Use Fb to Grow Your Business-NEW

>> Hey there, and welcome back. Now that we've covered some of the best practices for promoting your business on social media in general, let's focus in on one of the most commonly utilized social media platforms out there, Facebook. Facebook is one of the world's biggest social media networks with a current 1.9 billion users. It's also the number one platform businesses use. Makes sense, right? That's where everyone's checking in on a regular basis. Interested in using Facebook as part of your marketing strategy? There are both free and paid ways you can use Facebook to connect with and market to your target audience. Let's start by taking a look at some of the ways you can promote and boost your business with Facebook that are free of charge. Number one, create a Facebook business page. This free resource makes for a great starting point for all of your Facebook marketing efforts. To create a Facebook page, simply log in to your Facebook account, click the down arrow in the upper right-hand corner, and select Create Page. Your business page should be easy to find, meaning, it's appropriately titled with the name of your business, for example, Mary's Health Coaching. Your Facebook URL, that's what someone would type in their web browser to navigate to your Facebook page, should also be updated to reflect your business name, rather than the default numbers and letters that are automatically generated. You can do this in the Settings section. Using our previous example, you'd want to update your Facebook page's URL to something like www.Facebook.com/MarysHealthCoaching. The profile picture and cover image of your business page should be representative of your business. Now you might hear that you should be using your logo as your profile picture on this page, and you can certainly do that. Keep in mind though that many small businesses, such as yours as an Integrative Nutrition Health Coach, tend to rely more on personal connections than on logo recognition. And for that reason, we'd suggest using a professional photo of yourself as a profile picture and incorporating your logo into your cover image instead. Both your profile photo and your cover image should be professional quality. I can't emphasize this enough. Remember, this is the first impression someone has of you and your business, so make sure you're making a good impression. You'll also need these images to meet the optimal size requirements which are 160x160 pixels for your profile photo, and 851x315 pixels for your cover photo. Finally, make sure you fill in every part of your business page to the best of your ability. This especially includes the About section, which is one of the first places people will look to learn about you when they visit your page. The About section should clearly and concisely convey your mission and your brand. Number two, create or join a Facebook group. Did you know that there are online communities of people sharing similar interests on Facebook? They're called groups. You can get involved with Facebook groups by either joining a group or by creating your own. If you're joining a group, you can type keywords into the Facebook search bar that would help you find groups of people in your niche market. For example, type emotional eating into the Facebook search bar, select the Groups tab, and you'll see a number of groups pop up. Now if you're joining someone else's Facebook group, make sure to get clear on the group rules when you join. In some groups, it's okay to promote your services, other groups have strict non-solicitation policies. Just because a group doesn't allow you to promote, doesn't mean that it's not worth joining. You can still share insights in the group and answer people's questions. And when you do that, there's a really good chance that people in the group will start to see you as an expert in that topic. Then they might go to your Facebook page, see that you're a Health Coach, specializing in thyroid health or emotional eating, and then reach out to you about coaching. See, how that works? You can also opt to create your own Facebook group. The great thing about doing this is that you get to set the rules for the group, which might mean that you don't allow any promotional posts other than for your own business, and that's totally fine, after all, it's your group. If you create your own group, you want to make sure you do a few things. First, fill all the fields when you create your group. This includes a group description, keywords for the group, etcetera. Make sure to include your website so the people who join the group can learn more about you. Just like with your other social media channels, be consistent in posting and be sure to provide valuable content, and direct them to your opt-in offer. Don't rely on them to figure out where they can learn more about you. Actively direct them to their next steps, whether that's reading your blog, signing up for your weekly newsletter, or downloading their free gift. Number three, keep Facebook's algorithms in mind. The world of social media is unique because it changes so rapidly. No other marketing platform shifts quite so quickly. Have you ever noticed that it seems like you see the same people's posts in your newsfeed, and then for other people, you don't see their posts at all? That's the result of Facebook's algorithm. This algorithm dictates who sees your posts, when, and how frequently, and it applies to both personal and professional pages. While this algorithm is constantly shifting, there are some things you can do when sharing on Facebook to make sure your post gets seen. You can post directly on Facebook. Well, posting on one platform such as Instagram or Twitter and sharing to another might be easier and more convenient, Facebook doesn't really like that, they like for content to be posted directly onto their platform. Similarly, for videos you create, it's best to upload directly to Facebook instead of sharing from Instagram or YouTube. This is because Facebook doesn't want to link people away from their site but instead keep people using their own platform. Just because someone likes your business page, doesn't mean that they're going to see your posts. Facebook wants you to pay for advertising. So they