How to Create and Optimize Your Facebook Business Page

With almost 2.7 billion monthly active users as of second quarter of 2020, Facebook is known as the most powerful social networking tool. Given its enormous reach, businesses can benefit from this social media platform to promote products and services to a wide audience. Also known as a Facebook Business page.

On top of that, Facebook is a fast, inexpensive and effective way to get in touch with customers. You can easily share basic information about your business, engage with your customers and reach your target audience through (paid) campaigns.

Although Facebook changes its rules and algorithm frequently, here are some tips to get you started using Facebook for business.

Creating your Facebook business page

The first logical step for getting your business active on Facebook is creating and optimizing your Facebook page.

Creating a Facebook business page is free and has only one condition: you must have a personal Facebook profile. A Facebook page is different from a Facebook profile since profiles must represent individuals and are not meant for businesses.

Follow Facebook’s on-screen instructions right here to create a Facebook page.

By immediately adding some content when creating your Facebook page, your page will be attractive for your first fans:

• Add a profile picture, for example the name, logo or icon of your brand. Keep the composition simple and easily recognizable.
• Add a cover photo, for example a picture of the products or services your company has to offer or some general company pictures of your co-workers.
• Add some necessary information about your company. Summarize in a few sentences what your company is about and add your contact details.
• Add some posts (see below ‘Types of posts’) to show your first fans that you’re open for interaction.

Spreading content through different types of posts

As this is case with content on your Facebook profile, messages on your Facebook business page can also be posted in different ways. Let’s have a look at the main types of posts.

Text only

The most basic post is a text post, with no images, videos or links involved. This type of post is the easiest one to create, but probably also the least engaging one. By attaching multimedia, chances are high that your post will be more visible in the newsfeed of your followers.

Side note: since almost everyone is adding multimedia to their posts nowadays, a text post could also stand out in the newsfeed because of its simplicity. By posing a question to your audience for example, a simple text post can still be engaging.

Image

Facebook users tend to respond more to posts that are accompanied by outstanding images. You can add one or multiple images to your post, but the choice of your picture is crucial. A relevant, visual appealing and high quality picture will help to reinforce your message.

Link

If you want to drive traffic to your website, you should create link posts. They show a preview of the link attached, usually with an image, headline and a description. An appealing title in your article engages the user to click.

Since this type of post is easily clickable, conversion to your website is stimulated but it will lower your post’s reach as the algorithm doesn’t like links.

Video

Videos do great on the platform and are currently the most popular type of post.

We would advise you to upload a native video, instead of using a YouTube link. By uploading a native video, the video will start playing automatically when users are scrolling through the newsfeed. Therefore your dynamic content will immediately grab your audience’s attention.

When you upload a YouTube link to your post, the video will not play automatically in the newsfeed. Facebook users will have to click on the directed link to YouTube before watching the video. On top of that, Facebook doesn’t want its users to be led away by clicking on a YouTube link, so the algorithm will show your organic post to fewer users.

Apart from uploading existing videos, you can also create a Facebook Live video. By broadcasting a video live on Facebook, you create more excitement and you can connect with your followers in real time.

Stories, polls and events

Next to the main types of posts mentioned above, you could vary with some other ways to distribute your content on Facebook. A brief sum up:

• Facebook stories, based on Instagram stories, are meant for easy, temporary content and disappear after 24 hours.
• With polls you can turn your post into a question your audience can answer, choosing between two options.
• By creating events you can include fans, followers, customers in a number of activities (for example a webinar, product launch, grand opening, celebration).

Getting help from Facebook features

Facebook has some features available that helps your Facebook business page with managing posts or reaching your Facebook audience in a different way. Have a look at this concise overview of some useful features.

Facebook Advertising

When your organic posts do not reach the audience you want to reach, you could benefit from Facebook advertising. By spending some advertising budget you can target the right audience, based on demographics and behaviours, with different ads.

You will have to set up a Facebook advertising account through Facebook Business Manager in order to organize and manage your ads. Next, you will be able to set up a daily or total budget, select the amount of time your ad should run and define your target audience.

Facebook Groups

If you have some content to share that is not relevant for all your Facebook fans, creating a Facebook Group would be a good idea. A Facebook Group is an online community where you can gather customers around one specific topic.

Since members of this group are a targeted, highly perceptive audience, it will be easier to discuss and share ideas around common interest, or to do a product trail for example.

Facebook chatbot

If you’re looking for another touch point to engage directly with your customers, Facebook chatbot is the answer. You can create a Facebook messenger bot that automatically sends messages about interesting content and great deals to your target group.

With the Facebook chatbot you can improve customer care, build trust with your customers and reach your audience directly.

Facebook Insights

Measuring the effectiveness of your social campaigns means a great deal in improving your posts. Facebook Insights helps you to keep track of your efforts.

With this free analytics tool you can export data on three different levels for a selected period of time. Page data shows the page views, number of people reached, number of post engagement, new likes vs un-likes etc. on page level, while post data measures the reach and engagement for individual posts. With video data you can break down your video metrics.

Conclusion

Facebook is an interactive platform where you can use several features and tactics for improving your Facebook business page. The first step when starting promoting your page on Facebook is to get the basics right. After having used the platform for a while, you will learn what works (and what doesn’t work) for your audience.

Applying the tactics above, together with keeping track of your results and keeping up with the latest trends, you will be able to manage your business page successfully.