How to Create a Facebook Business Page and Attract Customers

Business owners, entrepreneurs and marketers have already been utilizing the influence of social media to promote their products and services online. Facebook, the most popular, most active and most crowded social networking site in the planet is one of the top destinations if you want to attract potential customers for your business. Small and medium business owners are also taking the opportunity to reach a wider market while keeping their tight budget using Facebook. Aside from the personalized profile or timeline, Facebook Pages are one of the features provided by Facebook to users who want to create a place on the social network to promote a local business, company, organization, institution, brand, product, cause or community online.  If you want to leverage the power of social media for your business success, here are some tips on how to attract more potential customers and build closer relationship with your existing customers using a Facebook business page.


Creating a Facebook Page for your business

To start creating a Facebook page, sign in to your Facebook account and go to this URL http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php . There you will see the following options as seen in the image captured below. Select your option and fill up the necessary information

Once your Facebook page is setup, you can edit your page to set the settings, manage permissions, fill up and complete your business basic information, upload profile picture or your business logo, check out resources to develop your page, install useful apps, set up mobile status updates, and check your insights. Please see image below.

Furthermore, you should also change and secure your page username to protect your brand and better communicate in your marketing campaigns. You can choose and customize your username by going to “edit page”, then edit basic “information.” However, you need to earn 25 fans or likes first before you can secure your own username. Please see image below. To earn 25 fans or likes quickly, you can ask your close friends or relatives to like your newly created business page. Once you have secured your own username, your page URL should be like this: http://Facebook.com/yourchosenusername. To learn more about Page Usernames, please read this article from Facebook.



Promoting your Facebook Business Page

Setting up your Facebook business page is easy and can even be done in less than an hour, especially if your complete business information and profile picture are already available. The hard work happens when you start promoting your page and inviting more people to like it. Here are some ways and tricks to gain more likes to your business page.

Invite your friends. The first 25 likes are required to secure your page’s username as we discussed earlier. Now, you can also invite your other friends to like your page. You can do that by suggesting your page to your selected Facebook friends.

Make your page interesting and engaging. There are many ways to make your page more interesting to attract fans and followers. The following are some of those tactics:

1. Regularly post interesting status updates, photos, and videos which are related to your business.

2. Run a contest or reward your most active follower of the month

3. Ask engaging questions and make interesting choices

4. Be active in replying your followers’ comments

5. Post useful and interesting contents from outside sources. Don’t fill your page with all of your promotional stuff. This is to show that you’re not only running a business page for your own interest.

Promote your URL/Username within Facebook. Here are some ways to promote your page inside Facebook:

1. Indicate your Page Username in your personal Facebook profile or timeline. For example, you can state in your profile that you “work at your Page Name”. In my case, I’ve indicated my work information on my timeline as an author at my page. Please check out image below.

2. If you have a team or employees, you can also tell them to indicate in their profile or timeline info that they work on your business / page.

3. Join groups which are related to your business. Then promote your page in those groups according to their guidelines.

4. Share your Page’s statuses, photos or videos in you personal wall or timeline. Make sure that your contents shared are useful and interesting.

5. Connect and interact with other pages that are related to your business. Choose the pages that are popular and active.

Promote your URL/Username outside Facebook. Promoting your business page outside the Facebook realm can also encourage more people to like and follow your page. Here are several ways to do that.

1. Put your page/URL on your other social media profiles, such as Twitter, Youtube, Google+ and Linkedin.

2. Include your page in your email and forum signatures.

3. Include your page in your business cards.

4. Place your Facebook page widget in your website or blog.

5. Put your page/URL in your other offline marketing materials

Invest in Facebook ads. If you are willing to spend some money, you may invest some marketing fund for Facebook ads. For more information about advertising your page on Facebook you may visit their advertising page here.


Attracting Potential Customers

Among the thousand or tens of thousands of people who will like your business page when you launch your massive promotion, only a percentage of them may actually become your customers. Thus, you need to see to it that you target the audience that will more likely become your customers. Here are some tips to attract more customers using your Facebook business page.

Be active. Make your business page productive. In other words, make sure that your fans or followers can always get something fresh and useful when they visit your page. Share regularly and consistently. Don’t flood you page with too much information in one day then leave it like a ghost town the next day. Furthermore, don’t just be active in sharing updates, but also be active in replying comments on those updates. By actively engaging with your followers, you will have more opportunity to convert them into potential customers.

Help and solve problems. Share unselfishly. This means that you should only share things on your page that you know will become useful to your followers. Don’t flood your page with everything about your products or promotional items. But also share other things that will educate and improve the lives of your followers. For example, if your business page is about a hotel and restaurant company, you can also share interesting and practical resources, such as information about healthy lifestyle, travel tips, beautiful places and other things that are useful to your followers.

Be relevant. If you will educate people, teach them things that are related to your business. To attract more potential customers, you should uphold your brand and its uniqueness. Don’t share things just because they are on the top of the news even if they aren’t relevant to your business. This will only show that you are riding the bandwagon and you’re not offering something that can stand on its own. Be consistent with what your business is all about. If your business page has consistency, you are opening your gate to more people who will do business with you.

Analyze. Utilize Facebook Insights which you can access freely in your Facebook Page admin (see image below). Use insights to analyze information such as the demographics and location of your fans or followers. You can use these pieces of information to geographically target potential customers or target them according to gender and ages.

Build trust and lasting relationship. Not all people who will land at your business page will immediately trust your brand. Hence, be honest and be patient. A successful business page is not done overnight. You’ve got to be persistent in providing real answers and solutions to your followers’ questions and problems. To attract more customers using your business page, it should always maintain quality, integrity, consistency, friendliness and usefulness.


Final thoughts

The social media era has already provided several marketing advantages to small and medium business owners since it gained popularity in the past few years. Facebook, with its pages functionality, is providing on its own another opportunity for us to leverage. Most business owners (big or small) are already utilizing its power. Your competitor/s might already one of them. If you want to attain optimum success on your business and lead your competition, you should not ignore investing on the power of the social media. To create a Facebook business page on your own will not cost you any dime. It only requires your precious time. But if you don’t have enough time, you can just pay attention and delegate some important tasks to a social media strategist. Contact me if you need some help.