Tips for Developing a Facebook Marketing Plan

Facebook seems to have become the go-to platform for small businesses to begin their social media marketing. With its easy accessibility and over 1.15 billion active users per month, Facebook marketing is a great option for businesses looking to promote themselves locally and engage directly with their customers.
In this article, we will consider the seven best ways uses for Facebook in your marketing strategy.

1. Invite Your Customers and Friends

The best way to get the ball rolling and generate likes is to ask your friends, existing customers and employees to get involved. Starting up with a small amount of likes is a lot better than starting with nothing. If an individual stumbles across your page and become interested with the service you provide or the products that you sell it may be a little off-putting to realise that the page has no followers. Likes = establishment. If people have willingly decided to engage with your company on Facebook it must be worth engaging with.

2. Up your Content

The content that you share on all of your social media accounts should be as exciting and as relevant as possible. Consider sharing high quality images and links to external articles of relevance to your business as well as posts that direct customers to your own website.
Facebook marketing isn’t all about promoting your services; sometimes people just want a little light-hearted fun. Many larger companies post special offers or online competitions towards the end of the week to get their customers involved and updated. Although this may be a stretch, smaller businesses can still keep the engagement flowing with entertaining images, videos and status updates.

3. Promote Your Facebook Page

Promoting a Facebook page is as simple as adding an icon to a website, copying it into the header or footer of an email newsletter or writing it a business card – any place where you deem a Facebook address to be acceptable. Subtly adding it to an email signature, for example, will increase its reach if you are prone to getting in touch with customers on a daily basis.

4. Schedule Status Updates

An effective and efficient way to ensure that your status updates are sent out evenly throughout the week is to use scheduling software such as Buffer or Hootsuite. These free programs enable you to update a number of social media platforms, scheduling your updates at the times that you want them posted. Apart from saving you from writing them throughout the day and it eliminates the need for a social media writer as you can do a week, possibly a month’s work in one day.

5. Use Facebook Ads

If you’re looking to expand your reach and increase traffic to your site, Facebook adverts can be a great way of doing so. Since Facebook changed their algorithm, not all of your page’s posts will be visible on followers’ newsfeeds. This can be problematic for businesses employing a Facebook marketing plan as customers are unaware of new updates or changes to your business unless they specifically search for your page. Only opt for this strategy if you happy with the cost per like and believe the conversion rate will offset it – this may become a little pricey!

6. Integrate Social Media Sharing

It’s easy to integrate your social media accounts with other parts of your online business. Think about adding social media sharing buttons or plug-ins to your website will make it easy for customers to share your content. Once a customer has shared a post or page on Facebook it will open up the expanse that it reaches, allowing more users to connect with your business.

7. Engage with Your Customers

The most important use of a social media account is to be social. Interacting with your followers by responding to messages and wall posts and answering any questions that they have regarding your services will drastically effect your online reputation. Creating a dialogue with frequent followers when they comment on a post will make the service seem more personal and enticing.

To Wrap Up…

 
Like all social media platforms it is important to find a balance between posting content relevant to your business, promoting your products and services and being fun and engaging. Inject a good mix of these into your business’ Facebook page and you’ll soon see a change in customer engagement and reap the benefits of great Facebook marketing!