Are you using a Facebook page for your business? Here are some tips on how to drive engagement, gain more followers, and bolster your business’s online presence through Facebook:
Create a Facebook page, not a personal profile
Some business owners make the mistake of using their Facebook profile for their business. The problem here is that people can’t easily follow your business because they have to send you a friend request first – plus, being ‘friends’ with a business doesn’t really make sense.
Hence why Facebook pages exist. Anyone can ‘like’ your business’ Facebook page without permission. Pages work similarly to profiles, where you can easily broadcast announcements, sales, and other news by posting to your page’s timeline. But Facebook pages have additional functionalities, such as incorporating polls and newsletter sign-up buttons, listing business hours and locations, and linking to your business website. And unlike Facebook profiles, there’s no limit as to how many people can ‘like’ a Facebook page.
Post engaging images with quality captions
The #1 thing you can do to increase engagement on your Facebook page is to post images with captions. People respond more to images that they can relate to, and images that are exceptionally beautiful: e.g. landscapes, animals, people, and behind-the-scenes shots. These types of images will gain more likes, but if you want more comments it’s helpful to caption the image with useful information, the story behind it, or a question posed to your followers. The more people that interact with your post, the more widespread it will be across the network, which will hopefully result in more people liking your business page.
Tag relevant profiles and pages whenever possible
To get more eyes on your business’s Facebook page, you should tag other business pages or people’s profiles whenever possible. Tagging other businesses whose work you support, or who you worked with on a project, may lead to them returning the favor and sharing your post on their business page. Tagging people who have already liked your page – e.g. if they won a contest you held, or if they appear in a photo you posted – results in your post appearing in their friends’ news feeds.
Promote your Facebook page through your Facebook profile
It’s a good idea to maintain both a Facebook page for your business, and a Facebook profile for personal use. First, you should invite all your Facebook friends to ‘like’ your business page – that way they won’t miss any business-specific updates. Then to catch the stragglers that may not have gotten around to liking your page, you can share posts from your business page to your personal profile – they may see the link to your business page, click through, and ‘like’ the page from there.