Business Pages on Facebook Explained for Business Owners

Transcription: Hi, Eric Thompson here. And I wanted to talk to you today about Facebook and social media posting, and the difference between a personal page and a business page. I find myself having to explain this quite frequently. So this is hopefully going to be informative to you and give you a little bit of insight into how I look at things versus what the, uh, I suppose to say would be conventional wisdom out there. And at the end of the day you have to understand what Facebook and these other platforms are pushing our information in their own best interest and not necessarily yours, because if you remember, they make money based off of your ad revenue, that the revenue that they gain from, you know, forcing you to advertise. So it isn't necessarily in their best interest that you do well free. So I wanted to start by explaining the difference between personal versus business pages.

They are 100% not the same, uh, so many times I'm consulting with business owners and they think that their business page is exactly the same as the personal page. It, it could not be further from the truth, uh, personal pages there to connect with people and, and, you know, move forward and, and, you know, get your message out or be friendly. A business page is not that way could be if that's what your goal is, but we're in business. And I'm going to make an assumption here that your goal is to actually increase your revenue. So if your goal is to increase your revenue, this is actually going to be, um, you know, advice that you can utilize moving forward. So that starts with, uh, the first thing that I want to talk about is what is your purpose? What is your goal? I need you to actually define that if your goal is to get people to come through the front door, make that your goal, uh, you know, you'd, there should be a call to action in what we put out there.

If it's to get people to order online, if it's get to people to sign up, uh, you know, and you can also have goals within goals mean at the end of the day, uh, you know, we can have marketing calendars and we'll be talking about that a little bit later. Uh, but which, you know, we can have specific campaigns that we want to push and, and, and do things, uh, to increase the viewership and the reach that we want to get. So understanding a little bit of how this works, there's organic versus paid. So for instance, on your personal social media page, it's 100% organic. There absolutely is nothing that you paid in order to make, you know, people see more of your stuff on the business side, on Facebook page side,

Essentially it is an advertising platform. It is only paid for the most part. So for instance, let's say that you have, um, you know, we have two different companies. One is 300 followers. One is 10,000 followers,

Okay. At this point, right now, the estimated reach the organic reach for out any posts that you're going to, that your followers, even people that follow in like your page are going to see is only anywhere between five and 10%. So you can, you know, I work with people all the time and they spent all this time trying to be creative and put all this effort into it. And it's not reaching anybody. It's not reaching people, particularly if you only have 300 followers, if you only have 300 followers, these are people that more often than not are related to you where your friends, some of whom are you, maybe your clients or your customers, but more often than not, it's just people that, you know, are you really spending all this time and effort putting this ex you know, all those creative content into making something that nobody's seeing, or even if they do see it, is it really reaching the right person?

If you have 10,000 people, that's fantastic. So you put out a post, maybe 500 to a thousand people are going to see that. But even at that, it's just scrolling through, they're scrolling through their feed and that's, that's counted as a view. So what, what really do you want to put out there? I mean, from, from my perspective, and it's a couple of things we're going to get into it, but you should have a call to action. I mean, so if you want somebody to come to your business, ask them to come to your business, show them your, you know, directions, show them your address, give them your phone number, ask them to text. You think of it like a commercial. Every post should honestly be somewhat of a commercial, not always sell, sell, sell, but you, you can inform and you can do whatever, but everything should always have a call to action.

My thoughts, like I said, are going to be a little bit different than most people creating content for content's sake. I mean, unless you're trying to build up a personal brand and your own personality, that's, it really doesn't make any sense to do so on a business page with this, we have a limited free, you know, access that we can get to people to see our posts. And, and, and we don't have to pay additional money to, you know, an advertisements to reach out to people, even that follow us. So why wouldn't we want to maximize that now, depending on the industry, depending how many people follow your page? What you want to do is probably post anytime between one and three times a day, you know, a busy restaurant, that's got 10,000 followers post three times a day, two times a day. Um, if you're an attorney, once a day is going to be fine.

