Why choose Facebook?

According to 2014 stats there are over 31 million users of Facebook in the UK alone. This is a massive user base and a huge opportunity to market to an array of different age groups as well as build a following of customers who will want to engage with you.

You Vs your Page

There is a major difference between your profile and your page. Your profile is personal to you and cannot be used to represent your business, they are only to be used to represent individual people. At a first glance pages look very similar to profiles but pages have far more tools specifically aimed at businesses. You the person creates the page.

How to create your page

Your first few steps:

• Find the header category that is the best match for your business or organisation. (These can range from “Public Figure” to “Movie Theatre”)
• Update your icon and cover photo
• Add your business address to the page, this allows people to leave reviews once this address is verified.
• Update your descriptions (there is a short and a long one make sure you get both!)
• Links to any other Social media or web site that you have for this business or organisation.
• You can make another person your page admin. They either need to be friends with you or, you can add them if they have liked the page, and you know their Facebook email address (i.e. the email associated with their personal Facebook profile)

Once these steps have been taken you will have quite a filled out looking page the only thing missing now is posts and people to view them!

How to get an audience.

The first port of call for anyone creating a page is to invite your friends on Facebook to like your page. Following this there are a few more steps you can take.

Through joining groups on Facebook that are relevant to your page you can promote your page and gain a following from people who would be interested.

Make sure it is OK to post promotional content within the groups before doing so.

The final (and probably easiest) way to gain views on your post and page is to pay for Facebook advertising, you can set your audience in 3 ways:

• People who like your page
o These people are the people who already like your page this helps make sure that they see the majority of what you pos
• People who like your page and their friends
o This is assuming that people who already like your page will have friends that will also be interested this will do a combination of making sure your posts are seen and making sure that you are introduced to people who might be interested in your page
• Create audiences
o This is a great tool for targeting your customers based on their age, where they live and their interests (Facebook are just about to widen their targeting tools so new changes may mean even better use of your marketing budget.

Facebook advertising is cheap, starting at £3.00 per day.

Time to post!

The actual content of your posts is going to vary greatly depending on what you want to use the page for there are some general rules of thumb though!

• If your post contains an Image try to limit the amount of text associated with it.
• Try not to have a large amount of text in a post as people may miss the point if they cannot see all of the text and have to click to view the full post.
• Regular posting is important because it ensures your content is fresh and your page is more likely to come in peoples news feeds.
• Facebook will provide you with insights about which posts are getting more attention and interaction than others giving you an idea of what works and what doesn’t!
• Link back to your website in your posts to drive traffic effectively.

Other top tips

• After 25 likes you can get a vanity url
• There is a new feature – Call to action button
o This allows you to link to your store directly if you are advertising a product
o You can also get people to sign up to a newsletter or something similar with this feature
o You can create events and offers through the page
o You can customise tabs to suit your business, see: http://bit.ly/1DEo2Hj