Five Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Facebook Business Page in 2019 And Onward

Making the most out of your Facebook page is vital in today's climate, with many consumers and customers using social media to find what they need. With having around 2.23 billion active users and over 80 million Facebook business pages, it's a potential marketplace that you can't afford to avoid. However, it's often increasingly difficult to do something unique with your Facebook business page, but there are ways to get the most out of your page and give your audience the best value possible.

Here are five tips to help you increase your audience participation, number of followers and traffic to your site through your Facebook business page.

Less promotional content, more fun content

Putting it simply, only posting promotional content on your Facebook page is pretty boring for your followers. The people who have liked your page aren't particularly interested in having your products or services shoved down their throats over and over again and are more likely to not click on the posts. So, what kind of posts should you be putting up, if not promotional ones?

There are a wide range of different posts that you could possibly be putting up on your Facebook business page. Here are just a few:

• Tips & Tricks
• Testimonials
• Videos
• Industry News
• Blog Posts

Alongside this, depending on how you want your brand to appear, you can be jokey and entertaining in your posts. Of course, this wouldn't work for a business page about an undertakers, as you would want to keep a respectful brand voice, but for a coffee company, you may want to post an amusing picture of an animal with a coffee cup.

You never want to have the same posts over and over again, mixing it your promotional content with items that should pique your customers' (or potential customers') interest. Again, it's obviously dependent on what kind of brand you have and how you want to show to your customers, but it's important to think outside of the "sales box". Sometimes engaging with your customers in a different way and making sure you like to relevant pages on your website will get you better results on your Facebook business page than just yelling buy, buy, buy!

Keep an eye on your competitors

Something that we at Smart Domain Group utilise is a social media audit; we make note of how our competitors are doing on social media in relation to our own pages. It takes a little bit of time, but it's worthwhile when followers are going up or down to see if it's a platform-wide trend (perhaps Twitter is culling bots, or Facebook is glitching), or if you're doing something very, very wrong.

As long as you are running your Facebook business page well and you are using your ads correctly, your amount of followers should always be going up. How big that number of followers is will be dependent on the content that you're putting out as well as the products or services you are selling.

There is a way to analyse other pages, by Facebook's "pages to watch" report, looking at the Total Page Likes, Posts this Week and Engagement this Week by their audience. You will be able to add pages as you see fit, but if you have more than your Facebook business page, such as Twitter, or Instagram, or Pinterest, then a simple Excel spreadsheet to compare and contrast is a great idea.

Reply to all activity on your page

If you get a kind comment on your page, or a nice review, make sure you write a reply. Even if it's just a simple "thanks for your kind words!", it goes a long way. Of course, it's always better to write something a little longer and more personal (and we talk about this more in our How to Respond Well to Online Reviews article), but if you have a lot of comments to go through then quick and friendly responses are always key.

It becomes a little trickier when you get a comment or review that's negative, or offensive. The first thing to do with an offensive post is to remove it, and you should be doing this as soon as you spot it come up to limit how many of your followers are going to see it. If it's a negative comment, then it's best to respond to it as openly as you can - don't blame the customer, make sure you answer their complaint and offer to take the discussion off of your business page. Then, you will be able to deal with their issue one-to-one, and when it's resolved, ask them to leave another review, or comment, to explain that everything's sorted out.

Make use of Facebook Insights

A key way to find out whether your business page is doing well is by using Facebook Insights. A simple and free way to make a note of your engagement during the week and it tracks a wide variety of things, such as:

• Page views
• Reviews
• Audience behaviour
• Traffic source
• Post engagement
• Shares
• People reached

If you want to start specifically targeting your posts, you will also be able to see when people were visiting and engaging with your page, so you can change the times your posts go out. There's no point in posting when everyone's asleep or at work and can't check their Facebook feeds as your posts may get lost along the way.

Making a note of these different elements will really help you pinpoint your Facebook posts, meaning you will be able to produce content that hits the right target for you and for your audience.

Make use of Facebook polls, too

The simplest thing you can be doing to find out how best to enhance your posting to better suit your audience is to ask them. People enjoy engaging in simple ways and polls are certainly easy to get involved in; you could even give them some kind of reward at the end of it. Bribery is also a good way to get people to engage, such as competitions or offers on products/services for their participation. The engagement rate for polls is really high, and if you make the content of your poll interesting, you'll have a very high chance for getting great results from it.

Bear in mind that certain types of poll questions get more engagement. Questions that start with 'Should', 'Would', 'Which' or 'Who' tend to get more involvement than those asking 'Why' or 'How'. Phrasing questions correctly gets your audience involved in your polls, which is exactly what you want, and from there you can use it as a jumping off point for your next set of posts.

Are these the only things I can do to help my Facebook page?

Of course not! There are plenty other tips and tricks to help you boost your Facebook business page, but at the end of the day you'll need to start with specifics, root out your weakest parts so you can make them better. Following these five tips might not skyrocket your page into stardom, but it will certainly help with engagement and getting your brand and voice right. Don't forget, at the end of the day, a poll works wonders! Involve your audience in something and they will feel like they matter.

Keep pushing sales posts at them and they won't care.

If you want to be active with your Facebook business page then drafting up a plan for the year is a good idea. As 2019 is coming to a close, you should be reflecting on what went well and what didn't; looking back at your mishaps and failures will give you more of a direction on what you should and shouldn't be doing from now on. Learn from your mistakes, but learn even more from our five valuable tips!