Five Rea­sons To Pro­fes­sion­al­ize Your Busi­ness’ Face­book Page

So­cial me­dia plays a ma­jor role in help­ing small busi­ness own­ers pro­mote their brand’s mes­sage and con­nect with their tar­get audience.

So why not up­date your busi­ness’ Face­book page and give your au­di­ence a rea­son to connect?

Be­low are five rea­sons to pro­fes­sion­al­ize your busi­ness’ Face­book page and quick tips to help you make a few sim­ple adjustments. 

1. In­crease the Chance of Be­ing Found Online

Think of your web­site as a des­ti­na­tion and each page that men­tions the company’s name and links back to the home­page is a road lead­ing oth­ers to your dig­i­tal home. 

Your Face­book page can be a well-built road if you add a lit­tle SEO-friendly con­tent. Use the About sec­tion to tell peo­ple what you do and who you do it for, and be sure to uti­lize key­words, the phrases that your au­di­ence uses to find your web­site, in this section.

Take Target’s Face­book page as an ex­am­ple. The About sec­tion states: “Ex­pect More, Pay Less. We hope you find some­thing you ‘Like’”. This sim­ple, yet to-the-point, sen­tence states the company’s brand­ing mes­sage and en­cour­ages Face­book participation.

Start with a short and sweet sen­tence like the above ex­am­ple. You can al­ways add more in­for­ma­tion un­der the de­scrip­tion sec­tion (a part of your About tab).

2. An­other Op­por­tu­nity to Man­age Your Reputation

A small busi­ness can use their Face­book page for rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment. If you have an ac­tive page, your fans will en­gage and of­fer feed­back. Even dis­grun­tled feed­back can be good for busi­ness if you take ad­van­tage of it. 

Cus­tomers have a place to vent if a ser­vice or prod­uct is not up to speed, and you will have a chance to make the sit­u­a­tion right in a timely man­ner. This not only tells up­set cus­tomers that you care about their needs, but it shows any­one who fol­lows you that your com­pany will do what it takes to con­tinue earn­ing their business.

The so­cial me­dia man­age­ment sys­tem, Hoot­Suite, re­ceives a lot of on­line praise for their tool. They make it eas­ier to share up­dates on var­i­ous so­cial me­dia ac­counts. Users can log into one plat­form and post to Face­book as well as sev­eral other so­cial me­dia sites. When the prod­uct went down one day, they were flooded with complaints.

Hoot­Suite used that op­por­tu­nity to let their users know what was hap­pen­ing and kept their fans in the loop as they made the up­dates. Their au­di­ence still felt frus­trated, but they weren’t left in the dark about the sit­u­a­tion – they were connected.

Prob­lems hap­pen in life and in busi­ness, but you can use your Face­book page to get on top of it and promptly man­age your small busi­ness’ rep­u­ta­tion -- es­pe­cially in a crisis. 

3. Cre­ate an En­gag­ing Playground

In an ar­ti­cle on Forbes.com, Cheryl Con­ner shares some tips from Ra­mon Ray’s new book, The Face­book Guide to Small Busi­ness Mar­ket­ing. Ac­cord­ing to Ray, you need con­tent and en­gage­ment via con­tests, polls, ques­tions, videos as well as great look­ing pho­tos so that your au­di­ence has some­thing to do while they’re on your page. This also gives them a rea­son to come back.

As a sim­ple way to be­gin en­gage­ment, up­date your Face­book page daily. Pro­vide links to your most re­cent ar­ti­cles and in­clude en­tic­ing pic­tures of your company’s em­ploy­ees, fans or products.

Ann Kelle shows how to do this on her Face­book page. The com­pany sells fab­ric, note­books, per­sonal sta­tionery, scrap­book and other sim­i­lar items, so Ann posts bright and fun fab­ric swatches to alert every­one that the prod­uct will be for sale soon. One such post, “All month I’ll be shar­ing my new fab­ric col­lec­tions. First up, Ur­ban Zo­olo­gie on flan­nel!” gar­nered 102 likes, 13 com­ments and two shares.

Not only does this post pro­vide a cute pic­ture of a prod­uct that can be pur­chased shortly, it also tells the read­ers to come back to the page again to check out other soon-to-be re­leased collections.

4. Cre­ate an In­ter­ac­tive Space for Lo­cal Busi­ness Reviews 

When it comes to lo­cal busi­ness re­views, Daniel Kehrer be­lieves the most in­flu­en­tial ref­er­ence is “a sim­ple whis­per in the ear.” While ref­er­enc­ing the Har­ris In­ter­ac­tive Study from 2011, Kehrer says “three out of four lo­cal cus­tomers (75 per­cent) still rec­om­mend busi­nesses by word-of-mouth.”

Since Face­book re­cently launched a new mo­bile de­sign that makes your page eas­ier to use on a smart phone, you only need to fill out your About page, of­fer your ad­dress and phone num­ber and en­cour­age your fans to leave you feed­back in terms of re­views and likes. This can turn that lit­tle whis­per in a shout heard around the world.

5. You Get an Up­grade; Every­one Gets an Upgrade!

Chances are you can’t give every­one a brand new car like Oprah Win­frey did for her stu­dio au­di­ence, but you can give your so­cial me­dia an up­grade and every­body gets to hear about it.

Ac­cord­ing to Hazel All­sopp in Why You Should Be Us­ing Google+, “Face­book still is the lead­ing so­cial site, but Google+ has ad­van­tages” in­clud­ing in­creased level of so­cial en­gage­ment, the op­por­tu­nity to im­prove a website’s SEO and so­cial presence.

Key­word op­ti­mized in­for­ma­tion is eas­ier to find. En­gag­ing con­tent gives your so­cial me­dia fans some­thing to talk about. So the work you do to im­prove your Face­book page can ben­e­fit your Google+ ac­count as well. 

Now that you have read these tips on why you should clean up your Face­book page, take a look at your busi­ness’ page and see which up­dates should be made. These tips could re­ally help el­e­vate your brand both on­line and offline. 

By Jamil­lah Warner (MsJ)

Lib­eral arts ed­u­cated, small busi­ness raised, MsJ’s a poet with a pas­sion for your vi­sual, ver­bal and writ­ten brand and the au­thor GrittyWriter.com.