How would you like to log into Facebook each morning to see a vibrant, thriving business page?

And what if you could make new contacts daily, tapping into all that Facebook has to offer?

You can! It just takes commitment, planning, and a little know-how.

Because no matter what you’ve heard, Facebook is still a powerful marketing tool.

It can help you take your business marketing to the next level (IF you have a smart Facebook strategy in place).

Whether you need to make a few simple tweaks to your current page or perform a complete overhaul, these Facebook marketing techniques will help your page get seen.

5 Facebook Marketing Techniques to Get Your Page Seen

Tip 1: Build Out Your Bio

Just because you build a Facebook business page doesn’t mean people are going to flock to it. There are a few things you need to do to ensure people can find you and that when they do, that they want to follow you.

Your first step is to craft your bio. Create a 150 and 300 word bio for your short and long description. Here’s a great example from one of my favorite ladies (and pages), Sally Hogshead:

See how she speaks directly to the needs of her fans? Keep this in mind as you put yours together.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Add in details about your skills, talents, awards, who your perfect audience is and how you help your clients or users.
• And don’t forget to sprinkle in keywords. These are the phrases that will help search engines and people know what you’re all about.
• Remember, this isn’t a time to be salesy or spammy. Think useful, helpful and informational/educational about you and your company.
• Add information that helps fans and potential customers take that next step with you. What do they need to know?
• Think about client needs and then position the content in your bio to meet those.

Tip 2: Write a Memorable Tagline

Your next step is to create a memorable Facebook tagline.

A tagline makes your company sticky. It brands your business and leaves an indelible mark in the mind of your fans.

Just think about how some of the most popular taglines have stuck with you throughout the years. Here’s a few of my favorites.

1. BMW    The ultimate driving machine
2. BOSE    Better sound through research
3. Bounty    The quicker picker-upper
4. Capital One    What’s in your wallet?
5. GLAD    Don’t get mad, Get GLAD
6. M&Ms    Melts in your mouth, not in your hands
7. Nike    Just do it

Each one of those taglines is easy to remember and simplistic in its mission.

So, how can you come up with a clear, memorable and actionable tagline for your business?

• Pick one that you will want to keep around for a while. Make it relevant to today, tomorrow and years ahead.
• Choose one that is easy to remember and will make people think of you every single time they hear it.
• Share the one thing you do better than anyone else in a succinct way.

Once you’ve nailed down your tagline, add it to your page.

• Short description box
• Long (extended description)
• Cover photo
• Logo/profile picture

Tip 3: Create a Branded Cover Photo

From your Facebook graphics to your logo, videos, and cover image – create a seamless look and feel that’s a direct representation of your company.

The best place to start? With your cover photo.

It’s one of the first things people will see and a perfect place to brand your business and tell your story.

But don’t just stop there. Use it to promote your products, share what’s happening within your business and talk about upcoming events.

Here’s a mix of industry related content to get your creative juices flowing!

Scalable Social Media

Brendon Burchard

Luna Vine Wine Bar

Jenns Trends

The Blog Squad

Now that you’re feeling inspired, make sure you change out that cover often.

Take action and head over to Relay – choose the Facebook cover template and create your own unique design.

Tip 4: Add a Call to Action to Your Page

Your next stop is the Call to Action button. Here you can direct fans to a product, service, your latest webinar or even a book.

Begin by brainstorming what that next step is you’d like your fans to take.

Now look at the 7 call to action buttons:

1. Book Now
2. Contact Us
3. Use App
4. Play Game
5. Shop Now
6. Sign Up
7. Watch Video

Once you know what they are and which one makes the most sense, it’s time to get one active on your page. Here are a few ideas on how to use them from social media strategist Peg Fitzpatrick.

• Book now *for consulting calls or intro appointments*
• Contact Us *for brick-and-mortar businesses to grab local customers*
• Shop Now *for any service company or to drive traffic to your Etsy business*
• Sign Up *to grow your essential email list (this should be your default!)*
• Watch Video *could be the gold-standard choice to tell your story*

You can see what they look like in action on Peg’s page:

Tip 5: Spice Up Your Page With Video

‘Spice’ up your Facebook Page by using video.

