Facebook: Small Business Pages

Here are a few basic tips for you and your Facebook page.

Interact with Your Community

Social media is based upon social interaction, communicating, sharing and building relationships. On Facebook we have the opportunity to do that in many different ways. A few to get us started which are extremely affective are as follows;

• Follow like minded businesses, people, and others in the community you are operating in. Most towns and community groups have Facebook pages of their own, such as community boards.
• share with the community you are a part of.
• always respond to comments on your page
• comment on other pages posts, if you want people to interact with you, you have to first interact with them. 

Its not About You!

The art of posting on your page is something that is reasonably hard to tackle. What do I post, how do I post it and when do I do so.
These things are completely dependant on who we are trying to reach and communicate with. Every marketing campaign should begin with the preliminary question of: who is the target audience?

• who are they?
• what groups do they operate in?
• what do they care about?
• how do they talk?
• what do they need/want?

What we are posting should be all about what our audience wants hear, not necessarily what we want to say.

Therefore we can lead into the 1-4 posting ratio.

1-4 Ratio

When it comes to posting on most social media platforms the best rule of thumb is the 1-4 ratio. That is, 1 of your own posts to every 4 you have shared from another site, group, or organisation.
On social media people don't just want to be "sold to," they don't just want people yelling at them with sales items and promotions. If this is all you are posting them people will be very quick to "un-follow."

Pictures

Have them. Just posting words is meaningless. Advertising has transformed in the recent past from being a means of telling the consumer what a product does, to showing a consumer how the product makes them feel.
Consumers emotionally connect with photos, they relate and can get excited about a page that is colourful and interactive. There is nothing worse than a business page which just long paragraphs of monotonously written updates.
Throw some colour in there.

Doesn't that make you feel happy? :)