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5 Steps to improving your Facebook business page

pyramid scheme reach for the stars phoenix cards phoenix trading Facebook business page

reach for the stars phoenix cards phoenix tradingI don’t claim to have the best Facebook page there is but I’ve learnt a few tips over the last couple of years and wanted to share them with you. I don’t have any official social media training or background – I’m in the same place as you, just learning as I go along and offering to share my little experience with you. So here are my 5 steps that I have found have increased my reach on my Facebook business page, grew my audience and stopped my posts being ‘lost in space’.

1 Understand your audience
2 Understand how Facebook business pages work.
3 Likes
4 Post reach
5 So what do I post?

Whether you run a Facebook page or a group for your small business, the principles of getting your audience to engage and what to post are still the same. Using Facebook to develop your small business is hard work, like every other aspect of running your small business! Don’t expect it to be easy. Later I’ll post about networking and some ideas of how to network without spending your whole life on Facebook. In the meantime if you want to pop over to my page and say hello, please do, leave me a link and I’ll say hello back on your page but don’t ask me to like just cos you’ve liked my page! As my 4 year old now tells his sisters when I’ve said no to something, ‘Not happening!’ (Read on and you’ll see why)

www.facebook.com/cardsandgiftwrap.co.uk

1 Understand your audience

Firstly, you need to ask yourself, ‘Why do people go on FB?’

Facebook is not an online shopping platform, though people do use it to shop. Most people go on Facebook to catch up with friends, read something funny or see what the latest gossip is. In short they want to feel connected to something.

They generally don’t want to see adverts, horror stories or political/religious posts. Therefore keep your page fun and light hearted.

People want stories!

2 Understand how Facebook business pages work.

Facebook chooses which posts to show people. Unless someone has marked your page to receive all notifications from your page (which to be honest they are unlikely to do as I doubt your page is their main priority for going on Facebook)…then they won’t see your post unless Facebook decides to put it in their newsfeed.

Facebook will show posts that it thinks people will engage with (that means like, comment or click on).

There is no definitive list of words not to use but it does seem that words like ‘offer’, ‘sell’, ‘price’, ‘website’ etc will make your post less likely to be shown. Facebook wants you to pay for these posts as they are advertising. In my business I am not allowed to pay for boosting posts…and to be honest I wouldn’t want to. If my Facebook friends are anything like me they will be switched off by a ‘sponsored’ post! As a Facebook user I don’t want to see adverts.

So your posts need to be ‘engaging’.

3 Likes

Firstly – you want people who like your Facebook business page, to actually ‘like’ your page. No point someone clicking the ‘like page’ button and then not wanting to see anything you post. That makes Facebook think you’re not a very interesting page and therefore they are less likely to share your posts.

Who do you want to like your page? I would suggest that you want your friends to like it first – they already know you and are most likely to engage with anything you post. Surely the start to building any business is to engage with the people who already know and trust you – after all if you’re selling anything (product, service, idea) you have to sell you first.

You can invite everyone you are friends with on Facebook to ‘like’ your Facebook business page. On a desktop go to your page and scroll down the left hand side.Invite friends facebook page

You’ll see the invite friends option at the bottom of that list. Click that then invite everyone you know.

The next way to get more likes is to start networking – but I’m going to do a separate post on that as it’s quite a big topic.

DON’T get hung up on likes – you may invite all your friends, they might accept and decide the next day to unlike your page – that’s cool, they weren’t your target audience then, they weren’t going to engage and you’re better off without them.

DON’T do ‘like for like’ – not worth it – both you and the other page end up with a meaningless like, makes your figures look good but doesn’t impress Mr Facebook and makes him less likely to share your posts.

You want people who like your page to  really like your page so they’ll engage. (Think I might repeat myself a few times here – it’s important!)

4 Post reach

Your reach is all to do with how many people see your post. This is boosted by how many people like, comment or click on your post.

There are different sorts of posts, mainly 3 (status, photo, video).

