Having a business page on Facebook has become a staple for any company. Whether you’re selling products, offering services, or are trying to become your own brand, you need to have one in order to develop like, know and trust – the three critical components to increasing your customer base and creating repeat clientele.
But having a Facebook business page won’t instantly garner results. And randomly posting whenever you think of it or find the time won’t work either. You have to work in favor of the dreaded algorithm and you must do so consistently. Here are 5 social media posting tips to adhere to for business pages on Facebook in 2019:
1. Plan Your Social Media Calendar In Advance
If you’ve ever tried to curate posts for your business page, you know it involves some serious time. From finding the perfect image to thinking of just the right thing to say, the time you invest into planning one single post adds up quickly. This is why many businesses try and fail at posting regular content on their Facebook business pages.
The trick lies in creating multiple posts at once. By scheduling out a block of time to focus on creating an entire social content calendar, you’re able to keep your mind focused on the same ‘theme’. This allows your brain to work at a much faster pace than by trying to put together posts one at a time.
It’s best to plan out an entire month’s calendar. While it may seem like an impossibility to spend an entire day planning your month’s worth of posts, it will actually cost you far more than that 8 hours by the time the month is over if you don’t.
Decide on one day each month to plan your social media posts. Block off that time in your calendar, and get to work. Plan everything including which images or videos get paired with what text. Decide the posting date and time. Include any necessary links. The ultimate goal is that when it comes time to schedule your month’s calendar worth of posts, it’s a simple copy/paste.
It’s important to note that if you’re posting multiple times a day or more than 3-5 posts per week, you may need to block off more than one working day to plan your calendar. But trust me when I say, you won’t regret it.
2. Only 25% Of Your Posts Should Link Back To Your Site
Ah, the Facebook algorithm. Some love it. Most hate it. We’re guessing the only ones that love it are the ones that created it. Regardless, it’s there, and if you want your company’s Facebook business page to yield successful results, you’ve got to play by the rules and embrace the algorithm.
Linking back to your website on your posts plays a large role in whether the algorithm will work for you or against you. Facebook wants to see that you’re invested in building relationships with your audience. They don’t want to see you just trying to push your own agenda aka your products and services.
This is something I advise our clients on regularly. And it’s important to know that the rules are the same, no matter how large or small your business may be.
You might think that the most important goal of a social media page for your business is to get people back to your website, buying your products, signing up for your services, becoming loyal customers. And that might be so.
But you can’t ever get there until you establish that little thing I mentioned earlier: like, know and trust.
And your audience won’t like, know, or trust you if all they ever see are posts trying to sell them. On the flip side, the algorithm will pull back your reach and possibility for engagement as well – which only makes it harder for you to get in front of more people.
So when planning your social media posting calendar, make sure that no more than 25% of your posts link back to your site. You might not think it’s doing your company any favors to link less, but social media isn’t an overnight game changer. It’s a long-run game. And you’ve got to play to win the championship, not the playoff game.
3. Schedule Posts Directly On Facebook
There are all kinds of 3rd party posting schedulers out there today, but when it comes to posting on your business page on Facebook, you’re better off scheduling directly on the platform itself.
Just like the algorithm plays into effect where your links are involved, it also does based on how you schedule.
Posts scheduled directly on Facebook gain higher organic reach than those with posts scheduled through third-party tools. So while you may want one of those tools for tip #5, when it comes to scheduling, stick to Facebook itself.
4. Focus On Building Relationships, Not Pushing Products & Services
This tip is all about the actual content you’re curating. We’ve already discussed how your links can affect the like, know and trust factor. But now, let’s talk about the actual content you put out on your business page.
I like to tell our clients this: when we’re creating the text to go along with the image, we’re thinking in terms of having a conversation with a friend.
When planning out the words you’ll use for any given post, keep your audience in mind. If you sound like you’re just another business looking to increase their sales and profit margins, then that’s what your audience is going to think of you. But if you sound like a company that genuinely cares about how your products and services can make a member of your audience’s life better, you’ll gain their trust.
Always put yourself in your ideal customer’s shoes. How do they feel? What do they want? What problem do they have that you can solve? And the big one…How would they want someone to show they care about helping them solve that problem?
By asking yourself these questions every time you start to type content for a post, you will better serve your audience, create better post content, and you will be building relationships that will convert.
5. Track Your Results
Any business owner knows that in order to have growth, you have to know what’s working and what isn’t.
Tracking your social media posting results is a key component to your Facebook business page.
Facebook does have key analytics for business page owners free of charge that allow you to get a good view of what your campaign is doing and how it’s working. But those analytics can sometimes be difficult to decipher, and they aren’t available in an easy-to-understand format.
While you may not want to use a social media management tool to schedule your business page posts on Facebook, it can come in handy especially when it comes to analyzing the data. Depending on the management tool you use and the package you select, you can create reports that offer all your data in an easy-to-read format with user-friendly charts and graphs, and you can pull these on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis, or more.
We love using Sprout Social as our social media management tool. It creates reports that our clients can easily understand and see at-a-glance all the areas of their campaigns and how they’re performing.
No matter which tool you use, it’s important to maintain a close eye on how your posts are performing.
A Social Media Management Team That Does The Work For You
If all of this sounds like it’s more than you have time to handle or want to, then perhaps hiring a social media management team is the right answer.
At Connections Marketing, our team of social media experts plan your monthly posting content, schedule it out for you, and even hold regular reporting meetings with you to go over campaign data. So you get all the perks of building the audience for your brand, increasing your like, know and trust factor, and doing it within the ever-changing rules of the algorithm – and you don’t have to do any of the work!
Interested in finding out more? Give us a call today at 312.924.0252 or send us a message here.