27 Facebook Business Tips Learned At The Facebook Small Business Boost Event

facebook advertising tips
facebook advertising tips by Curt Maly

Curt Maly, the Social Media Ad Genius, likes to learn as much as he likes to teach!

The Social Media Ad Genius team members are students of the Facebook Business Advertising marketplace, and, as such, are constantly attending workshops, masterminds, and even webinars to learn as much about this technology as possible… so we can pass the knowledge to you!

This week, we attended the Facebook Small Business Boost Event in Austin, Texas.  This event is a 2 hour presentation for business owners hosted by Facebook.  To find out where the next Facebook Small Business Boost event is, visit https://www.eventbrite.com/d/united-states/facebook-small-business-boost/

Here are the top 27 Facebook Business Tips learned at this event that cover both organic marketing and paid Facebook Advertising.

Tips On Setting Up Your Facebook Page

Tips On Setting Up A Facebook Fan PageOne popular question asked at the Facebook Small Business Boost event was whether or not businesses should waste their time on organic posts since Facebook organic reach has dwindled to about 2%.  Facebook stated that there are still benefits to having a Fan Page because, if you completely optimize your profile, customers who are looking for you, your product, or your service on Facebook will be able to find you.  Here are some tips that they gave regarding setting up your Page:

  1. Complete the About section – this has SEO value, plus, this information assists Facebook with suggestions for Facebook users with similar profiles.  For a small business, this will help you get found in graph search.  Facebook recommends completely filling out the following:
    • Address
    • Hours of operation
    • Phone number
    • email
    • website
  2. Add a cover image that will help you create the right impression for your business
  3. Add a ‘Call To Action’ button on your Fan Page cover photo.  Your options are Book Now, Contact Us, Use App, Play Game, Shop Now, Sign Up, or Watch Video.
  4. Use a profile photo that will look good in a small size – think images or logos rather than text.
  5. Run a Like Campaign to start getting your targeted audience to your Fan Page

Facebook Posting Tips

The goal with posting updates on Facebook is to get people to engage.  Their advice is to create posts that would be similar to what you would actually say to a customer or prospect.

Here are some Facebook Small Business Boost tips for Posting on your Facebook Fan Page:

6.  Pick an engagement method – you pretty much only have 3 choices:

  • Text – least effective
  • Photo – your photo post takes up considerably more real estate than a text post, and as such, it’s much more likely to get people to stop scrolling and look at your message
  • Video – in many cases, this method is the most effective way to get people to receive your message.

7.  For video ads, don’t get overly fancy.  Use your cell phone to take the video if you have to.  The simpler you make the video process, the more likely you are to implement.

8.  The shorter the video, the better.  According to Rhythm Insights, 88% of people will watch a Facebook video ad to completion if it’s less than 30 seconds

9.  Use Facebook’s stock image library for your photos.  Their library has a great selection of royalty free images that will help you create a professional looking ad.

10.  Keep your photo posts concise.  Shorter posts will get more responses.  Facebook recommends that you only use between 100 to 250 characters for an update.

11.  Create a two-way conversation.  Create posts that actually ask people to answer a question, give an opinion, share their thoughts, and/or provide feedback.

12.  Answer every reasonable question.  Some people are jerks, but for the most part, if someone asks a legitimate question (even if it’s painful), answer it.  Publicly asked customer service questions can potentially be embarrassing, but if you handle it professionally and promptly, you can turn a bad situation into a good one.

13.  Track the times when your Fans are most responsive.  When does your target audience want to hear from you (during lunch, after work, first thing in the morning)?

14.  Post when your customers want to see your posts.  If you don’t want to wake up at 6am or stay awake until 11pm, then use Facebook’s post scheduling technology on the Fan Page to schedule these posts in advance.

15.  Know your business goal. There are three main objectives for Facebook Pages: drive foot traffic to a brick & mortar business, generate leads, and create brand awareness.

16.  Know your audience.  You can utilize Facebook’s native information (demographic information obtained through Facebook user’s profile information) to create specific ads.  For example, if you’re a restaurant, you may want to create a different ad for your younger audience (Reverse Happy Hour specials from 11pm – 2am) versus your older clientele (Happy Hour specials from 5pm – 7pm).

17.  Pick A Topic.  Facebook revealed the 2 most successful types of topics that small businesses use:  an employee telling a story about the service or product or announcing a new dish or product being created (with the intent of bringing back a customer).

18.  Create special organic offers.  Reward those customers who engage and interact with you the most by creating special events & offers for those individuals.

Use Paid Facebook Advertising To Promote Your Facebook Business Page

web-smag-chalkboard-765x300Ultimately, what Facebook revealed about the most effective Facebook business strategy was simple: if you want to engage with customers, use organic posts.  If you want your customers to take a specific action, then use paid Facebook advertising.

