How Facebook Can Help You and Your Business

The Facebook Era

With over 2 billion monthly users, Facebook has revolutionized social media and how people interact. Over the years, Facebook has already diversified its business to become an excellent brand marketing platform. In many ways, it can actively engage audiences, target customers, increase sales, and boost ads.

Here’s how Facebook can become a platform to help grow your business.

Four Facebook Features to Help Your Business

Facebook Personal Profile

You can use your very own personal profile to advertise or support your business, provided that you do not violate Facebook’s Terms of Service. For example, sharing activities such as upcoming events, new products, or your business story can be done through your personal profile.

You can also fill in the “About” section to share your business website and other social media platforms related to your business, so you can have more opportunities to interact with your customers. Aside from your Facebook Friends, you can adjust privacy settings in a way that can make posts public, in order to attract more followers.

Facebook Groups

A Facebook Group is a community of like-minded individuals or organizations that share and discuss ideas and common interests. Groups can be public or private, and may have a set of rules for a more focused interaction. You have the option to join a Facebook Group that shares a similar interest to your business. Through this option, you can share relevant content, such as blog posts, events, and articles related to your business. Alternatively, you can create your own to share business-related topics and activities, and manage your posts accordingly.

Joining and setting up a group is relatively easy, and each have their own privacy setting. Facebook has a good outline of how group privacy settings work. Using Facebook Groups is useful for a more focused or targeted audience or customers. It also enables interaction with group members which can become potential clients. To maximize its opportunities, limit yourself in joining 1 to 3 groups, as it can be overwhelming and time-consuming to read, comment, and interact on group posts. It would also be good to become mindful of a group’s rules to avoid being removed.

Facebook Page for Business

You can create a Facebook Business Page that is separate from your personal profile. A page is a lot more flexible as it allows you to take control of the content. You can post, advertise, and share relevant content to your followers and customers. Remember: the pages you create will be connected to your personal profile.

Setting up Facebook Page is not that complicated, as mentioned in this guide by the Social Media Examiner. Part of its advantage is that it gives you access to a whole range of features, which are not available on your personal profile. This includes ads, analytics, and the ability to schedule posts. As it is a separate page, you can focus your content and make it all about your business. You can create and personalize cover photos, videos, articles, posts, and other business-related content on your Facebook Page. In addition, the analytics page displays the number of likes, comments, shares, views and other interactions generated by your page.

Facebook Analytics gives you a complete picture – that is, it allows you to understand customers, analyze performance, and get insights so you can optimize data across all media channels. You can measure audience behavior for a better insight. The automated insights provides information on trends so you’ll know your business focus. It even has push and in-app notification campaigns that can help you expand your audience, as it allows you to find people with similar interests to your most valuable customers and set custom audiences for ads.

Facebook Ads

Facebook advertising is an advanced tool which you can use for e-commerce or to simply boost your marketing strategies. Facebook ads can be used to target niche audiences, encourage customers to make repeat purchases, or make brand advocates. This useful guide can help you get started on using Facebook Ads. You can choose your audience for a more targeted approach on ad campaigns. Their ad formats are simple, eye-catching and easy to use.

Facebook also has advert reporting tools so you will have information on how your ad campaigns are working. Many brands have benefited from Facebook Business and their ads – Halls is an example of an established brand that utilized Canvas, an ad format with immersive, rich content optimized for mobile. Another example of a success story for Facebook Ads is Cheetos, which increased their target sales across the US-Hispanics affinity segment after developing video ads and running them on Facebook. On the other hand, Facebook Pixel enables you to create targeted ads as it allows you to track how people engage with your brand.

Additional Resources and Information

Facebook continues to dominate the social media stratosphere, with no doubt they will continue to create more innovative strategies to further diversify their products and help brands grow. Take advantage of Facebook’s numerous opportunities to help your business.

Want more information? Find out how Facebook can drive traffic to your local business.

Want to know what’s hot in social media right now? Read our story on the social media marketing trends of 2017.

For more information on digital marketing techniques, visit Arcalea’s blog.