Growing your business on Facebook is such an exciting adventure and it’s even more exciting when you get it right the first time. In case you haven’t noticed, Facebook isn’t going away and with more than 1.19 Billion active users each month, your customers are bound to be there. Here are a few quick tips for marketing your business on Facebook

1.     Get a Facebook Business Page

You may have shared a few posts about your product or service on your personal Facebook profile but if you are going to be effective in marketing your business on Facebook a page is the way to go.

Not only is it against Facebook terms of use to use your profile for business, there are many benefits to having a business page. These include the ability to advertise your page, access to insights on how your audience engages with your posts, the ability to create custom tabs, content scheduling and a connection to Facebook places amongst many others.

If you would like to create a Facebook business page you can do so by visiting the creating a Facebook business page section of Facebook while logged into your profile.

2.     Quality is more Important than Quantity

Once we have our page set up you’ll probably dive head first into building your likes. Here’s where quality matters. Quality leads are leads that are part of your target audience that are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. There are many ways to get likes from people that genuinely want your offering:

• Always target your Facebook advertisements using the precise interest drop down on the advertising dashboard. This will target your advertisements according to people’s interests.

• Develop email opt-in offers such as downloadable papers and offers instead of using competitions. Competitions generally do not build quality likes or leads – people may sign up for a chance to win but they are not genuinely interested in your offering.

3.     Use Graph search to understand your fans

Graph search is a nifty social searching tool that is new to Facebook. Want to know what other pages your fans like or which restaurants they like? Graph search will give you these and other great audience insights.

Graph search is still being rolled out in Australia but I managed to get it working following these steps:

• Sign into Facebook, or if already signed in, make sure you are using Facebook as your personal profile.

• Go to your Facebook account settings and make sure the language is English (US).

• Visit the Facebook Graph Search pageType “Pages liked by people that like Mara Roberts” to test it out!

Once you have completed these steps, your search bar on the top of your profile page should change to graph search ( a slightly bigger box). Graph Search is only available when you view are logged on to your personal profile instead of your business page.

Use Graph Search to make sure you are engaging with your audience where they are at. Start discussions on pages they like and discuss topics on your pages that are linked to their interests. The opportunities are endless.

4.     Turn your fans into leads

Facebook is a great marketing tool but the key to success is to not leave yourself at the mercy of Facebook’s rules and guidelines which are subject to change. Facebook could close down your page at any point and without reason. Be diligent in converting your fans into emailed subscribers via an opt-in offer. An email list is a much more concrete investment for the long term.

5.     Update your status at least once a day

In Facebook, not all your posts make it to your fans’ newsfeeds, and not all your fans are on Facebook when you are. Getting into the newsfeed more often is your number one priority on Facebook and a higher frequency of updates increases your chances. My advice is to use software such as Hootsuite for scheduled updates and to add to this with regular personal updates on Facebook.

Thanks for reading, I hope this post will bring you one step closer to using Facebook effectively in your marketing.