As a journalist with an emphasis on social media (including social media marketing) and content management, some companies are still getting their feet wet in regards to the ever changing social media world. I'm sure many of you already know what social media is, but here's the general definition: "websites and applications used for social networking." Social networking these days, means more than just chatting on the phone with someone. You can contact them through many different platforms, Facebook being one of them.
Established in the United States in 2004, worldwide in 2005, Mark Zuckerberg could easily be declared as one of the "founding fathers" of social media, social media marketing, and social networking. Facebook, in my opinion, is one of the first social media accounts that a business of any size needs to get established and honed in on. What do I mean? If you don't know how Facebook works, it won't work for you (and your business).
I've compiled some important facts based on my own personal experiences using Facebook for my own blog fan pages and for clients.
It's as simple as that. Since Facebook was one of the first big social networking sites to really take off (I'm excluding MySpace since it is now primarily used as a music social networking site), it has a little more leverage than Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and even Google+. There are a few things you want to be sure you're doing to utilize Facebook successfully for your business.
1. Be sure to create a business page. This will help you separate personal interaction with business interaction. Publications, restaurants, local businesses and many more genres of companies have a Facebook business page. However, if you're an independent contractor for a company, and your brand/business is you, then don't create a business page. It will defeat the purpose of getting to know your clients on a more intimate level.
2. Update every piece of information on your business page that you can. You want to make it easy for people to find you on Facebook and search engines.
3. Make sure your profile picture and cover photo relate to your business. Your profile picture could easily be your logo, and your cover photo could be a current promotion you have going on. You can Google around to find out what the dimensions are. Mediabistro has a great infographic on photo dimensions for most social media sites, including Facebook.
4. Post status updates frequently, but not too frequently. DO NOT post multiple times in a day. This defeats the purpose of bringing people to your page. You can have 1,000 people like your page and follow your updates in a matter of days, however, if you post 3-4 times per day, those people will turn around and decide not to follow you because your posts are bombarding their news feeds. You don't want this to happen.
5. Learn Facebook insights. Now, I'm not a huge fan of Facebook Insights, and that's because it changes so frequently that you have to learn how the algorithm works all over again. But what Facebook insights is good for, is tracking how many new followers you have and which posts were most popular. This will give you a good gauge as to what type of content to be posting on Facebook.
6. If you can, have content managers for your Facebook business page. This will lessen the load for you. Chances are you have a lot of other important things to do during your day. If you hire a person (like me with Leverage Social Media Marketing) or one of your staffers has minor control over Facebook, you'll know posting and interacting is being taken care of.
7. Speaking of interaction -- be sure to interact with your followers. If someone leaves a comment or sends you a message through Facebook, be sure to reply! That way your audience sees that you're engaged with your followers and that you actually are interested in what they have to say in regards to your content.
8. Be sure to like and follow other business pages. The more interaction the better. If they like your content, their customers will see it and, more likely than not, follow your business page, too.
Those are my top eight tips, but I can guarantee you there's plenty more. I'll be updating regularly with other social networking website tips.
Stay tuned!