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Facebook for Business Tips to Try Before You #deletefacebook

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Facebook for Business Tips for Desperate People on the Verge of Giving Up

Are you sick and tired of trying to appease the Facebook God?

Have you tried everything, wasted countless hours, thrown money at it, and STILL see zip? Nada? No likes, no comments? And only your loving grandma liking your page?

If that's you, I feel your pain! As small business owners, we have all bashed our heads and sacrificed tears and blood at the altar of the Facebook God at one time or another.

But I'm here to help you get back up on your feet, dust yourself off, and get back at that keyboard to try a few new things. Things that, as a social media manager and consultant, I see most small business owners completely fail to do.

My job is to study those Facebook nasty, hungry algorithms we all hate, and learn to feed them what they demand.

Let me help you learn how to put Facebook its in place so that it serves YOUR business, and you're not just serving Facebook!

So, before you go and delete your business page or abandon it to become a graveyard, here are 6 commandments you may not have known.

Facebook for Business Tips to Try Before You #deletefacebook by Hexotica

Facebook for Business Tips: 5 Ways to Slay the Beast and Grow YOUR Business

Slaying Tip #1: The two elements to fuse together to make a branding BANG!

First off, let's get the foundational underwear out of the way.

There are two things that everyone looks at first that help them make a snap judgement about your business. These are the profile image and the cover image. They must work together.

If either image is blurry or hard to read, or if it isn't sized properly, you're telling people you run a sloppy business and they aren't going to want to stick around.

Secondly, the profile image needs to match or coordinate with the cover image.  If your profile image is a picture of you but nothing else on the page tells the reader who you are in relation to the page, you're making the visitor work to learn about your business. You should make it clear and effortless for a viewer to understand what your business is about. Make it a big obvious BANG from the moment your page loads!

With the profile image, it's best practice to use either a logo or, if your brand is based on you, a photograph. Try not to change it very often.

And for cover images, use a graphic image or a photograph that very quickly tells the viewer what your business is about. Change the cover image at least every quarter. It should reflect whatever current promotion or event you are promoting.

I prefer to use a never-changing logo in my profile pic and include updated photos of me in a cover image I change quarterly.

Everything else is not near as important as these two visual elements.

Slaying Tip #2: Your page should look like Times Square.

When last the Facebook God spoke about their algorithm changes, they commanded us all to make Live videos. Nothing will beat the algorithms better than Live Facebook videos, so take the time to get visible at least once a week. Go live on the same day at the same time each week if you can. Let your followers know when you will go live with a pre-announcement or two.

If your nerves fail you, the second-best option is to upload pre-recorded videos.

And if you ain't got time for dat, find the best, most entertaining, and most shared videos you can and share those. Caveat: NOT from YouTube. FROM Facebook. Facebook hates when we direct traffic off of it's domain, so only link out sparingly and strategically. Learn how to embed the videos as a post so you can schedule them. These are some Facebook for business tip and tricks that I teach in my mentoring programs.

I loved this video by JP Sears that pretty much summed up the relationship most of us have had with Facebook and its algorithms over the years. "You could say it's been a bit of a love-hate relationship" Omg, has it ever!

Slaying Tip #3: Give away free stuff as if you were on a float in an infinite Mardi Gras parade.

Hands down, the best way to get eyeballs to your page and to gain new followers is to run regular giveaways. Whether you pay for ads or not, this is the best way to attract attention. I especially advise new or dormant Facebook pages to consider running a giveaway.

However. *loud throat clearing* For giveaways to work you can't run them on your own or you'll get more of zip and nada. Trust me, I have tried, even with large pages. You need to sign up to third-party software that will help spread the word around the internet outside of just Facebook.

Easy, affordable software tools to look into are Rafflecopter, Gleam, Wishpond, Shortstack, Agoraplus, and WooBox.  Read about all of them in more detail here.

Whatever you do, be sure to read Facebook's Terms of Service very carefully.

Don't be a TOS noob and tell your followers to "tag a friend!" about your giveaway.

It's not allowed.

You'll anger the Face-God and get brutally punished.  

