In the last blog, I discussed Twitter for Beginners as a part of the Social or Not Too Social Series. This week let’s explore Facebook and see how you can use it for growing your business.

Facebook is an online social networking site, founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004. Facebook helps users exchange messages, photographs and videos to their network online. As of July 2013, Facebook has over 1,110,000,000 active users out of which 680,000,000 use Facebook on their mobile. There has been a 26% increase in Facebook users from 2011 to 2012. On an average all Facebook users spend 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook.

Facebook is available in over 70 languages around the world. Every 20 minutes on Facebook, 1 million links are shared, 2 million friends request sent and 3 million messages sent. The total revenue of 2012 for Facebook was $5,090,000,000.

To grow and establish your business on Facebook, you are required to setup a company page and we will be exploring some fundamentals. A Facebook page makes you discoverable and lets you get connected with your audience directly. You can update your customers/audience in a timely manner and you can use the analytics on the company page to get insight for the activity you do on your company page.

Set Up Your Business Page: Sounds obvious, but this in fact is the first step. If you would like to setup a brand identity for your business on Facebook, you have to create a page. When you make a request to setup the company page, you can request a web address specific to your business name, for example www.facebook.com/AppletreeMarketing. If your business is primarily online, you can use this direct address on business cards or any other printed collateral material to drive more traffic to your business page. When creating a page, complete the details like: opening time, contact number and summary. Add a lovely logo or the key person’s image as the business identifier.

Identify Your Audience: You can reach a much larger audience from business pages than your personal contacts. You can reach specific people, who are most likely to become your customers. To do this, consider what your customers have in common, what is their age, where are they based? To build the audience ask your current contacts, customers and friends to like your Facebook page and promote it to their contacts. Invite your business contacts, and maybe share the page on LinkedIn and Twitter to increase the interactions. You can also host some contests to increase likes on the Facebook page and maybe arrange a giveaway of one of your products or services when you reach your target.

Create Amazing Content: You can post updates, photos, links and more on Facebook page. When sharing content, make sure the content is relevant, interesting and inspiring. When creating content, do not think sales, think sharing and building interest. The rule is the more you give for free, the more you get. You definitely need a call to action when posting things on Facebook, but not all post should have a call to action. Alternate posts you make with useful information, sales messages, product launches, offers, images, links to blog post and any other content. When sharing content, remember to be authentic in your content. If anyone is making a comment on your post, be responsive (human) and engage conversation rather that just being an automated response. Content sharing works, when you are consistent, ad-hoc activity does not generate interest.

Measure and Analyse Activity: Well you have been amazing at putting all that time and effort in creating wonderful content and posting on Facebook. Measure your activity on Facebook using page insights to understand the trends for your activity. You will be able to gauge what is the best time to post your content, what kind of content your audience most engage with and what is the demographic of your audience. The insights you gain, will help you structure your content in the way your audience consume. You can create promotions based on these useful insights.

This is just the starting point for creating your business identity on Facebook and you can use it grow your business easily. When creating a marketing goal for using Facebook, remember good content and consistent activity will help you achieve your target over time.

Do you have questions that I can help with please feel free to ask away…

Until next time, happy posting 😀