Social Media Fundamentals – (Facebook for Business) Part 3

(music) Hi there I'm Polly McGee also known as Dr.
Digital and welcome to social media fundamentals for the digital ready
program as part of the Tasmania state government's way of helping your
business get on social media and participate fully in the digital economy.
So if you haven't seen our previous social media fundamentals you might want
to go back and have a look at them before you launch into this or if you're
feeling lucky you can just roll straight in. We're deep diving into Facebook and
Facebook specifically for business so it would not be surprising if you are a
Facebook user given that there are already 15 million users in Australia
and over a billion users globally. So 63% of Australians of which you're probably
one are on social media and on Facebook and using it every single day. This might
give you a clue as to why Facebook is a great channel for your business to be
part of. With that level of participation and I
believe something like 93 percent of people use it on a mobile device that
means that anyone who's using it is potentially going to be looking at your
business and be able to find out more about your products and services.

So how
do you use Facebook for business? It's a little bit different to how you might
use it socially in some ways in terms of the setup and what you do with your
profile and we're going to talk about that in detail in just a moment. But the
way you use it for business is very similar to the way you use it socially; it's there
to help your brand have a conversation with your customers and with your future
customers, it's there for people to see your brand values in action, it's there
for you to be able to break down some of the barriers as to what your product or
your services and how you use it and it's there for you to be able to tell
stories about your brand and have conversations with your customers.

So it
functions in all the same ways it does when use it as your personal channel but this
time everything that you do when you're using it is oriented towards the
intention of sales for your business. Now in an earlier video we talked about
social media strategy, if you haven't seen that video and you don't have a
social media strategy written yet, I suggest you go back and you have a
little look because the main reason you'd be using Facebook for business is
that it fits in with your social media strategy. Which
means that you've had a really good look at what you're doing and why you're doing it
and you know that your customers are on Facebook. Now we know because of the
statistics I just talked about that your customers are likely to be on Facebook.
But you also want to be sure that they are directly using that channel and that
your business can speak to them as clearly as possible from Facebook.

If
that's the case then let's roll on. Now Facebook for business has some really
brilliant tools. What Facebook has learned over the years is that they
drive most of their revenue from their business customers and so Mark
Zuckerberg and the team have gone out of their way to build in some really
excellent tools into their business platform which means that you get access
to some amazing demographics a really great reach into your audience and lots
of ways to be able to analyze that. You also get some really fantastic
opportunities to advertise into rich markets you may not generally be able to
get in contact with. So for all those reasons and more, Facebook is good for
your business. I have to say I'm yet to come across a business that I don't
think Facebook can help and although there's sometimes a bit of resistance to
getting involved in social media and people say, "well why would I bother?".

The
reason you bother is that it's going to drive sales and it's going to connect
you with a whole lot more people than you've ever been able to contact with
before. So let's talk about setting up your profile. Let's imagine that you're
really just thinking about Facebook for business for the first time. What are you
going to need to sit down and set that profile up and get started.
The first thing you're going to need to have on hand are some of your brand
assets. Now if you don't have any brand assets, I refer you back to the social
media strategy video because you're going to need to think about what your
brand is and what it says. Let's imagine you've got a brand. So you're going to
want to have your logo, you're going to want to have some really great
photographs or some images that speak to your brand. At the top of the page you've
got what's known as a cover picture and a profile picture. The profile picture is
a small square and the cover picture is a bigger banner that sits on the top of
your page.

You need images and assets that will fit in those gaps. The profile
picture normally I would recommend that you have a logo or something that
really sort of succinctly fits into a small space. With the cover picture you
have more a licence to be able to have an image in there or a really beautiful
representation of what your product or service is. So have a bit of a think about
what is going to look the best in those spaces because this is what people are
going to see when they first come across your business on Facebook. Now when you
had your brand set up you might have had a designer build those for you in the
formats that will fit in the cover and in the profile.

pexels photo 3768911

If you haven't you can
try with what you've got. The Facebook software does resize those images for
you or you can go and use an online tool like candle which will be able to do
that for you quickly and simply and cheaply. So that's got your brand all set
up at the top. What's next? You need to fill in your profile. Facebook collect a
lot of information from you about your business one of the main reasons they do
that is so they can direct people to your page and they can put it in front
of the right demographics and of course the more information you give the better
a profile people have of who you are in what you do.

So when you sit down to set
up your profile you're going to need to fill in things like; when you were
started? what it is that you do? they ask you for a short paragraph talking about
your business and what its purpose is so make sure you've got those documents
with you. If you're say a restaurant you might want to put up your menus, they'll
ask you for your opening hours and just general information like that. You can
also put in details as to your location which you link it to a map to help
people find you. As I said all of the depth in that profiling really allows
people to get a good idea of who you are and it further builds your profile on
Facebook on your business page.

Once you've set up your profile you're going
to actually think about the content you're going to use now. So there's a
couple of things we need to talk about here; we need to talk about frequency of
posting and we need to talk about what actually goes in those posts. When you're
using Facebook for business you're setting it up to have a conversation and
so in a normal conversation you wouldn't just be pushing out cells information
over over over people would get pretty tired of that pretty fast.

So the
frequency you're posting during the day is going to largely come down to what
the appetite your audience has is but here's the rule
of thumb; generally you wouldn't do probably more than four posts a day. The
more – people don't want to be bombarded with information from you otherwise it'll
just become like spam. So the least I would do is one post a day. You really
want to have an ongoing touch point with your customers.
The timing is important as well so statistics have shown us that posts that
happen at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. tend to get the most click throughs in the most
action I guess that makes sense people are either having a lunch break or maybe
they're getting home from school or work.

Anytime you post between 9 a.m. and 7
p.m. people generally will engage anytime
after 7 p.m. the engagement rate really drops off. So
just to recap; you've set up your profile you've got all the assets, you've made
your page look as good as possible, you've thought about your content, you're
having a conversation, you're not pushing out endless sales banter and you're
having that conversation regularly. Don't leave your people high and dry. Don't
overwhelm them with information. Just give them a nice constant stream of
information about your brand and about your business that really opens up the
conversation and lets them in and make sure you measure the interactions that
you're having.

There is fantastic analytics sitting in the back of your Facebook
page that will tell you exactly what posts are working and what posts aren't. And
if you want to know more about analytics you can go and click over onto the
analytics video. That's all from me right now –
Polly McGee or Dr. Digital. Thanks for your company. Now it's time for you to get
on Facebook and create a fantastic Facebook business page.
I can't wait to like you. (music).

As found on YouTube

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