Did you know that an adequately supplemented video marketing plan on Facebook can earn your business thousands of views per video? Using Facebook can be a marketing goldmine, and to boost your company’s page exposure you can use tools to buy Facebook views or try establishing various targeted marketing campaigns.
Facebook relies on interaction and connection. Because of this, it’s a great place to engage with your customer base and entice new shoppers to build lasting relationships with your business. By utilizing their business-specific promotional options and properly managing your presence on the platform, you can generate a significant number of leads that are sure to enlarge your revenue and build your business.
It’s essential for business owners to promote their brand on different social media channels. Instagram used to take the leading positions as a platform for a successful promotion of B2B and B2C brands. However, we are going to prove that Facebook can be an even more powerful tool for your marketing campaign and explain how to take the most advantage of it.
Let’s break down exactly what you need to know about the benefits of using Facebook for your business promotion and how to take advantage of them.
What Facebook for Businesses Looks Like
Facebook, the social media giant, founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, has long been one of the most effective ways to reach new customers. Designed to connect people with other people and businesses they may know, the company has more than 2.9 million active users as of 2021 and generated $85.9 billion in revenue in 2020. Its content is broken down into text statuses (2% of the total posted content on the site), links (47%), photos (36%), and videos (15%).
The website relies on building small communities around individual pages and groups that users can like based on common interests. Anyone can make a page for anything, though as a business, you get expanded features, including the ability to tailor your page to appeal to particular demographics using built-in categories and searchable hashtags.
A Tour of Facebook Business Suite
The most impressive feature of Facebook for small businesses is their Business Suite. Completely free to join and maintain, the Business Suite lets you run multiple pages for your business across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.
Within the software, you can create, schedule, and manage posts and track analytics for pages as a whole. You can manage your inboxes for all of these pages in one location, monitor your page activity, and create advertisement campaigns that will run across all three platforms.
Business Suite also offers insights and tips from Facebook’s branding and marketing experts in the form of a resource library and individually booked consultations. It’s relatively simple to navigate, with a home dashboard showing an overview of your pages’ performance as well as a simple sidebar menu that brings you to each section of the software. You can even customize your dashboard for specific analytics.
All of this is to say that Facebook Business Suite offers your company the tools it needs to up your pages’ reach and engagement.
Why Reach and Engagement on Facebook Matters
Both reach and engagement are two of the most important metrics your company can use to measure performance on Facebook. Reach measures the number of users exposed to your content, while engagement measures how many users directly interact with your content.
Simply put, the more reach you have, the more brand awareness you can build. Thus, your name in front of people with an attractive advertisement can often be enough to get them curious about what your company can do for them, which can, in turn, lead to higher engagement rates. It is especially true of content that is already well established.
Engagement, then, is one of the most important metrics to follow. With Facebook’s detailed metrics, you can track engagement on a post-to-post basis, meaning that you can see what wording and graphics best convert viewers into leads. This shows you whether your advertising strategy appeals to your customer base and where you can improve it.
The Benefits of Using Facebook for Your Business Promotion
If it isn’t clear enough yet, there are many benefits to using Facebook for your business promotion. Here are the key benefits you should consider when deciding to join the platform:
Facebook is Cost-Effective
Facebook is incredibly cheap to use. There are no charges for creating or maintaining pages, so you’re not required to spend a penny to build a presence on the platform. This means you can create and populate accounts easily that can link back to company websites, quickly increasing your SEO and customer outreach without dipping into your advertising budget at all.
That being said, their advertising system is extremely inexpensive as well. A budget as low as a dollar a day can see an increase in reach in the hundreds, if not thousands. If you’re posting and advertising regularly, the system can pay for itself in leads and sales generation very quickly.
Scheduling and Posting is Easy
As mentioned, you can create and schedule different post types directly from Facebook Business Suite. This includes feed posts and Stories for Facebook and Instagram. With their newest content management calendar feature, you can even devise recurring schedule weeks in advance.
All you have to do is create and input the content, and Facebook will automatically post it exactly when you want it to go live. You can edit the posts at any time from the suite and include pictures, videos, mentions, and tags ahead of schedule, meaning you really can just set it and forget it.
On top of this, you can “boost” posts (make them part of an advertising campaign) with a few short clicks.
Cross-Posting is Easy
As mentioned, you can create and schedule posts for both Facebook and Instagram in Business Suite. The best part of this is that you can do it in one go. Check the boxes for both platforms, and Facebook will automatically post your content to Facebook and Instagram. You can even customize its appearance on each platform individually on one creation page.