  • A status is just a statement. A status that is brief and funny, or asks a simple question can be successful. Of course questions need to be answered so that helps to get a comment too.
  • Photos obviously help to show off products, this works well for me as I sell gorgeous Phoenix cards. I simply upload the photo onto my Facebook page with a nice comment.
Stop trying to sell the products

People want stories. Tell them a story and pick a photo that suits what you want to say. By all means put at the end of your post what the image is that you’re sharing, or put a link in the comments, below your post, to your website (don’t do it in the post, I have found it reduces the chances of Facebook showing it to anyone!)

  • Videos are great and usually get seen by a lot more people. You can do this in two ways – you can make a video on youtube, you don’t need a camera – you can do it via a slideshow of images, then share the video on Facebook. You can also do a slideshow of images (3-7 images) on Facebook directly.

create a slideshow on facebook page

Can you see where you go to post a status or a photo? If you click photo you now get 4 options with the last being ‘create slideshow’ – simply choose your (up to) 7 images and write a post to go with it.

It’s all about the clicks!

If you do long posts where people have to click on it to read the end then Facebook thinks that your audience are interested in your post and will show it to more people.

Here’s a post I did recently that got really good reach (my normal reach is about 200 people seeing a post)

good post on facebook page good reach

You can see that 1,100 people saw that post – why? Because it was personal, most people who engage with my page are friends so they know my daughter and found it funny. It had a nice picture and people had to click on it to see the whole story.

If I click on the bit that says 1,100 people reached you’ll see what I mean about clicks

clicks on facebook page post

It’s not a perfect post – it didn’t sell anything or produce any leads – I didn’t do any ‘call to action’ like sharing where the image was from or my website link or say I was putting an order in. (might have if I’d realised it would reach so many people!!!) Obviously I don’t want to put a call to action in every Facebook business post, not when I post between 2-5 times a day.

5 So what do I post?

Funny, engaging stories

Quotes or sayings – these work well for me. I use Canva to put the quote on to one of our notecard images, I can then put my website link on the picture, not the post writing, which I think seems not to stop FB showing it to people!

A collage of images – again I use Canva to do this – I think it means that some people will click on the image to see the detail and therefore FB shows it to more people. Picmonkey is also another good site especially for photographs.

Here’s an example of one I made for my page

cake facebook busuness

National Days – if you’re stuck there are some good websites like nationalwhateverday.com that tell you what supposed national days are (it’s American but don’t think that really matters whatever country you are in). Write an interesting fact and find an image to match, of a product if you can.

Seasonal posts – Valentines Day, Mothers Day, Christmas…etc

Personal stories – why do you do what you do? For me, being a Phoenix Trader involves eating a lot of cake and luckily people like posts with cake on them! – with these you want a ‘call to action’ something like ‘ask me if you’d like to know how you can do this too’.

Videos – obviously you can make your own but you can also share other peoples. Keep a look out in your personal newsfeed for videos that others share and that get a lot of views (it usually says under the video how many people have viewed it). You don’t have to share immediately – if you click on the little down arrow at the top right hand side of the video you can ‘save for later’. Then you can share it when you’re stuck for something else to share. It might not lead people to buy anything or join your business but it improves your reach and helps to get people to like you!

 

Finally – a few DON’Ts!

DON’T

  • share anything that is controversial- political, religious or otherwise.
  • whinge, e.g. don’t say ‘no one is seeing my posts so blah blah blah’ – it’s very tempting but to be honest most people couldn’t care less, you’re not going to get any sympathy!
  • share anything too personal about your children or anyone else (I probably cross the line occasionally on this because I innocently think I’m safe living on the edge of the world as I do).
  • share a photo of someone without their permission.

 

PS – IF THIS HAS BEEN USEFUL TO YOU, OR IF YOU’D LIKE TO ADD YOUR TIPS, PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT.

PPS – If you liked this you might like 5 Ideas for Networking with your Facebook Page