There are over 1 billion people on Facebook. While the social media site was originally created with the intentions of keeping family and friends in touch with each other, it has become an incredible tool for businesses looking to connect with their customers.
With so many competing users and brands, however, it can sometimes feel like the content your business is putting out can become lost in the frenzy of cat videos, cooking recipes, and status updates. Forbes put together a “Definitive Guide to Marketing Your Business on Facebook.” The article outlines some of the basic steps you can take to ensure that Facebook is working for you and helping you to engage and interact with your customers.
We’ve highlighted our five favorite tips that they discuss. To read the full article, click here.
Use keywords in your about section. Your about section is the place to describe the products or services that your company provides. In your description, be sure to include specific keywords that your customers might search for when trying to find your genre of business. Doing this will help boost your page to appear closer to the top of search lists on both Facebook and Google.
Use professional images. Users make judgements about how professional a Facebook page looks by the quality of the images used. Along with ensuring that you are using professional quality images, you also want to make sure that they are the correct size. Facebook cover photos should be 851 X 315 pixels and profile pictures should be 160 X 160 pixels.
Make it easy for users to like and share your content. Every piece of content that you place on your website should be able to be easily liked and shared on social media sites. The easiest way to do this is to include social media buttons or plugins next to everything you post. Users are more likely to share your content if you provide them with a way to do it within a couple of clicks.
Post videos. With so much content being generated and posted every minute, businesses sometimes find that the things they are posting don’t always make it into their customers’ news feeds. Facebook uses algorithms to decide which posts get display priority. One way to combat this is to post more videos. Videos tend to have farther reach than posts that involve text alone, and they are more likely to appear in the feeds of your followers.
Find your optimal posting times. There has been a ton of research done to try and determine what the “perfect posting time” is. Some studies have found that Thursdays and Fridays between 1:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon tends to be optimal. However, since every company’s audience varies greatly, these findings should only be used as a starting point. Keeping track of what posts seem to get the highest level of engagement can help you determine your perfect time to post. As far as how often to post, Forbes suggests that five to ten posts a week is ideal for many businesses.