Want to leverage Facebook to grow your business online? Here are 5 ways to do it.
Not an hour passes by without a vast majority of people tapping the Facebook icon on their smartphones. They go online to connect with friends, family and companies that offer them products or services.
Harnessing the power of over a billion users, Facebook is a dominant form of social media. And yes, you read that right. A billion users. A seventh of the entire human population on the planet.
With such an audience at your fingertips, it is a no-brainer that you should leverage Facebook to expand your business out of its current confines.
This post will take you through the different steps you can use to poke your business to life with the power of this social media giant.
So, why use Facebook anyway?
Facebook is probably the one social media site that enables total connection amongst different people. These could be your friends, family, colleagues from work or just things you are interested in.
With every post, these groups of people are instantly notified, keeping them up to date with whatever is going on in your life.
The social nature of humans means we are very eager to know what’s going on with the next person. Facebook plays right into this mentality, allowing people to instantaneously keep abreast of each others’ activities.
And it does this perfectly. This infographic shows you just how good Facebook is at keeping people connected.
Courtesy of wearesocial wearesocial
These numbers clearly show that businesses are making a killing off of people’s desire to stay connected through Facebook.
With that in mind, let’s proceed to see how to use this to your advantage.
Are you finding it difficult to keep up with your competition? Take a look at how Facebook can boost your business.
How exactly can you leverage Facebook to grow your business?
Given the different ways people interact with others and brands on Facebook, there are a number of ways you can use to get your business up there.
1. Create your own Facebook Group
A Facebook Group for your business is an excellent idea. On this forum, you are able to interact with your customers and potential customers.
The advantages of having such a group cannot be stressed enough. You have the ability to build a community around your brand’s products and services.
The constant contributions within the group provide valuable information that goes a long way in helping you to make your offerings better.
Jill Stanton of ScrewTheNineToFive offers some excellent advice on how to grow your page.
She says putting a link to the page on your website’s navigation bar is a sure fire way to direct your customers to your Facebook group.
You do not need super coding powers to create a Facebook group for your business. By the end of this short video, you will be a pro at it.
Now you know how to set up a Facebook Group. However, you might be torn between starting up one and going the Facebook Page route.
Related Post: How to Save Time with Social Media Posting
These are two totally different things. The page is the face of your business but, since 2014, it can cost an arm and a leg to get it recognized by a large number of people. Also, you do not get the same interaction with your audience as you would in a Facebook group (especially with the 2018 algorithm changes announced).
So Facebook group it is, yeah?
2. Find and participate in popular Facebook groups
If you do not know how a Facebook group works, it doesn’t hurt one bit to join a few others and see how things play out.
Bean Ninjas founder Meryl Johnston, who built her successful online bookkeeping business through strategic social networking, advises you to join just a few groups and seeing what goes on and participating every now and then. She cautions against joining too many groups in your haste to make yourself a known figure in your business world.
Once you have gotten around to selecting the groups you feel most comfortable in, you can actively engage.
Contribute top-notch content and rise through the ranks as an authority on your industry subject matter.
Through this interaction, you will get to know what others have gone through in their businesses.
You will also glean information that will not only help your business stay afloat but also make it back into port with the fruits of success.
So, once you get onto these platforms, remember to discard the salesy pitches. These could get you thrown out of the group.
3. Utilize Facebook Live Video
Nothing is more intriguing than watching something happen in real time. Since the live broadcast of the infamous police chase and trial of O.J Simpson, the spike in reality TV has been phenomenal.
But I digress, back to the business.
The gist of the matter is that people love watching things happening in real time. To give more gravity to the word ‘social’ in social media, the various sites and apps have integrated live video features onto their platforms.
Look at how many people in the US alone watch online content. And this is just through the devices in their palms.
Find more statistics at Statista
This alone is incentive enough to leverage Facebook Live Video to promote your business.
What makes Live Video platform different from ordinary video content is that you do not have the chance to edit it. That means your audience feels the authenticity of your brand.
Another benefit of doing FB Live is that you can easily repurpose the video recording by embedding it into a blog post, uploading it to youtube, getting it transcribed, and so on.
Not all FB Live videos need to feature your face on them either. Below is an example of a FB Live webinar that Jarrod Robinson did for The PE Geek page. Notice how it’s Jarrod speaking to a set of slides he’d prepared before the live session.
