For small businesses, Facebook is often considered the B2B and B2C platform of choice. Here are six underutilized tools to help you get the most out of your Facebook marketing strategy.
1. Join Facebook Groups
Courtesy: techcrunch.com
Whenever someone talks about marketing, promotions, and community engagement on Facebook, they always center it around the page. But a page isn’t the only way to interact with the community. Here is the first underutilized, yet effective way to share your message: Create a group.
What’s so special about groups? Well, groups lead to engagement. Creating a Facebook group around your product may not be that helpful, but creating a group around a topic will almost certainly help because people tend to discuss topics more than products.
Also, creating a Facebook group means that you’re offering help and information for free. It also builds trust among your readers and makes your expertise more visible. For the basics on Facebook groups, click here.
2. Posts daily updates with clear pictures for continuous growth
The best way to show your business’s online presence is to post new updates daily. That doesn’t mean you need to publish 4 or 5 posts per day. Instead, a single post that connects with your readers on a daily basis is more than sufficient.
The timing of the post plays an equally important role. Publish the post when most of your followers are online.
Along with your daily posts, don’t forget to upload clear, good quality images as well. A post that contains an image will get you twice or thrice the number of views than a post without one. A few great mobile tools you try for image post on the go are Adobe Post and Canva.
3. Set up the CTA (Call-to-Action) button
It has been more than a year since Facebook introduced the Call-to-Action button for Facebook Pages.
As of now, there are seven Call-to-Action buttons available: Book now, Contact Us, Use App, Play Game, Shop Now, Sign Up, and Watch Video. Although this feature isn’t exactly a game changer, it’s free to add and can help drive sales and traffic.
For an e-commerce business, the “Shop Now” button will help you get customers directly from the Facebook Page. Also, you can see how many people have actually clicked on your Call-t0-Action button.
For additional help with adding a call to action button to your Facebook Page, click here.
4. Use Facebook Insights
Facebook Insights is to Facebook what Google Analytics is to websites. It isn’t as powerful as Google Analytics, but you can access all the basic metrics, including how many people clicked on your post and how many likes you received when your fans shared your post.
You can also use Facebook Insights to identify the types of posts that are most engaging to audiences, such as posts with pictures, videos, text, etc. You can also see when most of your fans are online as well as the demographics of your most active fans.
Using this data, you can create a better content strategy for your Facebook page. If you have not yet created a Facebook page for your small business, click here to get started.
5. Schedule your posts
Scheduling posts is an efficient way to reach more people. Also, you don’t need to have fancy software to plan your posts in advance. With the help of Facebook Insights, you can schedule your posts such that you get the most engagement from your community.
6. Promote your best content
If you are advertising mostly through Facebook, you should set aside a part of your budget for this underutilized strategy.
You don’t need to promote everything you put up on your Facebook page. All you need to do is promote the content that is critical and important to your content strategy.
Sometimes, it’s a good idea to promote the content which is already getting more views through organic search. Whatever means you choose, make sure to ask yourself: is this something my customer would want to know about?
A simple idea also is you can choose themes to simplify your strategy, e.g., an account may have a theme “IRS changes for 2016 that affects small business” and each day or week, develop and promote the content to potential clients on Facebook.
Check out this great resource article by “77 Academy” for additional information on this strategy.
Here are some resources you should check out:
1. The 25 Facebook Groups For Entrepreneurs
2. Make Money with Facebook Groups: Build Relationships, Convert Customers, Create Fame