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Even as new social media players emerge, Facebook remains one of the top platforms for users around the world, making it an ideal tool for small businesses.
With a ton of different features and options, understanding how to leverage Facebook for success can be a challenge – but it doesn’t have to be. With our expert tips, you’ll be able to use Facebook like a pro, promoting your business, growing your following, and enhancing your customer experience.
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The Benefits of Using Facebook to Market Your Small Business
There are many benefits to using Facebook to market your small business, including:
- Wide reach: With over 1.8 billion daily users, Facebook has a massive reach, which makes it an ideal platform for you to reach potential customers.
- Targeted advertising: Facebook's advertising options allow you to hone in on audiences based on their interests, age, location, and more. This means you can tailor your ads to reach the people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services.
- Measurable results: Facebook Insights help you analyze your posts to understand how they’re performing and resonating with your audience.
- Cost-effective: You can use many of Facebook’s features for free or with small set budgets that you can manage and control.
The Challenges of Using Facebook to Market Your Small Business
With any marketing tool, there are bound to be challenges to overcome. For Facebook specifically, these include.
- Changes to the algorithm: Facebook regularly updates its algorithm, which can affect the reach and visibility of your page.
- Time and resources: Managing a Facebook page by posting consistently and engaging with others can be time-consuming, especially if you have limited resources.
- Privacy concerns: Because of criticisms around Facebook’s use of user data, people may be less likely to share personal information over the platform, which can affect your ability to target specific customers.
- Difficulty in reaching younger audiences: Younger audiences, especially Gen Z, are increasingly moving away from Facebook, so if that’s your key market, Facebook might not be the best social media platform to use.
15 Pro Tips to Market Your Small Business on Facebook
1. Make Your Profile Stand Out
The first thing to do to maximize your Facebook marketing potential is to make your profile stand out. You can optimize your profile with several elements to make it easy for visitors to find the information they need quickly. This includes:
- An identifiable profile picture, generally your brand logo
- A cover photo that aligns with your branding and makes a good first impression
- Up-to-date and complete contact information, including phone, email, and location
- An About section that lays out what your business does clearly and concisely
Finally, you’ll also want to ensure your URL matches your page's name (like www.facebook.com/bobsfantasticburgers). When you first set up a business page, it will have a generic URL, but you can change it by going to your page and clicking “Edit Page Info.”
2. Ensure You Include a Strong CTA
Another business page feature you’ll want to ensure you have is a clear call-to-action button. You can link out to your website, a landing page, a lead magnet, or something else.
You can choose from one of seven pre-made labels – “Sign up,” “View shop,” “Contact us,” or “Book now,” are the most common ones for small businesses. These clicks are tracked through Facebook insights, so you can try different versions to see what gets the most engagement.
From your page overview, you can choose “add an action button” in the right-hand column, as pictured below. That brings up a list of actions you can select from.
3. Schedule Posts to Simplify Your Content Upkeep
Facebook works best if you post regularly, but keeping up with consistent posting is hard. To optimize your posting schedule, you can create and upload a bunch of posts at once and then schedule them ahead of time. This works for posts, stories, reels, or ads.
From the Meta Business Suite, you’ll have the option to create and schedule a post, using the function as shown below.
The simplest option to schedule posts is to use Facebook’s built-in content planner, which is available from the Meta Business Suite. Facebook will even recommend the most active time to optimize audience views.
4. Start a Facebook Group
One of Facebook’s best features is the ability it gives you to create specific and targeted community groups for like-minded people to join. Facebook groups for small businesses are perfect for building a loyal base of customers and learning exactly what your customers like and don’t like.
People can connect with others that love your business and ask questions about products, usage, and more. You can also post exclusive deals or first looks to reward loyalty.
The best type of group to create is a private, visible group. This means that people can find it through a general search, but can only be added after approval from the admins. Even still, these groups can get out of hand, so I recommend bringing on at least one other admin to help manage it.
5. Use Facebook Live
Facebook Live is a relatively newer feature that offers an alternative way to engage with your audience in real time. Live videos have the advantage of appearing more authentic and don’t require any editing.
You can use a Live broadcast to:
- Answer questions about your business
- Run a contest or giveaway
- Announce new products
- Showcase a milestone
- Do a live product demo
With Facebook Live, you can choose to schedule a time in advance to let your audience be prepared. You can also go live spontaneously, but you probably won’t get as much engagement that way. The added benefit is that your streams are recorded, which allows you to then create additional content to share at a later date.
6. Set Up Facebook Messenger for Customer Communications
Facebook Messenger is a great customer service tool for small businesses, especially if you don’t have a website. Messenger can be used as a way for customers to ask questions pre-purchase, get support for ordering and shipping, or to purchase directly from you.
You can set Messenger to send a personalized message to a person anytime they open a message thread. This can let customers know when they can expect a response and thank them for reaching out.
You can also set instant replies and create responses for frequently asked questions, to streamline the process and allow customers to have quick access when they need it.
7. Build a Facebook Shop
Facebook makes it easy to create a product store straight through your business account, which allows you to sell directly through the platform. This is an amazing tool for small businesses, especially if you don’t have a separate website or don’t have much traffic to your site.
With a Facebook Shop page you can add unlimited products and categorize them for easy shopping. These will be accessible through your main page and your Shop page, plus they will be featured on the main Marketplace, for greater reach.
There are three ways for customers to checkout through your shop – through your website’s checkout page, through Messenger, or directly through Facebook (valid only for US-based businesses).
