If you are a Christian business owner and you just set up your Facebook page, you are probably wondering what you should do now. Let me show you.
Complete your Profile
The first step you need to take is to complete your profile. Here is a quick checklist for you.
- Profile Pic: Make sure your logo fits the dimension of the profile pic. I suggest using a picture of the owner with a smiling face. People relate to people.
- Header: Include a great looking picture for the top of your page. You can put words on that picture with a graphics editor. Put a call to action or give a promotion code as an incentive to call you.
- About: There is a lot in this section. Go through each piece of it one by one. Choose a category, put your address, hours, etc. Pay attention to the short description and the long description. Make the words something that causes a customer to instantly relate to your product or service.
- Call Now: This is new to Facebook. There is now a button for customers to call directly from Facebook to your business. Make sure this number is correct and test it to make sure it is working. (This works great for ads!)
Invite your friends and customers
After your profile is completed, start inviting friends and families from your personal page to your business page. The best way to do this is to post something announcing you are excited about your business page and include a picture. Invite people you know well who will like your page, share it and tell their friends about it. If you want them to take action, tell them what you want them to do.
You can also invite your customers. If you have a database with emails, you can add those emails and connect with your customers. If you don’t have a lot of friends on your personal page, nor a good list of emails, go to the next step and take a more time to interact with pages.
Like relevant pages and activities
Now that you have some friends and your profile set up, start liking pages and groups. You can use the search bar at the top. You want to find relevant pages and groups. You can look for distributors in your business and other partners you do business with. Pay attention to what groups and pages they like. If you do business with the same kind of customers, it may be good to connect to the same pages. (You can also like the same things as your competition!)
Then, look for affinity groups. What are some groups that your customers would relate to? You may not run a bike shop, but you may notice a lot of your customers have bikes. You can like pages related to bikes in order to connect to those customers and make them feel good about doing business with you.
Another great strategy is to stand for something. Find a cause that you, as a business, can rally behind. Do you research about these causes to make sure you know who you are aligning with. Remember, when you stand behind a cause on social media, people expect you to post about those topics. You don’t want to choose a personal topic if it would not be beneficial to your business. (See our post on sharing controversial topics in social media.)
Post
Posting should be done regularly. Regularly could be once a day or once a week. When starting your page, I suggest posting at least ten posts and make sure each one has a picture or a video. That way when people find your page, they can have something to look at and see what kind of a business you are. You can post something about your company, its history and products. Then, you want to post interesting, entertaining and informative posts your customer would relate to. The more they interact with your posts, the more Facebook will show your page to more people.
See our helpful articles:
Optional: Pay for a ‘like’ ad
Yes, PayPal is a ‘pay to play’ system. You may want to pay for a simple ad to increase your likes and get your page noticed. You can do this for as little as five dollars a day. The key here is to highly target your ad. Facebook has some great helps on their page about creating an ad and your first time, they will give you a representative to talk to if you ask them. (Why not take advantage of free expert advice for your first ad?)
I suggest doing your first ad for yourself. It may be clunky at first, but the better you know how the system works, the better you can hire someone to manage it for you. I have seen too many business owners pay way too much for little results because they did not have a good grasp about how their ads could be best used.
Conclusion
Facebook takes a bit of time to set up, but once you get your foundation built, it is much easier to have it working properly for you. You don’t have to spend hours on Facebook, just select a simple strategy and focus on one topic at a time. Look at the major holidays and you can easily post relevant information about upcoming holidays. Then, take a peak at the news and share interesting, relevant and entertaining content.
Lots more help go to our page with all of our social media articles by clicking here.
Facebook is not about selling, it is about building relationships with your customers. Click To Tweet
