What exactly is Facebook? We know it’s the most popular kid in class, but how can you use it to your digital marketing advantage?
Facebook 101: Getting Started
According to Facebook’s Facebook page (seriously), “The Facebook page celebrates how our friends inspire us, support us, and help us discover the world when we connect.” That’s really just a more convoluted way of saying it’s a place where people you know connect through creating posts, sharing stories and images, and waste a bunch of time scrolling through their news feed looking at posts from other people they don’t care that much about.
In nicer terms, Facebook is a social networking platform that allows users to connect to other users, send photos, share updates, and more. You can connect with others through your profile and any page you create under that profile. But we’ll get into that later. First things first, getting started.
Signing up
Signing up for Facebook is pretty simple. Just fill out the form (pictured above) and boom! You have your very own Facebook profile. Of course, creating your profile and completing it are two very different things. Check out these basic steps for completing your profile:
Complete your profile
- Find friends – (This is easier than you think. It’s almost creepy how Facebook finds random people you knew 10 years ago.)
- Add friends (Unless that dude you knew 10 years ago is a complete asshole, don’t get too picky with which people you add as friends. You can always unfollow them, so you don’t see their dumb posts.)
- Fill out your info (work, background, etc.)
- Choose your interests
- Add a profile pic (and a cover photo, don’t get lazy now.)
Before we go any further, we’d like to take this time to clear up some language barriers people struggle with when talking about Facebook. We’ll do this through a simple set of glossary terms:
Facebook Profile – Your personal profile. The very first thing you make when you join the Facebook community – the same thing we just walked you through completing. The part of Facebook where you become friends with other Facebook users.
Facebook Page – Not your personal profile. Not the same thing as your profile. Is not the thing you create when you first join the Facebook community. The part of Facebook where you invite other Facebook users to like your page.
A Facebook Page can only be created with a Facebook profile. There are multiple types of Facebook pages, including community pages, business pages, public figure pages, and more.
Facebook Timeline – Refer to Facebook Homepage
Facebook Homepage – Refer to Facebook Timeline
Profiles vs. Pages
Facebook personal profiles are for real people. Facebook pages are for business, brands, organization and other commercial entities. Although the two may look the same, the easiest way to tell the difference between profiles and pages is that you can friend profiles and like pages. You can’t friend pages or like profiles. Personal profiles always manage pages because you cannot create a page without a profile.
Note: it is against Facebook’s policies to have profiles represent brands/organizations. Any organization, such as a sports team, restaurant, local business, animal shelter, non-profit, should always be on a Facebook PAGE.
How do you create a page (for your business because you already created a Facebook profile for your personal use)?
It is relatively easy to create a Facebook page for your business, brand, etc. Select the “Create Page” found on the left side of your Facebook homepage. You will be taken to a screen that looks like this:
Select the type of page that most accurately reflects your organization or cause and follow the steps. If you aren’t sure which type of page or sub-category to select, don’t worry! Facebook will allow you to change the type of page later. To complete your Facebook page, fill out the page information and add a page photo and cover image.
Tip: You can create more than one page with the same profile. Woah!
Groups
Groups serve a different purpose than pages or profiles. Just like pages, you cannot create a group without first creating a personal profile (so just suck it up and create the profile already). However, Facebook uses groups to help foster discussion about a particular subject/topic. The group pages offer a platform that fosters this discussion— which is not a platform beneficial for official brands and organizations. So don’t try and get creative with a Facebook group before you’ve already established a Facebook business page for your business.
There’s a time and place for Facebook groups in social media marketing, but not for official business. Pages allow public figures/organization to broadcast info to their fans. Don’t get it twisted.
Facebook 102: Facebook Posting
Given the fact that there are Facebook profiles, pages, and groups, it’s only natural there would be a shit-ton of places to post on Facebook. We will only talk about two ways of posting to Facebook here:
Facebook profile posting
Facebook profile posting is easy. When Facebook asks you “What’s on your mind?” on your homepage or personal profile, they’re asking you to post to your profile.
Personal profile posts can include the following:
- Cat videos
- 10,000 pictures of your kid that no one else really cares about
- Your extreme political views that won’t actually change anyone else’s political views, but just piss them off
- Images of what you ate today
- How amazing you are— all those accomplishments you like to boast about
- Why you are angry at some person for doing some stupid thing next to you
Facebook Page Posting
Facebook page posts should NOT include any of the above. Page posts should relate to and represent your page, which is supposed to be representative of your business, brand, organization, etc.
