How to Use Facebook for Business: The Pandemic Update

Facebook marketing, as you know, is crucial for your business growth. I am sure you are already familiar with Facebook’s vast user base and how it can help you reach the farthest parts of the globe.

And if you are not advertising on Facebook, this is the perfect time to start. Why?

The answer is ongoing Pandemic. Coronavirus has hit almost every part of the globe, and people have been asked to stay home and work from home. I am sure you are all aware of this situation, and there is no need for me to bore you with the details.

But what you need to know is that in the past three months, Facebook’s engagement has quadrupled, and it has generated revenue of a total of $5893 billion to be exact. That is a lot of engagement, and if you can manage to get 1% of that engagement, your business would thrive.

The reason why we have seen this sudden spike in engagement is people stuck at home, especially teenagers. Students who should be studying, playing, or doing extracurricular activities are stuck at home doing nothing. And they are focusing all of their energy on social media.

Therefore, you must take advantage of this situation and start advertising now. To help you with this, we have gathered a few of the best Facebook marketing tips. But, first, let’s get you set up on Facebook.

How To Set Up Facebook For Business

The first thing you need to do is set up a Facebook page for your business. Use this page to post pictures and videos, website or new product links, and also to communicate with your followers. Apart from this, you also need to create a Facebook business page to begin your marketing strategies. Here’s how you can prepare your Facebook page-

  • Create your business page on Facebook by logging from your personal account. Once you have done that, choose your page type and add your business details correctly. Do not add any incorrect information.
  • Create a good profile and cover photo for your page. Make sure it is of high quality and perfectly optimized with Facebook’s pre-defined size. The reason to do this part perfectly is, it will be the first thing people will notice, therefore it must be eye-catching.
  • Now since we have covered the basics, it is time to dig deep and go all technical. Click on the “Edit page info” button and fill all the empty sections such as description, contact information, and extra options too. Filling all these details makes your page look more genuine and trustworthy.
  • Moving on, we have a call to action button. It enables your followers to jump from your Facebook page to your website. To add one click on “Add a button” under your page’s cover photo.
  • Lastly, we have, username and privacy setting. Facebook allows its users to create a custom username according to the preference of their page. So, create a captivating username for your page by clicking on the “Click page @Username” button.

    Once you have added a CTA, take a look at your page settings. Go to privacy and security settings and make sure your contact information is visible to everyone. Also, go through other settings in that category and make sure everything is according to your terms.

Congratulations!! You have successfully created a business page on Facebook. Now, let’s move on to marketing tips.

Facebook Marketing Tips:

  1. Categorize Your Audience

Understanding the audience you are targeting on Facebook is very crucial; you have to know people’s demographics and what they are currently interested in that part of the globe.

To do that, you have to dig in deep and get to know your audience a little better. You can start with age, gender, location, and go all the way up to purchasing activity.

All these tiny details will help you target your audience more effectively, which will increase your conversion rate. It also helps you devise offers based on their likes and special events, that may not work elsewhere.

  1. Intent

You can’t just post anything you feel like on your Facebook page you could but, you wouldn’t get any conversion. Posting content with an intent in mind is necessary when you are targeting millions of people online. It is important now more than ever as the world is going through a great ordeal; therefore, you have to show them that you care about your audience.

You have to decide before uploading a post, how you are going to target the audience using it, and how you are going to successfully convert them to customers.

You can take the help of Facebook Insights to get a good mix of content, or you can take the help of an Ad Analytics Tool. These tools help you see the ads that are used by your competitors to target their audience. You will find countless tools on the Internet for this job, but the best ones are as follows – PowerAdSpy, MagixAdz, Adspy, and Adespresso.

  1. Optimize Your Ads Perfectly.

On Facebook, posting an image containing strong promotional content with product links will not get you the desired engagement. You have to think out of the box and be unpredictable. Generally, being funny helps as it gets more engagement than any other posts, but current situations demand a much more sympathetic and “with people” post. However, you can mix your posts; you can add 1 or 2 funny posts along with the regular ones.

