How to Promote Your Business With a Facebook Page

Facebook has more than 500 million active users and is definitely the best social network ever. The number of people using it increases every month, and it seems Facebook will not stop its ascension soon.

Facebook can also be used for some other purposes besides sharing videos, writing on the walls of your friends and keeping an eye on your employees. Facebook can actually be useful for promoting a business, company or a specific service. Sure, the target audience has to be present on Facebook for companies to achieve results there, but who is not on Facebook today?

Every page of Facebook is indexed in Google and other search engines, so if you want to be good in searches by specific keywords, you can defeat your competition by doing more work on Facebook. There are very few sites in the world that can, by different important keywords, top Facebook in this field.

A Facebook page offers lots of features as well, even if it is basic and not customized at all. But depending on how much you are ready to invest (money or time, depending on how much coding you know to do on your own), you can customize a Facebook page even more. This is good because it makes Facebook pages not be static, but interactive.

Another advantage of a Facebook page over a personal Facebook account is that now you can share your information with your friends and still avoid showing these to all your clients and prospects. You now have the option to choose where to share information and if you want to keep embarrassing things far from your clients, then there’s still the personal profile where you can share them.

The discussion about connecting with clients and prospects on Facebook is very popular and I will talk about this in a further article, but by having a personal Facebook account and a Facebook page for your business you can easily get rid of this problem. The first step is finding out more about who your clients are. You have to find out who they are, how they use Facebook, why and maybe which method catches their attention faster. If your target audience does not use Facebook, then this article may not be very useful to you, however, it would be good to know these things for future references. The main idea is that you have to be, and take action where you audience is.

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Once you have the profile up and running, go and type in all the information of your company or yourself. Put in as much as it is relevant. If the location is relevant, type that in as well. People have to know who is it they work with. Also, specify the services you offer and, why not, the prices too.

Use the Facebook page to link to your portfolio, social network accounts and so on. Make the best out of your Facebook page and try to direct as many users as possible to your other accounts and pages, so maybe one of them will stick in their minds. Also, if you redirect them from there to your Twitter, it is very possible that you will get several more followers this way as well.

Don’t turn off the wall of your Facebook page, because this is your chance to interact with your users. Let them send you messages and answer as fast as possible, and also give them all the information they need. Otherwise ask them to contact you on your e-mail if they ask for private information.

There are five pictures on top of the profiles on Facebook and it is not a good idea to let them be random. Use the five pictures wisely. Show parts of your work or maybe yourself (e.g. if you are a content freelancer), but don’t leave random pictures there.  If you do not provide graphical solutions, then check Mashable’s list of creative ways for the Facebook profile.

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To keep up the interaction level it would be a very good idea to post on the wall often. Now, because this is a more formal page it might be difficult to find content to post there, but you can recommend links for example. Just show the fans you use the page and they can always find you there.

Another important tip I give you, and is quite obvious this had to come at some point in time, is to promote your page as much as possible. Fans do not appear from nowhere, they usually come from other people’s links and recommendations. Do some marketing, maybe viral, and try to use every source you have to bring more users to your Facebook page. It is a great way to keep them informed and talk to them once you convince them to click on the Like button, but there is some work to be done until you manage to reach that point. You can also promote your page by paying Facebook to advertise it on the right-hand side of the layout. I don’t know how effective this is, all that I know is that advertising on Facebook is still quite cheap, so you might want to try this once or twice, maybe it will work for you.

When you interact with the users and present the services you offer, try to talk from the perspective of the prospective client, not from yours. Do not emphasize the features of your solutions, but what the user can get if he pays you. “Web design solutions, delivered fast, according to the latest trend and at an affordable price for you!” is a good example of a catch phrase you could use.

Having a Facebook page can get very useful for you and your business and it is very good to use all the opportunities the technology gives us nowadays. But even if there are so many options out there, Facebook still is the best of them, and not using it to the maximum potential might show the users you are not interested in social media too much.

What ways of promoting your business on Facebook do you know and use?