Social Media for Business: How To Use Facebook for Business
For businesses of any size, social media is a very important factor, and many business owners, entrepreneurs, and marketers find themselves wondering what to post on social media. In this series, we are diving into how businesses can leverage each major social platform.
In this second installment of our “social media for business” series, we are going to discuss a platform that has a broad range of tools that are specifically tailored to the needs of businesses - Facebook.
When you create a business on Facebook, you gain access to FB Business Suite. FB Business Suite is a fully comprehensive platform that allows you to seamlessly track analytics, schedule and view your post calendar, manage business members, respond to messages and tags, set up FB Commerce and Instagram Shopping, and run ads via FB Ads Manager. Let’s take a closer look at each one of these functionalities.
Inbox:
The inbox functionality allows you to respond not only to FB messages, but also Instagram messages and comments. This allows business owners to view their social media messages in one place, which speeds up workflow, and makes sure no customer gets left behind when attempting to constantly switch between platforms
Posts and Stories:
The posts and stories tab in FB Business Suite allows you to view all of your FB and Instagram posts in a comprehensive layout that provides you with certain high level metrics of your choosing such as: reach, reactions/likes, engagement, and comments. This can help you quickly identify what post content is the most effective, instead of having to manually scroll through months of posts. You can also keep track of what posts have been boosted, and how that is affecting the metrics you track. Learning how to repurpose content can also be beneficial on social media.
Commerce:
As many of you may have recently seen, FB and Instagram have rolled out shopping tools that allow you to purchase items from a company within a social platform. This tool enables businesses that sell tangible goods to reach customers more effectively than ever before, and cuts down on the funnel between awareness and purchase. FB makes it extremely easy to set up your store, and begin to sell directly on their platform. Customers no longer need to be directed away from your social page to your own website in order to purchase, but can quickly purchase without ever having to switch away from the social platform.
Calendar:
The calendar view in FB Business Suite enables you to approach your social calendar from a high level perspective. It can be easy to lose track of your wider publishing habits week after week and the calendar view lets you take a closer look at post frequency throughout a longer time frame. You can also schedule posts using the calendar view, see how long your boosted posts are running, and take a look at upcoming holidays that may be a good fit for social content.
Ads:
The Ads section of FB Business Suite is an extremely useful tool for anyone who is looking to take their social media up a notch and begin implementing paid content. From within Ads, you can choose from a variety of goals that include: boosting FB and Instagram posts, building your business, getting more website visitors, or creating an automated ad.
You can also dig into Facebook Ads more deeply by going into the Ads Manager platform. Facebook Ads Manager allows you to create full ad campaigns, generate target audiences and lookalike audiences using a variety of metrics and Facebook Pixel, and ultimately gain control over the entire ad process. For business owners looking for the greatest customizability, freedom, and control, Ads Manager is definitely the way to go.
Insights:
One of the most important tools when it comes to social media is analytics. The insights page on Business Suite is a great way to track the success of your social media marketing efforts. Facebook automatically generates reports that break down your metrics by reach, the most successful content you generated, and audience demographics. You can also view a high level combination of these metrics in the Overview tab. These metrics can be used to measure success over any time frame, and are invaluable when assessing what content you want to create.
As you can see, Facebook Business Suite is one of the best social tools when it comes to optimizing your social presence for business. However, there are still business opportunities you can take advantage of on Facebook without jumping into Business Suite.
Groups:
Social media is all about building a community online, and taking advantage of the Facebook Groups feature is an amazing way to do that. You can join groups or create your own group on Facebook, and each strategy has its advantages. If you are a small brand or organization, it is a good first step to join groups before you create your own. Start by joining groups related to your industry, product, or content type. Actively participate in order to both learn from others within the group, and to begin spreading awareness about your own content. Once you have built up a large engaged following on your own social media accounts, starting your own group, such as the Issuu Creator Community, is a great way to build an online community around your product, and allow your customers to form much deeper connections with each other and with your brand.
Create content for Facebook
The question, how to create content for social media, is difficult to answer, and tools like FB Business Suite can be invaluable when it comes to producing, scheduling, and benchmarking the success of content. It is also still vital to put serious thought into the content your audience wants to see, and how the specific platform affects that content. Facebook is a very unique platform in that you have an extremely wide array of content to choose from. You can post photos, videos (and live videos), link to any external webpage, conduct polls, create events, and so much more. As with other social platforms, your content should be relatively consistent in format, but it is also okay to experiment. Experiment with different post types on Facebook and discover what your audience enjoys the most. Ask yourself these helpful questions: Is my audience more interested in long form text or short snappy captions? Do I produce a lot of video content that I have stored on YouTube that I want to share? Am I using Facebook to learn more about what my audience wants from my product? What should the overall focus on my content be? Trying out these different strategies, and then using Business Suite tools to assess the success of each content type, can allow businesses to formulate a social media plan that sets them up for success.
Deciding what to post on social media, and on each different platform can be overwhelming, but when you take it one step and one platform at a time the end result can be extremely beneficial for your business.
Check out Issuu’s social platforms for additional inspiration, and sign up for an Issuu account today to create amazing assets perfect for social media.