How to use Facebook for Business

Hi, my name’s Mike Rolfe. I’m a digital magazine executive here at Koozai, and today I’ll be talking to you about using Facebook for business. So, don’t be worried, don’t be concerned, don’t be panicking, where do I start with Facebook for business?

Just keep in mind, it’s Facebook. Most of you probably already use Facebook. It’s social. It’s fun. It’s easygoing and it’s a great place to bring your business personality across to the audience that you would like to reach. You probably know that social friend that you have on Facebook who is gregarious, shares quality content, funny, entertaining links with people and keeps in touch. That’s what your business is aiming to do as well. So we’ll just go through step by step a few easy points you can take on board when you are creating your Facebook for business profile.

To get started, you want to log in as yourself on Facebook. Then in the footer you can click on the “Page” button, and you can create a page. You can create the page for your business, and you can fill it with some relevant content, photos, videos, interesting information, such as your address and phone numbers and so on about your business. That’s a good place to start.

As you probably already know, when you are on Facebook, you really like finding and being introduced to content that is interesting, that is entertaining, and is also relevant. Keep that in mind when adding content to your Facebook profile.

When people start engaging with you, it’s important that you recognise that businesses see this as a genuine point of contact, and so you need to reply in a timely manner and also communicate in a way that is fun and has personality but is also mature. One way to look at it is to post things that you would be happy for your mother and your boss to read as well as your friends.

Should conversations not go the way you want them to, you don’t want to engage in a tone which loses its friendliness and its conversational tone. If it’s turning negative, one tip you can take is to take that offline. For example, just say, “I understand your complaint or your query or your problem. Give me a message with your phone number, and I’d like to give this the personal attention it deserves.” Then you stop polluting your brand with all this negativity.

If you have got to find people first to join your group, your Facebook page, then there are many ways to do this. A great add-on that you can get for free for Facebook currently is called the Advanced Search 2.2 Beta, and that allows you to search groups and profiles for key terms.

For example, if your business was about garden furniture, you can put that in as a key term, and you can find groups about garden furniture. Also, you can find people’s profiles that may like gardening, furniture and so on. Then you can communicate with these people, get involved with the groups they are involved with, and this is the place for you to put your quality content that they should be interested in and which will link back to your profile. That way you can engage the community you’re trying to reach.

Another way to do it is with advertising at the footer. There is an advertising button, and you can click on that, and you can sign up to be an advertiser with Facebook. You need to pay for the ads, and they’ll come on the right-hand side of the screen. It’s another way that a lot of big companies use to get fans for their page, people who like their page.

People who have been very successful at adding people to their page include very big brand names that you have heard of, such as Nokia who did a video campaign of people using their Nokia cameras to record videos. Then the interesting videos were posted and the really funny ones were shared.

IKEA ran a competition. Competitions, deals, coupons, and offers are the types of content that also do very well on social media. The IKEA campaign took a picture of one of their rooms with all of their furniture in it, and if you tagged your name to any one of the pieces of furniture or items, then you won that. Of course, this spread like wildfire, and people asked for more pictures to be put up online, and so they were. For the price of all these prize giveaways, they got a lot of good exposure and a lot of positive brand energy infused into the IKEA brand.

Once you’ve got all of this going on, it’s very interesting. It’s very exciting. It’s a great time to start measuring it. You can click on the page inside on the left in the sidebar, and you can find out all the data that’s available behind your Facebook page. For example, the number of likes that you’ve had, the number of active users you’ve had and so on.

It’s a good idea if you can measure those things, and then also be a bit more systematic in your content creation. There is a Facebook conversation calendar, which may help you to stagger releases of your content and so on, so you always have a conversation that is going on, and you’re always engaging your user base consistently.

One more thing before I go is please don’t cheat and try and take shortcuts. Social media can go wrong if you’re trying to cheat the people. There are a few examples. There was one company called Belkin, who do wireless routers amongst other the products you may know, and they got caught trying to pay people to leave positive reviews. Of course, that information spread negatively on social media. Don’t do that. Play nice and enjoy it because it’s Facebook.

The medium is Facebook. It’s fun. It’s entertaining. Make the most of it. Speak to your audience in that manner. You should have great success with it. It’s really not that complicated. You’ve just got to get it out there and do it. If you need any help on anything else or any more information about this, feel free to visit us and myself Michael Rolfe at Koozai.com.