How to make the most of your Facebook page

A Facebook page is a good way to promote your business, especially if your customers are consumers or you have a venue that members of the public can visit. Not only will it help online users to find you and learn a bit more about what you do, but it will also boost your SEO if you link your Facebook posts to your website. You can interact with people who liked your page, and message them directly, create events, discussions group, and promote products, services and offers.

Managing your Facebook page

First of all, keep your page up to date. Your Facebook business page is part of the online profile of your company. Make sure your website, address and phone number appears, and that your primary sales messages or mission are clearly laid out. We recommend that you to post out regularly in order to keep your audience interested. A post with an image is always more eye-catching than one without and statistical studies have shown that posts with images entice more engagement and feedback from the social audience, making it a smart thing to do. In order to make your time management a bit easier, we would recommend you write at least a week’s worth of posts in advance and schedule them on your page so that you don’t have to sit there and think of something to say every day, interrupting what you normally would be doing with your time. It is possible to schedule posts within Facebook, just select the ‘schedule’ option in the drop down menu next to the publish button to select a time and a date for publish. If you are posting a couple of posts a day you will find that you can easily schedule a week or two’s worth of posts in an hour.

Interacting with customers on Facebook

Alongside this ‘broadcast messaging’, you should always check if you have messages or comments that need a reply. The operative word in the phrase ‘social media’ is ‘social’; you should talk and respond to people and not just keep pounding away broadcasting your sales messages whilst ignoring customer responses.

Consistently ignoring inbound messages from customers will negatively affect your reputation. It also means that if all messages are ignored, the audience will be led to believe that the page is unmanned and so are more likely to leave negative comments and reviews. So facing up to customer comments – both the good and the bad – is actually a great way of avoiding other negativity. Showing that the page is monitored and that you are prepared to talk with and answer questions makes a good proportion of nay-sayers think twice before letting loose on their keyboard.

Make sure to reply to every comment left on your page within the same day. Customers like to be heard and considered. Be as friendly as possible and like and share nice messages, you would want other people to do the same for you, especially when messages on your timeline are public.

On average, 15 minutes spent twice a day should be enough for you to keep on top of an average sized company timeline or one in the B2B arena. A tip is to set up the Facebook Pages app on your phone to be notified of messages – sometimes a question can be answered quickly from your phone. If you weave in a couple of short sessions to your regular working day each day, you will find that you stay on top of it.

Obviously if you are running a large consumer facing brand, you will need to invest more time as it is likely you will be receiving more customer service enquiries via your page. And the more followers you have, the more likely it is that you will see interactions on your page and so you need to size up your time investment as your following on this channel grows.

You can set up the instant replies tool for Facebook Messenger, which is where private messages left for the page are found. If your page is not continuously manned instant replies are a good way of letting people know that you will respond soon. This function can be found in the settings tab of your page, under “Messaging”.

Getting more likes and follows?

The key to attracting likes and followers is in interacting with your audience as much as possible and posting regularly. It is easy for customer to tune out of a page that only seems to broadcast sales messages without talking back. Some brands have managed to create a really friendly online persona through their Facebook pages, and the aim is to make an online environment where your customers like to ‘hang out’.

Already mentioned is the Facebook Pages manager app that you can download onto your phone or computer. Apps like this help you to manage your time better when looking after your Facebook page, rather than keeping you desk-bound.

Another handy feature on Facebook is the ability to invite people to like the page that have interacted with your posts. Once more than one person has liked a post you put out, you can click on the ‘likes link’ to access a pop up that lists who liked the post and whether they also like the page or not. From this list you can click on the ‘invite’ buttons to invite that person to also like the page, increasing your Facebook followers.

If you are using Facebook post boosting or Facebook advertising, it is a handy way of ‘harvesting’ people that you have paid to target. After all, you paid to get that content in front of them so you may as well try to convert them into following your brand on Facebook as well!

Creating groups

Creating groups on your page can be useful to help you audience interact with each other as a like-minded group of people. People who opt in to groups that you run also gives you the ability to message a specific group of people. Groups usually work best where the reason for the group is a more specifically targeted subject matter. For instance, you could run a group for customers only such as a group for people who have taken part in an event you have run; or a group for allotment enthusiasts and another group for flower growers if you are a gardening brand; or for people to discuss aspects of training and technique if you are a gym; the list of possibilities is endless.

You can also create private groups – where only the members of the group can see the content published in there. This is useful if you put together focus groups trialling a new product, or if you have a media group who want to be able to discuss issues openly that might not be appropriate on the public timeline.

You can find the Group tab on the left hand side of your page.

Read more:

Once you have figured out the basics on Facebook, you might find these articles interesting.

• Facebook Live: What is it and how should you use it?
• Using social media to grow your business.
• To outsource social media management of not to outsource, that is the question.