make it a little trickier for business post to be seen organically. You can circumvent this by having people indicate an interest in your page beyond just liking it. When someone likes your page, they automatically "follow" it for updates. The default setting for following means your posts will not likely be seen in their newsfeed. Encourage people who like your page to change their following settings to "See First" like the image you see on your screen. All right, those few tricks should allow your Facebook fans to see more of your posts organically. Now that we've covered the most effective methods to leverage Facebook for free marketing, let's take a look at some of their paid options. Number one, boost your posts. Simply put, boosting a Facebook post is a way to ensure your post actually makes its way into people's newsfeeds while expanding the reach to more people who also might like what you have to share. Here are some things you need to know about boosting Facebook posts. The content is already determined. Now this is not the same as creating an ad for your business on Facebook. The content of the boosted post is the content of whichever post you've already made that you're choosing to boost. So if you're going to boost a post, make sure that post already has all the key information you want it to have, such as links and a call to action. You can choose between boosting to people who like your page and their friends or people you target. The former is calculated automatically by Facebook. However, if the people liking your page are mostly family and friends and not customers of your business, this is probably not the option you want to choose. While you might get more engagement on your post, it might not result in more clients. Does that make sense? By choosing to target your audience, you can select criteria that matches your target market so you can reach people who are more likely to become clients. The main objective of a boosted post is to create more post engagement. This will bring people to your page, and hopefully, continue them down the funnel to your website, and eventually, your coaching products and programs. If you want to create more engagement online, the best guidelines here are to choose posts that promote content that's highly useful to your audience. This doesn't necessarily have to be content of your own, so just keep that in mind. You want something that's going to spark their interest and make them click Read More on your post. The second form of paid advertising on Facebook is Facebook ads. The cool thing about this is that these ads are super customizable to help you reach your goals. To create a Facebook ad, you'll first want to navigate to your Facebook business page. On that page, you'll see a list of options for what to post, such as what you see on your screen. If you click on Advertise Your Business, you'll see a list of options pop up, including Set Up An Ongoing Promotion, Get More Website Visitors, Promote Your Business Locally, Promote Your Page, and Share Page With Friends. As you can see, there are a number of ways you can use Facebook ads to promote and grow your business. Now let's say your plan is to get people to visit your website. You have your free gift set up. So directing people to your website would allow them to claim their free gift which would add them to your mailing list and so they continue through your marketing funnel. When setting up an ad to promote your website, you'll walk through a couple of steps. The first is called Ad Creative. This section is where you can update your headline, text, and image for your advertisement. Make sure that the language and images you use are strong and compelling. Alternatively, you can use a video instead of an image if you have a professionally-shot video that would make for a great ad. Once you've updated the creative aspect of your ad, you can move onto targeting your audience. Facebook will have predetermined criteria set, but to make sure you're getting the most bang for your buck, click Edit to further fine tune your targeting criteria. You want to narrow down gender, age, location if you're targeting people in a certain location and interest. For the Interest field, note that you can target people by including certain interests, like health, wellness, fitness, things like that. And you can also disclude people based on certain interests as well. This will allow you to really focus on targeting your ideal clients based on both their likes and their dislikes. Use what you learned from surveying your target market to hone in on the ad criteria. Once you've done the creative and targeting pieces, you want to select a budget and duration. I'd recommend testing your ad for a short period of time, so probably about seven days, you can always increase the amount of time you're running your ad for, but this will allow you to check out the results of your ad so you can update it to increase conversions. Once your ad is good to go, click Promote to make your ad go live. Now there are two more things I want to cover about Facebook ads before we wrap up. The first is to keep your ad fresh. Have you ever seen a same ad over and over in your newsfeed? If so, you're probably familiar with what's called "ad fatigue" or "banner blindness" which is when people start skipping over things they've already seen before. Changing up the image or video and copy on your ad will keep your ad fresh and keep people seeing it and clicking to learn more. The second thing is to track ad effectiveness. The best way to find out if your ads are performing the way you'd like them to is to keep an eye on the results. On the Insights tab on your Facebook fan page, you can track the analytics of your ads and use the insights to have to tweak your ad to better suit your end goals. All right, we've covered a lot, so let's recap. First, we talked about some free methods for using Facebook as a marketing tool, such as creating a Facebook business page, joining or creating a Facebook group, and navigating Facebook's algorithm so your posts get seen. Then we discussed some of the paid options for Facebook marketing, including boosting a post and creating a Facebook ad. How will you use Facebook to grow your business? Share it in the Facebook group.