Small business Facebook 101

Yes. Your small business needs a Facebook page. Every business needs a Facebook page. Now, you may be thinking “my business is different, I will not benefit from a Facebook page.” Well, excuse my harshness for a moment, but the only thing that would differentiate a business enough to not need a Facebook, is if the business didn’t have the will to survive. To drive this point home, consider this quote from Erik Qualman, the author of Socialnomics,

The ROI of social media is your business will still exist in 5 years.

Now, I will not deny that many businesses create a Facebook page and epically fail at social media. But, that is why you are reading this – to avoid epic failure. Starting a Facebook page is easy, but that doesn’t mean it is a thoughtless process.

Here are 6 thing you need to do to create and start a successful small business Facebook page:

Set your goals
Before even typing in facebook.com, you have some work to do. First and foremost, you need to decide on what goals you want to achieve with your Facebook presence (and these should be relevant to your overall business goals and general content marketing goals. Social media is not a goal itself). Do you want to show your expertise? Educate people? Generate traffic to your website? Taking the time to define your goals will make creating content easier in the future and give your Facebook message a cohesive, organized appearance.
Define your target audience
You can’t reach everyone, so you have to decide on a target audience. Once you have defined who you are talking to, do some research on that demographic. What do they like? What values are important to them? Once again, this research will help narrow down and identify what kind of content you should publish.
Create a strategy
Now that you have goals and an audience – what are you going to do with them? Compose a social media plan that describes what your key messages are, your brand voice, categories of content you want to publish, and how often and where you want to publish (again, this should also be apparent in your comprehensive content marketing strategy). If you really want to be on top of the game, put together a content calendar.
Create your page
Finally, right? To have a business page, you first need a personal profile. You can use your own Facebook and assign others on your team admin privileges. When you create the business page, remember to fill everything out. You need a profile picture (180 pixels by 180 pixels), you need a creative, personalized cover photo (851 pixels by 315 pixels), and an informative “about” section (approximately 155 characters). A tip: Even though Facebook will walk you through the area to input your company URL, it’s a great idea to also put your website address in the short “about” section so that it also appears front and center when anyone views your page.
Post consistent and relative content
Having a Facebook page means nothing if you are not posting and engaging. If you need help posting regularly, don’t be afraid to use a scheduler like HootSuite or Sprout Social; just make sure you are aware of what you are posting each day and what is going on in the world – you don’t want to be that company posting happy-go-lucky content when there is a national tragedy underway. And don’t use it as a crutch; you want lots of real-time content as well.
Watch your numbers
Not every post can be a winner. That is a fact of life, but if you watch your analytics and respond to them, you can make sure a majority of your posts are popular. Facebook has a tenancy to change thing up, so keep an eye out for analytics updates that can help you understand your audience even better.

Easy, right? Epic failure is not hard to avoid so long as you stay aware of and committed to your goals. Now get out there and start creating the page that will connect you to the people who will help make your business a success.