How to use Facebook Business

Facebook is the most popular social media networking site today and is continuing to grow in popularity with 2.41 billion monthly active users this year alone. It offers many opportunities for business growth, learning relevant information relating to your business and sharing valuable content with customers easily. 1. Know your audience Getting to know your audience is crucial in promoting a service or product to potentially interested buyers. Your audience can be customers, leading retailers or contacts in your industry.

Some questions to determine who your audience is:

• Where is your audience located? On Facebook webpage look at insights and click people to see where your audience are

• How old they are? in Insights it shows off the age range but you can have a broad audience if needed

• Does your customers fall into a demographic? This looks at everything form education to financial factors to personal factors of home owning etc.

• What are they interested in? specifying an audience to your brand or look at ‘behaviours’ can help look at those with recent purchases related to your product.

• Are you looking to reach new or existing customers?

After determining your target audience, the next thing to look at is what do you want to achieve. Here are a few examples:

• Connect with customers

• Local awareness

• Build an audience

• Communicate with industry peers

• More exposure

• More leads

• Reach target audience

• Brand loyalty

• Increase website traffic

2. Create a business page Create a business page, you will need first a Facebook account. To make an appealing business page, it’s important to make an attractive profile with a friendly tone-of-voice. The more information and images you can provide, it helps to build up a relationship and brand trust with pe

Essential information to fill out is:

• Description – to let you know who you are

• Add business website address

• Categories – so people can help find you page.

• Contact information – the more ways to contact your the better so include your business phone number, website, and email address, add them here.

• Location – If you have a physical store, share your address.

• Hours – state the hours you are open.

Once all set up, get ready to publish your first Post! 3 Build awareness through promoting your business To promote your business page on a platform of billions of people can be a daunting thought and getting it right from the first post you publish can really get you off to a great start.

There a few ways to promote your business, word of mouth, adverts, posters, inviting your personal Facebook friends to like your page and creating posts for you to get others to share your page.

After gaining some followers it’s time to create some engaging and interesting content. Here are a few inspirational ideas to try: • Share photos, links, videos • Comment • Like • Create and list events in your local area • Support charity sponsorship • Send direct messages • Add your location to find your business • Start live videos • Instant chat • Maintain customer reviews • Post rich, high quality content • Organise prize draws and competitions 5 Make an investment using Facebook Ads

A standard Facebook page is free but can limit the reach of your posts to a wider

audience without the help of Ads to boost it. Facebook is the leading platform to advertise and is actually cheaper than you think, with a daily budget for those on a limited budget. Facebook ad is a powerful tool to use as it allows you to get in front of the right audience with targeted options. You can literally narrow down your target audience by: · Choosing specific demographics of location, age, gender etc. · Recent purchase behaviours · Like history · Groups interested in · Recent events attended. Facebook building brand loyalty, so its important to explore the possibilities it offers for your business.