Six quick tips to get amazing results from your business Facebook page

Starting a Facebook page is pretty high on the to-do list for most new businesses today. But what do you do with a page once you start it? And how can you ensure you’re getting the most out of it?

If you’re struggling to find a strategy that works, don’t worry. Inbound marketing expert Don Seckler shares six quick tips to help you get amazing results from your business Facebook page.

Using Facebook for business is easier than you may think

Social media is all around us. Like most of us, I’m guessing you may check your Facebook account many times in the average day – liking the latest pictures of your cousin’s children, or nodding in agreement with some words of wisdom a friend has posted.

But as comfortable and confident as you may feel engaging with people on Facebook for personal reasons, using the social media platform to promote your own business is a whole different kettle of fish – and one that many of us feel wary, confused and sometimes even a little frightened of!

The good news is that using Facebook for business is actually easier than you probably think. Like any marketing effort, it will take a bit of planning, execution and analysis, but with the right knowledge, even a complete beginner to Facebook can quickly reap the benefits.

Six quick tips to get amazing results from Facebook

To help you start getting better results from your business Facebook page, here are my six quick tips.

1) Focus

If you aren’t currently doing any social media for your business, and you’re not sure where to start, focus on the platform you’re most familiar with. And for most people that will be Facebook.

Start by posting once a day for a week, just on Facebook. Rather than trying to achieve success on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook all at the same time, start small and focus. Once you are comfortable and generating some results, then you can expand out to another social platform.

2) Post valuable content

Your goal in using social media for your business is to help your business grow. And in order to achieve that goal you need to post content that your followers find valuable.

What kind of content your followers find valuable is going to vary by industry, and most likely it will vary between businesses in the same industry. So you’ll need to test and see which kind of posts work best for you.

You can tell if your followers find your content valuable by seeing if they interact with content. Just spend some time thinking about what would appeal to you if you were your customer. What would you find helpful or interesting?

If you have a bakery for example, your followers might find pictures of your tasty treats very interesting or share-worthy. And if you are an accounting firm, you could post tips on recordkeeping for tax time.

3) Get engagement

An important part of the social media puzzle is engagement with your followers. Liking, sharing and commenting all show engagement with your content.

Engagement is especially important on Facebook – if no one engages with your posts, Facebook will not show your future posts to your followers.

So make engagement a priority. Asking questions is a great tactic to stoke the engagement fires. People will react to questions that touch their base emotions, but I would stay away from politics, religion and other divisive subjects.

Cute always works well – people love babies, kittens and puppies. If you can work those into an image you’re going to get likes and shares.

We also love food images, beautiful scenery, patriotic images and sometimes even sad images can work if done respectfully.

To give you an example of one way you can get engagement, let’s use our baker example. To try and get some response from your followers, you could post a picture of two cupcakes, one with chocolate and one with strawberry frosting and ask which one they prefer.

You can even offer a recipe or some other ‘how to’ information that they would find useful.

4) Post enough

How much is enough? Well unfortunately, it really varies by platform. But generally you should post once every other day at the very least.

Regular posting will train people who find your posts valuable to anticipate your content. Plus you will be rewarded with more visibility by the search engines and the social platforms themselves for regular posting.

The good news is that you don’t have to post your own original content all the time. Feel free to sprinkle in other content that you find engaging. Even if you post a story from the local newspaper and someone engages with your post the social media platform, it still counts that as engagement for your business (although likely it’s not counted as much as your original content).

5) Don’t post too much

Just like Goldilocks you’re going to have to learn what is ‘just right’. But to give you a head start, no one wants to see 15 Facebook posts a day from anyone – not your followers, and especially not Facebook!

In fact, if you do post 15 times a day you’re probably shooting yourself in the foot. Here’s why. Facebook’s algorithm that decides which posts get shown and which posts get buried mainly focuses on engagement.

If you post 15 times in one day, even if you’re an amazing Facebook post writer with spectacular skills, only a third of those posts at most will get engagement. That means that the other two thirds are getting no engagement. That’s a formula for post-burying by Facebook.

That means that you are much better off posting one or two spectacular posts a day and reaping the Facebook algorithm rewards.

6) Analyse your results and adjust

Facebook has an amazing set of reports that can show you all sorts of useful and actionable data about your posts.

You can see which posts were seen by the most people, which ones had the most engagement and you can even see what time of day your fans are online, which will help you plan what time of day you should be posting for the best shot at engagement.

Look at which posts get the most shares, comments, and likes and use those as a guide for what’s working. Then create more similar types of posts.

Just make sure you throw in a cookie or a tart among all those cupcake pictures and you’ll soon be a Facebook business page master!

What’s your Facebook plan?

Do you use Facebook for business? If so, what’s your strategy? And is it working for you? Do you have any tips to share with us that you have found helpful? If so, please add to comments. We’d love to hear them.

Don Seckler is President of Peak Inbound Marketing. Peak Inbound Marketing helps you get more business from your website by attracting people who are looking for your services and turning them into your customers.