Is it still worth using Facebook as a small business owner?

I get a lot of questions from business owners who tell me that their Facebook page doesn’t get much attention from their followers and is it even worth using Facebook for their business?

Algorithm changes that seem to favour likes and shares over anything else has meant that some business owners are struggling to get traction with their Facebook page, but I don’t think you should abandon it completely.

There’s always going to a place for Facebook in a strong social media strategy that looks at all aspects of marketing – it’s an important piece of the jigsaw puzzle.

In this blog I want to run through the reasons you should still be using Facebook and hopefully give you a new perspective on things. If you haven’t set up a Facebook page for your business yet, make sure you read my blog explaining the basics and how to make it work well for you.

Facebook is great for gaining brand awareness for your business

It isn’t always about the likes and follows with Facebook.

With 78 million business pages on Facebook, you’re facing hefty competition if you’re aiming to be popular and get noticed. Sure, clicks and likes are good to have and have a role to play in social media marketing but raising brand awareness is just as important, if not more so.

I find a lot of B2B business owners believe they struggle with Facebook because their target audience isn’t on there, i.e. other business owners. That I do have to disagree with as most us have a personal Facebook account. While we may not interact with service based business pages often, we’ll certainly take a quick look at reviews and testimonials when checking a business out.

In fact, it might surprise you to hear that 54% of B2B marketers say Facebook is their most important platform, which is an increase from last year of 11%! While the benefits may not be obvious, they’re still there!

Facebook is fantastic for boosting your website’s SEO

Most of your selling will take place on your website, but you need to be sending lots of traffic to it to win new customers, and Facebook is great for that.

One way that you get web traffic is through search engine optimisation, and one of the key factors that determines your ranking is external links. Every time someone visits your website from a link on another website, like Facebook, search engines take note.

Facebook is valued by these search engines because it’s such a popular website, so if you put lots of links on there that lead back to your website you’re naturally improving your SEO.

How do you do that? You can:

• share your blogs
• share links to sales and testimonial pages in your posts
• drop relevant links in Facebook live video comments
• make sure you link back to your website in the information box on your page

Facebook is fantastic for promoting your services

If you sell products then it’s easy to promote what you do through pictures, video reviews and testimonials from happy customers, but what you do if you sell services?

Well, the same principle applies, you just need to think outside the box a little when it comes to content.

You can share pictures of yourself hard at work, or with your office cat or dog.

You can do Facebook lives to answer questions that your customers have difficulty with, do a “how to” guide or simply get to know your target audience. Did you know that 71% of Facebook users have increased their video viewing in the last year alone?

You can run polls to find out what your target audience are really interested in.

There’ are a ton of ideas out there that you can borrow from other business pages, so take a look and remember to interact with them too!

Let’s also talk about Facebook Ads.

Yes, they can work well but you need to run them through the dedicated ad manager for best results. This will enable you to hone in on the audience for the campaign, decide on the call to action that’s right for you, and evaluate the results.

I will say that Facebook Ads can be tricky to get right but when an average Facebook user clicks on 8 ads per month, it’s a great way to reach your audience and get the attention you’re looking for.

Facebook is great for giving your target audience what they want

While you might want to sell through your business page, that isn’t always what your target audience want, and might be why it hasn’t worked out too well for you so far.

Some people will visit your Facebook page to get your website address, phone number or email. These people may still buy from you, and might not even mention Facebook, but they have used the page to get access to you and what you do.

Some business owners use Facebook to set up appointments because they know it’s easier for their customers than having to ring you, or visit in store if you have premises.

And some customers, will visit your Facebook page just to give feedback.

This kind of “social proof” is worth its weight in gold as other potential customers will check out the reviews to decide if you’re worth buying from. I know of some people who won’t buy from anyone with less than 5 star reviews!

Hopefully you can see now that there’s so much more to Facebook than pushing what you do at your target audience, and will give some of these ideas a go with your business page. Let me know how you get on, and if you need any help or advice on Facebook, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me at 07973 924 589.