Facebook for business: let’s start with the basics

It’s officially spring, and last month we talked about spring cleaning your business; part of which is revamping your marketing campaigns. There is no doubt that Facebook continues to dominate digital marketing for both online and brick-and-mortar businesses. But are you using Facebook in the most strategic way you could?

This month we will focus only on Facebook and to get started, let’s understand the platform itself.

Statistics first:

• 5 billion active mobile users
• 2 billion monthly active Facebook users
• 4 billion daily active users
• Link and share buttons are displayed on nearly 10 million websites daily.
• The average time spent on Facebook is 20 to 30 minutes.

I was surprised by the numbers, so I went through various sites to verify them, and although the different sites cite slightly different statistics, they are very close to each other.

1.4 billion users visit Facebook daily

So, let’s start using Facebook for YOUR business.

Some of this may seem pretty elementary, as most businesses at one point or another have created a Facebook page. The question tends to be, how active (or consistent) are you posting content? If you haven’t read our blog on creating a content calendar, or are looking for tips to get started and make this all seem a little less overwhelming, drop us a note, we’ll be happy to get you started the right way. .

What is the difference between your Facebook profile and your Facebook page?

Simply, your profile is you. Family vacation photos, private pranks with high school friends – they all belong on this page. Make business, business and personal, personal. However, you need a Facebook profile to set up a Facebook page.

Your Facebook page is a specific web page within Facebook with the goal of creating followers and sharing content relevant to your business. You need a Facebook page to create Facebook ads (we won’t cover ads today, but we will come back to this later in the month).

Business owners can use their page to connect with followers, share stories, build reputation, reach new customers, get feedback, provide customer service, and give their business a voice. Since you need a page to start using Facebook ads, let’s focus on how to create a Facebook page that represents your brand, helps establish your credibility, and gets found on Google.

Some of the same advice that we give to business owners when they are building their new website applies to Facebook as well. Look at the competition, brands big and small, what are they doing well, what could they do better, what elements you can incorporate on your own page. With Facebook, you also want to see which posts get likes and the level of engagement.

When starting your page (or revisiting and refining it further) keep in mind that full pages have a better search ranking. Some of the tabs may not apply to you and can be removed. You also have the flexibility to rearrange the tabs in a way that makes the most sense for your business. Create your page with text, videos, photos and share (or select) content from others. A useful trick: put the old date on some of your posts so they don’t all “show up” on the same day.

Our final tip for this week (and we’ll talk more about this when we start digging into keywords) is to maximize the impact of your Facebook Page’s short description. The first 156 characters of your short description appear in Google search results as your meta description, this is your chance to include 2-3 highly searched keywords (with your domain name). If you’re curious what this looks like, try searching for one of your competitors to see what they’re up to (just add “Facebook” in your search to filter the results).

We have a lot to cover this month, so stay tuned!