How To Build An Effective Facebook Page For Business
Facebook cannot be ignored as it has became a powerful machinery for businesses who wish to take on the social media marketing endeavour. To be able to fully use this feature, you must ensure that the Facebook page is properly optimized. This is to assure that traffics that reached your business page can convert highly and effectively.
If link-baiting is popular in article writing for SEO purposes, Facebook page contents must have similar ‘link-baiting’ capabilities.
Here is a few points that you can optimize to make sure that your Facebook page emerge as a powerful business arsenal that boost conversion rate to your corporate website and business;
Wall
Behaves like a notice board, you might want to populate the wall with stuffs related to your business nature, offerings, announcement and news-buzz. You can have them done manually or automatically. If this is to be done automatically, make sure you have a company blog that has access to services like Ping.FM.
RSS and tweets from Twitter can be fed to the pages seamlessly.If this is to be done manually, make sure that your business have a Facebook page caretaker to do that. His/her function is to post messages in the page on-the-fly as soon as it happens before your blogger even blogs about it.
This is to ensure news always stay fresh and new so that your viewers will have the earliest grasp on your company/business happenings. Encourage alot of ‘Likes’ as much as you can.
Photos
Before launching this, make sure that certain photo uploads are only restricted to your page administrators. Remember, this is not a community or club page. This is entirely corporate, and you have to maintain your ‘corporatey’ image all the time.
Lock this type of corporatey uploads to public. Upload meaningful, exciting and interesting photos related to your product offerings and business. Encourage people to comment, and keep the comment flowing.Photos that bring value for example; step by step pictures of how to use a physical product; you can encourage a section where fans are allowed to upload your products that they are satisfied using, and encourage them to leave few messages as testimonials or reviews .
For businesses that offer services, you can show pictures of your team at work. Comment positively on the healthy work environment that your staffs have been working in. They will likely to encourage job hunters to apply a job from you company too!
Videos
You might have learnt about the business successes in Youtube, and pairing them with your Facebook page they made formidable business arsenal for your business. Videos can spread virally and can get your message across faster and further across niches.
Encourage videoing product launches, conventions, expos and events that your company has participated.On the less formal side, you can post company functions such as annual dinners, charity nights or Christmas parties too. Do a journo style reporting where you can interview employees from top level to junior level asking them their opinions about the company and the business stating the good and positive stuff about the company.
Upload the best bits which is funny, exciting and memorable that fits well for a 10 minute clip. Avoid the boring parts like long speeches from the CEO and the big guns. Your audience had no patience for that! Try videoing the venue and location of your business locations for example showing the environment and surrounding of your main HQ, your branches and warehouses (whichever applies).
Downloadables
Some viewers might have found your Facebook page first rather than your company site. Facebook is undeniably
ranked very high in the search engines, and not surprising if your company Facebook page appears in the search engine higher or further up in the SERPs compared to your corporate website.
To make sure that you don’t miss out on customers needing guide, assistance, manual and catalogues even though they have not reach your official website, you can offer downloadables PDF/Word files such as product specs, product manual, trial softwares, catalogue, flyers/brochures in your Facebook page. A KMZ/KML file of your business location is one added bonus for Google Earth/Map fanatics!
Customizations
FBML – Facebook Markup Language, the de fecto scripting language in your Facebook page. Learn them, though not extensively, it can project your Facebook page to stand-out from the rest with customized landing pages and apps of your own.
With the usage of FBML you can launch your advertising campaigns such as squeeze pages and landing pages that will funnel them to your sales page in your official website. FBML offers alot of interactivity once you muster it. You can start creating app pages that Facebook does not have, making them unique and adds value to your page.
Don’t forget to add Static FBML app to your business page first before scripting your FBML. This can be done by going to the Static FBML app page and click ‘Add to My Page’ on the top left. it will prompt you with the selection of pages that you have setup, choose the corresponding page to your business and add them. Once done you can start putting them on the tab or box in your page. By now this app became editable, so feel free to jazz up the page according to your needs!
Offline Marketing
Have this done in FBML or post them as a box on the page’s sidebar. This is to provide continuity to your offline marketing campaigns that was traditionally enforced by banners, buntings, brochures, flyers and yellowpages. Tell your viewers if there is any sale or discounts ongoing at your place.
Combined with call-to-action phrases they complement your campaigns. You can go to the page settings to ensure that your landing page campaign is the first page viewed by your users once they have landed on the page.
Call To Action (C2A)
If you think call-to-action works only on internet marketing minisite squeeze pages and landing pages, then think again. Viewers are the same all over the internet. You need to encourage them, even on a knee jerk to call them to take actions.
Popular C2A’s like ‘Buy Now’, ‘ Click Here’, ‘Download This’, ‘Free Trial’, ‘Free Copy’, ‘Signup Now’ etc can be used throughout the page. Use them sparingly so that you don’t look like as if you are so desperate to get a customer! Decorate the ads with neat, clean and tidy colours.
Avoid distractions by focusing on the products that you intend to make a sale. Write good stuff about them and pair them with good C2As.
Information
Some business owners tend to overlook this by not paying to much attention in filling up the information spaces of their Facebook page. This is something that you should not ignore! Filling them up gave impression to the viewers that you are serious about your business and marketing yourself instead of giving the impression that you are actually setting up a squatter page.
Email, web address, corporate logo, contact number, product offering and description is a must have! Never left those information blank. If you are blank about yourself, what can you expect the viewers have about you? BLANK of course!
Encourage direct interactions
This can be executed by doing competition, contests, polls and surveys. Viewers like to be engaged and stimulated. Offer something that they can ‘play’ around in your page. This is to keep bounce rates to a minimum by keeping them excited to a certain topic that your page offers.
To maximize interaction, you can advertise directly in Facebook adverts. This make sure that your business page appears in the targeted audience that you have specified when you enrolled in the program. Once published, user can start engaging your page as soon as they click on the adverts.
The level of interest will determine whether or not they will stay or leave. To make sure they rate of them staying is high, do ensure that your page interactiveness is up to a top notch!
Data collecting
Every business wish to have their business flourish further and stays afloat competitively. To be able to do that, they need a mechanism to gauge with numbers that the activity in the page generates. The cool thing about Facebook page is there is a build in analytics in the form of graphs and charts for you to monitor the level of interactiveness of your page based on a span in a weekly or monthly period.
Your analysts can work on the numbers here and that can be made invaluable to your long term business goals and pathways. From the numbers you can determine what works and what is not, and you foresee how your business is going in the long run. Use it well as these analytics can’t go wrong.
There you go, 10 of my best points in setting up an effective Facebook business page.