Make sure your videos are short, entertaining, and captivating. Your goal with a video should be to leave the person who just watched it feeling like you helped them.

You should also allow them to gain insight into you and your business.Let people get to know you!

Wondering what type of videos you should create?

• If you’re a blogger, think about the content you’ve already written. How can you repurpose that into new media?
• Share a useful tip, offer your advice, share words of wisdom or brighten your fans day by making them laugh.
• Talk about an upcoming event and what your fans would gain by attending or following along on your adventure.
• If you’re a local company, video the area, local events, holiday happenings or landmark/historical areas that connect your fans to your local business.

However you choose to use video, make a plan to incorporate it consistently. Your fans will love getting a glimpse into your day to day activities.

Look at how Unbounce is using them. Create a series out of your evergreen content and boom – you’ve repurposed old content, giving it a whole new life.

Final Thoughts

The tips above might feel easy to implement, only taking a few minutes to execute.

But while they might be simple, their impact can be significant.

Take the time today to put thought into each one and transform your Facebook page from blah and boring to branded and engaging.

Which tip will you take and implement today?

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8 Simple Tips to Optimize Your Facebook Business Page

Social media should be the main ingredient of any marketing strategy. While some marketing techniques may get a bit expensive, this one is free and may bring you big profits.

It’s vital to have your Facebook Business Page correctly optimized with some SEO best practices in order to maximize conversions. First of all, there is a correlation between a well-developed social presence and your search rankings and in the end, a Facebook Business Page becomes a “second home page” for your online business. Since there are many rumors about Facebook Business Page Optimization on the Web, let’s put this straight. Within this post, you will learn some essential rules that will leverage your Facebook page….

Let’s start with the optimization basics:

1. Choose the right name

When it comes to correct optimization, it is fundamental to find the right name for your Facebook Business Page because you choose it once and it is permanent. It’s key to remember that the first word of your Facebook page title is the most significant in the eyes of Google.

This is why stuffing your page title with generic keywords won’t work. Doing so might make it look spam-like and discourage people from getting engaged, let alone sharing your updates. You need a brandable name that represents your business and shows its personality. This is the real intent behind any Facebook Business Page.

2. Custom your vanity URL

Never settle for the dynamic URL which is automatically generated when you sign up. On Facebook, you can easily personalize your address and unify it with your brand name. Make it unique and easy to remember. If you match your Facebook vanity URL with the page’s title you are going to strengthen your brand recognition. Moreover, personalization will hugely improve the findability of your page both in Facebook search and in search engines.

3. Fill out your profile

Make sure that your avatar, cover photo, bio and profile info are complete and contain up-to-date information. A complete profile reveals your professional attitude and is a clear signal to your audience that you are engaged. Moreover, aim for consistency across all of your social media channels, and make sure that the main visuals match. Utilize a Facebook cover photo that is 851 x 315 px.

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Build your marketing personas and improve the communication with your targeted audience by using the appropriate voice and tone.

4. Pay special attention to the “About us” section

The truth is, your visitors want to know all of the details about your business: where your office is located, what service you offer, what your working hours are and so on. Therefore, provide them with complete information. The “About us” section is a good place to emphasize values and benefits your products or service may bring to the customers. Similarly to Meta Description, you need an apt description short enough [you get 155 characters] in order to be correctly displayed in the search engine snippet, both on desktop and mobile. Make sure that you choose an appropriate category:

• Local business or place
• Company, organization, or institution
• Brand or product
• Artist, band, or public figure
• Entertainment
• Cause or community

Complete your short description diligently and use accurate wording (including targeted keywords) to concisely characterize your business.

Pro-tip: Remember to add the link to your website or landing page within the short description because it strongly improves the findability of the particular offer or content page.

5. Sprinkle your business page with keywords strategically

Optimizing for keywords remains crucial, even when it comes to social media. Place your targeted ones in the most important, strategic parts of your page. Include them in the URL, page title and “About us” section because they will be visible on the front page and will appear in search results.

