It’s the weekend, you have a little time to spare… do you watch some mind-numbing repeat on TV that you have watched ten times before or spend a few moments tweaking your business Facebook page to kickstart more sales next week and more fan engagement?
If you made it to here well done. Success in business is a lot about hard work but it’s also about using your time wisely and being prepared to constantly review what messages your business is putting out there and how it is doing it. Sometimes even the simplest and most obvious of things get missed so build in time to reevaluate and work through the following list of six quick tweaks and tips to improve your Facebook page.
Update your short description
You get 155 characters to describe your business in the About section. Use them wisely. Try one succinct sentence that sums up what your business does but leaves the reader impressed and intrigued enough to want to find out more. Also, make sure you add your hyperlinked website address there too so visitors can quickly find out more. Remember you want to be driving traffic between your Facebook page and your main website and you need to make that as easy as possible for visitors.
Create a sticky post
By default your stream displays newer posts at the top of the page as you post them but if you have a timeless post or one you want new visitors to see first when they visit your page, you can use the ‘Pin to Top’ feature to create a sticky post that displays above everything else in your timeline. This is perfect for evergreen content such as how-tos related to your product and also images that perhaps carry your company slogan or philosophy so that visitors to your page get what you are about right away.
Keep your posts short
Don’t be fooled by the ability to post more than the 140 characters other social media platforms limit you to. Even on Facebook, short is more likely to have an impact and ironically Facebook posts engage more if they are even shorter than Twitter posts. According to research by Buffer, keeping your posts below 250 characters can get you 60% more engagement than you might otherwise see. Even that may be too long however as they also found that posts with 40 characters actually received 86% more engagement (likes, comments, shares) than those with a higher character count. Remember visuals can be added to posts and they increase engagement even further too. That’s not to say there isn’t a place for longer articles – variation is key – but keep the longer ones to a minimum.
Organise your tabs
What’s the most important section of your Facebook page that you want visitors to look at? Tabs are a great way of driving traffic to certain areas of your Facebook or another web presence. Make sure the order they are presented to visitors on your Facebook page fits with your priorities. Changing the order of the tabs and the apps that may run your contests etc is very simple.
- Login to your Facebook page account as an admin using the desktop version of Facebook
- Below your Page cover photo click More
- Select Manage Tabs. You can now drag and drop the tabs and apps to move them to your chosen place
- Once all organised click Save
Secure your vanity URL
Every Facebook page gets its own unique URL (page address) but it often looks like a string of numbers and letters, so is less effective for would be customers. Once your page has 25 likes you can choose a personalised URL so that it is immediately recognisable as your brand. For example, our Facebook page can be found at www.facebook.com/123regfans. This also makes your Facebook page easier to remember and find for future reference. One further tip, that URL can be abbreviated to www.fb.com/123regfans if you are limited for character space when sharing it on social media. Be careful of your choice of your vanity URL however, it isn’t something you can keep changing. This article from the official Facebook help pages explains more and how to secure your own.
Take a look at what’s working
Facebook’s Insights tab gives you an impressive overview of how your page is performing but understanding how it fits in terms of the whole marketing mix of your business take a little extra thought. The Insights section provides details of how each of your posts has performed. Is there a pattern? Are certain topics loved more than others by your Facebook audience? Is there a correlation between the day a post is made and how many likes or shares it then gets? Have a look too at the demographics of your Facebook audience. Is this representative of what you know about your target audience? Consider your Facebook Insights alongside other reports on your online operation. Do they match up? Where do they differ? Data is a wonderful thing but only if you take the time to consider it and try to understand what it means in the wider picture of growing your business online.
It is very easy to forget about the intricacies of your Facebook profile. Time is often limited to just posting to a Facebook page can often seem like a chore, but if your profile is not up to scratch even that effort may be wasted. Take time out every month or so to recheck and evaluate what may need tweaking on your Facebook presence.