By reaching two platforms at once (three if you count Messenger as a separate entity), you’re getting significantly more users than you might otherwise. You’re effectively doubling the size of your target audience without any additional effort.
Advertising is Targeted and Efficient
Facebook’s advertising system is remarkably detailed. You can select several targeting metrics for your audience from your advertising dashboard, including age range, gender, geographic location, and even specific interests based on their tagging system. The site then places your ad in front of users who match those specifications, using the demographic data aggregated from their page and activity.
Because of this, your campaigns will always be highly efficient; the people most likely to buy are the first to see your brand, and you don’t waste any time or money on those who won’t be interested. Even better, you can save customized audiences for repeated use, so your next campaign is even easier to set up.
You Can Build a Community
The building block of social media is right there in the name – it’s social! Facebook is designed to connect users, and brands are considered users. As with advertising on Facebook, you’ll be able to see in detail who your audience is and what they enjoy, allowing you to tailor their experience and make it all the more personal.
With more personal experience comes more trust in your brand, and a sense of community fostered around it. By encouraging your audience to interact with you and other audience members, you’re building up loyalty while lifting engagement. This means more repeat customers and more word-of-mouth advertisement.
It Can Improve Your SEO and Lead Generation
On the more technical side of things, using Facebook for your business promotion means that you have an additional page on which to aggregate backlinks to your main website and build your brand’s presence on search engines. Facebook’s ad campaigns allow you to directly link back to your website, meaning more traffic from users who are likely to stick around, boosting your SEO.
Additionally, since most of your business’s information is displayed on your page, customers who click through to your website are automatically further along in the buyer’s journey. They have decided that they enjoy your brand and have specific purchase intent, making them more likely to buy.
How to Use Facebook for Your Business Promotion
Understanding that Facebook is an excellent tool for your business is step one; step two is using it. Here’s what you need to do to get the most out of Facebook for your business promotion.
- Set Up Your Page
As mentioned, anyone can run an account on Facebook, so setting up a page for your business is simple. Select “New Page” and input all necessary information – your brand name, a mention handle, descriptions of your business and services, and profile and banner images. You’ll also select an action button (“Buy Now” or “Book Now”), which will appear at the top of your page.
Once you’ve got the basics out of the way, you can dive into more advanced settings, such as automated messages in Messenger answering frequently asked questions, links to your website and other social media, and specific services your business offers. Facebook has a helpful page completion meter that suggests more steps to fill out your profile.
As a bonus, changing and updating your page’s information is incredibly easy. As your audience grows, be sure to go back and adjust your page’s displayed information to keep it relevant and up-to-date.
- Establish an Audience
This might be the most challenging part of managing a new business page on Facebook – actually building that audience in the first place. The first thing you need to do is post content. This may seem silly to do on an empty page, but a populated Facebook page is more likely to get likes than an empty one; it shows off what the page is all about.
This is the same reason you might choose to for some of your video posts. Ordering views means that your audience sees the video as popular and, not wanting to miss out on a trend, they are more likely to stop scrolling and watch, which in turn makes them more likely to click back to your page and engage further. Buying initial views can be a great way to drive organic traffic.
You can also build up your page by boosting it. This is a way of advertising your page in general or a specific post, with a unique call-to-action that can drive traffic to your page or website. Running these campaigns periodically can ensure that you’re reaching new users as they join and experienced users when they are most likely to engage.
- Respond and Engage
Once you have an established audience, you need to engage with them to keep them on your page. Devote time every week – or have a social media manager – to respond to messages, reply to comments, run contests, and oversee challenges. You’ll also want to manage brand hashtags for your business and frequently use them in your posts.
Actively engaging with your community will help retain your audience and improve your brand’s reputation. By giving them a dedicated tag to use, you’re allowing conversations about your business to happen off-page in a way you can still track, and by engaging, you’re showing that your brand is more than a faceless corporation.
By putting a personality behind your posts, you’re showing your audience that they are part of a unique community, making them more likely to trust and support you.
Conclusion
Facebook is a handy tool for modern businesses to have under their belts. The social media site is essentially the perfect vehicle for building and promoting your brand, from its vast user base to business-friendly data and analytics. Add to this the low cost of advertising, and you’ve got a dream vehicle for business promotion.
Because of their detailed audience data and easy advertising across multiple platforms, it’s never been easier to establish, grow, and maintain a public brand online. As long as you’re thorough, active, and engaging with your Facebook content, you’re practically guaranteed to see lasting improvement in your company’s image and growth.
Written by Bradley Henris