I mean, sometimes you're advertising to the people. Sometimes you're advertising to the computer program as well, the algorithm. So I guess my point is capitalize on what you can when you can. Now a good strategy here is actually to utilize a marketing calendar. Now, if you have, like, if you're, let's say you're a restaurant, I mean, it's just makes it easy. Everybody understands that. So let's say you have a lunch specials. Let's say you have Friday night specials. Let's say you have Saturday live music. You want to make sure that you're advertising to people at the right time. So if you want to advertise, when are people thinking about going out on a Saturday night, you know, Saturday, Friday at work, you know, it's different for everybody's business, but make sure you're posting at the appropriate times and then fill up your calendar and fill up your schedule in advance.

And you can utilize, uh, you can utilize programs. Um, we use one called social pilot. Um, we've used a buffer before. There's, HootSweet, there's all sorts of different places, you know, uh, programs out there and push those out there and then do your calendar and put your special events in place. Uh, then what I like to do is an all the other or areas that we don't have necessarily a specific event that we're doing, um, you know, have framework or skeletal type of posts. So that would be, you know, good photos or good videos with a good tagline in a call of action, put it out there. It's basically your generic posts that, that picture's worth a thousand words, come on down. You won't be disappointed sort of scenario, right? And then from there to maximize what we can do for free with Facebook and such is, and other platforms is take what they're giving us.

I mean, for instance, Facebook wants people to go live. They want people to post videos. So do that myself ingestion for everybody. Uh, that's a business owner outside of the framework posting is too, you know, and when we work with, uh, for example, when we work with restaurants, I don't know what your specials are. I don't know what your you're cooking for Friday. I don't know what, what new items you added on to the menu? I don't know what to drink. You're making. This is where you could get those chef, the bartender, a waiter, a manager in order to take photos or videos of that, give people an opportunity to see. So what my suggestion to people is is that if you have questions, if people are always seeing, wanting to see the same thing, if you have ideas that you want to do it, create a list.

Yeah. Just, just create a list, 10, 20, 30 items, long, print it. And then when you're, when you have a spare minute, when somebody is part of their job, check it off, have them post that have an upload it. If it didn't work out, delete it, it's all disposable content anyway. And then just go through the list and then reprint it when you're done and start all over again and do the same thing, you know, and the point being is that people, attention spans are that of goldfish or less at this point right now. So nobody's going to remember, although it's going to look soon, super repetitive to you, the people that are actually working on the page, it's actually not going to be repetitive to them. So my suggestion is to treat Facebook and everywhere else, like a advertising platform and your sole goal is to maximize what you can accomplish and what you can do with the limited time that you have in order to do things for free.

Now, if you want to do advertisement and stuff, obviously that makes more sense. And that's a whole other, you know, area. Do you advertise to the people that, to the people that don't follow, um, to what, you know, the audience setting up the demographics. I mean, there's a lot of that goes into it, but to capitalize on a Facebook page and to make the most use of it. Remember sometime you're advertising to people and sometimes you're advertising computers and you're not necessarily just advertising to Facebook either or LinkedIn or wherever you're posting, but you're advertising to the search engines that are actually indexing those pages and seeing the activity on those pages as well. So you want to make sure that you'd make the most out of every situation there and don't get too caught up into, you know, well, this, I see this big multi-billion dollar corporation doing this.

So that's obviously what I should be doing. Well, they have a staff of 20 people that are doing you. Don't put your, put, put your priorities where they need to be, and don't waste your time where it's not going to be effective, treat it like it should be treated. Not like they're telling you to treat it. Not like they're trying to get you set up. So you're a long, you know, basically they're, they're setting you up so that you become a long-term customer and it's been lots of money on advertisement. And, you know, eventually we all will, or until the next new platform comes out. But in the meantime, make the most of what we have available right now.