How to Optimize Your Facebook Page for Local Companies
Optimizing your company’s Facebook page is an important aspect of social media. First off, Facebook is free. Secondly, it has a lot of unique features that can be utilized to help grow your business. Third, using Facebook is an excellent, low-cost option for reaching out to your community with special offers, promotions, and events that they would otherwise never know about.
Let’s take a look at some of the best methods for optimizing (and using) Facebook to the advantage of your local company.
Populate Everything
By populate, we mean fill in. Fill in every aspect of your local company’s Facebook page that you possibly can. Add your bio text, your hours (make sure they’re accurate), whether you have parking, free Wi-Fi, your price range, your phone number, your website address, your contact email, and anything else that is offered to you. The more information, the better.
Use High-Quality Imagery
Blurry cell-phone photos (clean your camera lense!), bad angles, poor lighting, and general bad taste can have the opposite effect that you’re going for. We know you mean well, but don’t post anything less than awesome — whether it’s a logo or a product photo, be sure that it’s crisp, clear, and meets the proper sizing and resolution guidelines so that it appears clearly on both desktop and mobile.
Use Templates & Tabs
Facebook offers an array of custom setups that cater to certain business models. Many of these include mini-platforms for offering top products, restaurant menus, featured services, and similar business tools that make it easy to display information and even acquire leads and make sales directly from your Facebook company page. Take the time to use these tools to their full extent and you’ll see the benefits. After all, they’re there for a purpose. Use them!
Make Every Post Count
Every post you make should use your best effort to convey a clear and concise message that is short, sweet, and to the point. People will not read paragraphs of text about your product. Rather than posting an image and a wall of text about the product, consider using a video or a short post with a tasteful image, a price, and a call-to-action. Don’t be pressured to post every day, especially if you can’t post great content every day. But at a minimum, post three times a week. Speak to your audience, tell them what THEY want to hear, not what you think they want to hear. Pay attention to what makes them responsive or what type of content engages them, and use that to your advantage. As a local business, the majority of your customers are within mere minutes of your business. Your main goal should be to get a reservation, make a sale, or get them in the door of your business storefront today — each and every day!
Use the Stories Feature
While relatively new, stories are a short and effective way to get your point across. Not to mention, they appear at the top of the page, which means you get a prime piece of real estate to display something, rather than hoping the user will see your post on their timeline. Create a good video, show a special offer, and since they’re local, provoke them to take action TODAY.. Stories are proving to be an excellent tool on Facebook for local companies.
Be Community Oriented
As a local company, one of the best things you can do is have a large local network. Make sure people know you by your first name. Participate in local events and post those photos or videos to your company page. Invite people to join your cause, whether it’s a 5k run or a charity event — community brings people together and makes them more loyal to small business, especially in the tough times of 2020.
Start Your Own Group
Expanding on the idea of community, starting a Facebook group for your geographic area is a great way to optimize your fakebook’s potential while earning some well-deserved notoriety. If you’re a restaurant owner, start a Facebook group for local foodies. If you’re a auto repair shop, start a Facebook group for auto-repair & prevention tips that’s limited to your service area. There are a wide variety of ways to optimize your company’s presence on Facebook, and for a free platform, you can’t go wrong by investing your time in a group.
If in Doubt, Scope it Out
If you’re not sure how to optimize the Facebook page for your local business, or if you’re just plain out of ideas and it feels like you’ve done everything you can, don’t fret. One of the best ways to get fresh ideas is to copy what other businesses are doing — just don’t copy businesses from your area. If you’re in need of some motivation, search Facebook for business pages that are similar to your company, and find those that have the most following and action. The pages that are the most popular will appear near the top of search results, and chances are they’ll be using some techniques that you can learn from to help to improve your company’s Facebook page.
Again, Facebook is free, it’s popular, and it gives you a great reach — but it’s something you have to optimize to see any benefit from. Invest a little time to get things right and it can prove to be one of the best tools in your arsenal for attracting more local business.
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Article by Seo Zen NYC, a New York based search engine optimization company.