Remember that the name of your page corresponds with the title tag and your short description works as the meta description tag. However, make sure that you do not overuse keywords: stick to a top six and mention them naturally in the proper context.

6. Include the phone number and address in your Facebook page

The current Facebook design shows your business category, location, phone number and business hours straight away, on the front page. Therefore, make sure to fill out your street address, city, state, zip, and local phone number. Adding the address helps with indexing your brand for local search results and increases page following. Google simply pays more attention to pages that give specific contact information.

7. Optimize Facebook updates

The first 18 characters of each of your Facebook posts serve as the meta title and the meta description in SERPs. Therefore, anytime you are going to post on Facebook, share the content or upload a picture, and take advantage of the fact that you can add a description.

8. New features that you should implement

Facebook is constantly introducing new useful tools that are going to make running your business easier. To keep your page well-optimized, make sure that you keep an eye on any new features that emerge and implement them when available.

Call to action on Facebook

Worth mentioning are call to action buttons for Facebook Pages introduced in December 2014. Thanks to the call to action, people can easily interact with your business page. You can choose the suitable destination for your type of business and direct your followers to it. The full list includes 7 types of actions:

• Sign Up – mailing list or webinar sign up page, join the tool.
• Book Now – hotel or restaurant reservations
• Contact Us – contact form
• Use App
• Play Game
• Shop Now – e-commerce store
• Watch Video

Messenger for Business

Just recently, Facebook officially launched Messenger for Business to let users chat directly with the companies. Some U.S. businesses can already have a personal, real-time conversation with their customers.

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Payments via Facebook

Facebook launched a payments feature on its Messenger app available on mobile and desktop. Payments can be made with a debit card, and the best part is, Facebook won’t charge you for it.

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However, at the moment payments are only available for United States’ users and are limited to circles of friends. We hope that it will soon become accessible in other countries and useful for businesses, also.

Saved replies

Moreover, Facebook is currently testing a new feature called “Saved Replies” which is going to help business page owners speed up communication with templates. This will save you precious time from repetitive customers service inquiries. Saved Replies enables you to create a message and save it for later use. It will be accessible via the messaging interface within a particular message view. When the message pops up, the Saved Replies will appear on the left sidebar with the “Manage Replies” button at the bottom.

Saved Replies View

Prepare generic replies for all of your frequently asked questions and always personalize them before sending.
This functionality is targeted to small business including startups and e-commerce shops who are not using any helpdesk platforms like, for example, Zendesk.

Conclusion

Of course, the overarching objective of Facebook is to stimulate engagement and produce valuable and exciting content. Therefore, tailor your language to your audience, be personal and personable, and use fresh and simple wording. Executing these optimization tips will improve your Facebook Business Page visibility and user experience, both of which are crucial for your success.

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How to Build a Brand From Scratch With the Help of Facebook

One of the primary challenges marketers face is building quick traction for a new brand.

An established brand has it easy. They can target current Facebook fans, website visitors, customers and email subscribers. These people all know the brand, so they’re likely to engage positively.

But if you don’t have any of these things, how do you build a brand? In this post I’ll break down the challenge as well as the simple steps I recommend brands taking to build a highly relevant audience quickly using Facebook.

Here is a simple system for building a brand from scratch with the help of Facebook…

CLICK TO TWEET

The Challenge

If you hop onto Facebook looking to promote a new brand, you’ve got nothing to work with. While I will want you to immediately start building the top of your funnel, that is going to be slow moving.

Why? Because even if you offer helpful, educational or entertaining content, people are less likely to interact with it if it’s coming from a brand — particularly one they don’t know. So costs will be high early.

Ideally, you’d have some sort of built in audience around passionate people for a related subject matter. And in that ideal world, you could start sharing your content to this warmed up audience, driving them to your website.

1. Build a Passion Page

People may not be eager to interact with a brand’s Facebook page — particularly a brand they don’t know — but you may be surprised by how enthusiastic users are about engaging around a passion.

Create a Facebook page around a passion relevant to your brand or product. If your brand is a new micro brewery, create a “People Who Love Micro Brews” page — or something less corny. The main point is that it’s very general and is not connected to a single brand.