Facebook page posts can include the following:
- Business promotions
- Events coming up
- Tips for your industry
- The latest blog on your company’s website
- Other interesting or funny industry news and memes
Both page posts and profile posts can get likes, comments, shares and other fun reacting options called Facebook Reactions. Just hover your mouse over the post, or press and hold the like button if you’re on mobile, and little reaction faces will pop up, allowing you to react to the post with a like, love, haha, wow, sad, or angry. So you can finally stop liking your friends posts when they post that their grandma or dad died.
Regardless of whether you’re posting to your personal profile or your business page, certain Facebook posts will always get a little extra engagement.
The Right Kind of Facebook Post
- Picture or video (Gets the most engagement of all post types. Don’t forget memes!)
- Engaging questions (Consider currently trending topics involving your industry)
- Positive quotes/words (Facebook prioritizes positivity above negativity)
- Calls-to-action (such as “caption this image” to be fun or “read more here” to get people to go to your website)
- Link to your website!
Here’s an example of a good Facebook post:
(Notice the engaging image and question, the relevant trending hashtag and the website link? All key ingredients to a successful Facebook post.)
Facebook 103: Getting Friends and Page Likes
We’ve already covered this, but just in case:
Profiles get friends. Pages get likes.
Tip: Profile friends don’t matter as much as page likes. Why? Because it doesn’t matter if you are personally a loser, as long your business is more popular. Why? Because you personally being a loser won’t prevent you from making money, but your business being a loser means no one is spending money on your business. And businesses without money… Well, you know.
Follow these tricks to get more Facebook page likes:
Complete your Facebook page info.
This includes your About section with the page overview and the page info. Don’t get stingy on talking about your business now! Fill out both the short descriptions and long description with keywords that describe your business category. Find and add the most appropriate page subcategories. Don’t forget to include your business’s basic information like your address, website, hours, price range, phone number, email, etc.
Consistently post to the page (Refer to The Right Kind of Facebook Post above)
If you want people to like your page, you have to give them reason to. This means posting engaging and relevant posts to your page consistently. Use the tips mentioned above to create posts your audience will want to engage with.
Tip: Don’t overdo it!
- Don’t spam fans with the same self-promoting post over and over
- Do mix up your posts with engaging content, pictures, videos, shared news, calls to action
- Do post to your page two times a day (best practices)
- Don’t post to your Facebook page more than four times per day
- Do use Facebook ads (Refer to Expert level below)
Promote your Facebook page everywhere you go. Do this by sharing your page on your business website, other social media accounts, your store-front location (if applicable), and anywhere else you can think of. Write it on a T-shirt and walk around for all we care, just get out there and let the world know your Facebook page exists.
Facebook 104: Expert Level
So, you got the profile and the pages, the friends and the likes. Now, you just need to start making some money with Facebook marketing. Remember, marketing on Facebook begins with a page. To put it in simple terms:
- You cannot market your personal profile.
- You can (and should) market your business page.
Facebook Insights
As you begin to use Facebook pages for your business consistently (which should include daily posts), you can track your posts and page likes on Facebook Insights. Facebook Insights allow you the ability to see page views, post engagements, total reach, Facebook Reactions, and more. Use these Insights to your advantage to see which posts are getting the most engagement and which strategies are working best.
If you want to start making money with Facebook business pages, you have to pay to play the game. Facebook advertising is your next move.
Facebook Advertising
Facebook advertising is Facebook’s way of making money. They’ve strategically developed a social platform for businesses looking to market themselves on Facebook, by teasing them to think they can use Facebook for free, but then forcing them to pay in the end.
Here are Facebook’s Advertising Options:
- Page post engagement
- Page likes
- Clicks to website
- Website conversions
- App installs
- App engagement
- Event responses
- Offer claims
- Video views
- Local awareness
- Slideshows
- Carousel ads
- Dynamic product ads
To learn more about Facebook advertising campaigns, give us a call, and we’ll set up a Facebook tutorial appointment. Or, you can just throw your money at Facebook because they love pointless spending by billions of local business users who don’t really know what they are doing, it’s up to you.
One last tip:
It’s okay to recycle, repurpose and reuse your content… sometimes.
Facebook content doesn’t disappear the way Twitter tweets do. You can use the same image twice, but not with the exact same message and not within the same week. So take your current content and mix it up. Get creative. Be clever. Make it fresh. Or just call Post Launch to do it for you.
Happy Facebooking!