Slaying Tip #4: Pave the road and light it up with dozens of blinkers to direct the traffic.

Get clear on exactly ONE THING that you want people to do when they visit your page. Don't mess around with multiple calls to action. Make it very clear what you want people to do and where you want them to go. Be very consistent with your calls-to-action (CTA).

If you consistently use the same CTA for at least 3 months but have no takers, then change to a different one.

Experimenting with ONE CTA at a time will help you gauge what works best.

If you want people to pick up the phone and call you, have your action button set to that. Have every single post finish with "call me" and your phone number. End every Live video with a "call me!" and a twinkling smile. Then, be sure you ask every person who calls you where they heard about you.

If you want email sign-ups, tell people what they will get if they sign-up in the cover image. Instead of sending people to your website, send them directly to landing pages to sign-up.

The weakest pages are ones that give visitors no direction.

The strongest enslave Facebook and use it to serve their sales funnels. 

Make the page serve you better by giving it one specific function to help grow your business.

Slaying Tip #5: Scared money don't make no money.

Finally, once you've done all 4 steps above--and ONLY once you've done all 4--it's time to put down some cash.

Did I hear a moan?

If you're thinking, "I tried that, it didn't work" I would love to look at what you did, because 9/10 I find the same mistakes. Common ones are:

  1. Paid ads to send traffic to a website that isn't designed to convert. Simply, if you haven't studied copywriting or hired one to write a sales page, ads to your website are a waste of moolah. An exception to this is an e-commerce site.
  2. Paid ads without an offer. If you're not giving something away, offering a mouth-watering deal or promoting an amazing sale, nobody is going to care. Without an offer, you're not selling anything.
  3. Paid ads sent to the wrong audience. You tried to reach your own followers to tell them about your widget sale, but you targeted a cold audience that has never heard of you. Or, a similar mistargeting of audience warmth or demographics.
  4. Paid ads with terrible creatives (that's ad talk for the overall look of the ad). Bad copy, bad image, bad everything.
  5. Paid ads that never became an ad because you didn't read the Terms of Service. Repeated rejections. You gave up.
  6. Complete confusion. Never even tried any ads!

Here's an easy, effective way to spend money on Facebook ads:

Run ads based on what Facebook suggests for your type of business. They make it easy for you by walking you through a few questions about your business. You get to run 6 different images at a time and you can run them for as little as $1 a day.

Here's the thing with the cash you throw down though--if you offer the Facebook god $500 in ads but it hates your ads, it won't spend much of that $500. Your ad works like a bid. If Facebook likes it, then it will show your ad to more people and spend more of your money.

Also, if you are willing to spend even more than $200, don't do it from the Facebook Page. Do it through Business Manager, which is far more robust. You want to get the best bang for your buck if you're serious about advertising. The Page ad feature is best for just helping boost the page and get eyeballs.

Without any money behind your page, you are going to have to work a lot harder to create great original videos and posts.

Is all that work worth it, just to be hidden deep in the bowels of Facebook? I don't think it is.

Sacrifice a little dough and get some eyeballs on your page. Invest in advertising for your business.

If you don't invest in yourself, how do you expect others to want to invest in you?

Scared money don't make no money!

Ready to deal with that languishing page of yours now?

So, I hope I've renewed your strength to get back onto your page to give it another go. If you get your branding right, focus mainly on video, run contests, streamline your CTA, and sprinkle a few dollars on top, you WILL start to gain some traction with your page.

After following these 5 Facebook for business tips, you should see a steady increase in followers and in your target goal for the page. That target goal is more important than the number of followers you have, too, by the way. Follower count just serves Facebook, while your goal serves YOUR business. That's because Facebook OWNS your followers--not you

Want to learn more about marketing in a fun, no gobbledly-gook way?

Join my FREE Facebook community, Marketing For Creative & Unconventional Women & Gender Diverse. 

It’s where I help creatives overcome ugly duckling imposter syndrome and learn to kick-ass with their marketing to fund their DREAMS.🪄🦢

I’d love to help you build YOUR online empire this year!

Hexotica Alternative Lifestyle Blog