4. Use Community Voices (formerly “Facebook Stories”) for a personalized touch
Over the past few years, a lot of Facebook’s timeline has shifted from personal content to the more commercial type as marketers shared business updates on their personal profiles in an attempt to counter Facebook’s declining organic reach.
With this bottleneck of commercial content, you do not want your potential customer to have to scroll miles through their timeline.
They might not even see your awesome post sandwiched between that ad for a new tacky mobile game and the offer for scholarships in a foreign land.
Community Voices (formerly Facebook Stories), on the other hand, appear on the very top of the page and last only 24 hours.
When you swipe right on your Facebook app, you access the camera. You can then record your content. The app provides some filters and stickers to make the finished product refined.
For example, you can record a few seconds of your team at the water cooler having a laugh. Your audience will love the fact that there are ordinary people behind the logo, thereby relating more to the brand.
5. Leverage Facebook ads
In a virtual world saturated with content, it makes perfect sense to pay so that your content can appear more frequently on your audience’s timeline.
With the outreach Facebook has and its ability to analyze its users, you are able to determine the specific audience you are targeting. Ads are, therefore, a very viable way to get your brand out there.
Now, of course, you are not the only one that has thought of using this method. The trick lies in being able to use it strategically to the benefit of your business. That is not a nut many people have cracked.
Facebook provides different kinds of ads depending on your business and the audience you are after.
Hot traffic ads target the people who are already familiar with your brand to generate sales. This is because they are fans of your pages or have already visited your website.
If, however, you are starting off from zero, you need to use visibility ads. These are the kind that does not offer any hurdles to accessing your content. These hurdles are usually sign-up forms or various redirections to other sites off the app.
Visibility ads, on the other hand, are blog posts or videos that you have made available on Facebook. Since it doesn’t have a salesy approach to it, your audience connects with it on a personal level and starts to build trust with the brand.
Nonetheless, there is no perfect formula for using ads on Facebook. If your desired results do not materialize, you should be flexible enough to change strategy.
Does FB ads need to cost a lot of money?
We recommend you start with a small budget and scale up once you identify the ads that are performing well. If you only had $40 per month to invest in testing Facebok ads, here are some great tips on how you might allocate your budget to get the best bang for your buck.
Related Post: Sales tips: How to turn a cold lead into a paying customer
6. Make use of Facebook Messenger and Chatbots
In the world of technology, things are always up in the air – ever changing. While email is still a pretty good form of communication, the rise of social media apps has brought with it the use of messenger apps.
On Facebook, you can easily take to your friends via Messenger. As a business, you can take advantage of this by using messenger marketing.
While this is similar to email marketing, it takes out the formal aspect. Messenger marketing feels more personalized as you talk to the potential customer one on one.
ManyChat quotes this staggering statistic from a Statista report. The average rate of opening emails in 2016 was just 18.8 percent. This pales greatly when you compare it to messenger app opening rates of 80 percent.
Click-through rates (CTR) for emails were a measly 2.1 percent whereas messenger apps saw a CTR of 30 percent.
This difference is mainly due to the convenience of messenger apps. Facebook has actually made its Messenger app rich, offering the ability to send images and videos. You can also insert call to action buttons.
To begin harnessing the power of Facebook Messenger, you need to create a subscriber’s list.
Your target audience sends a message to your Facebook page and they are automatically added to the list. They needn’t type this message either. It’s as convenient as a click on a CTA button.
On The PE Geek’s Facebook page, you can clearly see this.
You can also embed on your website a button that directly adds your customers to the Messenger list. See this screengrab from the PE Geek website below.
Once you have your list, you can start sending messages. You can also use Chatbots to automatically send out these messages. The algorithms running these bots are more advanced than the tech used in automated emails.
This means that it won’t be any of those annoying emails you find every morning in your inbox.
Facebook is your ultimate business tool
With its widespread use, Facebook already has your target audience waiting for you.
All you need to do is master these various ways to leverage Facebook to grow your business.
Start with choosing 1 of the 5 options mentioned above, and test it for 60 days. We suggest going with the option that’s going to be easiest for you to implement.
Believe me, if done right, the results will surpass your expectations.
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