I’m not here to persuade you how important it is to have a social media presence, because if you want your freelance career or small business to succeed, you’ll know already. You’ll also know Facebook can’t be ignored.
But how do you go about marketing yourself or your business on Facebook? Here are our tips for a successful Facebook promotion.
Set up a Facebook Page
On Facebook, the majority of professionals and businesses have Facebook Pages tied to their personal accounts. Pages offer options to run promotions, boost posts, run ad campaigns and constantly monitor the reach of your posts and any advertising you do. If you haven’t already got one, go and set one up right now!
You can also create a group connected to a page, allowing you to build a community that is interested not only in what you have to say and/or sell but shares ideas with other followers with similar interests.
Create a Promotion or Ad
On your page, on the left, you’ll find a promotions link in the menu. This takes you to a page where you can choose to manage existing promotions or choose to create new ones. There are two options here: ‘Promote your website’ and ‘Get more page likes’, both pretty self-explanatory!
Choose either option and you’ll be taken to a page where you can choose:
- The text, call to action and any images or video you want to include
- The audience you want to target your promotion towards, based on demographics, location and interest
- The budget you want to spend
- How long you want your promotion to run for
- Whether you want your promotion to run on Instagram as well
You can also see how your promotion will look on a desktop feed, mobile feed and on Instagram.
If you want to design an ad instead, which gives you more sophisticated options such as image carousels and sliders, you can create a mock-up to see exactly how it will look before you run it by visiting Facebook’s Creative Hub.
You can find a link to the Ads Manager page and another to create an ad at the bottom of your Promotions page.
Keep Images Simple
Think striking and purposeful rather than detailed; close-ups of a staff member, a happy customer or a product are ideal, while wider focus pictures of your business premises or a display can work well too. Also, consider the balance between the image and any text you add. Facebook’s handy Image Text Check tool will let you upload an image to see if the text to image ratio is too high to fully reach your audience.
Keep Your Text Simple
Try to focus on one key feature you want to promote. Nobody will read a long list of every item you sell or every project you’ve worked on. Decide on a simple message and stay focused on it.
Reassess for Success
Like every other kind of advertising, Facebook promotions and ads shouldn’t be allowed to run on and on without any assessment or intervention from you. The insight tab and reach link on your page can tell you how your posts are doing, while in Ads Manager, you can view the status, results, reach, impressions, cost per result, amount spent and end date of each campaign you create.
If you’re not getting the results you want, think carefully about what you can change. A little trial and error may be required, so at first, keep promotions and ad campaigns long enough to produce data but short enough to make rapid changes if necessary.
Getting this right could be a huge boost for your business, so stay focused. In the words of Facebook:
Reach the right people, get them to take action, and drive real results.
Do you need help making your mark on Facebook? We provide full social media management for small businesses to help them reach their target market. Grab a quote and a free website review from us here.
