Today, only a small number of businesses don’t have a Facebook page. How social media work has changed because of Facebook. What started out as a website to help people find old friends has turned into one of the most important tools for advertising businesses.
No matter if you have a physical store or an online dropshipping business, you must have a Facebook page. We’ll tell you why you need a Facebook page and then show you how to set one up.
A bit of Facebook’s history
Mark Zuckerberg, who made Facebook, started what is now called FaceMash in 2003. The site wasn’t a social media site back then. It was a website with two pictures of Harvard students, where Mark was a student, and people could vote on whose face they liked better.
After that, the following things happened:
- In less than four hours, 450 people went to the mini-website, and 22,000 photos were looked at.
- The school’s leaders were not happy, so they shut down the site.
- Mark thought he would be kicked out of school, but he met his wife at a party years later.
- Mark had an idea to make a website called The Facebook at some point. The idea came from how well FaceMash worked. But people can put their photos on The Facebook. He worked with a friend named Eduardo Saverin, and the name of the company was changed to just “Facebook.”
When they first opened the site in 2004, only Harvard students could use it. Within a short time, the site grew and started letting people from the Boston area and other top universities join.
Facebook grew very quickly, and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel later gave the people who started it half a million dollars.
As of 2017, there are already 2 billion people on Facebook around the world. And this is just one reason why it makes sense for your business to have a Facebook page.
What’s the point of having a Facebook page?
Your business is real if it has a Facebook page. People make decisions about other people and businesses based on how they look on social media. Aside from that, Facebook is a place where you can easily advertise to your target audience.
Some of the reasons why you need a Facebook page are listed below:
made it easier to see
When you make a website, you have to get people to visit it, which is another problem you have to deal with. There are already two billion people using Facebook, so it shouldn’t be hard to find people to watch your videos. People can easily find your business, and you don’t have to spend money right away to get the word out.
Credibility has grown
With a Facebook page, your fans and customers can share your posts, rate your products, leave positive reviews, comments, and a lot more. As more people give you good feedback, your reputation will improve.
Focused advertising
You can set up your own advertising campaign with Facebook. And with it, you can choose who you want to see your ad.
Here are some good things about making an ad on Facebook:
- You can choose how old or how old your ad is.
- You can choose how far your ad will go or where it will be shown.
- You can set your own daily budget, and you can stop the ad at any time.
- With two billion users and a very flexible advertising platform, it’s clear that your business needs a Facebook page. You don’t even have to spend money if you don’t want to. Your fan base can grow on its own, which we’ll talk about in more detail later.
How do you make a page on Facebook?
To set up a Facebook page, you only need to do a few things. You need a personal Facebook account as a first step. If you don’t have a business page, you can’t make one. Your personal account will be linked to the business page, and you will be in charge of that page.
Also, make sure you create a Facebook business page on a computer and not on a mobile device. A laptop is a good choice. You can build a Facebook page on a smartphone, but it will be much easier to do it on a computer.
Create the Page
Once you are logged in to your personal page, click on Create and then choose Page, as shown in the screenshots below.
Pick the Page
You can make two different kinds of pages. The first is a brand, and the second is a well-known person. You must choose Business or Brand for a business. Choose the other one if you’re making a page for an actor, a doctor, or anyone else with a lot of power.
Fill in the Specifics
The third step is to type in the name of your business page and then choose the category. If you want to, you can add your phone number and address, and then click Continue at the bottom.
You can either upload a picture of yourself or skip this step and do it later.
That’s just about it. Once this third step is done, you only need to add a cover page, a profile picture, and content.
Also, you have to go to your settings to change things like whether comments are on or off. This is also where you can change how Facebook Messenger works for your business, like setting up questions and answers that will be sent out automatically.
How do you get people to follow you?
To get more people to follow you on Facebook, you should start by asking your friends and family to “like” your page. If they do this, their Facebook friends will see that they liked your page, which could lead to more people doing the same.
But this strategy is too simple. You need to do a lot more. Even though posting ads is easy, many business owners don’t realize that people only follow Facebook pages if they offer something of value.
