Determine the Best Use of Facebook for Your Business

Whether you’re an individual, small business, or even a large brand, there’s no getting around one thing: Facebook.

Facebook is a massive company with billions of accounts and an incredibly large umbrella of brands underneath it. After the company acquired Instagram in 2012, its user base jumped up even more as it diversified itself to appeal to younger generations.

To reflect their diversified portfolio and gargantuan size, the parent company renamed itself Meta. Meta is the biggest player in social media and provides universally effective tools for every brand…as long as brands take the time to understand how to use them.

So, how should your brand use Facebook?

Important Things to Note

Firstly, you need to understand that Facebook is in the most precarious position since its founding.

Forbes reported that Facebook lost 500,000 users in the last three months of 2021, but that’s just a reflection of a larger exodus. Young users are the most likely to leave the platform and it’s a problem so noticeable that Meta paid a political firm to smear TikTok’s reputation.

Apart from that, one of the biggest complaints about the platform is the constant reminder that Facebook sells its users’ data. Whether it’s the Cambridge Analytica scandal from 2016 or one of the numerous recent data-sharing scandals, Facebook refuses to stop. If users don’t feel that their privacy is being respected, they won’t stay for long.

But even with all those problems, Facebook is still vital to brands for a few key reasons.

The biggest reason to stay on the platform is that it provides a robust infrastructure. There’s almost no avoiding the features that your brand will need, nor the ease in which to use them. If your brand wants to host an event, Facebook Events are the easiest to create and most likely to reach the most people.

Your brand wants to connect to your consumers without fighting for attention in their already cramped inbox, so you buy a Facebook ad or invite them to like your page. It’s a quick and easy way to update customers on specials or deals and it’s a platform everyone, even those who otherwise don’t engage on social media, feel comfortable on.

Having an up-to-date Facebook page doesn’t require much effort either. As long as it has your company’s open hours, the correct address, and the name spelled correctly, your customers can find you quickly and easily.

The biggest advantage Facebook offers your brand, however, has nothing to do with Facebook at all; it has to do with Google.

Google uses the search engine optimization (SEO) values from websites all over the internet to decide what comes up first when people search for specific pages. There are hundreds of SEO best-practices and the company has said that Facebook likes and shares have no effect on your ranking, but it’s still important. Google sees Facebook as a trusted source so if consumers look up your company’s hours and location, Google will check your Facebook before anything else.

How Your Business Can Use Facebook

If you want to use Facebook for more than just a repository for your key information, that largely depends on who your target audience is and how much time you want to invest in the project.

There are many tools to use within the Facebook (Meta) infrastructure, and determining which to use (and how) starts with understanding your target audience’s demographics. A full understanding of that will give you the insight you’ll need to decide which of Facebook’s tools will be most important to your work.

There are many external marketing tools on Facebook, but here are three of the most useful:

Meta Business Suite

The first is the Meta Business Suite. When you create a business page, you’ll automatically have access to this suite and it acts as a more insightful look into your platform than you’d ever have a normal personal page.

You’ll be able to see the engagement on each of your posts from the home page including number of people reached, reactions, and comments. There’s also an option to boost your post further if you think you didn’t reach enough.

Additionally, you can schedule posts in advance and buy ad’s directly from the suite. Whether you use any of the other tools Facebook provides, the Meta Business Suite is a must for your brand.

Insights

The second tool is the Insights feature.

You can access the insights feature on the business suite at the bottom of the left-hand menu (it looks like a bar graph). This gives you a consolidated view of your posts and engagement, but there’s more than just that.

If you select the “audience” breakdown, you’ll see the demographics of your audience. Facebook can see the age, gender, and even the location of your audience, which will give you a much better insight into who you’re popular with. It also has an option to export that data into a useful Excel sheet.

Facebook Ads

The third tool we’ll highlight is the Ads tool.

Facebook ads are extremely effective. It’s the company’s main source of revenue so they’ve put a lot of effort into making ads desirable to companies.

Facebook knows so much about each of its users and puts all of that knowledge directly into the ads feature. You can advertise to people at a more personal level than ever before and even to those that don’t know who you are. The tool provides step-by-step instructions on how to create effective ads, so you won’t be left on your own.

No matter what you decide, however, the important part is experimenting. Look through the various tools at your disposal and find the best ones that work for you.

If you need help determining how best to use Facebook for your brand’s strategy, contact me today here. I look forward to speaking with you!