*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

*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 Parts 2 and 3 in the coming weeks:

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

Facebook for Small Businesses

By now, most B2C businesses realize that Facebook CAN benefit their business in several ways by:

• Spreading brand awareness outside the typical sphere
• Engaging current customers to increase customer satisfaction
• Attracting new customers by leveraging current customers’ social spheres
• Increasing social media usage, which has positive effects on SEO and rankings
• Improving business by actively listening to what customers have to say

You can argue that your target audience is too “old” to be using Facebook and social media – and in some cases I may not disagree. But I can guarantee that your “future” customers WILL be social media and Facebook addicts – today’s teens are tomorrow’s customers – so you may as well start figuring out this whole Facebook thing before it’s too late.

Besides, this series isn’t an argument on WHY you should Facebook, but rather on how smaller local B2C businesses can slowly start incorporating Facebook into their everyday marketing and branding tasks.

Facebook for Business 101: 3 Practical Tips for Getting Started

I promise – using Facebook for your company isn’t as overwhelming as it seems. This series lays out 3 easy, practical Facebook tips to get you started.

1. Creating Your Page & Choosing Your “Social Media Manager”
To create a business page, you have to have a regular Facebook account. Your best bet is to set up a new Facebook account rather than using an existing employee’s account – after all, employees can come and go.

It’s also important to choose 1-2 employees who will be responsible for the page. This person will need a couple hours a week to dedicate to maintaining the page. Someone in marketing, or even a receptionist/admin position would work fine. Typically, someone who is more tech-savvy and already engaged with Facebook will have an easier time of it. College interns (if you ever take them on) are also ideal for this, as long as you give them some strict guidelines on what they can post.

Facebook makes it fairly simple to create your business page – you can review their help section here. The Hubspot Blog also has a useful infographic about the newer Facebook Business Page Timeline.

A few highlights to keep in mind:

• Don’t forget to set a more user-friendly URL for your page at Facebook.com/username (when logged into your account). Making is similar to your website address is your best bet.
• Make sure your cover photo and profile picture are good quality and legible at the size Facebook sets. Be as creative with your cover photo as you can without breaking Facebook’s rules.
• Be sure to include correct contact and location information for your business.
• Get some pictures in an album to flesh out the content of your business page. Company parties are always fun, but examples of your products or work make great “testimonials” that speak for themselves.

Stay tuned for Parts 2 and 3 in the next 2 weeks:
Part 2: Practical Tips for Updating Your Facebook Page
Part 3: Easy Ways to Promote Your Facebook Page