8. Create Engaging Content
Facebook rewards engagement, meaning that if someone engages with your content (through reactions, comments, or sharing), they will continue seeing your posts. That’s why it’s essential to create content that’s interesting, insightful, entertaining, or informative to really draw potential customers in.
You should focus on quality over quantity, with strong visuals (images or videos) incorporated into all your posts. To make content that engages try these strategies:
- Ask your followers questions
- Host a contest where followers tag their friends in the comments
- Create a poll to gauge interest in things related to your business or fun, relevant topics
- Teach your viewers something with carousel images (and cross-post to Instagram!)
- Share the human side of your business – employee profiles, funny pictures, etc.
- Mix up the content between business-focused and non-business focused to better engage
9. Learn Facebook Ad Manager
To make the most of your time and resources, there is no better tool than Facebook’s Ad Manager – now called the Meta Ad Manager. This works with your existing business account to create unique ads for your audience.
The platform itself isn’t difficult to use, but there is a bit of a learning curve, especially if you’ve never created ad campaigns yourself. However, Meta offers plenty of training guides and videos for free, so it’s worth diving into those to master the program. After doing so, you’ll be able to create and segment amazing DIY ads for your business.
10. Boost Posts
An easy marketing tool you can use on Facebook to heighten post reach is to boost your posts. While it does cost money to boost a post, it is generally a much lower cost than running an ad campaign. Because of constant algorithm changes on Facebook, you can never be sure your post will organically reach your audience. Boosting your post is a simple solution that ensures it will have a bigger audience to target.
Boosting a post is a cost-effective way to get more eyes on your content, even if you have a small budget. You don’t need to create a whole separate ad. Instead, you set the budget and the general target audience and Facebook will boost it until it’s reached its maximum budget.
11. Target the Right Audience
Facebook has an extensive targeting tool for advertising distribution. You will see stronger conversion rates if you learn to target the right audience. The best place to start is Facebook’s Audience Insights, which can be found in your Business Manager.
This gives you a ton of insights about people that are already engaged with your page, including age and gender, other page like, location, and activity. From there, you can create a custom audience for your Facebook ads.
While you may think having a wide audience will lead to more engagement, it’s actually best to narrow in on a specific targeted group. If your business is local, you should also ensure your audience is set to the proper location. By not targeting your location at all, or by making it too broad, you risk missing out on your specific customer types.
12. Use Meta Pixel
Meta Pixel (formerly Facebook Pixel) is a retargeting tool that is incredibly useful. You’ll need to install it onto your website either by manually adding the code or using an integration, depending on your technical skills and the website builder you have.
Once installed, you’ll need to add a notice and an opt-out (in certain locations) to your website since Meta Pixel collects user data with cookies. From there, you can create retargeting campaigns on Facebook to people that have visited your website.
13. Collect Customer Reviews
Getting reviews on a public platform is a great way for you to build trust with potential customers. One of the best features for small businesses on Facebook is the built-in review system which allows people to easily rate and review your business.
Your overall rating (out of five stars) will appear in the “about” section of your page. You can also enable a “reviews” tab, which shows the details of each review. Because it’s built in, you’ll be notified when a customer reviews you, so you can quickly send an appreciative thank you or address any issues they might’ve had.
Don’t be afraid to put a call out for reviews on your page. It can help you build a positive reputation and potentially even offer an incentive to customers that participate.
Because of the public nature of Facebook reviews, it’s possible that disgruntled customers may post negative reviews. If that happens, don’t panic! Instead, make sure you respond to the negative review in a professional way and try to address their concerns clearly.
14. A/B Test Your Ads
A/B Testing, also called split testing, is a popular marketing technique that can help you learn what ads work best for your audiences. You can easily A/B test your ads through Meta’s Ad Manager platform. With this, you can choose a variable to test including:
- Audience
- Creative (visual assets)
- Placement
- Delivery Optimization
- More than one
- Product sets
After you decide what you want to test, set the budget and publish the ads. As they run, you’ll be able to monitor their engagement to see what works best.
15. Measure Your Success
Like any marketing strategy, Facebook only works if you can measure and adjust your content as needed. Luckily, Facebook Insights offers a ton of different ways to analyze your page and your posts.
From the Insights page, you’ll be able to see an overview of how your page is doing overall. You’ll also be able to get down into specifics like how individual posts or events are performing based on likes, reach, and views. This can help you tailor your content strategy towards similar types of top-performing posts.
What’s the Best Way to Accept Payments Online?
The best way to accept payments online is through Pay.com. The sign-up process is straightforward with a quick and easy onboarding process, allowing you to start accepting payments right away, whether you have a website or not.
If you have a website, Pay.com makes it super simple to add a checkout page to your site, whether through pre-built templates or custom API integration, depending on your skills.
Even if you don’t have a website, you can still receive payments online by sending Pay Links to your customers through email or messages. A link will direct a customer to a secure checkout page where they can complete their payment.
Pay.com is a user-friendly system that is perfect for any business owner! Sign up here!
The Bottom Line
There are so many marketing tools on Facebook. If you understand how to use them properly, Facebook can be a great cost-effective way to reach your customers and find new ones.
Always remember to monitor your metrics to find the best ways to engage with your audience. Don’t be afraid to try new things, because you never know what strategy will stick, especially as Facebook continually changes its algorithm.
Pay.com is the best way for a business to accept payments online. Whether you’ve just opened or are looking for a payment system revamp, Pay.com has all the features you need to get selling quickly. Click here to get started now!
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