In the ever moving world of social media, it’s important for brands to ensure the face of their company is looking its best at all times!
So with this in mind, we have put together our top ten suggestions for brands managing Facebook pages and the most important steps to ensure your page is performing at its best.
1 – The correct user name
First and foremost, does your username fit your brand name. With so many businesses, brands and individuals in the world and an estimated 42 million Facebook pages alone, it’s important to find out if your company’s name is available to use. If not you might have to get creative by adding in additional words such as ‘official’ after your company name to ensure your customer base finds you!
2 – An up to date ‘About’ section
One of the first things customers do when they visit your social channel is go to your ‘about page’.
They want to make sure your page is legitimate so it’s a great place for you to put customer service emails / website to support them should they be there for a query or to shop! Make sure your website address, contact info and if applicable opening hours are all up to date and continue to update this throughout the year. In this section you can also update the services you offer, the cost of your service and any additional information your customer base might need.
We also suggest you update ‘Our Story’ section. This is a great way to include anything important about your brand or a way to instantly engage with an audience. You can also add in an additional cover photo. We would suggest a team photo if available, as it adds that personal touch to your brands page.
3 – A unique URL
To ensure your brand stays on brand and looks its best on all channels, make sure your Facebook URL is updated to suits your brand. Facebook automatically provides users with a URL that shows a string of numbers at the end, so amending this to contain only your brand name will mean your page is instantly more searchable and user friendly.
4 – A captivating cover photo and profile image
It’s fair to say that a page without a cover photo or profile image is often ignored and overlooked by its potential fan base. This is because many of us respond well to images and familiar logos so making sure your logo and images stand out well on Facebook’s white backgrounds is going to be vital!
We would suggest you update your cover photo regularly depending on any events, seasonal activity and just to keep your page looking fresh! This is a great way to keep audiences engaged and show them new things. You also have the option to upload a video to your cover photo (20-90 secs long) that in our opinion, brings the page alive! But ultimately, the choice is yours!
5 – Videos and GIFs
More and more people are using images and GIFs to communicate feeling and emotion, so don’t get left behind in the flood – stay afloat by re-sharing and making your own engaging video posts to captivate your audience. Keep your videos short and sweet, don’t post hours of videos as it’s unlikely to be watched, save that content for YouTube and post teasers and shorter videos to your Facebook channel to encourage and inspire your brand’s audience.
If you’re at an event or want to interview someone, why not try Facebook live. It’s a great way to get a lot of organic reach and arguably a way to defeat the algorithms – try it for yourself and see!
6 – Communicate with your audience
As a customer, there is nothing worse than not knowing where to turn should something go wrong. So make sure you’ve got in place the option for people to contact you!
You can also personalise a message to link customers to a separate site or let them know you will get back to them shortly.
7 – Call to action buttons
Depending on your business, we would strongly recommend a call to action button. There are a lot of variations on this button and they range from ‘sign up now’ to ‘watch video’ through to ‘book now’ and as you can see in the image below ‘contact us’. This button is a great way to drive traffic to your website and to support the customer journey, making it as easy and stress free as possible.
To enable the button on your page, simply click ‘+Add a Button’ and choose the one that is right for you.
8 – Post seasonal and relevant content
As mentioned previously, it is important to ensure you are posting videos and images across your channel on a regular basis. The key thing to remember with content going out on social media is less is more, make sure your content is of a high quality and something that will be of interest to you customers. You also need to make sure that any images you post are correctly formatted and will look right on your page, the current image ratio for Facebook is 1280 x 720 landscape, 720 x 1280 portrait. Minimum width is 600 pixels for both landscape and portrait. Landscape aspect ratio is 16:9. Portrait aspect ratio is 9:16.
People love to feel part of something, so engage them with fun content that they will want to respond too. Ask questions to get people thinking and most of all, don’t be corporate, leave that to LinkedIn!
9 – Use the features provided by Facebook
Once you’re all set up with steps 1-8, you will be able to start utilising your content through Facebook’s range of features. One we particularly like is the ‘pinned post’ meaning you can keep a certain post at the top of your page no matter what else is posted after. This is great for upcoming events, important brand activity and company changes!
Some of the other features you can use are: Events, featured likes (i.e. show what pages your page likes / other pages that like your page – great for large brands), Polls, Questions and more.
10 – Use Facebook tools
Investing in your page is paramount to keeping your Facebook fans interested. It is a well known fact that Facebook organic reach is dwindling, so using that compelling content you created in step 8 means you now have the chance to show it to a wider audience.
Facebook’s internal analytics tool will help you measure and understand which content is and isn’t engaging to your fans. Once you have analysed this, we suggest trialling some of the content with promotional boosts and dark posts (ads created in ads manager) to see what works best for your page.
Whilst there are many more factors to take into consideration when managing your brands business page on Facebook, these are our top 10 that will get you started. It is worth noting that in the world of social media, having a Facebook page alone won’t be enough to get your brand out there and we suggest using a multitude of social platforms to encourage views, sales and interest in your brand.
If you would like any assistance with your social channels, please get in touch with us as we have a dedicated team of social media experts on hand to help.
