A guide to social media for business: Facebook

Nowadays, it’s almost inconceivable to imagine that somebody might not have heard of Facebook. It’s one of the most popular social networking websites in the world. With many millions of people accessing it, racking up billions of page views every single month. It’s certainly a tricky bit of real estate for your business to break into but with some dedication, following these tips and with a good responsive website behind you, it should be easy enough for your business to vastly improve web presence.

How do to get success on Facebook?

Getting started on Facebook

It’s easy to create a Facebook page (Go to Facebook > Pages > Create a Page), and the site will guide you through how to add a facebook page, add keywords, descriptions and photos. Creating a Facebook Page is so you can start to build a closer relationship with your audience and customers. One important point to check in the settings is that you give yourself a custom page URL - make it relevant to your company, and catchy. You should also ensure that you have an eye-catching profile picture and timeline cover photo, as these are shown across the network. You could use your profile picture for your logo (and update it for Christmas, etc. - it shows up in news feeds, and gets people more likely to interact) whilst saving the cover photo for updates intended for the top of the page. Images are far more likely to be shared than text, so putting special events or discounts in cover photos is really beneficial. This is easy for you to do if your website is produced by our custom website designers.

Making content for Facebook

On the internet, good website content is king and social networks are no exception. Creating content for social media is a little different to writing blogs, though it can also be a great way to distribute the content you write on your site. Because of the high-volume of mobile users accessing Facebook, it’s important therefore that your site is easy to read on many devices, meaning responsive websites are the best for any linked content. Also, unlike a blog where text is generally the clearest way of portraying information (hence well-written websites are crucial), the best medium for Facebook is generally images. People share them, and if they portray information clearly then they can be fantastic. Even if posting a link to a blog, packaging it to a related image can bring in much more traffic.

Facebook provides analytics so you can find out what the best content for your demographic is over time.

One final thing to promote yourself on social media (and therefore hopefully get people to visit your website) is to give exclusive deals and offers if you have an eCommerce website. This encourages people to ‘Like’ your page, where you can then continue to send them back to your site whenever they use their social network.

The key is really just to share things that are important to your business and networking, and that those viewing your page will be likely to act upon or share. You can invite them to do so if appropriate, in those posts.

Getting found

Facebook feeds can be difficult real estate, but there are a few simple ways to make sure you get found, asides from producing great content. Facebook has a function for inviting your friends to like the new page, which can be a good way to get things started (although only if it’s appropriate for your business and target market). You can also use any current lists of users or mailing lists and invite your clients to like your new page (maybe in exchange for an opening, exclusive promotion on the page of some sort) to get your current clients interested in it again.

You can also invite people who currently Like the page to “Get Notifications” (an option under the Like button) so they see all your updates.

Summary for Facebook Usage

The most important points to remember:

  • People must Like your page, otherwise they won’t see what you post - so give them a reason to like your Facebook page.
  • Use your site alongside your Facebook page: remember that responsive sites are the best for this.
  • Content is king: make your content worth sharing, rather than having to pay to promote it!

If you would like to arrange a free design consultation to discuss your website and if Facebook is right for your business, please contact our website designers in Wiltshire today.

Written By Kirsty Paget