First let me say this, if you have a business you should have a business page on Facebook. With the amount of people that are using facebook every day you would be foolish to miss out on any potential customers that may see or interact with your page. Not to mention that Facebook is actually becoming a search engine for businesses just from the sheer amount of people looking for phone numbers and addresses. So it only makes sense to have your business listed on Facebook.

I’ve been building a lot of facebook pages over the last year and a half. I’ve seen some great ones and I’ve seen some not so great ones. I want to discuss why some pages thrive and some pages don’t, as well as some tips to help you manage your page to get the most from it. There is a big misconception about Facebook pages from business owners that even give it a try, but because it doesn’t explode into a new revenue stream they think it doesn’t work and give up on it all together.  This is a big mistake not to mention costly. Facebook is a great place to get your business out there weather it’s a small mom and pop store, a sub shop pizza place, a restaurant or corporation. No matter what the size of your audience you will make a difference and have an impact that will grow over “time”. Unless you have a big name business in your area where you will get fans without even trying it takes time and effort. If you can get your page up to 25 fans then you are heading in the right direction, you see with that many fans you might think it’s not worth it to try and entertain them but you would be totally wrong. If you post something of interest and any one of those 25 fans click on the “like” button you have the potential of spreading your message to 50 to 100 more people. This is because when ever someone likes a post or picture it is going to show up on their friends news feed and that may interest someone enough to take a look at what their friend just “liked”. Also a lot of people think that if they have 500 fans on their page that when ever they post something that all 500 people will see it. This is not the case, it used to work that way but then facebook figured there was too much noise on a persons page to do that, plus now they try to get you to purchase facebook ads or sponsored posts to get more fans. So to get an Idea of how many people are seeing your posts you can go into the analytics of your page to brows through the different types of statistics they offer. Note, there has been some chat about these numbers not being accurate yet either. So the way it works in lay terms is that the fans that see your posts are the ones that have been on your page at some point. Or if they are interacting with your page by liking different posts here and there. So the number varies quite a bit and isn’t as strong as we would like it to be in my opinion. Now that we understand how your page get’s more fans let’s talk a bit about what to share.

Before you run off and post, Stop Think and Think again and as often as possible post pictures.

Most business owners are hungry for business it’s the nature of the beast but we have to understand Facebook is a social network and always will be and business does come 2nd. So The most important rule to follow especially with a newer page is this. When posting you want to keep it more social than business related. There is a rule of thumb that says posts should be 80/20 being 80% social and 20% business related. I would even take it a step further and make it 90/10 from experience. People want to see pictures and interesting content they can “like” and the more they like something the more your page is going to spread through friends. Pictures have the most interaction than any other post so whenever you can add a picture do it. Believe it or not Links are the worst kind of post seeing the least amount of interaction. I would credit this stat because of the risk of viruses that are out there and so many viruses are spread from clicking on a link. The risk outweighs the curiosity of the link. Once your page is established and you are known as trusted source links may be more beneficial but for now only use them if you have to. Unless you are linking to another Facebook page or content. Sharing content that is interesting is best keeping it related to your business makes it even better. I have found a good way to post content although I do believe it hurts my page rank because it’s being posted by a third party site, Twitter! You can set up your twitter account to post tweets to your business page. “make sure you set the correct settings on Twitter so you post to your business and not your personal page”

Every time I find a good article on another website or blog I will tweet it from the social tools the website I’m on has. This populates a post on Facebook and even includes a small picture within the title most of the time. The only thing I don’t like and I haven’t been able to back up my suspicion yet is. If you post it directly to your page it will reach the news feed of others. If you click the tweet button to share from another site I don’t think it shows up in as many news feeds on facebook. I could be wrong but from what I’ve noticed tweeted posts from twitter don’t seem to get many likes on facebook even if it’s a great buzzing topic. This tells me that facebook is punishing those that use the share button in hopes to keep you posting directly from facebook to keep you there longer.

I hope you enjoyed this information as I have lived it and learned the hard way. I hope it clears up any misconceptions you may have had using Facebook. There is so much more to know but we have to keep it in bite size pieces or it would be a novel.

Keep an eye out for my new book release coming soon! It’s almost done and I haven’t even decided on a title yet but it’s a book that shows you step by step how to get any business to the top of Google!

Please comment below and share this if you thought it was useful to yourself or someone you know.