What is Facebook Marketing?
Essentially, Facebook Marketing is all about the creation and usage of a Facebook page as a communication channel of your business. When someone says they are involved in Facebook marketing, you know that they are using their Facebook page to attract new clients, turning them into converting or purchasing customers and retaining them as part of their loyal fanbase.What Type of Business Can Do Facebook Marketing?
When you try to open a Facebook page, you will be prompted to choose a page category. This is where you’ll notice that pretty much all types are businesses are eligible to do Facebook marketing!
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), big brands, communities and public figures alike can all be involved in Facebook marketing with different goals in mind.
SMEs could be more focused towards branding efforts and lead generation, as an example, while communities would be looking to drive traffic to their fundraising page and unique reach. Meanwhile, public figures could aim for unique video views or messaging interactions.
Whatever the goal might be, you will notice that pretty much all sorts of businesses are eligible to run Facebook marketing.
How to Set Up the Perfect Facebook Page
If you were able to reach the Facebook page category selection pictured above, chances are that you already completed step 1, which is to have your own personal Facebook profile.A Facebook page creation is different from that of a Facebook profile. You can opt for the ‘Add Friend’ option when you are on someone’s Facebook profile, but not if you are on a Facebook page, where you can choose to like or follow it instead.
Based on the categories mentioned in the previous section, a great start to creating your perfect Facebook page would be to choose the page category that fits most closely to your business, because it would affect the accessible fields that you can edit later on. As an example, our PanPages TRINITY page was opened under the business category.
When selecting your Facebook page name, do think twice! While you are allowed to change your Facebook page name in most cases, it can take a long time to review.
Facebook Page Profile Photo Sizes & Recommendations
You are free to change your Facebook profile picture whenever you want with whatever you like - a nice selfie from your last Friday party, a memorable picture with your best mates in university, etc.However, a business pages profile photos should be kept fairly constant. The best practice would be to have your business logo as your profile photo and nothing else! Of course, you can add small variations such as some signs of festivity during certain festive seasons like we did for Christmas 2018, but the creativity is really up to you!
Creating a 1:1 ratio version of your logo would be recommended, since you will be prompted to crop your image into a square one if you upload a file that is not square to start with. If your logo is rectangular, try creating a square version as well! Take a look at the two logo versions that we have below to cater to both sizes and dimensions.
Some businesses might actually do better with a different profile photo format. While most official business accounts would use logos, public figures can use a professional headshot, while a local restaurant or pub could feature their best-selling dishes as their profile photo.
Facebook Page Cover Photo Size & Recommendations
The large, horizontal image that appears on the top of your Facebook page would be what we refer to the cover photo - much like a blog header imager or a signboard on a shop. Ideally, the cover photo should also reflect your Facebook page’s identity.You can update your Facebook page’s cover photo frequently to keep it updated with the latest promotions, offerings or even workshops and events that you have in store for your customers and clients.
The official cover photo dimensions are at 851 x 315 px. However, it’s alright if your cover photo does not fit that dimension exactly. When you upload your cover photo picture file, you will have the option to reposition the picture, soyou can center the images before you save it and keep that cover photo focused in the area that you have set.
The best practice would be to include a description for your cover photo to further elaborate on the ongoing promotions or events mentioned in the picture. As an example, when we held uploaded a cover photo for our business website workshop, we included the event details in the descriptions.
If you have an online retail store featuring the promotions, you can even include links in the descriptions to bring interested Facebook users to those specific links!
Creating a Short Description for your Facebook Page
When you edit the descriptions for your Facebook page, you will see it in the ‘About’ section of your Facebook page.
This includes your business information, contact information, your business story and other information. The general tip? Input as much information as possible, with priorities to your contact number, location, website and e-mail.
You can also include 1-2 sentences describing your business in the short description section. When people search for your company, this is the description that would appear in the search results, so remember to keep it short but informative! Additionally, this description could be the first touch point for your potential clients to get a glimpse of your brand personality.
Facebook Page Username
Your Facebook page username works just like how usernames work when you create an account for Twitter, Instagram or just for your Steam games. This username would appear in the page URL to make your Facebook page easier to find.As an example, your page name could be listed as PanPages.com, but your username can be PanPagesMY, which would be reflected in the URL.
