Whether you are into Facebook or not, with hundreds of millions of users, your perfect clients are interacting on Facebook everyday. Therefore, it makes sense to establish a presence and find ways to connect with them.

Although it’s not hard to do it does have it’s tricks. Since we come across quite a bit of distributors who are not sure how to setup their Facebook pages correctly, let’s start with the basics and break down the main components of Facebook and how each works, so you can have a better idea of how to use them for your marketing.

The 5 basic sections of Facebook

1. Your personal profile

2. Facebook pages

3. Facebook groups

4. Boosted posts.

5. Business Manager

1. Your Personal Profile

This is your personal Facebook page. It has as much or as little of your personal information as you want, and you should setup your privacy settings so only people you accept as “friends” can see what you share. This is where you interact with your friends and family, posting personal status updates, photos, videos, etc. The “friends” who connect with you and see the updates from your profile are mostly personal connections, such as family members, old high school friends, acquaintances from church, and such. It’s not unusual to have business connections wanting to become “friends”, and it’s up to you whether you’ll accept them or not.

You can use your personal page for marketing but it has limited exposure and marketing tools. As a business owner, however, it is a good practice to add your tittle, your company name as your place of business, as well as your website and Facebook business page links in the proper places. Additionally, your business posts are likely to annoy your personal contacts, who are only interested in your personal activities, and will mostly enjoy photos of your cat, your latest family trip, etc.

2. Facebook Pages.

This is your official Facebook for business page.  You want to fill out the information completely, not only to increase the chances of getting found, but also to provide visitors with details about your business that they’ll be looking for, such as where you’re located, what type of clients you work with, etc.

Cover and Profile Images

You’ll want a properly designed cover and profile graphics to give the best professional impression of your brand as possible.  It is important point to keep in mind that people will see your posts on their phones’ tiny screens. One common mistake is to place the logo “as is” as the profile image, which often results in very small, blurry and unrecognizable image as your posts show on people’s feeds, thus defeating the purpose of creating brand recognition.

As for the cover, again, it is important that the design is professional and representative of your brand. You must avoid low resolution or generic images at all costs. For reference, the size of the profile image is 180 x 180 pixels, and the cover is 851 x 315 pixels

Marketing tools and benefits of Facebook business pages:

– Pages are indexed by Google. This means that if someone wants to check your company out and they “google” your company name, your page will be listed in the results.

– You can place a call to action button on the cover, such as “Contact Us” linked to the proper URL. There are other CTA buttons to choose from.

– The “Insights” section of the page provides excellent analytics tools.  You can see the number of page visitors, level of interest in your posts, times of the day when they’re online, and much more.

– There is an event section where you can publish and promote events you’re holding, including full details such as date and time, and RSVP information. You can use this section to announce your participation in a trade show, or announce a special limited time promotion, as examples.

– Integration with other applications: you can integrate your Facebook business page with 3rd party applications that allow you to have people sign up to your mailing list, run contests, and much more.

3. Facebook Groups

Facebook groups serve the purpose of gathering people around a particular topic, interest or cause. Groups can only be created and joined  through a personal profile, as opposed to a business page. There are 3 types of groups: “open”, that anyone can join,  “private”, that are listed in searches but people have to request to join, and wait to get access granted. There are also “secret” groups that don’t show in searches, where people have to be invited to join.

Groups provide outstanding opportunities to promote your business, even though interaction has to be through your personal profile. Say for example you are targeting your local area. You would join business and community groups in your town, and begin participating, commenting and liking other people’s posts. Soon thereafter you would start sharing your own business page posts with the group. Very much like networking, the more you interact the more people will start to take notice of you and your business. This tactic has proven extraordinarily effective for our clients, I highly recommend you implement it.

There are a lot of groups and you will have to spend some time exploring them. Some are very active with lots of conversations going on, while others seem like an endless stream of advertisements with no one watching.  One thing is for sure, spending time finding your best groups will pay off.

4. Boosted Posts.

This is not exactly a section, but it’s worth addressing because it’s very easy to implement in the wrong way.  Every time you post something on your business page you see a button to “boost your post” below it.  When you post something, only about 2% of people who have liked your page actually see it on their feeds. Boosting a post makes it appear on the stream of everyone who has liked your page and their friends. Typically, people who’ve liked your page are a mix of friends, clients, competitors, and vendors, among other non- ideal-prospect type of people. Paying so they see your posts will be a total waste of money. If you want to use Facebook advertising, there are far better ways to go about it.

5. Business Manager

This is the section to manage Facebook advertising. This section is available through your business page.  It has all the tools to create and manage your ads. One of the best features is the ability to create target audiences based on very specific demographic criteria. Facebook advertising produces exceptional ROI, but it’s not easy to do.  If you’re considering Facebook advertising your best bet is to hire a reputable company with the experience and know how. This is not a good place for trial and error because it will be costly.

There you have it!
That was an extremely basic overview of profiles, groups and pages. I hope this clarifies what each type of page is and how to use Facebook to your advantage. And we would love it if you visit our page and give us a like!

If you have any questions or need help setting up and optimizing your Facebook business page, get in touch!