open? Do they have food options for me? What’s their phone number?
All of these questions should be answered in the About section. In this you can put
- Opening Times
- Menu (PDF)
- Contact Details
It also shows how quickly you respond to messages and this can have an impact on how likely someone is to message you. So always remember to get back to people as soon as you possibly can in your business as seeing a quick response is definitely going to help people ask you questions in this quick reward dependent society.
So under the About section there are lots of other things that Facebook puts there including Reviews, Photos, Videos and Visitor Posts. You can order these how you like so that as people scroll down your Facebook page they can get hit in the order you would like. Worth taking a little bit of time over and getting your best stuff at the top.
6. Boosting Posts
You’ve posted something brilliant but you’ve noticed recently that of your 1000 page likes only 50 people are seeing them? Why? Facebook introduced an algorithm a few years back so that we as users don’t get overloaded in our Newsfeed with everything that everyone is posting.
That had the effect that business pages organic (not paid) reach suddenly hit the floor and a lot of businesses really lost out to this.
The reality is that Facebook is now a pay to play world. It doesn’t have to be expensive though.
Our strategy at the moment is to write two blog posts a week and post them across all social media platforms but to ‘boost’ the post on Facebook to people that like our page and their friends.
You can boost from just £1/day so it really isn’t going to break the bank if you don’t want it to. So at the time the above page was boosted we have around 530 likes on Facebook but our content actually went to double that through the boost. The light orange on the graph represents organic reach and the dark orange is paid.
You can see how important it is for Boost Post function to be activated when showing off your best content because otherwise there would’ve been a lot of our friends that love what we do that would have never have even seen the post at all!!
7. Organic Targeted Posts
This is for big pages that maybe have more than one location but have a central Facebook page. This is an amazing tip for those that are growing and go for separate Business Pages even though it’s the same business name etc etc.
First thing you need to do is turn targeting on
Now when you go to post you will see this new targeting cross hairs appear on your posts
This is also useful for expansion into new areas or location specific offers. This is ORGANIC targeting though so remember if you have low numbers and low organic reach this is probably just not worth doing yet.
You’d be much better off running a Facebook Local Awareness ad that we wrote a blog about here to get new business.
8. Growing Your Page
Growing your page is super easy…in theory.
There are some ‘tactics’ that you can use:
- Invite interested friends – don’t be that guy that blasts all of their friends with invites to your business page every few days because if they aren’t interested in what you are up to why would you want them seeing your content any way?
- Upload emails – you can upload any email lists you have an invite them to like your Facebook page BUT please be careful with this as if you don’t have their permission to do so you could get yourself in some hot water
- Promote Page – There is a button on your Facebook page called ‘Promote Page’ and it is an easy way to set up some advertising that is based around your target audience and will encourage people to like your page. It’s easy but certainly not the most effective.
My advice is not worry about the total number, worry about how many people like your page and actually come in and spend money with you. Create great content, share it on your page and boost it. That way new people will get introduced into your branding by something brilliant you are doing and not just being presented with your business name and logo.
I also wrote a guide to Instagram which is now owned by Facebook and has a direct sharing capability. This is something that could cut down on content sharing in your business.
Ok that’s it for now. There is a lot of information in there but also probably a lot of questions following you reading it as well so I am here as always to answer any questions. Just pop me an email [email protected]