This username feature is convenient for pages with long names which could be hard to remember, or just to differentiate your business page from the smaller branches located throughout the country.
With a username, your clients can look for you just by typing fb.me/PanPagesMY or message the page at m.me/PanPagesMY. A convenient feature!
Be careful about choosing your page username! This cannot be changed later on unlike how a page name can be changed.
Usernames are limited to only 50 characters, and has to be unique - if it is being used by another business page, you will not be able to use that username.
Creating an Effective Call-to-Action for your Facebook Page
You Facebook page basics is pretty much nicely set up now, and we can now implement a call-to-action for it! You can prompt your page visitors to perform an action valuable for your business.If you have a reservation-based business such as hotels or Airbnbs, the ‘Book Now’ button could be more suitable than an ‘Install Now’ button, as an example. If you have a medical care-based Facebook page meanwhile, a ‘Call Now’ button could be much more important than a ‘Send Message’ one as well.
Under each button category, there are several other selections that can be better suited for your business. Some would require you to input a link that the visitors can go to upon clicking it. The ‘Learn More’ button, for example, could bring the users to an external website - their official business website, their YouTube channel and much more.
A service-based business like ours which could require some information before our customers convert would do better with a ‘Send Message’ button, which we are currently using.
There’s so much more to explore with these CTA buttons! You might want to get started with automated replies acknowledging that you have received your users’ messages, or even try advanced chatbot options such as Chatfuel!
Facebook Page Interaction Optimization
The simplest way to get started, especially if you have ‘Send Message’ as your CTA button, is to enter your page settings, and go to the ‘Messaging’ tab.As part of the best practices, you should always keep the ‘Prompt people to send messages’ option switched on.
What that button does is that the chatbox for that page would automatically pop up when a user lands on your Facebook page on two conditions: When you are online on the page, or when your page has achieved the badge ‘Very Responsive to Messages’.
This simple action can go miles in prompting users to send you a message to ask about what they want to know - improving user interaction rates. You can take this a step further by using the ‘Stay Responsive’ and ‘Show a Messenger Greeting’ option which you can find under the same settings page.
Under the stay responsive option, you can preset an instant reply for your Facebook page. When a user inputs a certain query, they will immediately get that response, whether or not you are there to manage the Facebook page.
This can significantly shorten the response time for your Facebook page, a performance criteria which would enable you to customize the Response Time badge which can only be displayed once you started replying in a day or less 75% of the time. If you don’t have this response rate, you will not be able to display the badge or modify the messages.
Users seeing the ‘Typically replies instantly’ badge on your Facebook page would be more encouraged to send their inquiries to you through Facebook messenger.
Our Facebook page has switched on all the available messaging optimizations mentioned above, and when you land on PanPages TRINITY’s Facebook page, here’s how the chatbox would look like:
We have a messenger greeting that pops up once the chatbox is open, and an instant reply that prompts our users to key in some of their contact details for us to follow up with them later.
Of course, this message is just tailored to suit our purposes. Try setting up different types of messages to A/B test its efficacy and performance!
Facebook Grey Verification Badge
Any business pages can get a grey verification badge. This badge will show that a business page is authentic in representing who or which business it claims to be.To verify your business, you can go into the page settings, and go under the general tab where you will see the ‘Page Verification’ option. Here, you can choose to either upload a business official document with your business name and business address on it, or to request a phone call from Facebook to your business’ official phone number with a 4-digit verification code.
You can only request to verify your business if your page has a profile photo, a cover photo, and some posts on the page.
After uploading either the documents or the 4-digit code, your information will then take a few days to be processed, and after that, you will receive an e-mail about the verification status. Remember that page verification is not a requirement for a business page, but rather, a recommended option.
Once you are verified, you will have a grey tick next to your page, giving you a higher page rank in comparison to other similar pages!
If you’re wondering about the unique blue badges, keep in mind that only certain brands and public figures can get these badges - you cannot request for the blue badges!
That's all for part 2 of our Facebook marketing guide! We hope that this guide will be helpful for you to set up your Facebook page. Have any questions about setting up your Facebook page?Drop your questions in the comments below and we'll get back to you soon!
Enjoyed reading this post? There are 5 parts in total for our Facebook guide and this is the 2nd part! Check out the other parts below!
