Using Facebook To Market Your Business

Building an audience – at first this will feel daunting and growth will be slow, especially with little/no budget for adverts. The key here is to stick with it and be consistent, you need to have the ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’ kind of attitude, otherwise you’ll abandon your page and get nowhere with it. See the following to give you some tips on how to build an audience and how to stay consistent;

• Blog posts – write compelling industry specific content to attract and engage with the right audience.
• Relatable content – light-hearted, funny posts or ‘memes’ will engage followers and lead to your content being shared around, thus gaining more followers.
• See what your competitors are doing, is it working? Yes? Why?
•  Put yourself in the mind of a potential customer, what would engage you?

A great way to stay consistent and avoid spending too much important time on Facebook, is to batch your posts. You can use scheduling tools such as HootSuite, Buffer, SproutSocial or even just Facebooks own tool. Scheduling posts is a fantastic way to stay on top of stuff, and to stay active at all times so that your followers remain engaged.

You should also reshare content that you’ve already posted – don’t put time and effort into a blog, just for it to be a one hit wonder!

Promoted Ads – As with all other social platforms, paid ads are necessary to get your content and business out there. Facebook's Ads Manager, like many social media advertising networks, is designed with your campaign objective in mind. Before getting started, Ads Manager will prompt you to choose an objective for your campaign:

There are 10 different objectives to choose from. The list includes everything from sending people to your website to getting installs of your app to raising attendance at your event.

By choosing one of these objectives, you're giving Facebook a better idea of what you'd like to do so they can present you with the best-suited ad options. Facebook's ad options include:

1. Page Post Engagements
2. Page Likes
3. Click to Website
4. Website Conversions
5. App Installs
6. App Engagement
7. Event Responses
8. Offer Claims
9. Video Views
10. Local Awareness

As with Twitter and Instagram

• Set your audience, choose by targeted demographics (it’s important to remember that if this is your first time experimenting with Facebook Ads you’ll need to find what works for you)
• Set your budget – start off small so you don’t exhaust your budget on the wrong audience.
• Make sure your content is worth promoting/boosting – is it engaging enough to generate organic reach? Will it be shared? Liked? Commented on?
• Schedule your campaign, if your audience are in the U.K it’s pretty pointless running an advert at 3am in the morning – pick the best optimal time

Run your ads, and track the engagement through Facebooks analytics – I believe Facebook is the best Social Media platform for business, with Instagram and Twitter following behind it. However, it isn’t limited to these. Here a few others worth considering if you really want to grow your business through Social Media;

• Snapchat
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Google+
• Tumblr

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