Take Five: How Small Businesses Should Be Using Facebook

You are in small business, so you have to keep it simple. You have to be able to make it, sell it, and manage the money. You wear several hats and it is our job to help you simplify so you can do more with less. I am going to quickly cover the five things every small business should be doing on Facebook to help their business grow.

1. Tell Your Story

Number one is to tell your story. In a world of vanillas be the rocky road. Telling your story is mostly about consumers connecting with you as a person and the culture of your company. And the culture of your company is largely the personalities of your employees. The bottom line is people want to do business with people. Many businesses get caught up in making what they sell the primary focus of their social posts and they fall into the trap of being another "me too" company. Unless you have an exclusive product no one else has don't make the product the sole focus of all your social content. If you share on social every day make sure that thirty to fifty percent of what you do is tied to the human element, and show off your people and your story. Show off the "who" and the "why" behind what you do.

2. Grow Your Channel

Make goals every month to increase the number of likes your page has. Don't simply focus on engagement with your posts, although that is important. If you take care of number one you will get post engagement. Go back to everyone who engages your content and ask them to like your page. Also, over the course of every month, be sure your posts encourage page likes. Mix it up and have a contest once a month or once a quarter to encourage page likes. Your Facebook page can be a powerful thing if you are continually growing it.

3. Take Advantage of Facebook's Ad Platform

Facebook has great targeting tools that are easy to use. You are able to create saved audiences that save you time on future ads you run. If you are taking care of number two (Grow Your Channel), you will be able to get in front of your entire audience quickly with small ad spends. Ten dollars can go a long way on Facebook and create a tremendous ROI for very little cost. Facebook also has retargeting tools that help you generate ads for prospects who have been on your website recently. Drop a little code in your website header and you are off to the races. Click here for some helpful information to help you get started or you can request a training course with us to help you get started with all the ad tools Facebook offers. You can also check out this recent blog post to get a step-by-step guide to setting up a Facebook ad.

4. Convert Your Facebook Audience Into Permission Email Marketing Leads

Why spend money if you don't have to? Take steps every month to convert your Facebook audience into email contacts. Email is still a very powerful and effective marketing tool and it's free. If you have offers, contests, giveaways, or special events you think a person would exchange their email address for - you should go for it. Every month, make a goal to convert some of your Facebook audience into your email database. If you have one thousand followers why not make a goal to get 100 of those people on your email list. If you are able to grow your audience ten percent every month, make a goal to get half of them on your email list.

5. Be the Expert

Always be telling your story, but also show off your knowledge and passion. Remember not to make this the main focus of your social posts throughout the month. Keep this category to twenty percent or less of all of your monthly posts. People don't want to be sold. They want high-quality information so they can educate themselves. The modern consumer can shut off most advertising and so businesses need to shift from an old-school advertising mindset and become educators.

Here is some bonus information, too. If you still are struggling to find time to do this consider getting someone else to do this for you. Most small businesses could cover these five steps in four to five hours a week. If outsourcing this to a marketing agency likes ours is not the right fit you could get a person on your team to own this for you and with the right training they could do wonders for your business. One of things I like most about social and digital marketing is that you can measure the results. This will move the needle for ninety-nine percent of small businesses. It just takes persistence and refinement.