No market is bigger than the internet market as it is considered to connect you with the whole world. But can you simply find customers that will buy your product/service if you have an internet connection?

You will need a platform where you can connect with people and there is no platform that has more people and active users than Facebook. Despite the fact that Instagram and Snapchat are growing at a rapid speed, these social media sites are nowhere near Facebook.

I know that many of you don’t use Facebook now. But the fact is that Facebook has become the ex-girlfriend/boyfriend of social media. You can never forget it. Facebook has a whopping 2 billion + users whereas Instagram or Snapchat has just a billion users less than Facebook. Therefore you can imagine the difference between any social media platform and Facebook. There is little or no comparison. Not using Facebook and using other social media platforms for your social media marketing is just like not using project management software for a project and using a task management system instead.

As traditional marketing moves to digital marketing, Facebook is growing bigger and bigger. As millions of people visit Facebook every day, with some targeted advertisements, you can definitely increase your sales. Facebook is helping hundreds of thousands of businesses to achieve their goals, the only thing is your efficiency in using the platform. If you are planning to start e-commerce business, or If you are planning to join any marketplace to expand your business from virtual shops to online, sell on amazon, it is one of the biggest eCommerce marketplace.facebook is a powerful tool to promote your business.

The following are the benefits of social media marketing:

1. Target a specific audience
2. Higher traffic
3. Increased brand awareness
4. Improved search engine ranking
5. Higher conversion rates
6. Better customer satisfaction
7. Improved brand loyalty
8. Cost-effective
9. More brand authority
10. Helps to gain market insights

What is better than using the king of social media for your business? In fact, Facebook was the first social media platform that introduced ads for social media. Therefore, Facebook is the benchmark for how other social media sites run their ads algorithms. By choosing Facebook as your social media strategy, you are simply choosing the best platform that is available out there for your business.

Here are some tips on how to use Facebook effectively for your business:

1.   Choose the right category for your business page:

The first thing that you have to do is to create a business page for your business on Facebook. Do not use a personal account for your business.

Choose the right type from the following 6 categories available:

1. Local business or place
2. Company, Organization or Institute
3. Brand or product
4. Artist, Band or Public figure
5. Entertainment
6. Cause or community

Most of you will fall under the first two categories.

The category type is very important as each category has different features that are targeted accordingly. For example, local businesses will have a feature to insert the physical location of the store while an online business will not have such a feature. Therefore, choose the category wisely.

2.   Get a vanity URL:

If you have ever seen something like http://www.facebook.com/xyz/, this is known as vanity URL.

As soon as you have set up your page, you can grab its vanity URL. It helps you in your marketing and you can even mention it in your blogs to generate traffic to your page. Vanity URL is extremely good for SEO. Google will link your vanity URL to your site’s keywords.

Besides, the Vanity URL looks much more sophisticated and professional.

3.   Photo Time:

Facebook and many other social media sites are highly visual and you will find photos everywhere, therefore its time that you should also upload some.

You should use your brand logo as the profile photo and a relevant background photo as the cover photo.

Your profile photo and the cover photo is what people will use to judge you, that’s your first impression and you should make it the best. Use high-resolution photos only. Use these photos as an opportunity to showcase your brand to the public.

 

 

4.   Choose your CTA button:

Let’s say someone has come to your Facebook site, now what shall they do next, this depends on you.

This is where the Call to action button comes to your aid. You can choose from the following CTA’s:

• Sign up
• Contact us
• Book now
• Use the app
• Play game
• Shop now
• Watch videos, etc

You can link the CTA to your site, contact form, video or an opt-in page. The decision lies with your conversion goal. As a Flipkart seller, you can promote and expand your customers by providing call to action button on your blogs.

5.   Select your custom Facebook tabs:

The slide bar that you see right below the profile picture of any page is known as custom tabs and luckily they can be customized.

This is very useful for your brand’s Facebook page as:

• You can include all the information that you want to display about your brand in it.
• You can use it as an alternative to include CTA’s when you want to include more than one in your Facebook page.
• It can help people find the answer to questions that they may have before buying anything from you.

You can keep the main CTA as sign up to collect email information of the people visiting your page and you can use the custom tab to add a tab like – Free trail to take them to your product’s free trial. This can be extremely useful in providing people with multiple ways to interact with your page.

6.   Use the “70-20-10” rule:

As you have optimized your profile for engagement, now it’s time to create content.

People want variation and thus let’s provide them with what they want. Moreover, it is not good for you if you stick to a single type of content.

The 70-20-10 rule is that

• Post original content 70% of the time.
• Post content that is relevant to your audience’s interest 20% of the time.
• Post self-promotional content 10% of the time.

Post photos, videos, stories, linked based content, etc. The key is to keep the content varied.

7.   Maintain your feed:

Your feed is what will help you in turning your Facebook marketing into a success or a failure.

Facebook’s news feed is a crowded area and you just want to showcase the best things. There are two things that you should keep in mind:

• Upload only photos and videos that are high quality as it has people like to engage to and share high-quality content.
• If you are sharing a link, remove the URL from the post as it doesn’t look good.

And if you want to save your time, money and energy, you can share user-generated content too. This will also help in promoting your brand royalty and the users will feel included and valued.

8.   Use of videos:

Facebook users watch over 100 million hours of video every day.

Don’t you think that if you upload a small video, people will watch it and if it is interesting and convincing, they may even engage with your business?

With the introduction of 4G network and 5G network on its way, the popularity of videos of blowing off the rooftop. Therefore, if you are going to invest in the content, do invest in making a video. Many people watch the video with no audio, therefore do include the caption.

And if you are not into making videos, you can choose Facebook live. It’s a live video service that broadcasts through a mobile device.

9.   Analyze your content:

I am sure that you will be posting quality content, but is it content that your audience wants to engage with?

Is your strategy working or not? The answer can be found using Facebook page insights. This will monitor your metrics to find trends in engagement so that you can know if your content is generating engagement or not. If yes, which content?

This will give you insights on how many likes you got in the last seven days of each post, what the reach was and what the engagement rate was. You can know all the likes, shares and comments too. For instance, if you are a Paytm Seller, you can write a rich content on how to use Paytm and using this analysis tool, you can check out the content efficiency.

10.   Promote your page using Facebook ads:

Organic posts are not the only way you can get people to connect with your brand. If you wish to target a specific audience, you can use Facebook ads and Facebook will show your content to a potential buyer. For example – If you are a Shopclues seller or a Snapdeal Seller who is trying to grab attention of customers to increase sales of your product, can promote their products using facebook ads.

Ads are way more powerful than organic postings. Moreover, Facebook ads are much cheaper than google ads. Just combine ads with quality content and you will see wonders happening.

This post is a kind contribution from Mohit Sharma.

Author Bio:

Mohit is an ECommerce Enthusiast and Owner of MohitECommerce. He is Working With Many Vendors in Different Categories of Products Across Various Marketplaces. He is Very Good at Amazon Seller Training, Amazon FBA, Amazon Seller Registration, Amazon Brand Registry, Amazon Account Suspended (Making Plan of Action). He Likes To Help All Type of Businesses Mainly Small and Medium Businesses Which are eager to Step in Online Business.