Setting Yourself Up for a Successful Facebook Page

publish date: September 16, 2016

Like many different mediums, Facebook is a powerful tool for any companies marketing strategy.  The social media site is generally free to use and gives you access to interact with thousands and thousands of people in your market.

Unfortunately, many businesses don’t take the time to create a proper plan when developing their Facebook business page and subsequently end up with little to no results.  Simply put, a major aspect in determining the success or failure of your Facebook page is actually going to happen before you even publish one post. These tips will get you started on what you need to know to getting the results you are looking for from Facebook and other social media sites.

Specific Goals
Without goals, you are likely to have no purpose behind your posts and the impact of that can be devastating to your page.  Having specific goals can help you determine what you want from your Facebook page and how you are going to get there. Some examples of goals for a Facebook page can be:

• Overall brand exposure.
• Community connection and interaction.
• Demonstrating expertise in your area of business.
• Sales.

These are just a glimpse at some of the things you may want to accomplish through your page.  Now, many of you may be gravitating towards the “sales” goal because, well, that is the ultimate goal.  With that being said, focusing on some of the other goals, in combination with broadcasting sales-driven content, may be more beneficial in the long run because people could be turned away by a Facebook page that merely sells to them.

Schedule Monthly
Once you have your goals set, you can begin to develop a schedule of when you want to post.  This is crucial because being current and consistent with your posting is paramount to being relevant to your audience and having a monthly calendar for this is a way to keep yourself on track.  Without scheduling ahead of time, it’s all too easy to have days go by and forget to post.

Not only is scheduling important for posting in general, but it also gives you the chance to focus on your specific goals and create posts that reflect those goals.  If you want to enhance your overall brand exposure and community connection, maybe you want to make sure you schedule in posts about your businesses community involvement or include questions for your audience to respond to. On the other hand, if you’re focusing on your expertise, you may want to schedule links to articles that explore your area of expertise or post about blog topics that your business covers.

Plan “Spontaneous” Posts
No matter what line of business you are in, audience interaction (likes, comments, opening links) is correlated to the success of your page.  Posts that highlight office life or “live photos” at business or community events are always good ways to enhance interaction with your page.  This is why planning your “spontaneous” posts ahead of time are a good strategy for maximizing the amount of posts that capitalize on this.  All it takes is thirty minutes of planning where you can go over community or company events that you can take pictures at and create social buzz.

Utilize Insights
With any goal, you need a way to measure the success of your campaign, and Facebook is no different.  Luckily, there are some very helpful tools that Facebook provides for doing just this.  When you create a Facebook page, you have the option of an “insights” tab that will show you all kinds of information on when you post, what kind of posts you have, and how successful each post is.  Explore this feature and find out where you need to tweak your strategy month to month.

While there are, of course, more elements that come to a successful social media campaign, these tips are always a good starting point.  Decide what you want from your page, make tangible goals that achieve that, and build a calendar to ensure you stay true to that strategy and successfully build a purpose-driven Facebook business page.