Facebook Marketing How-to Guide for Small Business

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Facebook Marketing How-to Guide for Small Business

Facebook marketing tips, cautions, ideas and how-to advice for small businesses.  Learn how to market and promote your business, products and services on Facebook along with some important cautions and realities of setting up and maintaining a Facebook marketing program for your small business.  

When something changes on Facebook that's important for you to know about, we update this article. 

Facebook has 800 million+ users.  It's the second most popular website behind Google in terms of unique visitors.  And while it started out as a social network for college students, it's now expanded far beyond that.  Facebook users who are 26 to 64 years of age represent more than half of Facebook's users in the United States, according to InsideFacebook.com. 

Facebook is like an online version of a coffee shop or bar.  People go there to be entertained and to mix and mingle with people they know and people they want to meet.  Some products and services are a natural fit to sell and promote on Facebook.  Other products and services are much more difficult when it comes to grabbing someone's attention on Facebook.  It's about the mindset or attitude of the person on Facebook.  Most people are not in the mindset to think about certain types of products, services and companies when they are on Facebook.  You can buy someone's attention by giving away something of value for free or making a great price-off discount.  That's like buying everyone in a bar a round of drinks - it's expensive and is it really going to win you people who will become paying customers?  Just like with buying drinks for strangers, you may get a lot of "likes" but not many long-time friends or business customers.  Most of the large companies with huge Facebook followings have "bought" the "likes" by offering an entry to a sweepstakes or an amazing offer.  They then have the ability for those people to see their posts. 

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Our Editors continually update all our articles and how-to guides.  We keep up so you don't have to. 

 

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Facebook Marketing - What's New?  What's Changed?

Lots of changes going on with Facebook that have implications for marketing yourself or your business on Facebook.  As things change, we update this article.  Here's the latest...

1. Facebook's new "Timeline" format became mandatory for all Facebook account holders as of April 30th. You'll want to be sure your company page is updated to support this format. Otherwise, you'll appear behind the times when your customers visit. Facebook provides an excellent microsite about the timeline: Timeline: A New Kind of Profile.

2.   Facebook personal profile pages and business pages no longer appear in Google search results.  The war is on between Google and Facebook now that Google has introduced and is promoting Google Plus.

3.  Facebook has launched a new feature that allows people to control how often they get status updates/posts (messages) from their connections. 

What that means to you is that your "fans" on your business and personal page can choose how often they want to hear from you.

4.  People can now "subscribe" to read posts made by people they don't know. 

Know this: This subscribe button only works for personal profiles, NOT business pages.  It's meant for popular celebrities and bloggers who post public information on their profile page. 

If you see a subscribe button on someone's Facebook profile page, you can subscribe to get their public posts (messages).  In this way, Facebook is now more "Twitter-like."  However, there's one important difference.  With Facebook when you "subscribe" to get posts (messages) you can control how many posts you want to receive (all; most; important only).  With Twitter you get every post.

Excellent blog post by Facebook on how this works
 

4.  Facebook is giving away $50 advertising credits to small businesses

6.  Facebook Privacy - you should know and do this

Take a look at your URL (top box on your screen.) If you see "http" or just "www", instead of "https", you DO NOT have a secure session and can be hacked. Go to Account Settings - Click Security on the left top corner - click Edit next to Secure Browsing, Check box, click Save. FB has automatically set it on the non-secure setting! Do everyone a huge favor, copy & re-post.

7.  Facebook has made changes to help people create "lists" of their connections which they can use to determine who to send a post (message) to.   This works now somewhat like a direct mail list selection where you might choose to send an email message to everyone on your list or just to people on a sub-list (like employees, best customers, prospective customers, etc.). 

Now on Facebook you can more precisely target who you want to receive your status updates through what they're calling "inline controls" which sounds a lot like Google Plus "circles".  It's a smart idea to allow you to target your posts on Facebook to the people who will find them most relevant.  Question is whether people will take the time to actually do this. Learn more in this blog post from Facebook about this new feature.

Tips on Facebook marketing

The blurring of personal and professional connections on Facebook.  How are you going to handle that?  Lots of options and trade-offs. 

1. Have a Personal Page and a Business Page.  When you post on your Personal Facebook page, choose who the status update is appropriate for.  Attract fans to your Business Page and post relevant business-related information there. 
2. Use your personal page for business like what bloggers and columnists are doing.  They promote subscribing to their personal page.  Since Facebook doesn't allow you to have more than one personal page, Facebook then becomes, for them, another way people can read their posts and they miss out on the social sharing on Facebook among their friends.
3. Keep your personal page for "friends only" and your Company/Business Page for anyone who wants to become a connection/fan.  You'll then want to go through and disconnect from people who Facebook connections on your personal page who are business associates. 

Know this:  If you use your personal page to share business updates, posts made on personal pages are prioritized over posts made on Business Pages in someone's news feed.  That's a good thing but personal page profiles have a limit of 5,000 friends.

Facebook marketing works best if you create a two-way dialog with your customers and prospects.  You post relevant information, deals, tips, news and they respond and post questions, complaints and compliments. Think of Facebook marketing like a public conversation where your "fans" (people who "like" your company page) can see what you say (post) and what everyone else does too. 

From our experience:  your hardest job may be attracting "fans" and getting them to engage.  Most people won't post a question or comment on a business Facebook page.  Some people will post negative comments like they do on Yelp. 

 

You have to monitor comments, respond promptly, handle questions and complaints well (ideally on the phone, not on Facebook). 

Think of your Facebook Company/Business page like a Karaoke stage.  You sing (post) and you want to encourage other people to sing (post).  Most people will observe and want to be entertained, informed or find a great deal, just like they would if they were at a live Karaoke bar or business networking cocktail party. 

Half of small businesses don't invest in social media marketing.  Of the 47% that do, 19% are using Facebook with a company page.  See the survey findings.

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