How to use Facebook for your business

With more than 1.65 billion monthly active users, Facebook is in a league of its own in the big world of social media. Founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 with his Harvard roommates Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskowitz, Andrew McCollum and Chris Hughes as a social network for Harvard students, the site has seen tremendous growth in its 12 years of existence. In March this year, Facebook announced that there are three million active advertisers on the platform. This number indicates the kind of power Facebook enjoys in the market. It’s safe to assume that almost anyone with an internet connection is a Facebook user.

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A Facebook page is a free marketing tool for businesses. Not only can you list your products and services with it, but it also gives you the opportunity to share links and post images and videos to connect easily to your customers. This is where you can show your company’s humane side and develop your brand identity. Let us see how a startup can leverage Facebook’s reach:

Share, share, share

The world is never going to get tired of watching cat and dog videos. Use this to your advantage. Share information via images, links and videos on your Facebook page. Create engaging content that your customers would love to share. Having an element of humour always works well.

Advertise on it

With its all too incessant newsfeeds, it was inevitable that we were soon going to see ads in their place. You can expect a decent reach for your posts using the organic options available. Facebook ads are usually referred to as marketplace ads. FB advertising can be used to increase your likes or to drive website clicks. You can target people based on age, location, education, interests and so on. You can also set ad budgets along with ad testing, where multiple versions of the ad can be run to compare its reach among different interest groups.

Poke your head into Page Insights

Page Insights provides a wealth of data on the type of content that your users dig into. You can see the kind of posts that get a lot of traction. Go to the Reach area and examine the spikes on the graph to identify the ones you want to recreate. You can benchmark these results, run experiments and search for a specific time period under the Reach option to see if these new techniques are making a difference.

Celebrate your victories

If there are moments which you think are worth celebrating on FB, like an office party on the rooftop, a promotion in the team or an anniversary, go on and let your users know of it. The way you put it across is important as well. Make sure you don’t go overboard with sharing every tiny detail about your startup on your FB page. Stick to a language and tone that goes well with what your startup represents.

Go Live

The new Live feature might take up less of your time than creating a post. You can give your customers a sneak peek into your office or focus on an aspect of your business that your target audience would be interested to learn about. If there is an event, create a post to let your fans know that you have a special announcement to make and share specific details using the Live video feature.

Host contests

Another marketing tactic that could help increase your brand awareness and your number of followers is hosting Facebook contests. You can use a third-party app for creating the contest and direct users to the app from your FB page. There are tools like Shortstack and Pagemodo that help you host contests.

Facebook has turned into the central hub of the internet. It may not be the best channel for all your social media initiatives, but its sheer size forces everyone to participate in it regardless of the type of business you run. Are you taking advantage of your Facebook page? How important are your social media efforts to you? Would you like to give any advice on creating content for FB pages other than the ones mentioned here? Let us know in the comments section below.