This weeks Facebook Live’s in the Leading Women in Business Group, have been around the subject of how to make organic Facebook work for your business. The changes in the algorithm over the last couple of years have made it increasingly difficult for business pages to get organic reach.
On average – if you have 100 people on your page you will have to put out between 50 and 100 posts to make sure everybody sees one. That’s a lot of work isn’t it? You might be feeling that it just isn’t worth it. However, there are 2 good reasons why you need a fully functioning and active Facebook page.
2 reasons you need a Facebook Page
Firstly, you can’t advertise from a group or a personal profile, so you will need a business page. Secondly and more importantly even than that (to you – if not to Facebook), is that we are now in the place where your audience EXPECT you to have an active and engaged Facebook Page. If someone who has heard of you is looking for you on Facebook and they can’t find you 2 things will happen.
2 things happen when you don’t have a Facebook Page
First – nature hates a vacuum and so does Facebook. If someone is looking for you on Facebook and you don’t have a page, Facebook will create one for you. This is NOT a good thing. Why? Because you have no control of it. It won’t LOOK like you. It won’t have YOUR content on it. And you won’t even KNOW about it.
Here’s an example.
Now how do you know it is a page made up by Facebook? Well apart from the fact that it looks s**t – that doesn’t necessarily mean it is not a real page. Unfortunately, there are a lot of not very good pages on Facebook. No, how you can tell is near the top, under the picture, on the right it says, “unofficial page”. And when you hover over that it says,
This unofficial Page was created because people on Facebook have shown interest in this place or business. It’s not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone associated with Peter Herds.
Now – Peter Herd is a bakers with a couple of premises in south Manchester. On this page you will see posts from 2013 and 2014. Clearly – they didn’t have a Facebook page at this time. So Facebook, not wanting its users to be disappointed, created one.
Is this how you want your business to be represented? No? Then you need a page.
And the second reason why you definitely need to have an official Facebook Page is….
Your potential customer will go somewhere else. Let me say that again. Your potential client WILL go somewhere else, and they won’t tell you. So, you will never know what you lost.
This also happens if you have a page – but it isn’t very good.
What I mean by that is – some weeks you post a couple of times and other weeks, you don’t post….for weeks.
I can’t stress enough how important it is that you have a presence that is active, reflects your brand and that engages with your potential clients.
Imagine it is 15 years ago – 2004, and someone has just asked you what your website address is. And you say – wait for it – “I don’t have one”. What do you think they are now thinking? Perhaps they think you are a cheapskate. Or that you are a bit old fashioned. Perhaps they are surprised that a business like yours wouldn’t have a website. Whatever is in their heads I think you can agree, it’s not positive.
Well, that’s where we are NOW with social media. If you are NOT where your clients / potential clients expect you to be – then you will be seen as out dated, old fashioned maybe even – not a proper business.
So – what do you need on your Facebook Page and how often should you be posting and engaging
Well we can’t go into everything here in this blog, but here are 5 top tips for your page presence.
You need a great header. Preferably this should be a video header, and at the very least it should be an image that draws the reader in, with a great piece of (short) copy and a CTA. We will go into this in more detail in next weeks blog.
You need a picture of you. In this connected ‘social’ world, now more than ever people want to do business with people they know, like and trust. A faceless Facebook page with just logos on it, just won’t cut the mustard.
Have an About Us that is your story. Your personal, business story, is a short cut for your potential customers to get to know and like and hopefully trust you.
Have a messenger bot. Yes I know – you don’t like AI or the thought of your clients speaking to a bot. But unless you want to be online 24 hours a day – it’s that or risk no engagement with your potential client at the exact moment they want to speak to you.
Use video. Mark Zuckerberg has said that he wants 90% of all content on Facebook to be video by 2020. And what Mark wants, he generally gets. That is telling us that the algorithm is already and will continue to increase its favouritism for video content. Now there are ways of doing video that are not you in front of a camera – but there is no getting away from it – Facebook Live gets 6x the engagement of non live video, which itself gets 2-10x the reach of non video content.
OK – so to the last question
How often to be posting and engaging.
The answer to this question is – often! How often are your audience online? Well that’s when you need to be there. And if you can’t then point 4 above will help. And how do you know? Well the Facebook insights will tell you, or you could ask them!
And how often to post on Facebook?
It has to be once a day or maybe twice. But the important thing is that you are not posting for the sake of it and you are not selling. People don’t go to Facebook to be sold to – but they DO like to find out new things, be entertained, surprised, made to feel like they matter. So – post inspirational, educational, informational and entertaining content that will help your audience.
And ENGAGE with them. Respond to their comments – if you don’t talk to them when they talk to you then there really is NO point being there. If someone comments on your post you need to acknowledge it. That’s what they are hoping for – so fulfil their hopes – show them they matter.
If you’d like more content around how to make social media work for you – either hop over and follow our Facebook Page here or join the Leading Women in Business Group where I Facebook Live most days!