What does this mean, then? If you are giving value, you are either solving a problem or giving something that is hard for other people to figure out. Many people think that sales and discounts work, but they only do so for a short time.
Here are some tips about giving value that can help you get more people to follow you on Facebook:
Find a solution
The first thing you need to do is find a problem that most of your target customers have. Once you know what it is, you have to fix it and offer this as a solution.
Here are just a few:
- For restaurants, make and share recipes or tell people how to cook steak the right way.
- For athletic wear, write about how to keep the body healthy, how to keep athletic clothes smelling good, and how to take care of them.
- For beauty products, tell your audience how to put on makeup or how to make sure the color of the clothes doesn’t clash with the makeup.
- People will share the useful information you post, as you can see. People will follow you if you do this because they know that if they do, they will get updates from you. Not your ads or discounts, but updates and new content are what they will look forward to.
Bring in new ideas
Most of the time, when we talk about innovations, we think of new technologies. This doesn’t have to always happen. Find new ways to make things easier for yourself.
This may sound like solving a problem, but what you really want to do is show your customers new ways to deal with problems that they haven’t tried before.
Here are just a few:
- For restaurants, there are tips on how to keep fruits and vegetables fresh longer and how to make ginger peeling and other tasks easier.
- Fashion: how to make old clothes look new; how to fix zippers with candle wax or other things you can find around the house.
- As was already said, innovation and solving problems can sound like the same thing. The main difference is that using innovations is not the same as offering solutions. For innovations, you show your audience new ways to do things that they might not have thought of before.
From here, you can slowly move up to learn about advertising and find out more about your Facebook audience.
How to market your business in a natural way
Growing your business naturally isn’t as easy as it sounds. Facebook is a social media site, but its programming has changed several times. Specifically, the executives of Facebook changed how the whole Facebook ecosystem works.
Today, if you post something, you’re lucky if only 3% of your followers see it. Because Facebook is a business, it has to do this. It forces you and other business owners to advertise so you can reach more people.
But there is still a way to grow your business and get the word out about it without spending any money. Here are some suggestions to help you get started:
- Invite everyone you know to like your page.
- If someone liked your post, ask that person to also like your page.
- If you have a list of people who have signed up for your email campaign, send them an email about your Facebook page.
- Share your Facebook address every chance you get, whether it’s on a flyer or on your website.
- It takes a lot of hard work to grow your business on Facebook. It also means that you have to respond quickly enough to all questions, because how quickly you respond affects how people feel about your business.
Don’t just think of Facebook as a place where you can show off things you want to sell. It’s a place where many people live together. In short, your Facebook page is how people in the digital world see your business.
Important note: Facebook doesn’t always work, and here’s why
Facebook is just one way to use social media. Even though two billion people use it, not everyone likes it. Even though it’s important to have a Facebook page, you might also want to check out other social media sites.
Even if you haven’t broken any rules, the people who run Facebook can sometimes ban your page and shut it down completely. Someone may have filed a report against you even though you posted something you didn’t think was offensive.
Not every report on Facebook is looked at by a person. Robots do a lot of these things. Since they are done by robots, they will always have mistakes.
If your Facebook page was accidentally shut down, it might take a while to get it back up and running.
Here are two more reasons why you shouldn’t choose Facebook:
- Facebook can make you feel sad, so be careful. Don’t use Facebook to measure the growth of your business or how good you are as a business leader. Just because you don’t have many likes doesn’t mean your business isn’t going well.
- Facebook can be expensive because you might want to keep advertising to reach more people. As was already said, only about 3% of the people who follow your page will see the updates you post.
- You don’t have to stop using Facebook because of this. What’s important is that you find a good balance between how you use it and how much you spend on advertising.
Facebook is a powerful tool that you should use, especially because it makes it easier for you to get in touch with people.
Conclusion
A business needs Facebook, especially a small or medium-sized business. You don’t have enough money to put ads on TV, so social media is the best place to start. Since Facebook is the most popular social media site, you can’t go wrong by making a Facebook page.
With a Facebook page, you can get people to follow you, show them what you sell, help them solve a problem, and grow your business naturally.