At the event, organizers announced that Facebook users check their news feed approximately 14 times a day.  The goal of Facebook is to put the most relevant information in front of the user to keep them coming back.  Facebook business posts are deemed the least relevant to users, therefore, Facebook forces small businesses to 1) create better quality (less spammy) posts and 2) pay to promote those posts to the most specific target.

Here are some Facebook Advertising tips to find new customers:

19.  Create your avatar.  Think of the people you’d like to reach.  Who is your ideal customer?  How old are they, where do they live, what jobs do they have, where do they work, and what interests do they have?

20.  Use the different types of Targeting options on Facebook:

  • Location – reach people in cities, countries and communities where you want to do business
  • Demographics – choose the audience for your ad based on age, gender, marital status, education, and more.  Remember, as listed in tip 11, you may benefit from creating a unique ad for each type of demographic.
  • Interests – reach people on their interests, hobbies, and other Pages they like on Facebook.  For example, if you sell cookware, you can reach people who like ‘cooking’, recipe sites, and Like cooking shows.
  • Behaviors – you can target people based on their purchase habits, device usage, and other activities.
  • Connections – you can reach people who are connected to your Page, event, app, as well as their friends!

21.  Use Custom Audience.  A custom audience is an audience created by you when you upload your customer’s email addresses to Facebook.  Facebook will then scour the Facebook universe to look for a match.  You’ll then have the ability to target your customers via Facebook.  To expand on this audience base, you can create a…

22.  Lookalike Audience.  A lookalike audience allows Facebook to look at the demographics of your customer base and create an audience of people who share these same characteristics for the purpose of giving you a larger audience to which you may market.  Facebook will help you build a lookalike audience based on:

  • The people who like your Facebook Page
  • Customer contact info, like emails or phone numbers
  • People who visit your website

23.  Use Conversion Tracking – set up a conversion tracking pixel, place pixel on your website when you have a specific action you want people to take, create ads with the conversion tracking pixels in place, and view reports to determine your ROI on campaigns.

Facebook Ads Questions

Tips On Managing Your Facebook Advertising Costs

Facebook reiterated that you can have success by spending as little as $5 per day on your Facebook business advertising account.  The fact is, there really is no minimum spend.  Here are some tips from Facebook on how to manage your Facebook advertising costs:

24.  Use information from Page Insights to determine what posts are doing the best… and boost those posts.  If you’re getting good engagement and interaction for free, why not spend $5 on more engagement to attract more people to your site?

25.  Define your budget and set payment method – you can absolutely control how much you spend.  You can also control when you spend by using Facebook’s day parting tool.

26.  When setting your payment method, NEVER use PayPal – using paypal on Facebook ads will trigger a fraud alert and will cause your account to get shut down.

27.  Check your ads manager account daily to see performance– review this data to determine where you should stop spending money and where you should put more money!

Final Thoughts On The Facebook Small Business Boost Event | Facebook Business Statistics

While these are not tips, this is pretty impressive information shared at the event and I added this in because I thought it was interesting:

Facebook Business Statistics By the Numbers

  • Facebook has 1 billion registered users
  • Average Internet user spends 40% of their online time on the News Feed
  • Average Facebook user spend 6 hours per month on the network
  • Average user checks their news feed 14 times per day
  • 3.2 billion posts are made each day
  • 12 million daily users
  • 1 billion searches performed daily within the platform
  • 113 million check-ins every month
  • 13 million local business Pages
  • Facebook fans are 2 times more likely to become customers
  • 3 million Page owners have downloaded the Pages Manager mobile app
  • 150 million people finding and connecting to businesses on Facebook daily
  • 680 million people log in to Facebook mobile at least once per month

If you are new to Facebook business advertising, then this event is recommended as it will provide you with a great foundation for the basics of running Facebook ads.  However, if you’re not able to make the event, then this summary should give you a great overview of how to have success with paid traffic on the social networking giant.

If you have any questions or require any additional information regarding The 27 Facebook Business Tips Learned At The Facebook Small Business Boost, then you can learn more by visiting http://SocialMediaAdGenius.com.

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Nick Bridges

Nick is an Award Winning web designer, is also the Creative Director for the Agency, assisting in areas like funnel creation, copywriting, Landing Page development, and more. Nick also oversees all of the technical components of the creation and implementation of Social Media Ad Genius.

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About The Author

Nick Bridges

Nick is an Award Winning web designer, is also the Creative Director for the Agency, assisting in areas like funnel creation, copywriting, Landing Page development, and more. Nick also oversees all of the technical components of the creation and implementation of Social Media Ad Genius.

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