6 min
49% of all Facebook users like a Facebook page to support a brand they like . By now, it’s obvious that Facebook is a platform that can not only help you to boost awareness but also build a community. Creating an image for your brand is one of the main factors of a successful online business.
Facebook is an excellent platform to help build your brand. But although it’s a no-brainer, you need to act carefully and considerately. It’s easy to make mistakes when you begin to market yourself, among them:
- Posting inappropriate content
- Getting too pushy with asking for likes, comments, or shares
- Publishing under the wrong profile
- Accidentally promoting a competitor
- Poor management of automatic publications
- Not responding to customers or prospects
- Deleting negative feedback
To help you prevent mistakes and make your efforts succeed, here are 8 handpicked tactics to build a community on Facebook.
1. Set Up Your Business Page
We see that many SMBs set up a personal page for themselves on Facebook instead of a business page. This is not the best strategy.
Why?
Having a business page allows you to have access to Facebook Insights. That means that you’ll be able to view how your page is performing, and learn which posts have the most engagement (views, clicks, etc…it’s not only about likes). You will also have access to data on your Facebook audience (we’ll explain why that matters in one of the next steps).
So it shouldn’t look like this:
But like this:
The second reason is this:
Increased potential. You’ll be able to inform your potential audience about your field of business, products, awards, and reviews instead of only an age and a birthday from a personal profile.
With a personal profile you can have a maximum of 5000 friends, which immediately limits your potential growth. Last but not least, you can create promotional posts with a business page, which helps attract new fans and customers, and target people with relevant interests.
2. Know Your Audience
Before you begin to market yourself on any platform, it’s always good to have to have a clear understanding of your audience and what they want from you. So, before you start creating content, look at your customer base , look at your business model , and analyze who your prospects are .
One proven approach is to create buyer personas: representations of your ideal customers based on market research and real data about your existing customers. When creating your buyer personas, consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better.
If your main buyer persona is 35-year old Sarah, vegan, urbanite and dog owner, the content you need to post on your Facebook page will differ from when your main buyer persona is 25-year old John, professional bodybuilder and general health fanatic.
3. Post Your Best Content
To stand out from your competitors, you need to be exceptional, and for this reason the best strategy is always quality over quantity. In fact, you will only get reactions if you publish great content .
In addition to this, don’t forget that it’s the Facebook algorithm that decides if your post is seen or not.
It’s better to work with it rather than against it. Play the algorithm right by publishing what it values most, which at the moment are videos, surveys, questions.
The algorithm is constantly updated, so try to stay in the loop with the latest Facebook updates so you can tailor your posts to fit it and get a high reach.
4. Don’t Focus on Selling
It’s good to understand that Facebook is not necessarily a platform to sell your products, it’s a platform that helps you to steer your potential customers to your website or your club, where you can begin to sell.
On social networks, customers are looking for an experience, a way of thinking, something inspiring or entertaining that they are interested in following.
If you come across as a salesperson that uses social networks to push a product, you’re going to have a bad time, and you’re going to miss out on potential customers for sure.
5. Pin Some Posts
Facebook comes with a set of features that you should definitely utilize to market your business. One of them is pinning posts.
As soon as you have a post which is in some way more important than the previous posts, pin it! A pinned post is going to stay at the top of your page, even when you publish other content.
More than just for content distribution, you can use this function to promote important news about your club, promotional videos, new services, and so on.
Go to the top right corner of your post:
A pinned post look like this:
6. Know When the Time is Right
When you have already determined your buyer personas, it’ll be easier to determine the ideal time to post.
You can also use the Facebook Insights to understand your audience’s reactions to posts: what makes them react and when?
You can then adapt to publish only during the best times for your audience and thus reach more people.
Every business has different ideal times. That’s why it’s so important to experiment and check your insights. Research by Hootsuite indicates that an average ideal time is between 1pm and 3pm, while other insights recommend posting during off-work hours, when people are more likely to extensively browse their Facebook timelines.
7. Test to Improve
Tests are majorly important if you want to build up a successful social media strategy. If you only do things one way, without questioning yourself, you are not going anywhere.
To be successful on social networks, you need to test, try, and implement different strategies, to see what’s working and what isn’t: so try different types of photos, videos, and call to actions.
For example, you could try to pin a post with a call to action for a free trial and leave it for two weeks. And then after two weeks, change it for another call to action of your choice (example: a free group class).
Afterwards, compare the results and see what kind of communication works better for your audience.
You can create a call to action with the “learn more” button:
This separate window will open, you can create a CTA here:
You can also create a call to action directly on a post like this:
8. Always Respond
One last point that will make you stand out from competitors will be your ability to react to messages.
Answer every question and complaint on Facebook!
It can be a publication on your page, a message or a comment. Use them to interact and create a solid relationship between you and your audience.
Also don’t forget that anyone who go on your page can see all the previous visitors’ posts, so you need to have an exemplary behavior.
Conclusion
For businesses, the use of Facebook goes far beyond customer care and funny pictures. See it as a marketing platform with the potential to reach every single one of your potentials clients.
While for short term success, going the paid route might be beneficial, you see that businesses that last are those with a flourishing community around their brand. Loyalty through community is a long-term strategy that always pays off in the end.
