Should You Be Marketing Your Small Business on Facebook?

Marketing a small business is no easy task. These days, just about every business, small or large, has a carefully constructed online marketing campaign. Without an online presence, it’s hard for even small brick and mortar businesses to succeed. Many customers want to be able to research a company online before patronizing them.

For a small organization, creating an online marketing plan can feel overwhelming. With all of the social media platforms available today, the idea of establishing a presence on all of them can feel near impossible.

Despite the plethora of social media platforms out there, Facebook remains one of the most useful social media platforms for entrepreneurs. Here’s some reasons why Facebook can be useful in helping you to market your small business and how you can make the most of this platform.

Facebook Is The Largest Social Media Platform

While we often talk about the wide array of social media platforms available to marketers, it’s important to remember that Facebook is indeed the largest of them all and the platform that is most ingrained into the average person’s daily life. Facebook boasts a whopping 1.59 billion users; to provide some perspective, the second largest platform, Twitter, only boasts 400 million users.

This means two things for marketers. First and foremost, it means that it’s pretty essential that your social media marketing campaign is anchored by your efforts on Facebook. Second, it means that a lot of people are trying to promote their business on the platform, so you have to use the right methods and strategies if you want to stand out.

What The Facebook Market Wants

In the early days of Facebook, it was comically easy to make a quick buck on the platform, even for unscrupulous types who were selling junk. This is because people didn’t yet have a strong grasp of when they were or were not being targeted by advertisers. Today, people have a pretty savvy understanding of what is an ad and what isn’t.

Today’s Facebook markets is a big fan of video and image content. Although the platform remains largely text driven, people are more prone to share something that has a visual component. However, that’s not to say that text posts are completely ignored. People will share and comment on text based posts, provided that they’re offering something of real value.

Facebook users don’t like spam and they don’t like lazy content. For a business to rise to the top, it’s imperative that posts are of the utmost quality and actually add something to the larger conversation. It’s a bad idea to blindly “spam” your audience with dozens of junk posts a day. Instead, focus on one or two quality posts that will actually garner likes and shares.

The Growing Importance Of Reviews

Facebook users are able to review businesses directly on their Facebook page. The owner of the page cannot alter these reviews and can only request for them to be taken down should they violate the platform’s terms of service.

While reviews and testimonials make entrepreneurs nervous because they’re difficult to control, a positive review is a more effective piece of marketing than any post could ever hope to be. For example, if you were marketing a web based training program, you could bombard your audience with compelling statuses all day. However, the word of students who rank your company as one of the better web based training programs that they’ve tried is a much more compelling advertisement.

While you can offer customers incentives, such as coupons or discounts, for a positive review, the best way to rack up good reviews will always be to create a stellar customer service experience.

Making The Most Out Of Facebook

You should absolutely be using Facebook to market your small business. Remember, your goal should always be to create compelling content that people want to share and to stay in good standing under your customer reviews. If you can do those things, you can have a lot of success on Facebook.

Source: smallbusiness.com