According to the latest figures over 67% of Irish people are using Facebook and of these, 74% use Facebook every single day.

That’s a huge potential audience for your brand and with the diversity of age and gender on Facebook you can almost guarantee your potential customer is there.

On average, Irish people spend 5 hours 40 minutes per week on Facebook.  That’s a lot of time spent updating their status, looking at their friends posts and pictures, seeing sponsored adverts and deciding on what suggested pages to like.

With approximately 2.6 million Irish Facebook accounts don’t you think it might make sense for your business to have an account also?   Your existing customers are there, your potential customers are there and chances are your competitors are there too.  It’s a no-brainer, your brand needs to be there too.

 

Setting up a business account

A business account is different from a personal account in that anybody can ‘like and follow’ a business page and they don’t have to be approved as a friend.  To create an account for your brand you need to associate it with your personal account.  It’s free to set up but will take time and effort to maintain.  Take some time to create some great profile images and a good description to ensure a professional impression of your brand from the start.

Promote the page

Once you have set up your page you must give users a reason to like your page.   If what you are posting is engaging and interesting content it won’t be long before you start to see the number of fans increasing.   Start by asking your friends to like your business page to get some traction initially.

You can also promote your page by advertising it with Facebook.  You design your advert and then specifically target certain geographical areas, certain age groups and even people with certain interests.  By using all this criteria, it makes your advertising very specific to a certain audience thus making it quite cost effective.

Be consistent

Decide on what you are going to post and how often.  Depending on your brand and the time you have available to you this will differ from business to business.  You might post once a day or twice a week, whichever you do I would urge you to be consistent.

Watch the reaction to what you post and see which posts are getting the most likes and shares.  This may help you decide what to post and when to post in the future.

Competition

We all like to get something for nothing and running a competition is a great way to get exposure for your brand on Facebook.  However, there are Facebook competition rules that you need to follow.   There is a required disclaimer and certain terms that you should include in your competition rules to ensure you don’t have any issues.  Getting your fans to like and interact with your competitions gets more eyes on your brand and warms up those leads to become customers.

 

Going live on Facebook

If it suits your brand why not ‘go live on Facebook’ with a behind the scenes video?  Make sure you have a plan and know what the video will be about.  Announce it in advance to get your audience in place to watch it.  Before you begin ensure you have your equipment ready, decide if you will use a tripod and stay in the one place or move around.  Know who is going to be in it and what the content will be and how long it will go on for.   A bit of planning goes a long way in a ‘spontaneous’ live video.

 

Facebook helping your business

When your fans see something they like from your brand on their news feed they interact by liking, sharing or commenting.  This enables you to get in front of their friends as they also see the interaction.  This appears as an endorsement of your brand and a recommendation from a friend is worth so much more than an advertisement.

 

If you want to get started with Facebook and need some advice or if you want somebody to help you with your business posts then give Applejack Marketing a call.