If you break down the “microbrewery” interest within Audience Insights, you’ll get the following list of relevant page likes:

After experimenting to find out which show up with interests, I then end up with the following pages that all have one or several related interests I can target in an ad:

• Goose Island Beer Co
• New Belgium Brewing
• Anchor Brewing Company
• Samuel Adams
• Widmer Brothers Brewing
• Stella Artois
• Dogfish Head Beer
• Shock Top
• Stone Brewing Co.
• Blue Moon Brewing Company
• Dos Equis
• Oskar Blues Brewery
• BeerFests.com
• Founders Brewing Co.
• Newcastle Brown Ale

You could use this information to immediately try to build your brand page or drive traffic to your website. Just remember that this may be more expensive than you’d like.

Instead, run ads to promote that passion page for micro brew lovers. Focus on the love of micro brews instead of your brand (ignore your brand). This audience can be built very inexpensively because users will be far more willing to like a page associated with a relevant passion than with a brand they don’t know.

2. Share to the Passion Page

Hopefully you’ve been sharing interesting content for this audience while it’s been growing. They are engaged. They are eating from your hand.

Now it’s time to share a blog post from your brand website. Let’s start with a blog post that remains focused on the passion and less on the brand. It could be a list of the best micro brews, how to brew your own beer or something else related.

If you built your audience appropriately, you should see some pretty amazing results. Not only will reach be sky high (you are reaching people who want to see your content!), but the engagement and traffic you drive should come easily.

Repeat this several times. Your goal is to drive traffic to your brand site with relevant information that this audience will enjoy. While they’re there, they will now become more and more aware of your brand.

While organic results will be excellent, you should also promote these posts. Start first by promoting to the same interests you used for building your fan base as well as targeting fans. You should see Cost Per Website Click at extremely low rates.

3. Remarket to New Website Visitors

Okay, so now it’s time to find out just how valuable this new audience is!

You have been sharing blog posts from your brand’s website to the passion page and promoting those posts as well. In the meantime, you should have installed a Website Custom Audience pixel on your site and you should be building WCAs for all website visitors during the past 180 days.

Now that you have this audience building, it’s time for the good stuff. Run ads for your brand that target your website visitors for the following objectives:

• Page likes for your brand page
• Opt-ins for your brand
• Drive traffic for your brand
• Sales for your brand

You should also continue to promote blog posts for the passion page, but now also target your website visitors.

Real Life Example

I executed this same process for a project of mine. As you may know, I have a passion for baseball. I also have three boys who play baseball, and I coach their teams.

Back in the fall of 2014, I created a passion page for parents of youth baseball players. I ran ads targeting relevant interests, and quickly built up an audience of more than 30,000 people. I also created content to keep them engaged and encouraged them to participate.

When I created that page, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. I just knew that based on my personal interests, I would eventually have a need for such an audience.

Well, that need arose recently. I’ve decided to start a youth tournament baseball team for my middle son. I created a website for that team, and I immediately started publishing blog posts about coaching and parenting baseball players.

I shared my first post to that passion page at 2:30am on June 10 and the results were immediate.

Six days later, I’m seeing the following results from that share to the passion page:

• 201,856 Organic Reach
• 1,704 Shares
• 1,109 Likes
• 50 Comments
• 9,490 Link Clicks

Here is a screen grab…

I repeated this process for two other blog posts, and I also promoted each post as well. Here’s a look at the costs I’m seeing to drive traffic:

I’m getting 6 cent website clicks overall, which is insane, but even more incredible is the 2 cent cost I’m paying to reach my website visitors to drive that traffic. That’s nuts!

While my end goal may be to build a baseball team, I now have other goals along the way. I want to build as much traffic as I can so that I can also monetize the site.

In less than one week, this website has attracted more than 30,000 page views.

That’s just one week. For a brand that did not exist a week ago. There is no way I could have done this so quickly without first building the passion page. I would have otherwise been running ads from a brand that people didn’t know to a website they didn’t know.

Your Turn

My project remains a work in progress, but it’s an example of how an audience can be built from scratch with the help of Facebook. Have you done or considered doing something similar?

Let me know in the comments below!

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