Facebook for Small Business, Part 2: Practical Tips For Updating Your Page

*This is part 1 of a 3-part series giving practical, easy-to-implement advice to small B2C businesses on how they can use Facebook to promote their business, increase customer satisfaction, and gain a whole new customer base.*

Keep an eye for Part 3 next week:

Part 1: Creating Your Facebook Business Page
Part 2: Practical Tips for Updating Your Facebook Page
Part 3: Easy Ways to Promote Your Facebook Page

Updating Your Business Page: Easy Content Ideas

The most challenging part of using Facebook for most businesses is coming up with regular updates. The best way to gain fans and keep visitors engaged is to ensure your page is updated regularly.

Ideally, shoot for 2-3 updates per day, but even 1 per day is better than nothing. It’s often easiest to incorporate time into your morning and lunchtime routine to update Facebook. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t get much interaction at first – building your fan base is a slow process if you don’t have time and money to invest in heavy-duty marketing.

But coming up with content ideas won’t be as challenging as you think, especially once you get used to it. Not everything should be about your business. It’s important to mix fun and useful information into the mix, not just ads for your businesses or services. A completely self-serving business page is simply boring!

Here are a few content ideas that work for just about any B2C industry – though it’s important to use some sparingly (particularly self-promoting updates):

• Product or service updates, info or promotions
• Company news about events or conferences
• Specific tips or info that prospective customers would find interesting
• Employee spotlights for birthdays, big milestones, etc.
• Customer testimonials or reviews
• Limited time “offers” specifically for Facebook fans
• Links to cool or informational articles or infographics you’ve read or videos you’ve watched
• Completely random facts about your general industry
• Completely random facts about things that happen on a particular date (a holiday, a celebrity birthday, date of an invention, etc.)
• Trivia questions or polls (can be related to your industry, but doesn’t always have to be)
• Links to new content on your website (such as blog posts)
• Funny or random quotes (ex: “things heard around the office”)

This list alone is enough to keep you swimming in plenty of content for your page. It may even be useful to plan out a “schedule” so whoever is in charge of the page has as much direction as possible.

Useful Tip: Occasionally posting things about celebrities and relating it back to your industry can help in getting more people to pay attention to you in their news feed. Yes, it’s cliché, but celebrity still sells!

For example:

• A contracting/remodeling company could post about celebrity bathrooms
• A clothing retailer could post examples of ugly celeb fashions
• Retailers of baby-related products can post cute celeb babies
• Cell phone providers can post info about celeb cell phone sightings
• Real estate or building industries can talk about celebrity homes for sale

Again, you don’t want to over-saturate your Timeline with the same type of info over and over again – a good mixture is what it takes to get people interested and coming back for more.

Hubspot has a pretty useful article you can check out as well.

Stay tuned for the last part of the series next week:
Part 3: Easy Ways to Promote Your Facebook Page