Facebook was set up by Mark Zuckerberg eight years ago with some of his college friends at Harvard. Initially, the website’s membership was limited to Harvard students only, but was then extended to other colleges in the US. The rest as they say is history, and its meteoric success is nothing short of staggering, so much so that Hollywood developed a movie around its inception and creator. Today there are over 845 million active users, half of whom log in daily in order to communicate with friends. This blog article will attempt to demonstrate what you need to do for your Facebook business page in order to put your company’s footprint onto this powerful social media platform. I have outlined some key areas that you will need work on in order to get your Facebook page working for you.

What is it?

Wikipedia tells us “Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook Inc”.

How can it help my business?

Facebook can help your business in many ways. First of all you will need to establish what you want to achieve from having a business page on Facebook. Are you looking to engage and interact with your consumers? Will you be using it as a platform for advertising? Are you looking to market your products or services via a Facebook business webpage? It is important to know the answers to these questions as you will then be able to determine a comprehensive Facebook marketing strategy for your business or company.

Facebook can be utilised as a great consumer marketing tool. In order for it to make sense for your business, you should know the target market you are looking to go after. Targeting specific goals relating to your overall business objectives is the only way to go. For example you may want to target males within the 24yrs to 35yrs age bracket, and increase revenues by 10%. Given that Facebook can be used as an online acquisition tool, it is essential that you know how to use it properly so as to generate the revenues or extend brand reach you are seeking.

What do I need to do?

1.Create a Facebook Business Page: Getting Ready For Business Communication

Facebook Profile

First of all it is necessary to create a Facebook profile if you do not have one set up. Please note your Facebook business page will be tied to your personal profile as the admin of your page. You can add other administrators to your page.

Create Your Page

After you have created your profile, you can then commence the creation of your Facebook Business page at facebook.com/page. Select your page title and category but think carefully about this as it cannot be changed once it is set. Be clear on what the primary purpose is for the page.

• Trust & Credibility: You will need to fill out your page properly in order to inspire immediate trust and credibility with your consumers or target market.

• Appeal to Your Consumer/Target Market: Fill out as much information as you can about your business and include some nice photos to make your page more appealing.

• Brainstorm/Check Competition: For some ideas, look at other companies within your industry and see what they are doing.

• Incorporation of Personalised Link: I would also advise you to get a personalised link for your Facebook page. You can do this by going to facebook.com/username. Put this link on all of your marketing material.(Business cards, Webpage, emails etc

Business Posts & Content

Decide on what your first few posts are going to be about. You want to make a good impression and grab the attention and interest of your prospective audience so spend some time brainstorming. I would also recommend you take note of the following.

• Create A Schedule of Posts: Be organised by creating a schedule of posts with interesting and informative topics in mind. This will facilitate an easy engagement with your target consumer if you get it right. Be light and breezy and always upbeat!

• Quantity & Quality of Posts: As an absolute minimum, you will need to post two to three posts to your page. Also post custom company content, like video, rich text, graphics etc. All content that you post on your page gets indexed by Google.

• Engagement: It is important to allocate resources to your Facebook business page to ensure that it is monitored at all times. Responding to your fans comments promptly is very important. Engage on a level that is of a personal approachable tone.

Likes

The next step will involve getting people to “Like” your page. This is the hard part and it will take some time to build up a following of fans, but be patient, the “Likes” will come! Increasing likes can be achieved by

• Posting on other companies walls

• Creating competitions.

• Posting engaging & interesting content

2. Grow Your Network

On Facebook, you can have an endless amount of friends. This is an opportunity for extending reach of your brand or company to a new online community. Do not go overboard with the friend requests as Google might view this as spamming. The last thing you want is to have your account deactivated so be mindful of the number of friend requests you are sending out. 20 friend requests at any one time is sufficient. Take note to always add a personal message to any friend request. It will increase the likelihood of your request being accepted. As a means of finding more contacts, you can do the following:

• Use Friend Finder: Make contact with all of your friends and family to get your paged “Liked” from the outset.

• Invite friends/contacts by email: Seek to identify those who are influential people within your industry, and related industries

• Join relevant Groups and Facebook pages: It is a great way of building a list of contacts for professional networking purposes.

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