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4 Things I Learned About Facebook Business Pages

Creating a Facebook business page ought to be pretty simple, right? After all, if you’re on Facebook with a personal page and you seem to get along fine with status updates, posting family photos and liking stupid pet images, then a FB business page ought to be a snap, right?

Wrong. While creating the frame for the page is relatively simple, figuring out your strategy is much more difficult – and time consuming – that is, if you want to get it right. After all, why spend time creating a FB business page if it’s not going to create new opportunities for business and/or no one is going to visit it?

Bryan and I recently worked with our bookkeeping client in Atlanta to create and produce its page – and we learned a lot of lessons along the way. Note I will post the final page once it’s ready to post – we are still tinkering with it. Here are four lessons that may help you create or maintain your own business page.

Lesson #1: Publish Your Page

Most people probably think this is a huge “duh,” but it turns out the client thought his page was “live,” when, in fact, it wasn’t. It turns out this detail was overlooked for months and months, but at the same time, gave us the perfect opportunity to start over to create the page from the ground up. We didn’t recreate everything, but did change quite a bit on the page so that the messaging, images and other areas synced with the company’s website and services.

Lesson learned: Make sure the page is live.

Lesson #2: Outsource the Work to a Professional Who Knows All About Social Media Marketing

I have my own company, so I totally believe in outsourcing to experts who have knowledge in areas I don’t – and in this case, there was a huge gap between what I thought I knew about FB business pages and actual reality. I got a referral and the consultant took us through a journey that included researching the competition, defining the messaging and even providing us a variety of sample status updates based on the client’s industry niche focuses – for example, car washes. The consultant fee was well worth it to the client and to me; I knew I was in over my head and quickly remedied the situation by outsourcing the work.

Lesson learned: Find subject matter experts to help produce the best product possible. It’s well worth the fee.

Lesson #3: Attain High-Res Images for Your Image Library

Invest some money into your images and buy them from a reputable image site or, in many cases, you can find good ones on royalty free sites such as Pexels. The reason you want good images is due to reputation management – if you have crappy low-res images that were seemingly cut and pasted from the internet, then you’re telling your customers, clients and prospects that you didn’t invest your time into the page and may not invest time in servicing their needs.

In addition, note there are two types of images: “cover” and “status update” images. The ones for the cover are sized differently then the status update images, so watch the finished sizes carefully. What you want to avoid is cutting off someone’s head or other body parts because the image is more horizontal than square.

Lesson learned: Images draw visitors in to your business page; don’t skimp on low-res or the wrong kinds of images.

Lesson #4: Don’t Dismiss Paid Facebook Placements

All of my clients know I’m not a fan of advertising unless you’re going to place print and/or online ads in the same places in multiple issues of the same publication or page. Businesses and consumers thrive on repeat behavior, so placing one odd add here or there probably isn’t going to be worth the cost.

It turns out ads for FB business pages are a lot like Google AdWords – very affordable and easy to pull off. You set yourself a budget each month and spend toward that budget. Bryan recently attended a seminar in which the presenter talked about spending as little as $7.50 and received more than 4,000 inquiries. Now that’s a return!

Lesson learned: Look into FB ads; they might reap huge rewards.

There’s much more to creating the page than I could talk about here, but what will be interesting is what kind of buzz the page generates – that’s where the PR part comes in. Stay tuned.

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