Getting back to the optimizing part, what I am saying is to be unpredictable in a good way. Surprise your audience by making your ad creative and humorous. If you want to see the live example head over to Amazon’s Facebook page, here you can see their timeline photos and how they have incorporated every situation in their posts. I know, not all of them are advertisements, but you get the gist.

  1. Set Goals

Moving further on Facebook marketing tips, we have Goals. It is important that you have clear goals in order for your Facebook marketing strategies to be successful. Of course, the goal will differ as to the business niche changes, but the main set of ingredients are the same, which are as follows: lead generation, boosting conversion rate, and improving customer service.

Everything you do from your page must contribute towards achieving the goals. It also helps you move forward your brand’s online presence in a more successful way as you can easily share the page or posts on other social media platforms.

  1. Start With A Small Budget

Every major marketer recommends that the growing businesses must invest in paid advertising no matter how small it is, to ensure reach. The reason why you have to start with paid ones, in the beginning is to gather as much engagement in the starting phase of your marketing campaigns as possible.

You can also experiment with content, images, time, message, etc. As I said above, get creative with your content and find out what resonates best with your audience. Also, experiment with the time, post at different times of a day, and see at which time you get the best engagement.

  1. Optimize Your Page For Better Engagement

People discovering your page must follow and like your page in order for you to reach your goals. And to make sure that people are not bouncing off your page, so you should optimize your page properly.

How?

You can enhance the appearance of your page by changing the template. To do that, go to “Settings” and then click on the “Templates and Tabs” option on the left side of the screen. After that, go to “Edit” and choose a template based on your business type. And then click “Apply” at the bottom.

You can also optimize the “Pages Liked By This Page” section to provide users with similar businesses. It will help you divert the traffic to other pages that you might have.

Lastly, what you can do is reply to all the comments and messages your page has received. Go heavy on those, and whenever you have some free time, do it. People will appreciate you conversing with them, one on one, and it will improve the customer relationship.

  1. Facebook Story

Keep adding to your Facebook story regularly. You can add behind the scenes, news, questions, or any other fun interactive thing. It is important to keep your audience engaged on your Facebook feed.

Another way to entice the user is to share memes every so often in your story. Show your audience that you do have a sense of humor. You can also go live on Facebook and give a glimpse of what happens behind the curtain.

Doing so will help your audience connect with you on a more friendly level, which will bode well with your whole marketing campaign.

  1. Make Use Of The Messenger

I am sure you know that advertisements are not limited to Facebook; you can also do that on messenger. There are over 1.3 billion people that use Messenger every month; thus, you can comprehend its reach. The main advantage of advertising on this app is that, on it, you can directly interact with your audience, and they can do the same with you.

It is a great way to be connected with your audience 24*7. To enhance the user’s experience, you can also provide customer support on it so that people don’t have to go through google or your Facebook page to contact you. They can do so by simply clicking on the ad.

  1. Track Your Progress

After implementing all the strategies you have and experimenting with them. It is time to measure your strategies and see if they are working or not. You can do this with the help of the Facebook Insight tool. Using it, you can measure likes, reach, engagement, and unliking of your post. It will also help you determine which of your posts or post types are working best for your page.

You can also do this with the help of analytics that I mentioned on the first point. Such apps will help you get the complete insights of your ad campaigns.

With this data, you can easily tweak your strategy and improve it all together for a broader audience. At first, it may seem a little overwhelming, but the plus point is you don’t have to invest a penny in it. You can start slow with small ad campaigns, and as you gain more experience, you move on to more complex ones.

Get On With It Then!

If you are only beginning with advertising, these Facebook marketing tips are sure to be helpful. Start by creating a killer, eye-catchy Facebook page, add all the necessary details, and contact information. Categorize your audience according to age, location, and niche.

Set goals beforehand to make your marketing successful. Post with intent, have a perfect plan to drive the traffic from Facebook to your website. Use Facebook apps extensively to promote your brand or products. Actively post on the story and reach your audience and let them reach you with the messenger.

The most important thing to do is to track your ad campaigns. Watch how your ads are progressing and if they are or not. Figure out which ads are working better than others, and why. These points will help you improve your marketing strategies according to people’s preferences and time.